Connectors make up the majority of the American-Made Network. They are professionals from national laboratories, accelerators, incubators, universities, facilities, and industry who support competitors through the development and launch process. They recruit entrepreneurs to participate in the American-Made Challenges and provide the support, resources, and necessary connections participants need to succeed in the competition.
View Positive Deviancy’s Organization Profile on the American-Made Challenge’s website.
We are the most experienced Connector in the American-Made Network and have helped teams raise over $1.85M as their connector
We offer to review your deliverables and comment on how it matches to the judging criteria.
We have a vast network of contacts that we can introduce you to to if we don’t have the answer or expertise already.
Practice sessions and feedback are available to help prepare innovators for upcoming high visibility events.
We set a recurring schedule with you and check in to make sure you are making progress or need help. We help you keep up the pace to submit on time!
We will take you step by step through the submission portal application and show you how to fill out the technical assistance request form.
We keep a running list of all the resources and funding opportunities that we hear about and we make sure to share them with the teams we support.
When you need to demo your product in front of judges and customers, virtually or in person, we have you covered.
We do not charge innovators anything for our connector services for the prizes that we are supporting as long as you agree to write our name in your submission stating that we are your connector. We do offer other services that require voucher funds. (There are some prizes that we do not support – but don’t worry, we will connect you with the right organizations that can help you)
Overview of our process:
1)Contact us and share what American-Made Prize Challenge you are applying for.
2)Schedule a meeting and we discuss where you are at with your idea and then learn what your needs are.
3)We will write you a custom proposal with the services that we will offer to support you with and then send it to you to review.
4)If you agree to the proposal then we set up a regular meeting schedule and get started. (We do require that Positive Deviancy is written in your submission as the connector organization that you nominate to receive the award if you win.)
If you let us know within the first week that you forgot to write our name in, we are able to contact the prize administrators and get it fixed. (Don’t worry, we will remind you as we are supporting you through the submission)
We hope that you would reach out and let us know that something isn’t right. If we aren’t able to work it out, then we can explore some options on finding you another connector who would be a better fit and depending on how much support we have already provided you, we could negotiate an award split. No matter what it is, lets talk it out first and explore options.
We are not able to offer these services for connector support:
Positive Deviancy provides remote facility services for inventors/startups that are preparing to prototype or scale their hardware, design, or software prototypes for small scale manufacturing production. We accept DOE Prize Vouchers and other forms of payment after the statement of work is agreed upon.
Hardware Services:
Software Services:
Maybe. Most of the prizes only offer awards to one connector per team. Since Positive Deviancy doesn’t charge for connector support, we do require that we are written in your submission as the connector to receive that award. We suggest that if you want to work with multiple connectors to be upfront with them about who you will write to receive the award and go from there.
Power Connectors have a contract with the DOE to provide support to all the innovators for a challenge and are not eligible for connector awards.
Connectors provide individualized support to your team and rely on the connector awards to be compensated.
Yes. However, we limit the number of teams that we support in that challenge to match the number of prizes available to win. For example, the Solar Prize awards 20 teams for the Ready! phase. Positive Deviancy will only work with 20 teams or less as their connector. We want our innovators to succeed and it wouldn’t be right to mislead them that way.
