The Power of Pivoting with Nida Ansari

Show Notes
In this episode of See Yourself IN, host Casey Harrison sits down with Nida Ansari, Chief Innovation Officer at 16 Tech Innovation District. Nida shares her unique journey, transitioning from a chemistry background to a career focused on fostering innovation and supporting entrepreneurs. She discusses the challenges of navigating unexpected career changes, the importance of adaptability, and the power of leveraging personal strengths. Nida provides an inside look at 16 Tech, highlighting its diverse offerings, including coworking spaces, makerspaces, and community events. She emphasizes the importance of community engagement, the role of 16 Tech in supporting underrepresented founders, and the impact of hard tech and advanced manufacturing in Indiana.

5 Key Takeaways:

1. Flexibility is Key: Career paths are rarely linear. Be open to unexpected opportunities and adapt your plans as needed, using your strengths as a guide.
2. Community Fuels Innovation: Coworking spaces provide more than just a place to work. They foster a sense of community, offer access to resources, and encourage collaboration, which are vital for entrepreneurial success.
3. Hard Tech is Cool: Advanced manufacturing offers exciting and rewarding career paths. Explore the world of hard tech and consider its potential for innovation and impact.
4. Inclusion Drives Progress: Intentionally supporting underrepresented founders and communities leads to a more vibrant and equitable innovation ecosystem.
5. Find Your Adventure: Explore the resources available at 16 Tech, from makerspaces and coworking options to community events, and discover how you can get involved.

For more resources on the jobs, companies, and opportunities in Indiana, visit

https://www.cicpindiana.com/syi/  

Transcript

[00:00:00] Casey: Welcome to today's episode of see yourself in where you will learn about cool jobs, people and companies in Indiana. Today you'll hear about skills that will help you find success. And most importantly, we hope we inspire you to dream big. I'm Casey Harrison, your host. See yourself in is presented by the Central Indiana corporate partnership to help you discover all of the opportunities within Indiana's advanced industries.

We'll discuss career paths, job training programs, and all of the ways that you can develop and apply those skills to explore these opportunities. Today we're joined by Nita Ansari, Chief Innovation Officer at 16 Tech Innovation District. Nita manages innovation, the membership experience, and programming for the largest innovation district in Indiana.

She's passionate about supporting entrepreneurs as they look to leverage hard tech and innovation to propel not just themselves, but also their industries forward. Get to know Nita in today's episode.

Nita, welcome to See Yourself In. 

[00:01:05] Nida: Thanks for having me. 

[00:01:06] Casey: Yeah, we're excited for you to be here. We like to start every episode by helping people understand how our guest got to Indiana. So tell us, are you from here? If not, how did you get here? 

[00:01:16] Nida: I'm not from here. I've been here about three and a half years.

I moved here from Atlanta, but Atlanta is not where I started. I've lived in seven cities in the U S I'm originally from Pakistan. What brought me here was a job I've lived in the Midwest before I used to live in Kansas city, but what brought me here was, was work. And I've been here and loved it ever since.

[00:01:33] Casey: So take us back to high school times. Were you thinking, I know it feels like a long time ago for some of us. Were you thinking about life after graduation? Like, did you know college was the next step? 

[00:01:44] Nida: Oh yeah, college was a non negotiable for me. I was going to college. I also knew that I was going to go to college for chemistry.

So I knew that I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I want to say elementary school. If you want to take it further back, I wanted to be a scientist. Then it was a botanist, then it was a chemist. And then I stuck to that through college. I minored in sociology, but after that, I was a disaster in the lab.

I couldn't get a single thing to work. No product of mine looked like it was supposed to look none of my experiments. I broke stuff. It was a problem. So I didn't know what I wanted to do afterwards. So if I've majored in chemistry, what are my options after that? So it was kind of a. All right, I've, I had this very certain path for the sum total of like 16 years, right?

All the way through senior year of college. And then I was like, what do I do now? 

[00:02:30] Casey: Well, what did you do? I'm like, keep talking because today you're the chief innovation officer at 16 tech innovation district and we're going to introduce 16 tech in a minute, but I want to understand how you went from a very life sciences specific field of study to now working in innovation and doing much different work.

