Our Urban Innovator Platform (UIP – pronounced “whip”) is now open for business. The beta release of the platform is now available at https://urbanei.mystaging.dev. If you are 1) interested in innovation that improves the lives of people in urban communities, 2) working for a startup or established company that is focused on urban innovation, or 3) working for an organization that supports urban-focused innovators and entrepreneurs, we invite you to join our community. Our aim is to facilitate game-changing improvements in urban quality of life. We want the members of our community to do well by doing good. In other words, we want people to create profitable, sustainable ventures and projects that address important urban community needs. If this sounds appealing to you, please click below to sign up!
If you are a current UEI mail list subscriber who is not yet registered on the platform, we encourage you to do so. In the near future, we will be restricting our mail distribution to members only. We only want people on the platform who want to be there, and we have no intention to “spam” people with information they don’t perceive as useful.
This is “day zero” – much more to come!
We have established the basic framework and first applications for the UIP, but there is much more to come. Each of our current applications – Business Profiles, Business Proposals, Problem Statements, and Urban Entrepreneur Resource Organizations – allows members to both receive and contribute information and reviews. We intend to continue this pattern with our upcoming applications. We provide a basic social feed and messaging feature that allows members to freely offer updates to the community and to communicate privately with each other. We moderate all platform activity to ensure that members adhere to the site’s mission and professional standards.
In the coming months, in addition to adding members to the platform, we will be adding much more content! Our aim is to make the UIP an incredibly useful, if not indispensable, resource for urban innovators.
We invite you to join us on this journey. Together, we will achieve urban communities that are more livable, productive, equitable, and resilient.
A community built on TRUST
“The Whip” will remain a close-knit professional community. Members and daily active users will likely number in the thousands, not millions or billions. UEI is a registered Michigan not-for-profit organization. A key feature of our organization is the level of trust we aim to establish and maintain. We will not sell member information or ad space. This is a community that is by, for, and about the members. The financial support for the community will come from the members and from the organizations they represent. That said, there is no charge for basic UEI membership. We expect that members will support the organization to the extent they are able, and in proportion to the value they perceive. That is how entrepreneurial communities work.
Background
We established the Urban Entrepreneurship Initiative (UEI) more than ten years ago with one clear objective: to facilitate more innovation and entrepreneurship that benefit people who live in urban communities. During the ensuing years, we have engaged thousands of people and have made many more people aware of the opportunities associated with urban innovation and entrepreneurship. Last year (2024), we announced a significant pivot as we determined to take the lead in creating and actively maintaining a global community of urban innovators and entrepreneurs. Why a global community? Because with rapidly advancing technology and unprecendented global connectivity, we see tremendous opportunities to rapidly scale a solution that exists in one place to the many other places that can benefit. We also want to give innovators and entrepreneurs access to the widest possible array of problem statements, business proposals, established business models, and markets for their products, so they can make the most productive use of their skills and innovations.