Spotlight

on Innovation

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Shark Tank

Entrepreneurs shine in NU Venture Challenge.

BY ANDIE LINKER

Before the Garage opened on North Campus in the summer of 2015, McCormick senior Ahren Alexander was sleeping in the sawdust of his prototypes.

Alexander is the founder of the startup venture Audiovert. He and his partners are aiming to redesign speakers as customizable pieces of art instead of as simple black boxes. Although Alexander developed his whole startup in his studio apartment, the Garage, an innovation incubator, has given him a new space to work.

“There is a mess in the very back corner [of the Garage] that’s got a lot of wood stacked up, a tool chest, lots of sticky notes on the wall – that’s my mess,” Alexander says. “The Garage has given me a home for all my mess, and I’ve never had that before.”

While students can develop their ideas at the Garage, making them into realities poses a unique hurdle. That’s where the Northwestern University Venture Challenge comes in. Each year, NUVC raises $25,000 to $30,000 to fund Northwestern students’ startup dreams. The competition works a lot like the TV show Shark Tank: young entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to venture capitalists who decide whether they want to invest. The contest has five categories: business products and software, consumer products and software, healthcare and medical, green energy and sustainability, and social enterprise and nonprofit.

The challenge comes in three rounds: screening, semifinals and finals, and has multiple winners per category.

The idea for Audiovert sprung out of Alexander’s love for music. He says that he has had similar ideas since high school.

“There’s a much more meaningful way to design audio speakers, and that’s through customizing them and injecting your personality into the speaker system,” Alexander says.

HearYe, an app that creates a centralized platform for events on campus, has also found a home at the Garage. Anyone with a Northwestern email can create an event, and users can either scroll through a general feed or fine-tune their search to find events by interest.

Founders Max Weidell, Weinberg sophomore, and Drake Mumford, SESP sophomore, developed the idea during Winter Quarter last year after seeing the

A&O Productions Interstellar screening. Weidell and Mumford believe that having one interface for all events on campus will drastically change the way Northwestern socializes.

“What it allows everyone to do is experience events they would normally not be able to,” Weidell says.

HearYe did not advance in the competition. For Weidell and Mumford, the loss means that a big marketing push they’d been planning will be tough to fund. However, Audiovert did move on, and was the top undergraduate team in the semifinals. Alexander feels prepared going into the finals on June 2.

“Winning is the goal,” Alexander says. “We were semifinalists last year and we did not make it to the finals, so this year we’re really going at it.”

Alexander plans on working part-time to further develop Audiovert after he graduates. If he wins the Venture Challenge, he hopes to use the money to expand his production to meet increasing demand.

“Ultimately, this is definitely not the endall,” he says. “But if it happens it’s gonna relieve a lot of stress off of our shoulders.”

The Impossible Challenge

Inaugural competition aims to solve the world’s biggest problems.

BY MORGAN McFALL-JOHNSEN

On a Monday evening in mid- February, while hundreds of students filled the library cramming for Chemistry tests and churning out history papers, 46 students divided into nine teams prepared for a presentation they hoped would help change – maybe even save – the world.

Two teams analyzed state-of-the-art agriculture technology to grow crops without soil in crowded cities and disaster zones. Another two explored oil-free magnetic levitation driverless cars and trains that could travel upwards of 186 miles per hour. One team analyzed solar farms and another built-in solar panel roofing. But regardless of project or topic, every team has one goal: to find the best solutions to climate change.

Formed this school year, the Impossible Challenge draws inspiration from a stepby-step process for solving global issues laid out in retired computer programmer and systems analyst David Paul’s book, Standards that Measure Solutions: A Guide to Solving 21st Century Problems. Each year, the program will address a new major global issue for which solutions are complex and difficult to implement – what Jeffrey Strauss, the program director, calls “wicked problems.”

The Impossible Challenge is just the first step or the “first-cut analysis” phase in Paul’s book. Students do not try to enact the plans, but instead analyze how likely they are to be implemented and how effective they would be by looking at economic, political, social and technological feasibility.

“I’ve seen a lot of the programming with student groups at Northwestern and Impossible Challenge was very different from anything I’ve seen,” says Victoria Yang, a Weinberg senior on one of the two teams analyzing different sustainable

transportation systems. “The project is very open and it allows students to be creative.”

Students do most of their research independently, while meeting with their group throughout the quarter. After final presentations on May 26, each student will receive a $500 stipend, and the winning team will receive a $5,000 cash prize.

But the students have their own reasons for joining the project. For many, it’s a chance to explore fields, like transportation technology, that are not part of their academic experience.

“This was a taste of something that I couldn’t have done otherwise,” Yang says.

How magnetic levitation works

“It intrigued me so I wanted to be involved and this allowed me to do that without having a physics background.”

Weinberg junior Kathryn Kim is on a team working on aeroponics: using mineral-filled mist to grow food instead of soil. Kim, a pre-med student, analyzed the political feasibility of her team’s project, allowing her to use her political knowledge outside of conversations with friends for the first time.

“I was interested in [the Impossible Challenge] because it was a year-long project, so it required a lot of time and devotion,” Kim says. “I like that commitment to it because it made it seem like it would be something worth doing.”

But with every solution comes complications. At their midterm presentations, for example, Yang’s team presented the benefits their magnetic levitation train system could have in India: perfect fuel efficiency, noiselessness and speed. But the judges pointed out the trains would not accommodate India’s growing population and corruption would deter investors. Aeroponics systems could make food deserts sprout fresh produce, Kim’s team says, but would require high amounts of energy and could force farmers out of jobs.

For the students, though, the program makes a difference, regardless of whether the solutions come to fruition, through education and raising awareness around climate change.

“It will make people take a pause and think about [climate change] more thoroughly and I think that’s, in and of itself, a way to say that this is working,” says Weinberg sophomore Caili Chen, a member of the aeroponics team.

Next year, the Impossible Challenge will start up again with a new crop of students and a new global challenge.