Today we’ve relocated our lunch table from our usual spot in the Garden District to downtown New Orleans. We’re at Idea Village’s annual Entrepreneur Week.

Idea Village is an independent nonprofit organization with a mission to identify, support, and retain entrepreneurial talent in New Orleans.

They describe Entrepreneur Week as an annual business festival, celebrating entrepreneurship, innovation, and advanced thinking.

Summer Suleiman. Summer moved back to her native New Orleans after working at CNN as an international news producer. Idea Village was smart enough to snag her and today Summer is the creator and curator of an online blog called The Distillery – a unique community meeting place for entrepreneurs with an interest in the unvarnished truth about business.

Lowry Curley turned his Tulane Ph.D study of building a human cell into the ground-breaking pharma-testing technology, AxoSim.

Stacy Cannon somehow miraculously turned a background in sociology into Grok & Banter, a tech-based company that is an all-new interface between you and a street-sign or a billboard.

Domenic Giunta is the maker guru behind IDIYA, a high-tech workshop on Broad Street where you can go make something  as simple as a wooden box, or as complex as a factory run of computer-guided 3D objects. 

Among the users of IDIYA tech are Colin Grussing and Frank Lopicolo.

Colin is manufacturing shark suits.

Through his company Press Fire Design, Frank is making specialty printed designs on literally everything – from T-shirts to wood.

If you want proof that we’re not living in your father’s – or even your big brother’s – New Orleans, these conversations are it.