Entrepreneurial Innovators Take to the Stage

Part One: The Winners

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Ten entrepreneurs presented their five-minute pitches in an effort to win the top prize of $3,000 in the MIT Enterprise Forum’s annual Whiteboard Challenge. The top three presenters won $3,000, $1,500, and $500 in prize money from sponsor law firm K&L Gates.

There were about 90 entries this year. A panel from The Big Idea Forum preselected the ten finalists. Last year’s Whiteboard Challenge received entries from approximately 60 entrepreneurs.

The Winner: TiltAlign Therapy for Cerebral Palsy

This year’s winning entrepreneurial idea, as selected by a panel of four judges and a phone-in vote from the crowd, was Northwestern student, James Rein. Rein’s winning concept was called "TiltAlign", a therapy for people with cerebral palsy.

Rein, a Biomedical Engineering student at Northwestern stated that there are 800,000 people with cerebral palsy in the US. One of the symptoms of the disease is that patients have poor motor control and poor perception of where they are in space. Their spine and extremities get tilted from vertical and movement becomes difficult and strenuous.

This symptom of cerebral palsy is generally treated by physical therapy. One of the more common treatments is to teach them to move in a six foot cage, as seen  in these videos. Rein pointed that the efficacy of "cage therapy" for cerebral palsy is "just OK" and the cage itself costs five- to six-thousand dollars and is too big to fit in most homes. Thus the patient doesn’t have frequent access to the therapy.

Rein’s TiltAlign concept is to provide a more portable feedback mechanism to provide feedback to patients when they are misaligned. The device he described uses 1) a device with an accelerometer (the electronics that tell when an iPhone or Wii controller is moving), 2) attached to the chest, arms, or legs by a Velcro strap. The controller communicates to 3) a transceiver which controls 4) a device, either a DVD Player or Music, so that music or video instructions pause when the patient becomes misaligned during therapy.

The TiltAlign concept provides rewards for maintaining good habits and provides instant feedback. It can be used at home and the controls would have adjustable sensitivity, customizable for each patient’s needs. He estimated that the cost of each unit would be $200, compared to the thousands for the "therapy cage".

My question, prior to Rein's winning the prize, was to ask why this couldn't be a software solution built on Nintendo's Wii platform?

Second Place: The BFF <3 Necklace

The second-place prize of $1,500 went to Avelo Roy, who presented eMotion’s "BFF ‹3 Necklace". Roy said eMotion’s vision is to serve people who are physically separate and emotionally connected. Roy is also no stranger to entrepreneurial competitions, the eMotion team won $25,000 in November at Entrepreneur Idol, held at Northwestern University.

There are 8 million "tweens", girls between the ages of eight and thirteen. 27% of them participate in online social communities. These girls are three times more likely to be the victims of cyber bullying or pedophiles. eMotion’s product, the $29.99 BFF<3 Necklace gives people a way to add friends in person. Once matched, you can share private messages and communicate via the necklace. CNN.com describes the "BFF ‹3 Necklace" as "a wireless communication device that takes the form of a fashion accessory."

The BFF Necklace is heart shaped and has color LEDs. The units are encoded so that friends who share necklaces can join each other’s networks. They can send messages that are conveyed by coded configurations of the blinking LEDs and they can exchange private messages on the eMotion web site.

The actual use of the BFF Necklace wasn’t clear to many audience members (anecdotally), nor was it clear (to me) how this product could protect from either cyber bullies or pedophiles. However, the company has assembled an impressive board of advisors, is selling an introductory product, and, according to Roy, the site is "becoming a destination" for their target audience.

Third Place: Portion Controlled Dinnerware

The third-place prize went to Thu Nguyen, who brought to the competition a simple, practical entrepreneurial idea: Portion Controlled Dinnerware. "For as long as I can remember, I have been dieting," said Nguyen in her opening.

After many diets, Nguyen was diagnosed as being "pre-diabetic". She was put on a special diet that required counting points – "I had ten choices per day, compared to the twenty to thirty choices I was eating before the diagnosis." She started measuring her portions, especially when eating carbohydrates. This meant that when she dined with friends, she had to take her portions in measuring cups. It was both complicated and stigmatizing.

