Small Kitchen, Big Ideas: Do You Want to be an Innovator?

On a rainy night, roughly three years ago, the two of us sat in a coffee shop in the West Village, still in our business casual work clothes, drinking tea. Our notebooks were open on the table in front of us, and they were covered in scrawled handwriting analyzing cooking for two, considering how to entertain without turning your apartment into a mess, and weighing the costs of shopping at the farmers’ market versus the plain old supermarket.

We were total newbies. To food blogging, to working for ourselves, to entrepreneurship. All we knew was that we wanted to be creative, to take ownership of a specialty—cooking—that had somewhere, somehow become our own.

Enter: the Internet.

As everyone of our generation knows, if you have an idea, the web will provide you with at least the promise of an audience. And as long as we may have spent debating categories and tag names in coffee shops, the set up isn’t really the hard part. The slog is in the long haul, in blogging day in and day out, in keeping the big-picture vision while dealing with the mundane tasks, like being timely with email and hacking your way through CSS and HTML.

Three years down the line, the Internet is a more sophisticated place than it was when BGSK first appeared. Brilliant memes go from obscurity to omnipresence in 24 hours…and sink back to obscurity just as fast. Bad design is deeply, deeply frowned upon. Social capital is a must.

It’s rare that we’re short on ideas. There will always be ideas. We’ve got em, you’ve got em, your mom’s got em. The work, and the fun, are in executing ideas, in building a brand and a business online, and in finding good collaborators and mentors to support you as you plunge forward, perhaps somewhat blindly, as we did.

If you think you have the next big idea, pitch it to Intel. Intel Innovators is a community inside Facebook that connects young people “inventing tomorrow” to young people who want to have a hand in projects. Every month, for three months, an expert panel will award one “Innovator”$50,000 and one fan will win the right to determine which Innovator gets another $50,000. Think you can spot a big idea? Pick it. 
Do you know someone with a big idea? Nominate them.

Be sure to get your big idea to Intel by 12:00pm EST on December 13th, 2011 for a chance to win some big money to help you achieve it.

We feel lucky that Big Girls Small Kitchen found the audience that it did when it did, and we are thankful all the time for our readers (you).

From our kitchen, full of ideas and always supporting your ideas, to yours,

Phoebe and Cara, THE QUARTER-LIFE COOKS

This post was brought to you in partnership with Intel® who are all about making our lives better (and faster) with technology – today and tomorrow. Since we’re co-dependent with our laptops at every waking moment –that’s how we keep up to date on our food writing, photography, twitter streams, and facebook posts – we appreciate what Intel is doing.