Empowering Entrepreneurship in Rural Ecosystems

Hello and welcome to our third annual SBA Innovation Ecosystem Summit. If this is your first time joining us today, thank you for being here. My name is Jamila Corbett and I'm here to guide you through today's activities. I have a question for you. How many of you either live in a rural area or work with innovators from rural areas? Let me know in the chat. Did you know that SBA and its federal partners work with entrepreneur support organizations across the country to develop entrepreneur ecosystems in rural areas? Check out America's Seed Fund Road Tour. It's one of SBA's national outreach efforts to connect innovators and entrepreneurs to non dilutive technology funding opportunities provided through the SBIR STTR programs. We're dropping the links in the chat so you can register for America's Seed Fund Week, the Road to a Virtual Kickoff and and to find out which region in the 2024 road tour is closest to you so you can check it out. Okay, our next panel features agency representatives and rural ecosystem builders. They'll be discussing the unique strengths, challenges and opportunities they encounter from innovators in rural America and how federal agencies can support this work. Leading this very important discussion is Obum Okaboom from the OK Catalyst. Oh boom. Thank you so much for being here and take us away.

Thank you Jamila. Very excited to be here talking about rural entrepreneurship in rural ecosystems. It means a lot to me because I am the head of Regional Engagement for the University of Oklahoma for the Tom Love Innovation Hub and we do that through an organization called OK Catalyst. So very again, Jamila, I'm very happy to be here and introduce our panelists and have a great discussion. So let's get to our panelists, starting first with Anna Lucas. And so Anna is a Director in the Office of Rural affairs for the U.S. small Business Administration. She is an experienced political director with a demonstrated history of working in the nonprofit organization management industry. Anna, thank you for joining us. We also have Don Ufford. Don Ufford is an Assistant Director for Supply Chain and Ecosystem Development at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Manufacturing National Program Office as well at amnop. Excuse me, amnpo. Don works with federal agency staff to create strategies to improve the impact of manufacturing USA institutes on the manufacturing ecosystem and on domestic supply chains. He also works on advanced manufacturing research and analysis reports and policies. Dan or excuse me, Don. Thank you for joining us as well. And finally, Pete Nelson is the president of Ag Launch, a family of organizations that support SBA's Regional Innovation Cluster. We call those RICS, which is an initiative in several regions across the U.S. now, Ag Launch Focus is on food and agriculture, working specifically with farmers seeking to support technology and ag tech startups as a foundation towards building a more innovation food system. So I think we got a lot covered here. We have a lot of people with great experience and stories, and we're going to really talk about the unique, unique challenges, some of the opportunities and the rewards of working in the rural ecosystem and trying to, to thrive. Right. And try to, you know, help the rural ecosystem build through innovation. So I want to jump to my first question and we'll get to know the panelists through this as well. So we'll start with Anna and same question for everybody. Anna, what inspired your organization to focus on rural entrepreneurship and how has it evolved over time?

Sure. Thank you for the question and thank you for having me here today. It's great to be with all of you. As mentioned, I'm with the Small Business Administration. I think many folks heard about us through our Covid relief programs, PPP and Covid Idle and other programs we had. But the SBA has been around for 70 years and we have a number of services and resources that we provide to small business owners wherever they are in their journey, whether they're starting, expanding, recovering from a disaster, or growing, growing their business overseas or even just in their local market. And so as part of our charge at the Small Business Administration, we know that it is hard to reach every business owner or every aspiring business owner. And so through our network of district offices, we have offices in every state and territory in the country. We have folks living and working in their communities, SBA employees whose job it is to really try and know their local market and get out our resources and our outreach to those folks, including in rural areas, where we know there are some specific challenges unique to rural areas that small business owners face. And so at our Office of Rural affairs here at sba, we see it as our mission to sort of bring the whole of government approach to folks that are in rural areas, no matter where they are, kind of in their journey through our, not only our district office, who's covering large territories, sometimes of work, but also through our larger ecosystem, which I know is sort of the point of this, this panel discussion, but I love talking about ecosystem because we know at SBA we cannot do it alone. We cannot serve all of the small businesses in the country who need help in various stages. We want to meet them where they are, but we know we need help in order to do that. And so we rely heavily on our ecosystem, our sort of broader small business support ecosystem, which I know many of you who are in the audience paying attention and listening to us today have been working with our businesses and through SBA as a convener. But thank you for all of that and being part of our. I'll finish by saying it is a mission of ours. Our administrator, Isabella Guzman, finds it one of our missions to really make sure that we make our rural outreach a priority and make sure we have access to all the things that small businesses need, no matter where they are.