Nguyen’s entrepreneurial solution to this situation was to conceptualize dinnerware that integrates portion control into the design. The designs on the bowls and plates clearly and artistically identify half-cup and one-cup servings. Nguyen envisioned, on the whiteboard, a wine glass with portion control markings for eight or sixteen ounces, much to the amusement of the audience. Her concept enables portion control to be managed without having to pull out measuring cups.

Food can be attractively served without the extra, potentially embarrassing, step of measuring when serving. Nguyen placed in the competition with a simple solution to a non-obvious, but frequently recurring problem.

Those were the winners. Over the next couple of days, I’ll provide a write-up of the other seven entrepreneur’s presentations from the 2009 MIT Enterprise Forum Whiteboard Challenge.

Labels: bff necklace, chicago networking events, competition, entrepreneurs, innovation, MIT-EF, portion controlled dinnerware, tiltalign

2008 Technology Forecast
MIT – Enterprise Forum and Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center

Chicago, January 15, 2008

The panelists covered four areas of technology:

Energy and sustainability: Adam Cohen, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences at Argonne National Laboratory
Medical Technology : Linette Demers, Senior Consultant for Sg2
Mobile Technology : Thomas Lee, Vice President, New Product Development for U.S. Cellular
Information Technology : Armando Pauker, Apex Venture Partners
Moderator : David Weinstein, Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center

1. ENERGY AND SUSTAINABILITY
Adam Cohen provided a “whirlwind tour” of Energy Technology (with a nod to sustainability). Tech focus will be on “Green Energy” – Energy sources and uses with low impact on the environment.

Energy demand will increase two to three times in the next 25-50 years. 85% of energy use is fossil fuels. We have three strategies available: 1) Generate more energy, 2) Use more from green sources and 3) use less energy (we will move quickly from fluorescent to LED light bulbs).

His forecast: Globally, we will use more electricity and we will move away from fossil fuel.

Energy Sector forecast for the near-term:

• Solar is still ripe for small manufacturers.
• Nuclear will be big, but takes time to get online.
• “Clean” Coal – Carbon capture and sequestration will be future generation low emissions coal plants
• Solid Oxide fuel cells, starting with natural gas and developing toward hydrogen.

Other energy sources are small impact, including wind and water. Real long term: hydrogen power in 50 years, fusion also in 50 years, high temperature superconductors (HTS) a little sooner.

2. MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY
Linette Demers, SG2, Healthcare technology strategy consultants, primarily for hospital groups. Her talk was “Emerging Technologies in Healthcare.” The theme was “Smart Growth in Healthcare”.

Primary growth force is the cost of care. Hospitals are focusing on Workflow Productivity. This is a shift from the past, when they focused on “boxes” – expensive imaging equipment. Now that everybody has the “boxes”, the payments from Insurance and Government are going down. On the other hand, proton beam therapy accelerators for cancer treatment are being used more because insurance pays.

Government and Insurance is looking for cost effectiveness. Technology and medical treatment don’t always make a difference. Examples of include use of Stents for heart patients and Back Surgery. They don’t make a difference after a year or two.

Not that technology can’t help; there are some potentially disruptive technologies on the horizon that will displace conventional tools or technicians. In the short term these include:

• Non-invasive diagnostics replacing imaging
• Incisionless surgery, especially for cancer and gastro-intestinal ailments
• Vaccines – new disease models
• Molecular diagnostics and regenerative therapies
• Global workforce and telesurgery
• Mobile technology for monitoring patients

3. MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
Tom Lee from U.S. Cellular Marketing, the sixth largest carrier. He has a constant exposure to new product opportunities – he’s always being pitched. He stands at a nexus of new consumer technology. They are looking for areas of customer need and relevant technology.

How he judges fitness of those pitches:

• The customer experience, willingness to pay for that experience and the potential for new markets.
• Industry Ecosystem to support
• Needs best met other by platforms other than PC’s and Laptops
• Probability to launch in 2 to 5 years.

