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Chris Lantanen

Faculty Director of Entrepreneurship at PennWest Edinboro and Director of the NWPA Innovation Beehive Network; co-founder of Northwest PA Made accelerator for makers and artists.

Jul 22, 2026

speaker_0HOST
8:51
What was the inspiration behind it? Were you seeing kind of gaps in the ecosystem for people?
8:57
I wouldn't say gaps because what existed before was Erie Made.
9:02
And that was a program that obviously you can tell by the name shares a lot of DNA with NWPA Made.
9:08
And what we were finding was that the people that were going through Erie Made, which was a program our Beehive was not involved in, were eventually ending up at the Beehive anyways because they knew about us and a lot of them needed branding work and a lot of them needed website work and they're all artists.
9:25
And so...
9:27
I think, and correct me if I'm wrong Brandon but I think when you're an artist, you're so tied up in like the creative act of making your product, selling your stuff, going to vendor fairs, doing, doing commissions that it's really hard to then take like five hours on the weekend to think about, oh, what about like my brand identity and what about my website? And yeah, like all the things that take you away from like your creative self.
9:56
Right.

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16:14
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