Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

I recently was privileged to receive an invitation to present at a regional conference in northeastern Ohio. The WSOS Community Action Commission (WSOSCAC) of Ohio organized the event which was a gathering of seven small area communities to generate some solutions to the problems and challenges they face.  

I was in good company, joined on stage by Gary Schoeniger, founder of the globally recognized Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative (ELI) and developers of the revolutionary Ice House entrepreneurship program. “Ice House” is relatively new, I’ve been using it since the fall of 2012 when only 10 community colleges in the world were offering this very different method of conveying knowledge about successful entrepreneurs and how they think. 

We’ve learned in the last two years that Entrepreneurial Mindset combined with Fab Lab or other maker space resource can be a powerful economic development tool for the revitalization of small rural communities when used in conjunction with the other efforts being executed by those small communities. 

Deb Martin, one of the event organizers of this event gave me a very nice quote to use in our press release. She said “We have been familiar with the work of Independence Community College and its Fab Lab and other programs for some time now, and believe that it represents a great model of what can be done in rural areas to support revitalization through entrepreneurship.” 

WSOSCAC’s roots date back to the 1960’s with a primary purpose to fight poverty. They are seeing, as are we, that entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking are really the only plausible solution to poverty in the United States. Based on Gary Schoeniger’s work with Ice House all over the globe, we can consider this solution to be global in scope. 

Listening to the folks from these seven rural Ohio communities and others previously I realized their concerns are shared by all other small communities around the United States. We’re all concerned about a number of the same issues; youth leaving, population shrinking, economic mainstays becoming obsolete, shortage of work force and lack of soft skills in the existing work force. The participants in this northeast Ohio meeting were saying the exact same things that participants of such a meeting in southeast Kansas would say. 

We have come to believe that every community should have a Fab Lab or maker space of some kind. It doesn’t have to be as big as Fab Lab ICC; a laser and a 3D printer in the local library or other local gathering place, even coffee shop, could make a huge difference if the mindset is changing too. The maker space has to be combined with entrepreneurial mindset to be an effective catalyst to aid in small rural economic development. 

Our strong belief in this concept of combination is due to the number of entrepreneurs and small businesses we’ve help in such a short time of being open. It was not due to a superior strategic plan; we didn’t have one. We just managed to set up a good environment for collaboration with some cool fabrication equipment and people started coming. 

The ELI (Ice House) folks tell us that although they have implementations of Ice House happening all over the world in several languages, no one is yet combining Ice House with a Fab Lab or maker space to spur small community economic development. 

In February of next year, we are going to host a 2 ½ day seminar in Independence we’ll bill as “How to Create a Fab Lab from scratch.” We’ll share our knowledge of what we did and also include plenty of actual making during the time. We believe some of the folks from Ohio will come for the event and we’ll be promoting it around the country. One key message will be that the maker space won’t work without community entrepreneurial mindset. Another key message will be “there is no master plan for creating the right maker space for your community so don’t over plan. Start small, change the mindset and let things start to happen on their own.