Innovate for Maine Impact: KinoTek
KinoTek, a student start-up seeded in Orono just two years ago, is now a firmly rooted member of Portland’s tech scene with an emerging national profile.
The company led by University of Maine alumnus Justin Hafner, develops movement analysis software that can deliver a real-time full-body assessment in seconds, showing a person’s range of motion, asymmetries, muscle-firing patterns and more.
A key factor in KinoTek’s growth has been the Innovate for Maine Fellows program, which allowed the company to bring on two partially subsidized interns during the summer of 2019.
The Innovate for Maine program exists to provide Maine college students with meaningful internship experiences with exciting in-state companies. The program is supported by strong training and networking components, and the goal is to help students gain perspective on the innovative opportunities available in Maine while simultaneously helping to accelerate businesses. The Office of Innovation and Economic Development coordinates the program, matching students with suitable companies and guiding both through the process. The student fellows are hired and paid through the UMaine, and companies can apply for a subsidy to help cover the cost of paying their fellows.
For an early-stage startup such as KinoTek, hiring two interns in their first full year of operation would have been impossible without some form of financial assistance. A year after taking on their first summer fellows, KinoTek is a case study in the program’s benefits. Not only did they retain one of their fellows, creating a job in Maine, but that fellow, Dan Lesko, is now KinoTek’s chief technology officer.
“Dan went from an intern who was just building his software development skills to running circles around some of the best freelance developers we’ve hired,” Hafner says. “If not for Innovate for Maine, we never would have been able to pay him, and he might not be working with us today.”
Lesko, too, knows he wouldn’t be where he is without Innovate for Maine.
“It really did facilitate what has grown into the KinoTek team,” Lesko says. “The Innovate for Maine program allowed me to get a whole crash course in innovation, and it was eye-opening to shift my perspective from a very academic-focused and engineering mindset during college to a very innovation-focused and entrepreneurial mindset.”