Thank you, Anna. Pete, same question?

Yep. I was drawn to rural because I grew up in the rural south and had been interested in entrepreneurship and I was farming myself and was faced with the challenges that most farmers in a lot of rural communities face with access to markets, access to technology, ability to acquire capital and build things, and even just the connectivity between other farmers focused on sort of forward thinking entrepreneurship. And so I read a book about George Washington Carver about 25 years ago and learned about how he built things and introduced new crops and new types of technologies and innovation and and set out to kind of build an ecosystem that would do the best of what an urban ecosystem would do in terms of cluster effect and pulling resources together other than by nature. Because it's agriculture, it's not tightly geographically focused, but it's over much broader and more vast areas. And so as an organization, I will note we are focused on rural and we use the side of the same sort of cluster tools in terms of how we put organizations together and capital. But do that again because we're building ag tech tools and biology over big fat, you know, feedback loops. And I will say that the issues we have in rural are urban ag in underinvested urban communities are having similar issues. So we also get some really interesting dynamics about how our rural network of farmers and our urban network of farmers interact. So this is what we're all about. Glad to be on the conversation today and look forward to maybe getting more details about how we actually do some of the things we do. And also I'd be amiss to not thank SBA for, you know, the resources through the RIC program, but we get to be involved in Navigator and the Fast Growth accelerator and just really exciting networks with good people that help us do our work well.

Awesome. Thank you, Pete. Don, same question. What inspired your organization to focus on rural entrepreneurship and how has that evolved over time?

Yeah, thank you. Maybe first of all, myself, like Pete, I grew up on a farm out in South Dakota and loved it and just really enjoyed the opportunity to grow up in rural part of South Dakota. And in my role as I was growing up and then in my younger years I was mainly responsible for, if you will, the, the infrastructure on the farm and, and making sure that all the equipment and everything was ready to go. And that really inspired me in on the manufacturing and engineering side, which roundabout way brought me to this role. In N NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology and we're within the Department of Commerce and our role is to help commerce, industry and manufacturing in really difficult technical areas as we try and enable domestic manufacturing. Throughout the United States, rural economies have a large proportion of their economy related to manufacturing. So it's a natural link to have manufacturing connected to rural economies. In our role within the manufacturing USA we have institutes that are focused on advanced technology. Some of that advanced technology is geared towards rural economies. And it can be, it can be technology that is associated with metal working. It can be technology that's associated with autonomous operations. It can be technology associated with biomanufacturing. So if you think about.

If you.

Think, think about taking forage crops and, or if you think about taking biomass, how could we convert that biomass into usable products that you know, might be used someday instead of petroleum based products? And so that involves a lot of interaction with, with our rural partners in order to make sure we have good interaction with rural communities and the nationwide impact that we have. We offices in every state, so we have 50 offices throughout the United States in the Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program. So they help link the advanced technology work that we do in the labs and facilities that we have with those that need to utilize those facilities. So we got a real great way to connect with people and bring you on into the network.

Amazing. Thank you, Don. So for. I also want to back up and let everyone know that we will have a Q A at the end of this. So if you have any questions, please hold them till then or drop them in the chat for us. We would love to take your questions and we'll try to get as many as we can, but we do have Q A. So I want to get to these issues that we have, right, these challenges and how you all are addressing them. Right, we're going to get to that. But first I want to take another step back and just why the rural area. It's important to us, right? We know why a lot of us grew up here or we have some kind of type. But why should the rest of the country in the world Care and why now? So anybody can jump in. But I just want to know why the rural areas, why is it important and why now?