[00:02:46] Nida: I taught high school chemistry and environmental science for a year. After I graduated, so I was an international student, which meant I needed to get a job to stay in the country. So what I did was I got a special permit for it for a year and taught high school chemistry at a private all girls boarding school, North Maryland, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

So I did that. It was a, Interesting experience. I learned a lot about myself. So I did like teaching. I knew that I, I could have seen myself teach for the rest of my life, but when I actually started doing it, I was like, I cannot see myself teaching for the rest of my life. So I did that just for a year and decided to go into administration.

schools because I felt like that part of it was broken because of my experience as a teacher. Clearly, I'm not doing that anymore, right? Through a series of events, I had to stay in the country, which meant I needed sponsors for a visa, which meant that I took the job that I was given. So I applied for a ton of them, and I graduated around a time where, after a year, I went back to school and got an MBA, but after that MBA, I had to figure out what to do, and not many employers were sponsoring foreign workers, so I ended up just quite literally falling into the career I had at the time, which was working in packaging, being a project manager, working on product launches, corporate innovation, that kind of stuff.

But interestingly enough, the thread that's continued throughout the course of my career is the teaching and the storytelling. So now I couldn't have written this moving forward. I have a quote that's like, your life can only be lived moving forward, but it's only understood backwards. So if I look backwards now, I'm like, I've been kind of teaching this whole time.

But at the time, I was like, it was really nerve wracking because you're like, I thought I had a plan. Not a single one of my plans has gone according to plan. 

[00:04:33] Casey: But there's so much. First of all, thank you for sharing that. And there's also so much just value in sharing that because so many people are listening are in the stage of I have a plan.

I need it to go as planned. It's not going as planned. How do I pivot in meaningful ways? And I think what your journey illustrates, and we'll get into more of it, obviously, on the rest of the episode, but is pivoting using your strengths. 

[00:04:57] Nida: Yes. That's a really great way to move. It's constant change. Having a plan is important.

Understanding that there should be wiggle room, flexibility, forgiveness, however you want to think about it is super important and has been super important because if I was tied down to, look, I want this job and my identity is tied to that job and if I don't get that job, who am I? That's a problem.

That's actually very disconcerting. Recently, during Women in Tech Week. I did a mentoring session with young ladies at Purdue with Datamine and that's what we talked about is like you're women in STEM and you think you're gonna go work for the big pharma here or the lab over here or whatever it is and what if you don't get that, right?

Things change and that should be okay. You may end up in a better place, but if you're tied in every way, especially with your identity to that job you think you're gonna get out of school, you could be in a recession when you graduate, like I was. What then? So that's, that's really like disconcerting and can be damaging, in fact, if you tie your identity to that outcome.

[00:06:04] Casey: And that's why I think this podcast is so important because it's really demystifying that there are a ton of opportunities. So if the original plan doesn't pan out the exact way you expected, It's maybe not even necessarily a plan B. It's just a different plan A, right? It's a route that you maybe didn't consider.

I want to pivot and talk a little bit about 16TECH because it is the largest innovation district in Indiana. So for those unfamiliar or maybe they've driven by and only seen the sign, how would you introduce 16TECH? 

[00:06:32] Nida: 16 Tech's got 50 acres that are under development. We've got three active buildings.

We're in one of them right now recording, right? The one we're recording out of has three components. One that most people seem to be familiar with is the AMP. It's the food hall. We've got a ton of delicious food. A lot of the vendors in there are food entrepreneurs, which means that they are owners of one or two locations of that restaurant and are still figuring out how to scale, how to serve customers, et cetera, et cetera.

A large number of them are women minority owned restaurants, veteran owned restaurants, so that's kind of cool. The second part of the building is the co working space, where we have tens of thousands of square feet of co working, ranging from hot desks, which an individual can come in, sit wherever they want, all the way up to 20 to 40 person studios.

So, the idea is that as an entrepreneur, as you grow your business, you can grow with us here without having to move. And so consider it kind of like an incubation space, right? And then the third spot is Machine, which is our makerspace, which is where we have a number of different kinds of equipment. So if you become a member at Machine, you get to come in, you get trained, you get one on one sessions, you can join classes, you can learn how to prototype stuff.

