Origin Story
After a decade of building an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Kansas City with Think Big Partners, we are pleased to introduce our new spin-off company, Pioneer Partners, to better serve our smart city consulting clients. To better explain the origin of how Pioneer Partners has evolved, it helps to hear the background story.
Think Big started off in 2010 as a business incubator, accelerating the commercialization of technology to solve problems. Over 10 years, we ran an incubator, a startup accelerator, and invested in companies via our venture fund (some successes and some lessons learned). We hosted hundreds of events and programs in ten years including an innovation conference, smart city technology showcases, demo days, bootcamps, pitch competitions, youth educational workshops and community building events. In addition to the member companies, daily visitors included traveling entrepreneurs, local, state, and federal elected officials, corporate executives, investors and global teams, just to name a few. We built a nationally recognized coworking space that started as 12,000 SF and grew to 41,000 SF, which was then acquired in 2018 by a local, Kansas City company.
In 2014, we dove headfirst into our first smart city project in Kansas City, orchestrating a $15.7M public-private partnership with Cisco, and the City of Kansas City, MO. Recognizing the opportunity for human impact, we started taking more “smart city” clients and never looked back. Since then, we have worked in over 30 cities.
Today, we are excited about the world of changes that open opportunities for more impact. We recognize the need for digital transformation has become the conversation. In 2020, we launched Pioneer Partners to better serve clients, especially in smart city and digital transformation. Leveraging our experience at Think Big, we use design thinking, creativity, an ability to identify connections and the power of network to enable change.
We excited to continue to work with communities under this new company to build a better future.