Well, it's in my nature to jump in. I'm the entrepreneur on the call, so I will do that. You know, what we're seeing in agriculture is we're going into what a lot of folks find it different ways, but let's say the fourth wave of innovation. So we had domestication of plants and animals, sort of the industrial mechanized and sort of this biotech wave. And now we're entering this new wave that we like to say. We're now able to think about how we want to do agriculture for the next thousand years. So we know we want carbon smart, maybe even negative farms, more nutrient dense foods that are a lot more diversity in what we grow, geographically concentrated, all these things and in particular for us, equitable ownership in the value chains of the future. So we know we need those things. But the whole ag tech investment world, which sort of started as a frenzy back when Climate Core was purchased by Monsanto for $1 billion now almost 10 years ago, created this frenzy that has not really the business models for innovation have not caught up with that. So we're still developing an ag tech either sort of the software type thinking the Silicon Valley thinking that there's you know, millions of farmers out there. We're going to sell sort of this B2C model. Well, that doesn't work farmers, there's 2 million of us, a subset of that produce most of the food. This is a, these are B, you know, business to business businesses that are relationship driven and scale differently. So you've got ag tech companies falling off the cliff because they can't, they're going that or it's the other way. It's a pharma model where we're thinking about we're developing synthetic chemicals or biotechnology traits that require high regulatory barriers. Both of those don't work for the new technologies we're doing because what do the new technologies, AI, robotics, biology, massive feedback loops on many types of soil, many perspectives from different types of farmers on hundreds of crops. That's the feedback loop. So rural is the only place you can do it. And so when you think about it that way, we tend to be anchoring and it's important to understand with our work that our farmers are in essentially a cooperative where every company we scale that group of farmers ranging from Oregon to the Mississippi Delta, Iowa, all have equity in the companies. So for us it's a perfect, we're creating the Only system that has these massive feedback loops that allows you to scale appropriate regenerative climate smart technologies in a way that makes sense in this sort of new network. And again those farmers are connected. It's not that geographic concentration of Cambridge but it's concentrated by owning equity together, being part of a data lake together and being active at every step of the commercialization process. And obviously I love talking about this so I will stop there and we'll pass to somebody else to comment. But we definitely in the ag tech world we need rural. It is not the sort of, in fact I don't like the sort of flyby states or the D invest like this is. This is where the heart of building these kind of technology is going to come from.

Yeah, and you know, I think Pete touched on a few topics there. Definitely technology is, technology is incorporated into rural America and agriculture and some of the various aspects that Pete talked about. It's also going to be linked into the supply chain where manufacturing is involved. And so there's a tight link there from the initial production through the processing and manufacturing of that that you know, we need to make sure we're doing it in a world class way in order to make sure our producers and, and frankly the US is able to have strong manufact which builds resiliency in our economy and it'll also build global competitiveness for us. And that I think really as we think about manufacturing there's been, you know, a lot of concentration in some areas and I think people are starting to wonder is that the best way, you know, to be sustainable and other characteristics if you're concentrated or can that be more distributed? And if it's more distributed and located closer to where products are produced, closer to where they're consumed then there's some opportunities there. But that's going to take advanced manufacturing thinking. How do we do the integration with, whether it's the robotics or the sensing that was mentioned, how do we do that integration and, and then utilize that in an appropriate fashion. So that's where you know, we really think there's a big part to play there. And you know we're looking for those opportunities. We're, we're frankly, you know, we're open and we know that, that there will be a lot of inn innovation coming through the entrepreneurs and the innovators. So we want to make sure that we're known out there. Not everybody's going to come through on the manufacturing USA institutes but some of them will and they'll be able to generate, you know, a really great idea. And we might have the right facilities for them to evaluate their product or process. And when that happens, we got a great win, win.

And I would just add to that. And I think to Don's point, we at sba, we know that successful rural areas and successful rural entrepreneurship helps build the larger economic development in terms of, you know, not just what the, what the area or the region or the state may look like, but also for generational wealth for folks who want to, you know, own their own business, be their own boss, and that. That is true and strong and healthy in a rural, local place, then that is true for the larger ecosystem, if I may. And we know that at least at sba, that, you know, reaching rural communities or at least helping for folks to know that there are resources available to them may take some added intentional effort just by the nature of being in a rural place. And so we know that, you know, our services are made for everyone. But in order to make sure that folks are aware and that they have what they need to access those resources, that we need to go and do extra. And for that, we rely on our networks in the States, our larger ecosystem, of course, but also our trusted partners who are living and working in those communities.

