Innovate for Maine

The Innovate for Maine internship program connects students with companies that want to grow and create jobs in Maine. This program is designed to match students with companies that desire to create and accelerate innovative ideas. The companies that will be chosen must desire scalable growth and provide interns with a meaningful learning experience. 

Innovate for Maine interns have the ability to:

• Conduct market research and customer surveys to identify innovation opportunities

• Generate ideas to leverage market opportunities

• Write marketing messages and innovation descriptions

• Run "fail fast, fail cheap" experiments, such as working on prototypes and sales forecasts to determine innovation feasibility

Intern Availability

In June 2012, we selected 20 interns who worked with 26 companies over the past year.  This year, we will be selecting 30 students to work as interns between June 2013 – April 2014. Some interns are placed with only one company and may either work on site, or at the University of Maine or one of our partner organizations.  Other interns work on projects for multiple companies and are based at the University of Maine but may be available for company visits. 

Over the summer, interns will be available to work 200 or 400-hour internships.  During the academic year, interns will be available to work 125-hour internships each semester. Those interns based at the University of Maine, or a partner organization, are available to work on smaller projects requiring fewer than 200 hours.

Logistics

Prior to working with selected companies, interns receive training in innovation and entrepreneurship to enable them to work effectively with companies on growth projects. Specifically, students will be trained in Innovation Engineering, the University of Maine's ground-breaking new innovation program.  Through this training they will learn how to develop business models, customer surveys, and write customer messages. They will have the ability to create ideas for innovations and test them using "fail fast, fail cheap" experiments.

Selected students will be employees of the University of Maine and will have a UMaine supervisor/mentor in addition to the company contact.  Prior to the start of the internship, we will develop a work plan in consultation with the company contact and selected intern. (A sample work plan can be seen here.) Previous projects have included market research, competitive analysis, and digital marketing. 

Blackstone Accelerates Growth

The Innovate for Maine program is subsidized by Blackstone Accelerates Growth.  The percentage of the student stipend that the company pays is based on the size of the company. Stipends are $4000 for full-time (400 hours) or $2000 for part-time (200) hours interns.  For smaller projects, companies pay a percentage of the hourly pay for the time that intern devotes to the project based on the same criteria below.

500+ employees, pay 100%

250-499 employees, pay 75%

50-249 employees, pay 50%

10-49 employees, pay 25%

1-9 employees, pay 10%

Blackstone Accelerates Growth is a $3 million, three-year initiative that will help Maine entrepreneurs leading start-up and existing companies get the coaching and training that they need to accelerate their growth.  Blackstone Accelerates Growth will strengthen Maine’s culture of entrepreneurship and create a more vibrant and statewide system of support that helps companies add an additional 10,000 good jobs and $664 million in revenues to the Maine economy over ten years. 

Apply to be an Innovate for Maine company now! Deadline for submissions is March 23, 2013.