Cynthia Heyn has been appointed managing director of Innov8te Smart Cities Incubator, where she will be responsible for the overall execution and operations of the incubator, along with its strategy and partner relations, according to a statement.

The incubator was created to support entrepreneurs and early-stage companies in urban and civic transformation, and was backed by public, private, and academic collaborators including AT&T, Cisco, Microsoft, the University of Texas at Dallas, and the Dallas Innovation Alliance.

“The civic-focused companies of our founding cohort demonstrate tremendous energy and momentum for our smart cities vision in North Texas,” Heyn said in a statement. “I look forward to harnessing this enthusiasm and working with partners throughout the ecosystem to make this vision a reality.”

Heyn has a background in product innovation and smart cities consulting as well as in executive management for companies including Ericsson and Nokia Siemens. She also has experience in the not-for-profit sector.

In 2016, Heyn founded SMARTnTX, a consultancy concentrated on North Texas smart city initiatives.

According to a statement, Heyn cares about leading-edge technology and practical uses of existing technology to offer solutions to solve both every day and highly complex problems. She is a leader in the technical industry and has nominated over 100 people for tech industry awards, many of whom are women.

Innov8te Smart Cities Incubator’s founding cohort began in June with the participating startups receiving access to education, mentorship, networking, programming, products and services, connections to corporations, and access to capital channels.

The members of the founding cohort are:

CityFront Innovations bills itself as “the most powerful smart city integration platform on the market.” The Dallas-based company links data between siloed systems to create a unified view of a city’s data via a single mobile app experience.
Designed to centralize an organization’s vast amount of dynamic information and tasks, OrgCentral is a powerful web-based system that integrates a suite of tools. Located in New York, OrgCentral lets users manage their public facing website and staff intranet, as well as streamline and automate business processes.
Stroll is an app that acts as a “personal digital concierge” with real-time updates that keep users in-the-know. Created by Nashville-based bluField, the patented tech enables cities, tourism boards, and merchants to drive and track regional economic development and commerce.
Massachusetts-based Planet Alpha Corporation was created to develop new practices for planetary management and stewardship. It involves a greenhouse gas (GHG) measurement infrastructure, GHG pricing, and GHG products company.
RedHouse Virtual Education, based in Frisco, aims to discover new solutions to educational problems by using VR and mixed reality applications. Through its “theory of successful intelligence” models, RedHouse engages students at a higher level of cognitive education and advances learning.
Creative digital agency The Virtual Wild helps its clients integrate cutting-edge technology into their marketing strategies. Based in Dallas, The Virtual Wild uses innovative and interactive experiences that are visually compelling to bring visual design to life.