Hawaii Island Business Plan Competition

We convened our first pre-accelerator cohort in may-july 2024. We trained 6 Hawaii agrifood tech entrepreneurs/startups. This project was funded by htdc. To reflect Hawaii's world class expertise and tradition in aquaculture, we added aquaculture technology as a key theme of this program. We secured top shelf speakers and we convened entrepreneur meetups to help bring together and build Hawaii's agrifood ecosystem on kauai, honolulu, kona and in hilo. Several were zoom-based presentations by officials from usda and nsf on best practices in developing sbir projects. We organized an agtech section in the statewide future of Hawaii agriculture conference. Goals for the pre-accelerator were: to expose Hawaii entrepreneurs to key agtech management strategies with good potential for Hawaii, to expose Hawaii agtech innovators to global resources for adapting their technologies to tropical applications, and to inspire organic growth of innovative Hawaii agtech workforce development.