First Rice Alliance-George R. Brown School of Engineering Elevator Pitch Competition gives engineering students lessons in commercialization

BY MARY LYNN FERNAU
Special to the Rice News

A project accelerating the fight against cancer into the third dimension won the top prize in the first Rice Alliance-George R. Brown School of Engineering Elevator Pitch Competition, held Nov. 18 at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

A team of Rice seniors, all majoring in bioengineering, took the top honors — and a $1,000 prize — with a project that developed a way to use nanotechnology to facilitate large-scale, three-dimensional cell cultures to grow more clinically relevant tumor samples for evaluating cancer treatments. Team members were Christopher Bertucci (Baker College), Vani Rajendran (Martel College), Joseph Rosenthal (Brown College), and Elizabeth Figueroa and David Sing (both of Lovett College).

The competition had 25 teams of Rice undergraduate engineering students vying to convince judges of the commercialization potential of their projects during elevator pitch presentations, which simulate meeting an investor on an elevator and having only 60 seconds to convince them to invest in a company. The members of the teams were all students taking capstone design courses in the departments of Bioengineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.

A goal of the competition was to encourage the students to consider the commercialization potential of their products and devices as they complete their engineering design projects and create their prototypes. Teams were asked to consider such factors as the market size, customer needs, target segments, competitors and unique differentiators.

”Engineers are problem solvers,” said Maria Oden, professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. ”When the technical aspects of the problem are solved, (the students) tend to move on to the next engineering challenge. We hope entrepreneurial education and exposure to the possibility of commercialization of their work will help them ensure that their final designs are truly useful in the marketplace.”

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship presented cash prizes to the top three teams. The teams were judged by a panel of 45 Houston-area investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders and mentors.

”The event was created to expose engineering students to the possibility and process of commercializing the technologies they create,” said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance, who announced the winners. ”We hope that a number of these projects will move forward and become commercial successes and result in the formation of new startup ventures.”

The second-place team, winners of $500, developing a low-cost, rugged, low-power vital signs monitor for use in clinics in the developing world. Team members were Iris Chu, Joanna Jan, Celestine Shih, Monika Sun and Cortlan Wickliff.

Placing third and winning $250 was a team that developed a technology to noninvasively detect the potentially critical condition of internal bleeding during cardiac catheterization procedures in real time. Team members were Alex Arevalos, Marissa Brower, Andy Chang, Thomas Segall-Shapiro and Joel Khan.

The competition was organized by Oden; Gary Woods, professor in the practice in computer technology and electrical and computer engineering; Marcia O’Malley, assistant professor in mechanical engineering and materials science; and the Rice Alliance. The program was also supported by the Houston Technology Center (HTC), which provided classroom instruction and mentoring to teams. The HTC separately recognized Team Owl Eye with an award for its commercial potential.

This competition was also part of Rice’s involvement in Global Entrepreneurship Week, which was sponsored in part by the Kauffman Foundation. Global Entrepreneurship Week connects young people everywhere through local, national and global activities designed to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators.

The Rice Alliance is the university’s nationally recognized initiative devoted to the support of technology commercialization, entrepreneurship education and the launch of technology companies. Since its inception, the Rice Alliance has assisted in the launch of more than 250 startups that have raised more than half-a-billion dollars in early stage capital. More than 750 companies have presented at the 100-plus programs hosted by the Rice Alliance.