So it's the place to build your prototypes in Central India. Those are the three components of the building that we're in. Now, more broadly, when you look at the district, we've got plans to add Lab spaces, we already have a lab space with IBRI. We've got a manufacturing collaboration center with EMC squared.

So as you see that vision develop, this could be, and this will be a really cool space in the next five, 10, 15 years, where even next year we'll be putting up 300 residence units right behind the building we're in. This makes it a fourth economy kind of space. So what that means is you can live here, you can learn here, you can work here, and you can play.

So I think that's a really unique value proposition for Indiana as a whole, and it actually almost provides a blueprint for other parts of Indiana to emulate. 

[00:08:30] Casey: Oh, my gosh, there's so much in there. I want to unpack and we won't spend too much time here. But I think what I appreciate most about this space is that you really can find your way to plug in no matter who you are, what your interests are.

I mean, as someone who dines at the AMP often can confirm the food is fantastic, but it's also a great place just to come hang out for a farmer's market on a Saturday morning or to come out for a vintage market, or they've had various things during Hispanic Heritage Month. I was out here for so long. I love how that space is activated, but I can also say as an entrepreneur, the value of coworking spaces.

Is just not talked about enough. And I'm wondering if maybe you can talk a little bit about what it means to be in a coworking space and what you have access to as a member. 

[00:09:15] Nida: When you think about coworking, you and I are entrepreneurs, right? We're entrepreneurial. I want to be in a, there are days when I don't want to just work from home.

There's value to being a part of a fabric, right? Which is, look, I can be at a hot desk today. And then I see someone working across the, The, the way for me and they could be a wraparound service, they could be an accountant, they could be a finance person, they could be a lawyer, you could go down the hallway and talk to somebody else that's building something like what you're building or just built what you're trying to build.

So you can provide or you can find mentorship here, you can find peers here, you can find services here, so it makes it a really cool environment. And an ecosystem and a community really to be a part of the way we try to foster that community. And that engagement between our members in this building is a number of ways, right?

You show up, you participate in our lunch and learns, you participate in our events. Uh, we've coffee and connects on a regular basis. And then we have a platform called Circle that we encourage people and members to engage. So if you're not here every day, that's okay. If you're here once or twice a week or a few times a month, that's totally fine, but that makes you a part of this community in a way that you're probably not going to get working from home.

[00:10:26] Casey: We have people listening. We have young people listening. We have people who are in the middle of their career wanting to make a change. How would you recommend they start plugging into 16 Texts, whether it's the co working space or machine or I mean, obviously come to the AMP and E, but where should they get started?

[00:10:41] Nida: This is a, what I call a choose your own adventure, right? So when you show up, you pick the adventure based on who you are and where you are. So if you're a young person and may not have the time to come here and work, but you do have the time to engage here with events, I would encourage you to subscribe to our events calendar.

I would encourage you to subscribe, in fact, to the TechPoint. Events calendar includes a lot of the stuff that we do and then show up for those that evenings, afternoon, lunches, beyond that, if you're looking for a place to truly be a part of the community and work and get access to the amenities here, which include, by the way, this media lab, we're putting forward a space that will be a great place to facilitate workshops and brainstorms.

That'll be available in Q1. We've got spaces to do small events. You can host board meetings here. So if you're trying to really get your business going in a way that's, quite frankly, affordable for an early stage company, this is the place to start. So if you're looking, definitely reach out. We have an email address, info at 16tech.

com. You can go to our website, you could put in an inquiry. Come and take a tour. I think this is a very understated space. A lot of people I talk to don't know that the co working space exists back here. So at least come and come and walk through it. It's a very unusual space. The fact that you can go from a solo, being a solo entrepreneur to a two person office, to a 20 person studio, and then host conferences and small events all in the same place and get a mailing address while you're at it is highly unusual.

[00:12:14] Casey: Well, and highly beneficial if you're looking for those resources. Yeah, it's incredible. The work out here at 16 tech, we love recording here. 