The customer experience: Will this make my life easier or more convenient. Examples: Phone with bar code, RFID reader. Integrate mobile information with lifestyle; Google wants to be the “broker” of my personal profile. They will make my life easier or better in exchange for profit resulting from facilitating the exchange of my personal profile data.

Ecosystem will support ubiquitous connectivity to the Internet. For example, this could benefit people who require medical monitoring.

Information Discoverability: finding information that is relevant to me “here and now”. To do this successfully, device interfaces need to improve. The interface needs to be seamless with the user context. (I really like this as it echoes what we have learned from SEO/SEM work over the past two years).

Mobile advertising is a frontier. Carriers want dollars from advertising support. Nobody has worked out how to make it relevant and accessible -- the seamless user experience.

4. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Armando Pauker from Apex Venture. He was in Silicon Vally and in 2000 joined Apex. He discussed Information Technology trends.

• The rise of eco-efficient IT. Influence corporate energy and carbon consumption, track and manage consumption for the enterprise.

• Widening of the Wireless World. Protocols are not converging.

• User Generated Content. Social networks to go local, we may finally see micropayment systems for authors and service providers. SOA and AJAX, add value and generate capabilities to create and design customer software and collaborative communities on demand.

• Security continues to be a concern. Privacy has a large dollar exposure, there is more connectivity, and there is a need for collaborative security to fight fraud, phishing, and “day Zero” attacks.

• On-demand computing and Virtualization

• Innovative video conferencing services (I don’t know why this got its own bullet-point beyond collaborative, but I’m just reporting here.)

From the Business Model and Venture Capital side, Pauker identified some interesting trends:

• Globalization of Production and Consumption. Non-US markets are driving global growth and creating a need for global finance.

• M&A will continue. Big companies are lagging global growth. There’s increased commoditization and goods and services become commoditized more rapidly. Customers want to deal with fewer vendors.

• Business Models will continue to develop: Open Source and Outsourcing, Low-cost self-service, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Virtualization will disrupt traditional IT licensing models. Consumer advertising supported business will saturate in a weak economy.

• The Individual will have a profound influence, with many conflicts to be resolved: Privacy concerns vs. Social Networks, Always connected vs. need for personal down time. From the consumer side: technology products for aging boomers, merging cellular, RFID and GPS functionality – monitor your vital signs and transmit to your doctor or hospital.

5. FINANCIAL SERVICES in Chicago
As a bonus, David Weinstein talked about how he is seeing a lot of new IT being applied locally in the Financial Services area. Talk of a new exchange that will be completely automated trading, enhanced tools for investors (OptionCity), Access-based technology with low latency to markets, Back office technology for clearing efficiencies. He described what he sees as a lot of “deal flow”.

6. Q & A after the presentations
The first question had to do with the effects of an overall economic slowdown. Everyone responded and said that any innovation in the short term would have to be focused on payback over investment. Hospitals will focus more on workflow efficiencies and better utilization of current investments. In energy, LED lights, small-scale solar have the possibility of short-term payback. Mobile carriers may focus more on acquisition and retention over risky new technology features.

A diabetic guy with nine toes complained about hospital workflows and asked why the healthcare system doesn’t focus on prevention and preventative medicine. The response was that prevention doesn’t make hospitals money, and insurance companies profit based on managing expenditures, so prevention needs to be a matter of public policy.

As far as IT and Healthcare, healthcare records management and the adoption of electronic health records is critical to efficiency of operations, so it will happen. However, there is resistance to change and the cost of technology is to the doctors so there’s only 10% adoption currently. Healthcare organizations can subsidize the transition. Another issue is that the information isn’t transactional or interactive to the patient.

Where will we see the impact of genetic analysis for the replacement of current tests or drugs? Diagnostics has quick adoption but not high value for reimbursement. However, one example: study showed that a $200 test for breast cancer was so effective and created so much savings that they were able to get approved for a $ 3,500 reimbursement.

In response to energy questions, Argon’s Cohen said that he expects Ethanol to shift away from corn and toward cellulosic ethanol which is more efficient. He also sees nuclear as the inevitable future – 200% increase worldwide, but it takes 4 to 8 years to bring online. Stick around another 50 years to see commercial fusion power.

Labels: chicago, events, MIT-EF, technology forecast