 "Photo: Sara Young/The Daily Texan")
Fifteen teams from 19 universities and eight countries presented their inventions and marketing strategies at the seventh annual Idea to Product Global Competition over the weekend at UT.
Judges announced the winners Saturday at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, where top honors went to new antibacterial surfaces, improved medical kits for diabetics and special hand sanitizers in heart-shaped capsules.
The contest challenged students to create a product concept using innovative technology and also to come up with a marketing plan for the product. Luz-Cristal Glangchai, the program manager of the Idea to Product Program at UT, said science and engineering research efforts sometimes miss the business aspect and that students need the ability to commercialize their ideas.
“Ideas are great, but they don’t have inherent value,” Glangchai said. “Okay, cool, you came up with something, but it’s nothing unless you can create an application for it to help society.”
This year, for the first time, the program divided the contest into three categories with separate themes: sustainability and clean energy, biomedical technology and IT/wireless. Dave Bonner, competition judge and CEO of Stematix, Inc., said the categories make the competition more fair so that one type of product is not favored to win.
The program invited teams from universities including UT, Texas A&M University, Penn State University, COTEC Portugal, Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa from Brazil and Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship from Sweden.
The team from Keio University in Japan erupted in cheers and fist pumps after a judge announced it was the winning team in their category. The team had won a similar entrepreneurship contest in Japan for its invention of a hand sanitizer that comes in a capsule.
The capsule releases a hand sanitizer that dyes the user’s hands red, with a dark tint indicating extremely dirty hands.
Users have to rub the sanitizer around for a full 15 seconds before the redness disappears, forcing them to sanitize their hands.
“People don’t really spend the time to go to the bathroom and actually wash their hands, so we wanted to come up with a fun way to be sanitary,” said supporting team member Takumi Kawashima.
The Purdue University and Indiana University joint team won first place in their category and took home the overall award for Best Showcase. The team came up with the idea of an emergency kit that automatically mixes medication for diabetics.
Bonner said judging for the sustainability category was based on usefulness in the real market and whether current technology is sufficient enough to launch the product. A team made up of several Brazilian universities won in that category for coming up with an antibacterial film that can be placed on ceramic tiles in places such as hospitals.
“I think self-sterilizing ceramic tiles are a major innovation that would make an important contribution in the real world,” Bonner said. “They executed the idea very well and made the plan actionable so you could actually do it.”
The UT team, comprised of mechanical engineering grad students Andrew Tilstra and Matt Saunders and UT alum Josh Mueller, presented an energy storage device called an “ultracapacitor” that would store more energy than current batteries.
After the global competition in the fall, the program holds a similar entrepreneurship competition in the spring for UT students only. More than 200 UT teams have entered the contest since the first competition in 2001, representing the colleges of engineering, natural science, business, law and liberal arts.
Be the first to comment on this article!