Innovation Festival returns Aug. 16 with focus on human connections in a surging biotech hub

While the third iteration of BioKansas’ Innovation Festival might initially seem scaled back, said Dr. Kevin Mills, the summer biosciences conference is amping up its emphasis on what makes Kansas City a great biotech hub.

“The idea is really to get people with really diverse viewpoints and diverse jobs and careers together to hear from one another about what’s new and what sort of emerging challenges are out there,” said Mills, the new president and CEO of BioKansas, which organizes the annual Innovation Festival. “In large part, our goal is to get people together to interact and see what kind of magic happens.”

Click here to register for the 2024 Innovation Festival.

Kevin Mills, BioKansas

This year’s festival is consolidated into a single day — Aug. 16 at the Overland Park Convention Center — and removes past years’ focus on music concerts as an anchor of the showcase and celebration.

Mills, who joined BioKansas in March after 30 years in the Boston area in various biotech roles, hopes the event creates real visibility for the region and its bioscience strengths, as well as providing space for people to share their experiences.

“I want to hear those human stories and I’d like to be able then to use this festival as a springboard for us to be able to tell those externally to the conference,” he explained. “Because there’s so much that makes Kansas an amazing place to do science, and yet in a lot of ways it sort of flies under the radar.”

“We want to create some buzz,” Mills added.

In 2023, the Innovation Festival drew more than 400 attendees and 90 speakers, according to BioKansas.

Nick Love, Love Lifesciences, right, pitches his startup during the 2023 Innovation Festival; photo courtesy of BioKansas

Sessions for this year’s event include BioFinance 101, Bioscience in the Community, and Innovations in Agriculture. Panel discussions about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Innovation and updates from last year’s pitch competition winners and other startups also are planned as part of the economic workforce and community development effort.

“One of our long term goals for this is to make this meeting a destination meeting for people that have an interest in biotechnology wherever they might be,” Mills said.

Click here for a full schedule for the Innovation Festival.

Although the music festival element of the event has been nixed, organizers still want to bring in an element of the creative community, Mills said. He noted local artists are expected to present their work alongside scientific researchers in a STEAM Gallery. 

“It’s a nod to the notion that the things that we do in biotech — while they may be scientific and they may be technical — are every bit an act of creativity, as well,” Mills explained.

One returning feature: The event will still showcase the science and art of brewing with several local breweries featured in the Brewseum.

From the archives: Beer isn’t paint by numbers, it’s science: Why the art of brewing gets its own showcase at Innovation Festival 

Much of the event schedule was crowdsourced, Mills noted.

“We brought in a really diverse range of stakeholders, then handed them the keys and said, ‘You plan this and make it the conference you want it to be,’” he said. “So we’ve been very community engaged in putting this together. It’s interesting because it doesn’t look entirely like I thought it would, but it looks entirely better. It’s going to be really neat.”

A startup pitch competition also is expected to return this year, Mills said, but it won’t be divided into industry sub-sectors as previously organized.

“We want to be able to support entrepreneurs and startups by giving them an opportunity to practice their pitch and to get feedback from a diverse range of experts,” he said, noting a small cash prize as an additional bonus to winners.

“And part of it is to really show the world that there are some very cool things happening around here,” he added.

Mills is excited to experience his first Innovation Festival, he said, noting his experience with BioKansas so far has been great.

“The people are amazing,” he explained. “The work that we’re doing is really terrific and it’s gratifying. And I love Kansas City. It’s just amazing. I don’t know why I didn’t move here 20 years ago. It’s fantastic. There’s nothing that I’ve encountered that I don’t like.”