Thank you. So we know why it's important now, and we've always known. Right. But for everybody else, we have another. We have another insight into why it's so important that we really focus on making sure the rural areas are supported. Let's talk about some of these challenges, and more importantly, let's talk about what your organizations or organizations that you're working with are doing to alleviate that. So open up your playbook. Show us, you know, tell us, talk to us a little bit about some of the resources you provide, programs, strategies. What are you all doing to address these challenges and what are the challenges? I'll start with Steve, or excuse me, I'll start with Pete first.

Good. I mean, I think a few. If you think about what really drives innovation, we've got the. In the ag world, we just say we've got the tomato cage stuff, right? This is what you kind of have to have to build the infrastructure, and that's your venture funds. And you got those pieces in the middle of that, you got to get the tomato growing. And that's a little bit harder to define. And that is, we know it is massive amounts of diversity, very liberal immigration, a lot of different minds, perspectives in the room, and a lot of willingness, a high risk threshold. And so in a lot of rural communities like that, I grew up and others grew up in. We really like if you fail at a business unlike Silicon Valley, it's not a badge of honor. Let's move to the next one. It is really a black mark, right? Diversity. Even if in areas like the south where we've had diversity of people have not had full engagement between African Americans and people like me partly because of the history and for other reasons. And so those challenges are real and I think there has to be sort of a big vision around how do we get through those to get a true innovation spark in our world. The easy part is building the funds and building the tomato cage stuff. But how do we get a real spark that can like think and dream and so yeah that those are, those are sort of ways that we think about it. Another big barrier for us is we tend to do this sort of innovation work, startup work in an economic development model that is a lot more in our neck of the world like attracting an auto plant. We're going to fight with tax incentives and other things. Is it on this side of the border with Alabama? That side of the border based on these incentives and it's this job multiplier. And we kind of know especially post Covid, you know these startups are five people and three of them are going to be working remote and so really reorienting well a win if you do. It's the ultimate in place based. If a farmer in a distressed county now is in the tech stack and has visibility on 31 companies that they own ownership in and access to the latest technologies and they're grounding those technologies to actually work towards new benefits for markets. Let's start there and be a little less, a little more fluid with whether the company headquarters is in that county or it's in Iowa or another region. So we call that the open innovation model. But that's been kind of a huge barrier that the first thing a community does if they get interested in this often is use what I think are a little bit older models. So place based as you can get. These things are anchored on real farms where we're really testing in a real neighborhood that we bring others around the community around and we have a nexus that's now has global significance and a little more open on deal flow and innovation access are sort of one of our approaches.

Anna, what are you all doing currently right now to and how can federal agencies work with the eso? What are you doing to collaborate to address some of these things that Pete were Pete was talking about.

Yes, no, great. Thanks for Teeing me up. We sort of some federal agencies, and at least on the ground in sba, we have our district offices across the country. We have a resource partner network across the country which helps small businesses with a lot of technical assistance and other sort of really hands on work. One thing that we also want to make sure we're doing as federal agencies is that we are partnering with other federal agencies who also have a huge reach, especially in rural areas, but also have a lot of resources at their disposal. For example, the usda, the Department of Agriculture, has not only personnel out in the states, but a number of loan products. They also have technical assistance available through their sort of, their, their models. They have a huge focus on rural, just sort of, you know, inherently by being part of the Department of Agriculture, not everyone necessarily in rural areas think about SBA as their first go to, they may think usda. So we at SBA and usda, at least on the leadership side, have recently signed a memorandum of understanding, memorandum of agreement actually to work together. Both of our agency leaders have recently signed it. And in there it spells out a couple of things that both of our agencies want to do to really not just show our commitment to delivering resources to rural areas, but also aligning our work a little bit. It's already happening in a lot of places. This is simply just a way to sort of reaffirm and double down our commitment there. Because we know, especially on the ground in the states and territories, there's federal agencies and sometimes they can work kind of in a silo. And we want to make sure we sort of break that and say if there is a small business owner that walks into the USDA office, that they are given access to the same kind of resources that they would if they walked into an SBA office, for example. And it may seem like a simple thing, but part of this is also just kind of aligning our two distinct but similar missions and making sure that we are, we're kind of speaking with one voice and making sure that our staff are up to speed on the programs that USDA has and vice versa. And I think that we're, it's an important way to sort of like show that we can, as federal agencies work together. It's not on the small business owner or the ag person to then try to figure out, you know, which website to look at or which door to knock on or which phone call to make that they can kind of just go and trust that that's on us to make sure that they are then, you know, being referred to the right place. And since we know also in ag heavy areas, a lot of farmers and ranchers may not see themselves or may not define themselves as a small business owner. But in many cases they are and are therefore then eligible for a number of our loan products, for example, which give a lot of flexibility about how funds can be used. And we would see them certainly as small business owners and encourage them to take a look at that and see if that is something that could be useful for where they are in their, in what we would call the small business journey. So that's one example kind of how we're aligning with our own federal partners, both at the leadership level, but really where, where the rubber hits the road in the States.