[00:12:23] Nida: And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the machine part. So if you're a person that we get a lot of members who. have a desire to prototype and build stuff, but your spouse or your partner or your budget won't allow you to buy all these tools, laser cutters and wood, you know, lathes and all these 3D printers, uh, and put them in your garage.

But what you can do for 50 a month is get a membership at machine and come in and get trained on all this equipment that It's quite phenomenal. You can churn out onesie, twosie things. You can churn out, we've had people build game boards, arcade boxes, all the way up to 700 pound drones. Again, like I said, choose your own adventure.

You can be a hobbyist, you can be a maker, you could be an artist. We have plenty of artists here. Or you can be somebody that's trying to build a truly scaled startup and is just prototyping. 

[00:13:10] Casey: Choose your own adventures. The perfect way to explain that. I want to talk just briefly about manufacturing day.

I know we were on the back end of that. It just happened, but it will be back in 2025. Can you tell us briefly just what the event is and how to stay tuned for more information? 

[00:13:24] Nida: So I really nerd out on on what I call hard tech or what we call in the ecosystem called hard tech or advanced manufacturing.

October is Global Manufacturing Month, and what that means is that our ecosystem broadly in Indiana starts to celebrate manufacturing, hard tech of all kinds. So what we did at 16Tech and our team with Workforce Development, Tracy Jackson and Mayesha Cole, put together this phenomenal four day series for young people.

To come in and talk to a panel of folks that have worked in manufacturing and give them an idea of what aspiring to work in manufacturing looks like, because it's not what it used to be. Now everything's connected. You can build in AI, you're working with robots and cobots. It's really cool. I think, again, I nerd out on this, but I think to work in manufacturing because I did it for a dozen years, right?

So, I don't know if people say that normally, a dozen years, but it's a decade. We're here for it. Just over a decade. But anyway, so we put four days together. We had approximately 120 ish students come through. In cohorts of 30 to 40 at a time, and we had a panel of folks like Dr. Alicia McCoy, Ryan Henderson, and a number of other really great folks from the ecosystem to talk to them about what it's like, what is it like when you don't know what's out there as a young person, and Indiana is really one of our strengths is manufacturing and hard tech, if you don't know what's out there, and that it really is kind of cool to work in hard tech, You're not going to aspire to it.

You're not going to think about it as a career. You might think of it as a, just a stop. So this was intended and I think it accomplished that goal. The students also got to build their own little kits and they also got to spend some time in machine touring, showing Paul Williams, our senior operations manager.

Got a chance to show how the equipment runs, what you can build with it. He had sampled little prototypes for them. Like I said, you can be an artist, you can be a maker. We had a number of really smart kids come through and I hope that that event provided some kind of aspirational, they don't have to end up in manufacturing or hard tech, but.

Getting them think, thinking around, Hey, I could be just the, I could be that, which was the slogan for the event was really kind of cool. So for 2025, moving into it, so global manufacturing month happens every year. I'm excited about it every year, but next year, because, you know, we've got to strengthen life sciences, we're going to be doing something similar.

Tracy and Manisha's team is going to be doing something similar in the life sciences space. We'll certainly be doing more stuff in the manufacturing space. I'd love to do something that's more hard tech summit, like all the cool things that are made in Indiana and getting the ecosystem and young people to appreciate the stuff that they use every day that's made here.

I think that was the thing that became relatable because I've worked in industries where still yet today, I worked there like a decade ago, still yet today, I could walk through Walmart and see my product on shelf. In fact, I walked through Target the other day and I was like, Ooh, I've worked on this project.

Eight years ago and it's now on shelf and it's really gratifying to see. And so when you lay that relatable story out for those folks, for those kids, they kind of see that, Oh, that actually could be really cool. And you know, the fun facts, like, did you know that Coca Cola cans are made at over 600 cans a minute?

That's when you kind of see them go, Oh, that's really cool. 

[00:16:43] Casey: Well, and the last time I walked into Machine, I ran into a colleague from IU Health and they were 3D printing some bones and organs for practice ahead of big surgeries and things. So I mean, the impact of that space and the opportunity, not only for entrepreneurs and future leaders, but also for the community they serve.

