Once upon a time, in a place that is very far away, something awesome happened, baby I. Spark was born. I. Spark was unique. As a child, he was not interested in eating chocolate or playing with toys. I Spark was only interested in the idea of the toy and the idea of chocolate. He spent hours and hours gazing at the sky thinking about ideas. At just two years old, he read Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet and challenged his parents with this statement, “To be or not to be is clearly not the question. To be without an idea is simply not to be at all.” His parents were so outraged when they heard this; they immediately enrolled him in boarding school.

I. Spark was an only child who spent most of his time thinking about “blue sky” ideas. In fact, in boarding school he was called Sparky by the other kids who could not understand him when he asked, “”What would happen if you flew over there and discovered there was no over there over there? “

Sparky liked the idea of flying so all day long he drew ideas of things that could fly. One holiday season he was given a special gift, a giant Thinkubator. The Thinkubator was a great place of ideas. Good ideas and bad ideas were filed on giant shelves right next to ideas before their time, ideas that go nowhere and great ideas. He loved them all.

He spent many hours thinking and thinking in the Thinkubator. He thought about left brained problems with right brained solutions, and, of course, ideas. The task he enjoyed most, when he was not playing with all his ideas, was gathering pots of tiny creative idea seedlings and growing them into giant trees of innovation. Soon, the Thinkubator was very crowded with idea seedlings and all manner of creative clutter. When teachers yelled at him to clean the Thinkubator, it was time to move on.

He was impatient to grow up and wondered if he could grow up and down simultaneously. Sparky took a risk; fussed with this idea in his laboratory and developed the perfect formula to drink that would make him both big and small. But then there was another matter. He was bored with just being him. Many times, he looked in the mirror and knew he looked different when he had an idea. “Hmmm,” he thought. If I think about the idea of crayons …..The color of me changes too. Sparky liked the idea of being iridescent magenta, puce, red or green but never, never striped.

So, Sparky grew up in the Thinkubator and, strangely enough, the Thinkubator grew too. He thought that grown up people have grown up names. So he rifled through his personal files searching for his real name. There it was on his birth certificate. “It’s Innovation,” he yelled. “This is ingenious”, I am I. Spark Innovation, the idea man and I have much work to do.

He made the Thinkubator small again and put it in his lunch box. I. Spark Innovation was resolved never to lie down on the tracks of life and let the train of the future run over him. “I am the future,” he mused. And with that very heavy thought tucked away in his belt, he grabbed a toy model glider from his pocket. He carried it to the top of a hill and doused it with the formula for growing big to make it just the right size for travel. Then, he hoisted himself on the glider, waved good bye to the other kids, who were permanently grounded for a lack of imagination, and took off.

While flying high above the boarding school, favorite ideas swirled in his head including a new obsession with all the English words in the dictionary that begin with the letter “ I”. I. Spark Innovation knew it was imperative that he initiate his new life of intervening in the affairs of innovators immediately. This is how he met Chancellor Valtierra of Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana. Sparky was attracted by the letter I in the name Ivy Tech and Indiana so he immediately landed the glider in northwest Indiana. “There’s innovative stuff going on at the college,” he thought and settled down to a new job of doing what he liked to do best, interfering with the old ways and installing new ways.” “Welcome to the college,” said the chancellor. And the story of our portals begins…….