"It might look like an indie rock music festival on the outside, but a just-announced, three-day event coming to Kansas City this summer is as much about innovation in the region as the beats dropped by Grammy-nominated headliner Black Pumas," Sonia Hall, CEO of the Shawnee-based nonprofit BioKansas, tells the Kansas City Star.
The Aug.
4-6 Innovation Festival will feature nine indie bands, as well as innovation entertainment, a biologics reveal, STEM learning and communication, two conferences, and an exhibitor pavilion and brewery showcase, per the Star.
"What we want to do is start to disrupt the thinking that there's nothing innovative here and that we're just flyover territory," Hall says.
"We want [festival-goers] to see that they actually interact with our industry on a daily basis."
Hall says the idea for the festival came after organizers identified local talent in the biologics industry and wanted to celebrate the "real high-tech talent within our region."
"Most people think of science as being inaccessible to them for a career," Hall says.
"But working in a brewery is directly applicable to working in a biosciences-based industry, one of the heartbeats of the Midwest."
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Caroline Diehl is a serial social entrepreneur in the impact media space. She is Executive Chair and Founder of the UK’s only charitable and co-operatively owned national broadcast television channel Together TV, the leading broadcaster for social change runs a national TV channel in the UK and digital platform which helps people find inspiration to do good in their lives and communities.