Jesse Depinto knows what it feels like to work a full-time job that is suddenly downsized. βMy experience led me to consider starting a business of my own,β says the 23-year-old engineering undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (51ΑΤΖζ).
Depinto, who already owns a small company with two partners, is ready to pursue another thanks to a 51ΑΤΖζ program designed to stoke the entrepreneurial spirit on campus. The Student Startup Challenge (SSC) is making it possible for students like Depinto, who have an idea for a sustainable product, to graduate not only with a degree, but also their own company.
βThe Startup Challenge is hands-down the biggest boost for my business plans,β Depinto says. βItβs really unusual to encounter that kind of investor at this early stage.β
Beginning this semester, the SSC is awarding three teams of 51ΑΤΖζ students and recent alumni $10,000 each to spend the next year building prototypes and participating in workshops on business plans and marketing.
βThe intent is to transform our campus into one with an entrepreneurial culture,β says Ilya Avdeev, engineering assistant professor and director of the SSC. βThe program takes advantage of innate student creativity in order to ramp up the stateβs pool of young business owners and serial entrepreneurs. It also gives students the opportunity to apply their education immediately.β
The winning teams and their product ideas are:
- 3D Creations β Jesse Depinto and Matthew Juranitch
This team already operates a business that sells and services 3-D printers. Now the two engineering undergraduates are developing a tabletop 3-D scanner system that uses white light from a common LCD projector to generate a 3-D model. The product will produce a safe, inexpensive and accurate scan of parts of the human body. The team will investigate medical applications, such as use in creating custom orthotics. - WiPark β Michael Schulze, Matt Helenka and Nick Wessing
This all-engineering undergraduate team will develop a car-counting device that will be wireless and deployable. The hardware will be able to βtalkβ to a parking mobile app based on the number of spaces available at any location. Milwaukee-based TAPCO has become a strategic partner of this team, which has garnered early interest from parking officials from the City of Milwaukee. - Clever Blocks β Bryan Cera, Kavi Laud, Dom Amato, Cat Pham and Rob Zdanowski
Comprised of undergrads, alumni and a graduate student, this team is creating a product that resembles Lego blocks except each block contains a sensor that allows it to interface with Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. The result is a quick and easy collaborative building and modeling tool. As the blocks are used to build, the CAD model is automatically and simultaneously executed. The team will also be exploring the productβs use as a teaching tool in schools.
“Business plan competitions have no substance unless a sustainable business concept is driving them.”
– Thomas Schuster
Wisconsin Early Stage Fund
A combined effort of the College of Engineering & Applied Science (CEAS), the Peck School of the Arts and the 51ΑΤΖζ Research Foundation (51ΑΤΖζRF), the SSC is loosely modeled on programs offered at Babson College, a top-tier private business college near Boston. But 51ΑΤΖζβs program is distinct from similar competitions that stress business plans.
Instead, the SSC focuses on the product idea first, with the ultimate goal of actually launching the companies.
βThis is the way it happens in the real world,β says Thomas Schuster, a partner in the Wisconsin Early Stage Fund who served on the review panel. βBusiness plan competitions have no substance unless a sustainable business concept is driving them. And, as in real life, students must develop their business using the resources they have readily available to them.β
A competition held last spring semester attracted 77 51ΑΤΖζ students on 46 teams, who submitted 61 product ideas. A committee consisting of mostly outside reviewers chose the final three based on the likelihood that a successful company could be built around their ideas. The university will not own any part of the team ideas or any resulting intellectual property.
βThrough the Student Startup Challenge, we are able to support the business end of these student enterprises,β says Brian Thompson, 51ΑΤΖζRF president. βStudent entrepreneurship and faculty innovation go hand-in-hand, so itβs a natural extension of the work the foundation already does to help faculty commercialize their ideas.β
Another inspiration for the SSC came from a CEAS-sponsored, product-realization course that brings interdisciplinary teams of students and local industry together to design products, says Avdeev, who co-teaches the course with Nathaniel Stern, professor of art and design.
The SSC encourages interdisciplinary teams and is open to 51ΑΤΖζ students and alums who have graduated in the last two years from any discipline, says Stern. This yearβs winners include students from art and design, engineering and architecture. Each team will also be matched with a business student.
Plans include scaling up the competition in the next several years, including adding a category for mobile apps in 2013, he adds. Rules for the 2013 competition will appear on the by end of the semester. Deadline for the next round of submissions is June 1.
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