| Student entrepreneurs take home thousands of dollars |
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| Written by Carissa Wright -Argonaut | ||||||
| Thursday, 04 May 2006 | ||||||
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The mood in the Idaho Commons conference room was excited and slightly nervous as the teams of students awaited the judges’ decision. Each student team had presented its original business plan to the five-judge panel earlier in the day, and for the students, the awards presentation would cap off months of hard work in the business plan competition, sponsored by the University of Idaho’s Vandal Innovation and Enterprise Works. VIEW was launched last fall by the deans of UI’s eight colleges in an effort to encourage student entrepreneurship and cross-college cooperation. In addition to the business plan competition, which VIEW director Michelle O’Neill said will become an annual event, VIEW has launched a guest speaker series and various entrepreneurship workshops. “We hope to find more faculty across all colleges who are interested in incorporating entrepreneurship content into their courses,” O’Neill said. The first place honor brought with it a $6,000 award. A team of five students took home that award with its business, MustDirt. The MustDirt business plan emphasized the environmentally friendly nature of the product (a bioherbicide created from the waste products of crushed mustard seed) and the feasibility of marketing it. “This couldn’t be better,” said Larry Makus, the group’s adviser. Team members Gordon Seefried and Riley Higby joked about going to Disneyland. Winning second place (and an award of $3,000) was Precious Metals Recovery Systems. Chris Youderian, a junior business major, said the team’s plan commercialized a process by which precious metals can be extracted from waste streams and reused. The process, developed by a UI chemistry professor, uses superheated carbon dioxide and is awaiting a patent. “Our plan is very capital-intensive,” Youderian said. “The prize money won’t found it.” Nevertheless, Youderian remains positive on the future of the company. “We need investors that are interested,” he said, “and this is the first step toward that. We’ve proved that this idea is commercially viable.” Team Airhaul took third place and an award of $1,000. The team’s plan took an existing prototype of a light aircraft tug, improved it substantially and created a marketing scheme for it. After the award presentation, two of the team members stood outside next to their prototype, taking suggestions from one of the judges. “We have a client who gave us the original prototype,” said Juan Barajas, a senior electrical engineering major. Now that the competition is over, he said, the team will return the improved tug to the client. “Yesterday we won the innovation award at the design expo,” Barajas said, “and today we won third place.” The client, he said, can do with the tug what he will. MustDirt and Airhaul, along with many of the other groups in the competition, entered through an upper-division business writing class. The class stresses hands-on entrepreneurship and working toward tangible goals. Taking the class is not a requirement to enter the competition. “In some classes you get a grade,” said Higby, a senior agricultural economics major, “but in this class you gain a skill.”  Add as favorites (88) | Views: 1635
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