Innovation Engine is a strategy firm that helps organizations across sectors unlock new value, often by doing something they’ve never done before, or through a model they haven’t used before.

Innovation is a process interwoven into every cog in the machine of an organization. The strategists at Innovation Engine match our clients’ subject matter expertise in their sector with our knowledge and models to make the Innovation Experience© gears turn smoothly as growth challenges, modernization efforts, new technologies, or new initiatives emerge. The resulting acceleration is inspired by the imagination necessary to design, build, and sustain novel initiatives. And it is driven by RPM—the repeatable patterns and models that we work with our clients to build.

Working on innovation projects is an exciting and creative process. But there are myriad ways innovation initiatives can “go wrong” at key steps along the way. The Innovation Engine founding team has built their careers working on the process of innovation in a wide range of organizations—from Fortune 100 companies to mid-sized employers to startups to communities—and in a wide range of sectors—manufacturing, healthcare, media & entertainment, government, higher education, technology, retail, and more.

The company was founded in an old mall that had been adaptively reused to foster an environment for innovation, just north of Nashville, Tennessee, in Kentucky’s fastest growing city–Bowling Green, KY. That old mall is the headquarters for the Western Kentucky University Innovation Campus, and serves as the offices as well for Innovation Engine.

Co-founders Sam Ford and Vijay Kamineni first met through work on strengthening the innovation ecosystem for Kentucky. Building on a series of innovation pilot projects across Western and Eastern Kentucky–with partners throughout the state and at research institutions like MIT and University of Southern California–the two were instrumental in Kentucky becoming the first mainland U.S. region to successfully complete the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (MIT REAP) in 2020. In 2021, the duo helped launch the nonprofit AccelerateKY, which has acted as a catalyst for various innovation ecosystem projects over the past few years. In 2022, based on an AccelerateKY whitepaper, they launched the nonprofit Metals Innovation Initiative, focusing what they’d learned on building an innovation ecosystem on one of Kentucky’s comparative advantage industries, the metals sector.

And, in 2023, after paying several visits and experiencing the rising innovation ecosystem forming in Bowling Green, Innovation Engine co-founder Amanda Havard–a longtime collaborator and former client of Ford’s–moved to Bowling Green to establish her next set of companies.

In various combinations, the trio began working together on various innovation ecosystem projects in the region and–in 2024–established Innovation Engine to formalize the emerging processes that the founding team uncovered as they combined their knowledge and approaches of leading innovation initiatives across a diverse range of clients.