It started as a small, informal meetup of a likeminded people who wanted to talk about fostering innovation in Traverse City. Three years later, it’s a key cog in the local entrepreneurial community and a trusted incubator for cutting-edge new programs and technologies at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC). Such is the story of the Office of Possibilities (OOPs), an NMC-funded initiative that's increasingly spilling out into the community at large.

Described as “northern Michigan’s front porch for connection and collaboration,” OOPs facilitates weekly meetings where entrepreneurs, business owners, students, teachers, and other visionaries get together to network, share ideas, hash out solutions to local problems, and push local change. Now three years in, OOPs has seen 450 attendees pass through its doors and is at least partially responsible for everything from nourishing budding startups to bringing game-changing 3D house printing technology to Traverse City.

“It’s taken three years for us to become an overnight success,” laughs OOPs co-director Will Kitchen. A business consultant with experience ranging from telecommunications to education, Kitchen co-founded OOPs almost by accident in 2022 while attending a “design thinking workshop” at 20Fathoms. There, he “hit it off” with fellow attendees like Steve Rice (an NMC faculty member, and now Kitchen’s OOPs co-director), Nick Beadleston (the executive director of Grove Community Incubator), and Josh Hart (the local entrepreneur behind Riley’s Candles).

“We were having so much fun talking that we decided we would start meeting weekly over at the college, and we would just get into a room and whiteboard like crazy,” Kitchen says. “The idea was to just dream and scheme and have fun.”

One day, the group had an unexpected guest: NMC President Nick Nissley.

“He basically said, ‘What’s going on here?’” Kitchen tells The Ticker. Rice and Kitchen told Nissley about their standing engagement, and he encouraged them to expand it outward, both throughout the college and out into the community. OOPs was officially born.

“Especially from the community perspective, OOPs grew dramatically,” Kitchen says. There was less engagement from the college side initially, but that changed when Jason Slade, NMC’s vice president of strategic initiatives, got involved. “He helped us look at what things we could do at the college, and people started coming in,” Kitchen recalls.

Three years later, that split identity – between college office and community resource – remains at the core of what OOPs is. On the one hand, OOPs is funded by NMC and the NMC Foundation, and still meets regularly on college property. “There's definitely a component of it that serves the college, serves our students, our faculty and our staff,” Slade says. But many regular OOPs attendees aren’t directly affiliated with the college. OOPs also meets offsite each week at Grove Community Incubator on Eighth Street, underlining the fact that it is not solely an NMC entity.

OOPs is starting to become synonymous with the spirit of local innovation that initially sparked its creation. Take Jack Rutkowski, an entrepreneur who relocated to northern Michigan during the pandemic. Rutkowski credits OOPs with helping him build the local network he needed to bring his product concept, a yard game called Flabocce (or “flat bocce”), to life.

According to Kitchen, OOPs also played a key role in connecting NMC with Aqua Action, a Canadian nonprofit “dedicated to building a water-secure future by addressing the global freshwater crisis.” A few years ago, Aqua Action teamed up with NMC for the AquaHacking Challenge, a competition that invited freshwater-focused startups to vie for seed money. Now, the nonprofit has established an American headquarters in Detroit, and even brought Kitchen aboard as one of its consultants – connections he’s hopeful will help bring startups and innovators to Traverse City’s new Freshwater Research and Innovation Center.

“They have almost 100 startups that have spun out of their program in Canada, and we’re hoping to do the same thing in the U.S.,” Kitchen says of Aqua Action.

On the NMC front, Slade says OOPs helped prompt the creation of a several-times-a-year pitch event where students can request scientific research dollars. “If a proposal is tied to a college-related department or program, then we can support it,” he says. In 2023, the pitch competition led NMC to invest dollars in new microscopes for a microplastics study led by students from the Freshwater Studies program.

“That project started by looking at the Boardman/Ottaway River, trying to identify where there are microplastics and how they are accumulating,” Slade says. “And now that has expanded to look at everything from our septic and our sewer systems, to our wastewater systems, to our rain collection.”

It was also at an OOPs meeting that the idea of investing in 3D printing technology for building homes first took shape. That 3D printer will arrive at NMC this coming week, after years of work and investment.

“That idea actually started with work that Will was doing in the Office of Possibilities,” Slade says of the 3D printing tech. “Will identified through the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurs an opportunity to participate in a Pitch for the Trades competition, and then he worked with our construction faculty to pitch the 3D printing technology.”

In fact, Slade has been so impressed by OOPs that he expects the college will look to bake some of the program’s innovation mindsets into its next strategic plan.

“The current strategic plan will wind down this year, and the next one will shortly. So we’re looking at ideas right now, and one goal is to integrate more of that entrepreneurial mindset,” Slade says. “We’d like to look at some of our programs and our processes through a different light and ask: How does innovation get wound into everything that we do? How do we look at all our projects and all our objectives through that entrepreneurial lens? We’ve talked a lot about ‘an OOPs for education,’ or ‘OOPs 2.0.’ What does that look like, and how can we continue to support the community aspect of it, but bake it down farther into to what we do?”