Today's post is by Allan Tear, a Providence-based strategy consultant. If you have an idea for a post you'd like to write, please let us know.

Those of us in the design|geek zeitgeist in Rhode Island are feeling pretty good about the energy in this corner of the global neighborhood. Despite hand wringing on the national and state economic front, the range and potential of truly interesting startups around here is rapidly increasing.

But just like a company that wants to grow quickly, we’ve got to figure out whether we are going to grow organically, or by acquisition. Organically is how we got here so far, and we’ve built a small but compelling core, and we’ve learned to support each other in new ways. Spend time at Geeks or similar confabs, and its obvious that our startup gems center around talented people.

So how do we get more? More talent, more ideas, more design|geek startups, more successes? Consider this story.

In 2005, two seniors at the University of Virginia, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, were cooking up an idea for a Web 2.0 mobile application. They considered taking day jobs – programmer and web designer – to pay the bills while they built their idea in their “spare time”. But they’d also applied for a competitive seed funding program, Ycombinator, based in Boston.

Luckily for them, they got accepted, and they took the chance to move to Cambridge for 3 months to see if they could turn their idea into a real product that people would use. Ycombinator hooked them up with $12K in cash to keep the wolves from the door, and some good advice that their original idea was crap. Together, they came up with a better one, a Web 2.0 social news site.

Over the summer of 2005, with mentoring from Ycombinator, their prototype successfully launched as Reddit. They hit social bookmarking just right, and though they never caught up to Digg, Reddit climbed quickly to 70K users and 700K page views a day. In 2006, with 4 employees, having raised only $100K, Reddit was acquired by Conde Nast (Wired publisher) for $M’s.

Why am I telling you this story?

Well, what YCombinator and some similar models represent is a next generation funding platform that plays very well to the strengths and the needs of our design|geek community. By remixing the seed fund, the incubator, and the business pitch competition, this “early venture platform” channels the original intent of all those approaches.

It identifies and acts as a magnet for bright young sparks, most in/just out of college, then takes a chance on their talent. It gets them the right combination of seed funding, guidance, access, and drive for results so that their ideas can get a chance in the market. It uses a sense of place, colocating the companies and plugging them into an existing community of entrepreneurs, experts, and funders to nurture and advise the fledgling founders.

Although RI has many of the basic pieces to make this approach work – bunches of college students, a growing base of successful entrepreneurs, seed angels, service providers and freelancers accustomed to working with startups – no one has yet connected the dots. And each piece, in isolation, hasn’t made our design|geek startup rate hit escape velocity.

So what are your thoughts? Is there a place for this model in RI? If so, what would it look like? What would its hook be? Who would it target? How would it play with the existing ecosystem of entrepreneurs, investors, and service providers?

Jump over to the discussion forum and let me know where you stand. There you can read more about the model and find links to the organizations that we can learn from.