Any entrepreneur knows the importance of mastering the trade show. It's a chance to quickly explain your new product to customers and to suss out the competition and market trends. That's why Erik Monsen, associate professor of business, organized a trade show of sorts for his Entrepreneurship and Commercialization course. On March 17, his students lined the halls of Kalkin practicing pitching products to passers-by.
But as much as the event was just practice, it wasn't entirely theoretical. Monsen's students have been working this semester with real inventions created by UVM faculty, including a farm nutrition management application by Heather Darby, extension associate professor; a tool for cardiac stem cell grafting by Jeffrey Spees, associate professor of medicine; and a bamboo vertical wind turbine by Ting Tan, professor of engineering.
In groups of four, the business students have worked with the inventors to create business plans to bring these technologies to market.
Joining the roster of faculty inventors was one student: senior electrical engineering major Iain Portalupi, creator of a face-tracking software and camera system he developed in Professor Gagan Mirchandani’s Digital Signal Processing Course. For Portalupi's project, the students discussed a range of ways to commercialize the open-source technology, including casino applications to identify known card counters or for use at airport security checkpoints.
Senior Kevin Carita Rivero, who worked with Andrew Burger, Mike Rolla and Dylan Staats on Portalupi's project, explained the nature of the collaboration: “Iain is the brains of the operation like Steve Wozniak (designer of the Apple computer), but he also needs some creativity to have his idea change the world -- think Steve Jobs -- so that’s where we’re hoping to help.”
Portalupi said he loves working on trying to perfect the technology and appreciates the help of the business students in trying to market it. "I hope it makes money because it would allow me to work on other technologies," he said. "That's what I really love to do."
Danielle Dawson, a double major in mechanical engineering and engineering management with dual minors in pure math and business, represented a team with a different vision for Portalupi's invention. “We saw it as more of an educational product,” said Dawson, who envisions selling the system to universities as a kit for students in engineering design courses to assemble and to Lego as an enhancement to Mindstorms robot series.
Some of the products are still in development and awaiting research data, forcing students to consider multiple marketing strategies depending on the outcomes. “We’re still waiting for some of the data to come back to determine how much power the wind turbine can produce,” said senior Ed Batton. "Once we get that information we can focus on different markets. Our goal is to help developing countries with new energy, but we also see other applications here in the U.S.”
Encouraging more collaboration between the business and engineering schools has been a focus of Business School Dean Sanjay Sharma and a major reason behind hiring Monsen, the Steven Grossman Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship. "This is an example of how the business school is enhancing its linkages with other colleges such as engineering and medicine for mutual value creation," said Sharma. "The professors and students in engineering and medicine who are the originators of product ideas and patents get consulting from business students in areas such as valuation, marketing, and strategic analysis, and the business students learn how to commercialize the products/patents just as they would in the real world."
Students like Shawn Haskins value the interaction and the real-world experience. “This project has brought together a lot of our classes, like accounting, entrepreneurship and marketing,” said Haskins, who worked on the wind turbine pitch. “It’s been fun to learn about the product and actually apply what we’ve learned to a real life project.”
The trade show continues on Thursday, March 19, when four more inventions will be on display in Kalkin. They include a mobile child illness diagnosis and therapy application; a modified alginate bio-compatible lung bandage system; green building technology; and a heart performance screening device.
Monsen said he is teaching a similar course this spring for graduate students in the Sustainable Entrepreneurship MBA (SEMBA) program titled "Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialziation" in collaboration with the Office of Technology Commercialization and SPARK-VT program, and will be offering a new version of the class for students from all UVM graduate programs this coming fall.