Think Tank

By Emily Garvey

Eric Kogelschatz and Hallie Bram’s conference, TEDxCLE, brought together 10 Northeast Ohio innovators for a day of big ideas. But these creative thinkers have some big plans of their own.

ERIC Tour date: While Kogelschatz and Bram were working at an ad agency in Boston, he played in a band. She insisted that the group pass through Cleveland, her hometown, on the tour. The Michigan native was impressed. “The infrastructure of Cleveland is closer to that of Chicago, and I see the potential for this city to just grow immensely,” Kogelschatz says. Geek rock: Kogelschatz was the only non-neuroscientist in the band. “While we played all these shows and toured, we always talked about neuroscience,” he says. Eventually it sparked his interest in how neuroscience affects marketing. Neuro-what? Kogelschatz, a forerunner in the study of neuromarketing, led a panel discussion titled “Big Brother in Your Brain: Neuroscience and Marketing” at the 2010 South by Southwest Festival and Conference in Austin, Texas. Seriously? People are attempting to map how a marketing message affects blood flow and electrical impulses in consumers’ brains “to understand how a consumer reacts, to understand their subconscious,” he says. Florida dreamin’: Richard Florida, who wrote The Flight of the Creative Class, is a role model for the duo. He says a city needs talent, technology and tolerance to thrive. Applied to Cleveland? Cleveland needs to work on its tolerance, Kogelschatz says. “That goes to the idea of community, that everybody’s integrated and everyone works together.” More inspiration? Kogelschatz thinks comedian Mike Polk’s Hastily-Made Tourism Videos send the wrong message. “I don’t even want to acknowledge that they exist,” he says. Still, it was the perfect cover for his marriage proposal. He took Bram around under the guise of filming a positive version before surprising her at the site where TEDxCLE was held the week before.	HALLIE One fish, two fish: Shark&minnow comes from nicknames Kogelschatz and Bram have for each other. It also applies to their mission of bringing people together. “A lot of times when you’re trying to influence positive change, you’re up against the big guy, or the shark, so to speak. But the little guy can often make change,” Bram says. Who’s who? “I consider him a shark,” says Bram, admitting that she’s the minnow. “But in a good way!” Debunking miserable: “We had a Forbes reporter actually cover our event and say some really, really great things about the event itself and talk about some of the good things that are happening here.” Screen test: Bram studied marketing and film in college, where instructors told her, “Sometimes the best scripts come from painting your characters into a corner and then figuring out how to work them out of that corner,” she explains. “Sometimes when I’m given boundaries or a creative challenge, I refuse to accept, ‘No, we can’t do this.’ ” A land idea: Bram is passionate about the land bank in Cleveland. “I really hope that it succeeds. I’m excited to see … the types of projects that come about.” Service plan: Bram falls back on an idea put forth by Danielle DeBoe, owner of Room Service boutique in Cleveland’s Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, at TEDxCLE: Cleveland is not going to be Los Angeles or New York. “That’s kind of the beauty of the situation.” Positive thought: “Clevelanders want it right now. They want to see good things happening, and they’re hungry for it.”
On Hallie. “I just could see the passion light up in her eyes when she spoke about Cleveland, and I was really excited about that.”	On Eric. “He’s got a lot of great business ideas. … He’s got ideas around the next evolution of music, and he calls it ‘a digital Rolling Stone.’ We have some things in the works around that idea that he came up with, but it’s basically about evolving how people experience music.”

Related Taxonomy

- Creativity	- NEONow
- Today's Entrepreneurs

Popularity:
This record has been viewed 1374 times.