Chug, chug, SQUEAL! Hear that? Chugga sliiide. That’s the sound of Metal Tuesday – the day of the week when all Electric Owl Studios employees are required to rock out to heavy metal for the entire day. Stuff like this isn’t exactly standard operating procedure in a typical office – but it is for the next generation of start-ups and young entrepreneurial firms. How does anyone get any work done in an environment like this? Well, it takes a special breed.

“If you can’t handle a Nerf rocket flying at your head when you are trying to code…” says Fred Gallart, CEO of Electric Owl. “…then you might not be a good fit.”

I won’t say that it’s not all fun and games at Electric Owl – after all, they do design video games – but that certainly doesn’t mean that nobody’s taking care of business. In just two short years, Electric Owl Studios has raised funding from Idea Foundry, bagged a tidy contract from the Childrens’ Hospital of Pittsburgh and, in a way, helped the Pens win the Stanley Cup.

While Electric Owl has its own unique personality and niche market – they create high-tech toys to keep kids entertained in waiting rooms, called the Kids Interaction Creation Kiosk (K.I.C.K., partially inspired by fellow Pittsburgher, the late Fred Rogers) – Electric Owl’s style is notably representative of the changing skill sets needed to be a successful entrepreneur in the digital age – characteristics that are, in some ways, starkly contrasted to the go-getters of yore but in other ways, just the same. A DIY-attitude, resilience in the face of risk (and failure) and adaptability – especially adaptability – are still as important as they ever were. Stuff like donning a three piece suit, organizing high octane power lunches and nabbing an Ivy League MBA – less so.

Take a look at the education background of the team at Electric Owl Studios – they have three masters of entertainment technology from Carnegie Mellon University, a couple bachelor of science degrees and some bachelors of fine arts. Conspicuously absent from this list: MBAs, business school alumni and management majors. Which, if you think about it, isn’t particularly peculiar. In this age of innovation, qualities like creativity and collaboration are far more valuable assets than the ability to read a balance sheet and tactfully layoff an employee. For the folks at Electric Owl, that very creative spark was fanned into a flame at CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center (tagline: “The graduate program for the left and right brain…”) and carried over to their offices in East Liberty, Pittsburgh.

“CMU is different from many schools in that they encourage interdisciplinary study rather than setting up barriers to prevent it,” says Gallart. “The ETC itself is a very unique animal in that it is a ‘melting pot’ of people from backgrounds ranging from music to psychology to computer science. When you have access to such a broad range of talented people, the chances that dynamic teams can form dramatically increase.”

In the office, Electric Owl continues to favor the melting pot layout over the cubicle catacomb. In fact, the mezzanine level of 6101 Penn Avenue is home to both Electric Owl Studios and another ETC venture, Interbots. Like the ETC program, the workspace is notably barrier-free. It’s an open floor plan loft in a renovated bank building – a no wall productions property – which provides apt opportunities for ideas and innovation to spill over.

“You have this amazing collaboration between two entirely different companies/teams. It allows for very open communication, and keeps everybody very honest,” says Gallart. “Everybody’s personality is on display.”

Coincidentally, on the sixth floor of the very same building is another CMU spinoff: Deeplocal. Deeplocal is a “software design, development, and strategy studio” that brings together “artists, designers, and technologists to solve complex communication problems with a focus on usability and simplicity.” Like Electric Owl, the curriculum vitaes at Deeplocal are markedly free of business school degrees. “Above all else, Deeplocal is a culture of innovation,” says Nathan Martin, Deeplocal’s CEO. Like his downstairs neighbor, Martin also has a penchant for collaboration, passion and pinch harmonics – he screamed on behalf of the mathcore band Creation is Crucifixion until 2002. He also served a stint teaching courses with names like “Parasitic Media” at a college level – but he’s not particularly fond of teaching by the book.

“I don’t believe in teaching skills,” he says. “I believe that great people will teach themselves what they need to know and school is about fanning passions and allowing great minds to explore and experiment.”

