Montana Mentors' Innovation Incubators Pilot Project
http://lone-eagles.com/montana-mentors.htm

What's needed is a “Low Cost, High Imagination” way to bring Montanans up to speed with Internet entrepreneurship best practices, by providing online video success stories, and free self-directed lessons, resources, and services to fuel the home fires of local innovation. The social media tools exist and the crowd-sourcing trends suggest the need for the following pilot project;

Montana needs to share online videos of grassroots techno-mavericks telling their compelling success stories in the context that anyone can learn to do this, too, to preserve their cherished rural lifestyle.

A “Montana Mentors” program will engage Montanans directly, as “Montana's greatest resource” - using social media to connect those who know how - with those eager to learn. Both online and local innovation incubators will be created as local and regional success stories are identified via a Montana Mentors online “Call to Action”.

The 21st Century workforce solution is “Everyone both learner and teacher, both consumer and producer, all the time.” New free online instructional tools make it easy for anyone to create “show and tell” videos directly from their computer screens showing step-by-step their successful strategies and tools. 21st Century Workforce Basics, a short “first online course” created for the Alaska Dept. of Labor, by Lone Eagle Consulting, demonstrates and teaches these tools as a model to stimulate creation of similar online courses by citizens.

The Ideal Outcomes are:

1. Montana Ecommerce Success Videos: Compelling videos showing the diversity of innovations rural Montanans have accomplished using Web Tools - as a catalyst to raise awareness and the motivation to learn more.

2. A Montana Mentors Social Media Initiative will offer Free Online Self-directed E-learning resources for rural citizens as a grassroots open source initiative, with a plan to generate online for-profit mentoring jobs.

3. Local Innovation Incubators based at schools, libraries, and other public institutions, initially as a service learning initiative, will provide personal local support for sharing online citizen generated videos, E-lessons, and mentoring services.

4. Online jobs and services will be quickly generated based on documented mentoring successes as Montana Mentor's post video testimonies justifying their development of for-profit mentoring businesses. A competition format with peer evaluations will determine the best Mentors providing fast-track outcomes.

5. Angel and Venture Capital Networks will be stimulated by broader sharing of the process by which small tech business startups can be successful.

Learn more about Lone Eagle Consulting: http://lone-eagles.com/expertise.htm

See also: Strategies to Increase Broadband Adoption and Use

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-296733A1.doc