Don?

Yeah, I'm going to say I'm going to start real early in the process back with, with education, workforce development and you know, on the, on the STEM side. So science, technology, engineering and math. That's really some foundational capability building that we try and do and encourage nationwide in order to build expertise and capability, especially for folks that, that may want to stay local and may not want to move. We need that STEM talent and capability in order to be able to go in and help develop manufacturing operations, help bring an idea and innovation to fruition and to production. So we'll help support that, as will a number of other US Government departments and through programs such as First Robotics or VEX Robotics. You know, they're, they're real strong programs in middle school and high school that help introduce students to technology and they may not be an engineer. At the end of the day, we don't care, but they'll be technology literate and they'll be able to understand how it's integrated more. So what Anna and Pete just talked about here with building out those ecosystems, they'll be then very capable partners in helping to create, build and sustain these broader ecosystems, to build out ag technology as it may be developed and applied in rural areas. Then in our team, we also work very specifically with workforce development programs to develop technology programs for early and, and mid career workers in the field in order to help bring those skills to the table delivered through typically community colleges. So we have partnership with community colleges throughout the United States to deliver that manufacturing technology capability so that if somebody does go into a process and an entrepreneur starts up a business where they're gonna use some level of smart manufacturing and robot, then we want to make sure that we provide the training for that, how to utilize and work with that equipment, how to get data off of that equipment, how to utilize that in order to improve your process and your capability so that you're able to operate a better business. We are able to make those connections in each state through our Manufacturing Extension Partnership program that I mentioned earlier. Usually the Manufacturing Extension Partnership program has multiple offices. In a geographically large state, they might have multiple offices, so it's easier to connect and talk with the teams in those cases. Our MEP programs will offer training for startup businesses or businesses that are trying to improve their process in things such as Six Sigma, and will offer training for safety and will offer training for enterprise resource management. So we have a number of different business operational trainings that are available and they're able to be delivered in some cases in person. In other cases, we'll also do it remotely, recognizing that not everybody can travel. Many times we have, you know, smaller businesses that they only have a few people on staff and they can't afford to take six hours to go someplace. So we'll offer some of that remotely and then we'll will also offer some of it, you know, in person. So you get those in person relationships. So you start to learn from other people in your ecosystem, in your state, in your region, who might be in a similar business area, not the same, but a similar one, and what those benefits are and what you need to look out for as you try and scale up and grow your business. So, couple of thoughts there.

Thank you, Don. So, yeah, so it seems like I'm hearing a lot of themes of just wraparound services and meeting people where they, where they are. And you know, we have this background and, you know, excuse me, foundational things that Donald was talking about. And then we talked with Anna, said collaboration amongst, you know, the federal agencies, those are huge and key things. So, Steve, excuse me, I keep calling you Steve for some reason. Pete. Pete, let's talk about finding the people now. How are we engaging now? We have these great programs. We know that access is an issue. Right. How are we. How are you all identifying rural entrepreneurs or the organizations that may need the resources or the assistance? What are you all doing to do that? And how do you. What are some tips for a lot of us who have, who struggle with the outreach? Right. How are we finding the people that we need?