To leverage that is incredible. Absolutely. 

[00:17:05] Nida: Yeah. So we've got. We've got a couple of really interesting entities in just machine, right? So we've got a company that's working with amputees on their gate from the orthopedic side of things. You mentioned the IUL 3D lab. They actually scan patients prior to surgeries and 3D print lower jaws or other parts that are going to be worked on during the surgery so that the surgeon can plan out the surgery in advance.

They take Less time in surgery, patient outcomes are better, patient recovery times are shorter. So when you think about the cascading effect of the work that happens in this building, just from a prototyping standpoint, it's phenomenal. We have another company that started here as a single member, and they've now scaled up to a 2, 500 square foot space in EMC squared.

And they're building a 700 pound drone. So to serve the ag tech space. So the stories in this building are actually. It's not the building. It's the stories and the people in the building that make the building the community that we're trying to trying to foster. We've got some really cool entrepreneurs here.

[00:18:07] Casey: Because it's Indiana, it's not just community and entrepreneurs. It's your neighbors. It's your family, right? And it's your friends who are doing this work. So the impact is very real. 

[00:18:17] Nida: Yeah, so we're located in the historic Riverside district. And what that means is it's Historically underserved district at 70 plus percent African American.

We've made a concerted effort as the 16 tech community corporation to include our neighbors in all of the work that we do. So in fact, we have a workforce and neighborhood development team. I probably butchered the name of that department, but that's what they do in no small part. And so as a result of that, we've been able to include a lot of entrepreneurs in the work that we do.

So the schools that came in were from historically underserved neighborhoods, like the students were from historically underserved neighborhoods, going back to where a place for everybody, but we have been very intentional about who we serve, right? We've got the neighbors, we've got entrepreneurs, we've got young students, we've got corporations, so it's truly the live, work, learn, and play.

So when you come in here on a Saturday for the Indy Winter Farmers Market, you may see a coworker, but you may see a neighbor. I think that's super cool. 

[00:19:17] Casey: It's beyond super cool. You're passionate about this work. And I mean, that's obvious, but why are you passionate about this work? 

[00:19:24] Nida: I like helping and I like solving problems, both of which are things that I think early stage entrepreneurs desperately need.

They need help on all fronts, whether it's finding grants or finding the right resource or meeting the right people or hiring the right people. I love helping people. Set up the infrastructure that allows them to do that or provides them the community that does that. But then when we think about, all right, what are the, what are the puzzles of the problems being able to find and connect the dots in a way that closes some of these gaps with underserved neighborhoods or with, quite frankly, underrepresented founders, you've got minority founders and founders from the LGBTQ plus community.

We've got founders that are immigrants, refugees. We did a campaign in November that partnered with helping veterans and families. We placed a food bin. We did a little breakfast connect on Veterans Day and for the month of November, we collected almost a truckload of food to deliver to HVAF. And that actually was a result of members saying, Hey, I know someone up in Lebanon that has a ton of food that we could take for this.

So I'm hoping to do more of that in 2025, but that's an example of the community coming together in a variety of ways to help neighbors. 

[00:20:42] Casey: These episodes go so fast, so unfortunately we're getting to the end, but we like to end every episode by asking our guests to share three things that you've learned on your career journey that might help those listening.

[00:20:53] Nida: Always have a plan, be okay if things don't go according to plan, and forgiveness if things don't go according to plan. I think those three give you some semblance of control, because you have a plan, some semblance of flexibility, because you're okay if it doesn't go according to plan, and then from an identity perspective, you're not tying everything to that plan, so you're forgiving of yourself.

[00:21:13] Casey: Thank you for joining us. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, of course. How can people find you? 

[00:21:18] Nida: LinkedIn's the best place to find me, Nita Ansari. Indianapolis, shockingly easy to find on there, but that's where to start. 

[00:21:27] Casey: We're so glad that you were able to join us today to learn about Indiana's advanced industries and how you can start or enhance your career journey.

Until next time, we hope that you'll be able to see yourself in the unlimited opportunities in Indiana.