Martin first attended art school at age 16 and now holds two fine arts degrees – a BFA and an MFA. And he is nearly evangelical about the virile merits of studying the arts – even for those who want to start their own business.

“Business school is not where you learn to be an entrepreneur,” Martin says. “I think that, right now, university arts programs are the one institutional place where people seeking to become entrepreneurs can learn the most necessary skills to being an entrepreneur.”

Essentially, Martin seems to be saying, the driving force behind a successful business isn’t technical knowledge or business savvy – it’s passion, something that’s difficult to teach. Coaxing out your true passion is a matter of exploration, not regimentation. “I think that everyone should just take courses they think sound interesting. Ignore grades and degrees as much as possible,” Martin says before adding a call to action: “Take more art classes and fund the arts!”

Read more at Primer Magazine.

Indochino, the company, was born in Canada, at the University of Victoria, where two entrepreneurial students hatched the idea out of necessity and fostered it into an international phenomenon. But the spirit of Indochino’s business model has its roots in the reinvention of the tech space. Just as social media gives everyone a personalized voice, Indochino gives every man a suit that fits. And not the shabby, one-size-fits-hardly-anyone thing you’d get off the rack at Macy’s or some mall department store. Indochino’s suits are tailor made to order in record time and FedEx’ed directly to your door in two weeks.

The history of Indochino is inspiring, in spite of it only spanning about three years. There’s something populist and revolutionary about it. High quality men’s clothing, like the upper echelons of business, has long been an institution deeply rooted in tradition, exclusive to those with familial or financial legs up. After all, clothes can make a man – and a well-tailored suit is symbolic of the stately cultivation that serves as the runway to a well-connected, well-endowed launch into the corporate world. A gangly guy with the wrong knot in his tie and high-water slacks that reveal his should-have-been-brown socks, on the other hand, bears the hallmark of a neophyte. But without daddy’s tailor and checkbook, getting the right look for that critical job interview is somewhat of a crapshoot. Doing so without spending thousands of dollars is a damn near Olympian undertaking. Indochino co-founder Heikal Gani pulled it off, but it wasn’t easy.

Gani bought his first real suit when he was a psychology and political science major at UVic. A conference had come up and Gani had to look the part. Like most of us with our checking accounts close to the edge, the purchase of a suit isn’t exactly premeditated. Unfortunately, a properly fitted and tailored suit can take weeks to attain – especially if you’ve never been measured, don’t know what to buy and don’t know where to buy it. Gani did the only thing a 21^st century man without a network of old boys could do – he researched it on the Internet.

Being a slimmer guy, he quickly found out that he needed something different than what was on the rack. But in a city with a population of less than half a million on the west coast of Canada, the only place that he could find (and afford) was Moore’s – the Canadian equivalent of Men’s Wearhouse. He got the suit, but wasn’t satisfied. It was boxy, generic and overpriced, considering.  After dropping an additional $100 on tailoring, he looked good enough. But the frustrating experience stuck with him.

He talked over his experience with his friend and fellow UVic student, Kyle Vucko, a business major, and together, they identified that the problem lay not only in the product, but also in the process. Factory-made suits seem to call upon the man to fit the suit, rather than the reverse. It’s like something out of a dystopian novel about cubicle estrangement. Those that don’t fit inside the box are penalized with higher costs, a second-rate appearance and a notably cramped style. The notion is somewhat preposterous, once you consider how far we’ve come as a consumer society, where a house, a car and an education are attainable by the vast majority, but a decent suit is not. The need for accessible, affordable, and most of all, well-fitting and fashionable men’s suits was clearly there. The seeds for a compelling business opportunity were sown, and together, Vucko and Gani seized it.

Fast-forward to 2009, and now you can find the exact kind of business that Gani could’ve used back in college embodied in Indochino. It’s a mix between straightforward, well-produced style tips and instructions for the uninitiated and lightning-fast, responsive customer service. Here’s essentially how the process works:

Read the rest of this article at Primer Magazine.