For the past nine months, Ascentium Portland has been one of 10 marketing agencies working with the Portland Advertising Federation to create a unique internship program made to thrive in the spontaneous, adaptive and connected environment of marketing in the digital age.

From the COLABORATORY Web site:

Innovative marketing comes from people working together to synthesize new ideas and test them out. It’s about looking for answers to questions and solutions to problems.

In the 2.5 days since the program kicked off on Monday, July 7, I have been completely blown away by the ability and enthusiasm of the interns. The program was made to be customizable and every body has just run with it. Let me illustrate with an anecdote from Orientation Day:

We planned to split our 10 interns in two mini-agency teams competing to win a pitch for clothing company Sameunderneath. Cool, right? As the room buzzed in the aftermath of the team announcements (we called each intern out like a player rushing to the field before a football game) someone asked "What are you going to call your agencies?"

Huh. Never thought of that.

So, we pounced on the idea and had the teams spend the next 15 minutes creating their identity. Totally not enough time - but nonetheless, the groups came up with awesome names with intelligent reasons why they were chosen. Watch them explain for themselves:

Kiwi

Lattice

Seriously smart kids.

The program has each intern bouncing to three of the 10 agencies on a two-week rotation. Our first intern, Allison McKeever, is focused on becoming a Project Manager. One of the many cool things about COLABORATORY is that we are giving people with different career goals a chance to work together and learn from each other and the agency professionals. In addition to PMs, we have copywriters and designers.

But the truth of the matter is that everybody does a little bit of everything. Which is kinda the point.

Keep checking back for more updates from Ascentium, but don't think we're the only ones talking. Here's just a few of the places to keep an eye on COLABORATORY developments.

COLABORATORY facebook group

COLABORATORY Flickr group

Twitter search for #COLAB