Elevate honors Moran-Townsend
| Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly
August 14, 2020
Elevate Northeast Indiana congratulated on its Facebook page last month Marilyn Moran-Townsend for receiving its 2019 Community Champion of the Year honor.
Moran-Townsend’s vision “has created a culture of innovation that will provide businesses in the region with a strong foundation moving forward,” the organization said in a Facebook post.
Moran-Townsend became the first chair of Elevate Northeast Indiana in 2017 and was succeeded in that position last October by Dr. Michael Mirro, a key investor in early-stage and startup companies in Indiana.
Mirro said her efforts were critical to building a deeper entrepreneurial culture for the region and making it top of mind.
Marilyn Moran-Townsend
“Our economy is dependent on a very vibrant entrepreneurial community,” he said in an announcement around the time of the change.
“We need to do everything we can to cultivate that activity and continue to build off of our entrepreneurial culture. We have a lot of support organizations in the region that are helping and Elevate needs to be fuel for all the activities.”
A few weeks after Mirro became its chair, Dan Meek joined Elevate Ventures as northeast Indiana’s entrepreneur-in-residence.
“Dan has experience on all sides of entrepreneurship, not only in coaching startups but also being part of a startup himself,” Mirro said. “A lot of his experience has been in commercialization and medical device startups so it’s natural for him to be here helping entrepreneurs that are in that space.”
In addition to running his consulting practice, Seneca Business Ventures, Meek had served as bioscience commercialization director and venture development vice president for Rev1 Ventures.
At Rev1 he was involved in creating investment funds at OhioHealth and Nationwide Children’s Hospital and he led investments in companies spun out from those institutions and from Ohio State University.
While he has specific medical device industry experience, Mirro said Meek’s background has prepared him to help entrepreneurs across many industries.
In addition to medical devices and life sciences, Elevate Northeast Indiana planned to develop entrepreneurship with resources and mentoring in the region’s key industrial clusters of data science, advanced manufacturing and insurance, he said.
