See a need, fill a need: BAI Group’s journey from waste management consulting to leading solar energy advancement
Between 2020 and 2021, State College-based BAI Group’s revenue from its solar energy segment grew by ten times, and President Jim Echard projects this same rapid and significant growth over the next five years. The local company, which got its start in waste management, is a major player in the greening of the Mid-Atlantic energy […]
5 questions with a Happy Valley CEO: Juan Mario Gomez with Xact Metal
Sometimes in business, it’s all about how the stars align. Xact Metal’s CEO Juan Mario Gomez spent decades working as an executive with GE before leaving to pursue a more entrepreneurial environment. A seemingly kismet meeting started what’s now a fast-growing company. After leaving GE, Gomez connected with Invent Penn State and the Happy Valley […]
The road to redemption runs through Tyrone
How failure, gumption and the power of friendship created one of the biggest European motorsport franchises on the East Coast When Josh Nolten and Dave Myers became friends at Park Forest Junior High, mainly because their last names and thus their lockers were so dang close together, they never imagined that one day they’d be […]
Online Shopping Attracts New Customers to Local Farm Markets
A visit to any farmers market is, by its very nature, social. The mingling with other shoppers. The chit-chatting with the vendors. You get to know your neighbors and the folks who grow your food on a deeper level. So what happens when the “social” part of just about everything is stripped away and the […]
Penn State Entrepreneurialism By the Numbers
Penn State started out as a land-grant school to provide an ag education to children of farmers and working families all over Pennsylvania. It’s never lost sight of entrepreneurial-minded Pennsylvanians, people who put their own sweat equity into building businesses from the ground up. Over the last decade, that focus on entrepreneurialism has deepened as […]
Hometown Turnaround: Entrepreneur Offers Free Lewistown Storefront
The Facebook post read like the opening of a good book: “I will be offering a free storefront for 12 months. Looking for something unique that is proven to be successful to downtown Lewistown to make it a walking town. Submit an actual business plan, not just a vision.” But this wasn’t fiction; it was […]
Happy Valley’s Kijenzi Enables World-Class Manufacturing for Anyone, Anywhere
Started right here in Happy Valley, Kijenzi is now developing solutions to deliver medical equipment to remote areas in four different countries around the world utilizing 3D printing. The founding team at Kijenzi came together through Penn State’s humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship program. “We launched out of the university and kept Happy Valley as […]
Ben Franklin Giving Happy Valley Innovators a Boost with $50k Grand Prize
Ben Franklin Technology Partners is looking for innovators with big ideas in Happy Valley, Clarion, Clearfield, and Jefferson Counties — and the winner takes home $50,000. “If you are developing or crafting a product, process or innovation related to the maker economy, outdoors and recreation, forest products, manufacturing or technology, you need to apply for […]
Speeding Up the Scientific Process Through the Power of AI
A group of Penn State researchers that received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy is aiming to improve the efficiency of turbines for power generation through the use of artificial intelligence. Wesley Reinhart, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State, said that higher efficiency […]
