McGuire teams triumph at SDSU LeanModel™ Start-up Competition
Three McGuire Entrepreneurship Program student startups traveled to Southern California last weekend after being accepted to participate in the LeanModel™ Start-up Competition, hosted by San Diego State University and the Lavin Entrepreneurship Center. Two teams, Infinurja and InHouse Real Estate Marketing Platform, won awards at the competition, held March 6-7 on the SDSU campus.
InHouse Real Estate Marketing Platform provides real estate professionals with an intuitive, unified web application for brand enhancement, lead management, and marketing of listings. InHouse received $500 and the Showcase Pitch Winner award. During the Aztec Tank - the competition's version of the ABC television show Shark Tank - the "sharks" chose to invest $1,000 in prize money in InHouse.
InHouse is being developed by a team of University of Arizona undergraduate students: Brittany Auclair, Accounting; Onye Chi-ukpai, Accounting and MIS; Mat Friedman, Management; Cooper Kowalski, Marketing; and Luis Palomares, Management.
Infinurja designs, produces, and sells products that use organic waste and natural biological processes to generate continuous power to homes. Infinurja received $500 for winning Best First Impression at the trade show part of the competition. It was also a finalist for the Aztec Tank and was one of four finalists for the Lean Model Competition.
Infinurja is being developed by a team of UA graduate students: Nicholas Jennings, Public Health Policy and Management; Vinay Nenwani, MBA and MS in MIS; and Adam Ross, Applied Bioscience: Molecular and Cellular Biology.
H2Kn0w, which manufactures and distributes in-shower sensors and software to monitor and record water usage data and relay personalized metrics back to the customer to minimize water usage, was also one of the 20 student startup teams selected from a global applicant pool to participate in the competition. H2Kn0w is being developed by a team of undergraduate UA students: Andrew Granatstein, Aerospace Engineering; Kieren Thompson, Management; Andre Vidaller, Finance; and Patrick Weber, Systems Engineering.
Open to students from four-year universities worldwide, the LeanModel Competition isn't a typical business plan competition; it rewards students for identifying assumptions, testing them in the marketplace, and then pivoting their business model based on customer interactions. Learn more about the competition: LeanModel™ Start-up Competition.
To learn more about these student startups and the rest of the McGuire Entrepreneurship Program teams, join us at McGuire on the Mall on March 26.