Yeah, I'd say for our model, you could almost say it's a little easier because we're doubling down first with the farmers. And so there are, you know, robust leadership groups and organizations and others that we can sort of feed into word of mouth and what we're doing if you think about the technology adoption curve, we're looking for the 2.5 percenters. These are, you know, early innovators thinking about something new. And so the sort of entry point are organizations generally that exist or university extension or others. The challenge is especially at the beginning we did a really good job building around Don the kind of place you grew up, right? Row crop agriculture, corn, soybeans, wheat. And that is not a very diverse type of agriculture. And we think, you know, that's going to continue to shift as we talk about more specialty crops. And so the big challenge for us was building the culture on the front end that made sure we had a high percentage of, you know, historically underrepresented farmers. We've done well with African American farmers being participating because of the region we're in. We've not done as well with the tribes for example. So we're constantly learning but we're using these networks that exist and hopefully our presence is actually helping them be transformed as we move that forward. Now with the startups, it's a three prong approach. We are looking for startups globally that want to come and work with us, that our farmers can take equity in for helping them scale their companies. And the way this works, I mean we've got a company based in Iowa, invested first check in Iowa from a farm co op, first field trials in Tennessee in the delta, got the coming off the ground and as it's gone full circle it's raised corporate Money, it's in 28 states and what it does is spray ag chemicals from drones. So instead of you think about a plane, you're now targeting applications reducing the amount of pesticide and it's the leading company doing that in the country. So you see the farmers that were vested have stock. It's benefiting all the farmers and you're seeing that loop. So we're global in how we recruit startups and that's that open innovation model. As long as farmers place based in each community are in the pool together owning equity. We also are turning over any rock we can locally to find local companies. So it's a tool and we do that through boot camps in each of our regions. We in particular do an HBCU innovation challenge to make sure we're pulling student led teams at an early stage in and so we it's a two prong strategy and I want to affirm everything like Anna said. Another the USDA sba, you know connection is huge, Eda supportive us but that's really, I haven't described all the various programs and how we have. But this ability to work with each of those two groups we described to access the grants, the investment, we tap into SBIC and Arbix, which is the USDA rural equivalent of an sbic. Those are major funders. We're active in kind of getting them in the space. Same things with the other programs that we all know about, sbirs and others. And that's sort of the magic of this regional innovation cluster work, is how we sort of pull these things, capital stack services together. So that's really, you know, that's why we get excited about this.

Thank you, Don. Excuse me. Thank you, Pete. So Don and Anna, real quick, we have a couple of minutes before we get to questions. What if you have to leave them with, leave our audience with a program or something. They can go concrete, go look into your organization right now that you are very proud of right now and want them to make sure that they go check it out, name something they can really go check out on and obviously we'll have resources for everybody else and go check your LinkedIn and other links. But what are some things, Anna, that you all are so excited about right now that we should all go check out?

Yes, thank you. I was going to put a plug in anyway, so this is great. As I mentioned, we have have quite a network across the country. To your, to your early question. We are constantly challenging ourselves to be finding ways to be in spaces that we know we need to be that we aren't always in, showing up in the, in the in with our sort of whole of government approach. In many cases, SBA is the convener sometimes of these, you know, bringing non governmental entities, universities, nonprofits, all the folks that are working on kind of the like small business ecosystems that we are. We sort of see ourselves sometimes as a convener, if not the leader of bringing those folks together and kind of aligning our strategies. And you know, there's folks that are really respected in an area that we, you know, kind of take their lead on how to make inroads and meet people where they are, you know, as sort of the federal government approach. I think if you're listening to this webinar and curious about kind of where to start, if you are a small business owner, if you are thinking about becoming one, if you are pivoting because of COVID or other reasons, if you're just kind of curious about what's out there, we@sba.gov localassistance gives you a map of the whole country and Our territories. You can type in your, your zip code or your address, and it will show you kind of all of the resources that SBA has at your fingertips. We are in almost everyone's backyard, and if it's not us, it is a resource partner or someone that can reach you or you can get in touch with them. I would encourage folks, wherever you are, if you're just curious or if you are kind of have a list of questions or don't know where to start, to start there. And you can take a look at both our offices from the sba, our resource Partner network, our Community Navigator network, and on and on. We have probably something there for you. And if we don't know the answer, we know someone who does. So check us out. Lean on us. You know, this is what we're here for. This is our bread and butter and we love doing it. So if you're in a rural area, if you're not in a rural area, we still got something, so I'll leave it at that, but thank you.

