Last night, many members of the Flashpoint Academy team were pleased to join nine other winners of this year’s 2008 Chicago Innovation Awards as well and many nominees in a crowd of close to 1000 supporters of innovation at a festive celebration and awards ceremony held at the Goodman Theatre. This was really an extraordinary event and wonderful recognition for our new College and an acknowledgement of all of the hard work that so many people here and so many others have expended over the last two years in order to bring about the successes we have had to date.
During the evening, we were able to spend time visiting with some of the other award winners and meeting a number of new prospective students and employers and then to watch a very entertaining presentation by the MCs, (Tom Kuczmarski and Dan Miller), introductory comments by various city VIPs including Michael Krause, and a humorous and thoughtful presentation by Barry Moltz. Of course, all of our incoming Flashpoint students were privileged just a few weeks ago to have Barry come and give a similar presentation exclusively for Flashpoint students at the College and then to spend a considerable amount of time with our students in Question and Answer sessions.
HOWARD TULLMAN - ACCEPTANCE REMARKS FOR FLASHPOINT ACADEMY AWARD
We have slightly fewer employees than Abbott’s 68,000 so I thought we would try to bring all of them (along with a couple of our best students) on stage tonight.
Our thanks go to Tom, Dan and Eddie and the sponsors of tonight’s amazing evening. I also want to congratulate Barry Moltz on his presentation which I believe contained the only intentional humor tonight.
We want to congratulate all the other 2008 innovation award winners here tonight as well as all the other nominees and invite everyone to our reception at Flashpoint Academy on November 6th honoring this year’s 10 winners which will be sponsored by Microsoft. There will be some important news that evening for all new entrepreneurs.
I want to thank our entire team and especially our Chairman, Ric Landry who’s apparently too modest to attend these kinds of things. We, on the other hand, are all shameless glory hounds. But it is important to note and we say every day that no one succeeds by themselves – it’s all a team effort.
I want to thank Mayor Daley and the City for its encouragement and support for our dream.
I want to thank all our investors, and the parents of our students and the students themselves who believed in our vision when the college was just an idea and some empty space across the street.
And, as I said, we have two of our students here with us tonight – our “first” student (Dan) and the student body president (Kieran) to represent every one of the almost 400 Flashpoint students.
And lastly I want to thank my wife Judy who, as Barry noted, suffers through all the ups and downs of each new business, who is always supportive, and who never complains.
As everyone in this room knows, dreams and ideas are a dime a dozen, it's the day-in, day-out hard work of turning dreams into concrete realities that is what innovation is all about.
Thanks again.
We have provided a number of pictures below of parts of the evening, and as I said in my remarks, which are also reproduced above, we are grateful to everyone, and especially the sponsors, who made it possible for Chicago to celebrate innovation and for Flashpoint Academy to be recognized as the innovative leader in education that we all believe it to be.
