Bob Summers: Raising Entrepreneurs Through Open Collaboration

Presentation By Bob Summers In this episode, Bob Summers discusses entrepreneurship through the concept of open source village and how we can take entrepreneurs from an idea to growing a company through a complex fabric of methods, ideas, and concepts. He analyzes how to use open collaboration locally, nationally, and globally and how to catalyze this process to share with others. Bob Summers is an entrepreneur and founder of TechPad, a coworking space for software companies that helped 60+ startup companies, along with his team of 30-plus young entrepreneurs in the Blacksburg/Roanoke region. As a self-described "Entrepreneurial Evangelist," Mr. Summers serves on the boards of the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council (RBTC) and the Virginia Tech Entrepreneur Club at Pamplin College. He has also built scalable software products, which have reached more than 3.5 million customers in 196 countries. Mr. Summers is a proud Hokie who graduated from Virginia Tech in 1998. Presented in partnership with Virginia Cooperative Extension, Sustain Floyd, ASPECT, CSECP, The Floyd Country Store, The Community Foundation of The New River Valley, Outreach and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and VSU.