And I'm going to say manufacturingusa.com go and check it out. That's our website. And if you're in one of our technology verticals that are listed there, connect up with us. We want to grab entrepreneurs, especially those that have gone through SBIR STTR that you all have talked about earlier today, if you're ready to, to finalize that and get ready to go to financing with an SBIC that that was mentioned. We're right there. We have laboratory facilities and we have facilities that you all can come in and use, that members can come and use, oftentimes in conjunction with a university. So that SBIR STTR is a great connection with that university connection to come on in. And the second one is our Manufacturing Extension partnerships. Look up that office if you're an existing manufacturer and or an entrepreneur that wants to take and modify an existing process and really scale it up. Our Manufacturing Extension Partnership program, it's there in every state. Mep, we'd love to have you come and join us.

Thank you so much. We have a couple minutes. I have two questions we can get to. I just want to remind the audience, I know we said a lot of things and pointing you a lot of directions. You can always go to the SBA's website right here. We have all these links here. You can get all the resources and information that you may need. You can find us finding different organizations in your area, even if you're not in a rural area. I just want you to know that you have support everywhere, right? So Please go to SBA's website and find it and we will able to get a hold of you if you have any questions. You can even email us and we'll get get to you. So let's get to a real quick question. We have like two minutes left. Steve, Pete. I'm gonna keep calling you that. But Pete, we have a real quick question for you that I'm gonna ask Anna and Don this other question. So they want to know if the Farmers Veteran Coalition was relevant to this panel.

Very relevant. We do not work directly with that organization but do work with a lot of veterans. Not for any reason other than we just haven't submitted like a clear relationship. But we do work with our local in Tennessee Veterans Farmers Organization and multiple farmers that are veterans and that is a key for USDA historically underserved group that we invest in and others that do those similar work.

And we have in Manufacturing USA we have veterans training programs to prep the veterans to bring them on board.

So spot on.

And Anna, they wanted to know what was the SBA resource that you mentioned.

Yes. SBA.gov Local assistance.

Local assistance. All right, this question is kind of long. We have about a minute. So I just instead of that, we're going to get, we're going to email you back the answer. I'm going to get you that answer. Asking about how rural community think about supporting a broad base of entrepreneurs. In our last about 30 seconds, I just wanted to give you all one last word. Please plug any resource information how they can find you. I will start with Anna first and thank you all for having us.

SBA.gov local assistance thanks for everybody for being a part of this panel and for those of you who've been working with our SBA partners across the country, appreciate your collaboration and work to serve American as small business owners. Thanks for having me.

Mr. Pete Nelson, it was a real pleasure. Thanks Everybody. We're@aglaunch.com and available through the SBA Regional Innovation Cluster website as well. And thanks. Good job. Moderator too.

Thank you. And Mr. Don offer.

Yeah, thank you very much. Love the opportunity to be here and interact with the panelists today. And best wishes to all the entrepreneurs that are out there. Look up manufacturingusa.com where they're at.

All right. And my name again is Mr. Abumu Kaba. On behalf of myself, OK Catalyst University of Oklahoma, we thank you for coming to the SBA's Innovation Ecosystem Summit and our specific panel on Rural Entrepreneur Ecosystems. Please enjoy the rest of the summit today and tomorrow. And thank you again for having us.

All right, thank you Obum, Anna, Don and Pete for that much needed conversation. Let's give our panel an emoji or gift round of applause. This has been such a great day so far. Make sure you visit americaseed Fund Us your go to resource for sbir STTR events and activities coming out of our office. If you like this event, check out America's Seed Fund Week, a free online event to connect entrepreneurs across the nation working on advanced technologies and the organizations that support them to America Seed Fund, the country's largest source of early stage funding. Okay, we're sharing a link in the chat to learn more. We're going to keep things Moving. There are three breakout sessions happening concurrently from 2:40pm Eastern until 3:25pm Eastern. To join, just click on the Reception tab. It looks like like that home button on your menu screen. You're going to click that tab, then click on which breakout stage you're most interested in. Maybe you're interested in all three and wanted to split your time between the three rooms. That's perfectly fine too. But right now we're going to take a quick, really, really quick short break and then we'll all head out to one of the breakout stages starting at 2:40pm Eastern. I'm going to meet you back here on the Main Stage at 3:25pm Eastern to continue with the program. As always, if you have any questions, let us know in the chat.