Interactive Media Accelerator Grant Underway

Last fall, it was announced that the EDC received a $1.2 million grant to create the Washington Interactive Media Accelerator. For purposes of the grant, the term accelerator refers to accelerating an industry. The Accelerator will not only be incubating and mentoring young companies, it will also be creating a new education and internship program to close the gap between education and industry.

Building the infrastructure of this new entity has been a thoughtful and deliberate process. To date we have hired two new staff members: Audrey Fan, our new part-time Event Manager for WIN programs, and Carly Slater, WIN’s new Business Development Manager. Both hit the ground running in January and have not slowed down since.

In addition to the Accelerator work, the grant also allows us to give scholarship awards to women and minorities who are getting a degree in Interactive Media or Game Development, Computer Science and Engineering, Graphic Art and Animation, or Game Design. Information on the WIN Scholarship will be announced soon. Two $10,000 scholarships will be awarded every year for the next four years. We are looking forward to this summer when we announce the winners of our first WIN Scholarship Awards.

As we hunt for the perfect space for the physical incubator, we’ve created a Virtual Incubator where we are beta testing for our mentoring system. This allows us to test out various models so that, when we are up and running in the physical space, we have best practices in place and ready to go for our first class of companies.

Exciting things are in store for us in the next few months as we move forward by leaps and bounds.