'Social entrepreneurs' present new products at national contest

The products are part of the 2006 National Idea-to-Product Competition for Engineering in Community Service (EPICS) and Social Entrepreneurship held at San Jose State University on April 1.

EPICS was founded at Purdue University in 1995. The program received the 2005 National Academy of Engineering prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education.

The EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative is a partnership involving EPICS team members interested in entrepreneurship and the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship at Purdue's Discovery Park, the university's hub of interdisciplinary research.

"EPICS is a unique program in which teams of undergraduates design, build and deploy real systems to solve engineering-based problems for local community-service and educational organizations," said Ed Coyle, a co-founder of EPICS and director of the program's entrepreneurship initiative. "One of the important aspects of EPICS' Idea-to-Product Competition is that it gives undergraduate students the opportunity to learn about and experience entrepreneurship through the projects they develop with their partners in the community."

For the competition, students design a product or service that fills a known need in their local community and then explore other markets for it. They must identify the broader social need their product addresses, the uniqueness of their product relative to others, the best way to protect the intellectual property they have created and the most promising market for their product.

A total of 11 new products were presented at the national contest in San Jose sponsored by EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative and Purdue Discovery Park's entrepreneurship center.

Winning participants received a total of $25,000: $15,000 – 1st prize; $8,000 – 2nd prize; and $2,000 – 3rd prize. The top teams were announced during an event led by Malu Roldan, co-principal investigator for the San Jose State University's EPICS program. Purdue student ambassadors Amicia Elliott from Arcadia, Ind., and Alexei Czeskis from Carmel, Ind., representing the team winner from last year's national competition, announced the winners.

The top three teams were:

• 1st place — Illinois Institute of Technology received first place with KlarAqua, a low-cost, clay-based water-purification system for developing countries and other regions in need of potable water. Amanda Gilliam and Laura Grimmer presented the product.

• 2nd place — Purdue University's Mars Rover by the Imagination Station Team. The Mars Rover is a multidisciplinary project dedicated to developing a science exhibit that simulates the behavior of a Mars Rover mission. Purdue students Ian Snyder, Matthew Kocsis, Mariam Simon, Benjamin Borgmann and Kathryn Herre presented the product.

• 3rd place — Bedford North Lawrence High School in Indianapolis with a swallowing monitoring device for individuals with cerebral palsy or other neurological disorders that might cause swallowing difficulties. The product is a necklace that is sensitive to muscle motion that will remind the individual to swallow. Bedford students Cory Fink, Annie Bullock, Cheyenne Arrowsling and Nick Wiggins presented the item.

"The two-day event began with the students participating in a six-hour tour of several Silicon Valley's high-tech companies including lunch provided by Cisco Systems Inc.," said Nancy Clement, Purdue's entrepreneurship program coordinator. "Nine national EPICS teams also presented their products along with two non-EPICS teams 'showcasing' their programs."

Other EPICS university teams and presenters at the event were:

• The University of California, San Diego, presented by Raj Kumar and Loren Baxter.

• Pennsylvania State University, presented by Joe Keefe and Travis Miller.

• San Jose State University, presented by Brian Bautista, Jackeline Carpio, Michael Fernandez, Shabana Kodwavi, Elijah Marasigan, Peter Ng and Ricardo Uro.

• Butler University, presented by Zane Hrubey, Drew Waddell, Chris Duke and Michael Siegfried.

• Purdue's Anita Borg Institute for Women & Technology, presented by Dong Joo Lee, Amy Gum and Go Choi.

• San Jose State University, presented by Tomoki Oda, Van To, Hoang Pham and Michael Campos.

Showcase university team projects/participants were:

• The University of California, Berkeley, presented by Michael Kuehl, Heewon Lee, Fatima Johnson and Katherine Wakid.

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presented by Brittany Coulbert, Juhi Chandalia.

Judges at the event were Rhonda Abrams of The Planning Shop in Palo Alto, Calif.; Frank Greene of New Vista Capital in Mountain View, Calif.; Paul Keswich of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. in San Jose, Calif.; Brad Maihack of Hewlett-Packard Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.; Stephen Nichols of the University of Texas at Austin; Phil Shelley of Hollister Inc.; and Ronald Steuterman of Purdue.

Other sponsors for the event were Lilly Endowment Inc.; Hollister Inc.; Bose McKinney & Evans LLP; Hewlett-Packard Co.; WebCast In A Box; University of Texas at Austin/National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance and Cypress Semiconductor Corp.; San Jose State's College of Business and its College of Engineering.

The EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative is housed in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship in Purdue's Discovery Park.

Writer: Cynthia Sequin, (765) 494-4192, csequin@purdue.edu

Source: Nancy Clement, (765) 494-9884, nic@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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