May 5, 2004
Mammogram Technology Takes First Place in Idea to Product Competition
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Most of us, however accomplished we may consider ourselves to be, have yet to devise a smaller antenna or smarter PDA. Yet tech-savvy student entrepreneurs at The University of Texas at Austin have done just that. Those technologies were two of the contenders in this year’s Idea to Product™ Competition (I2P) held on campus April 23-24.
First place ultimately went to a team with a life-saving piece of medical technology: engineering students Mehul Sampat and Pallavi Jesrani of Team CADAD presented a system designed to enable easier detection of architectural distortions in mammograms.
Since 2001, I2P™ has encouraged students to create business plans exploring commercial applications of university-developed ideas and technologies. After being selected for the semi-final round of the competition on the basis of initial questionnaires, students present their plans to a panel of judges from industry and academia.
This year, 14 technologies reached the semi-final round out of sixty entrants. Teams competed for $8500 in total prize money, with the winners receiving $5000 and a package of legal services to facilitate the commercialization of their technology.
Unlike traditional business plan contests, such as The University of Texas at Austin’s Moot Corp® competition, I2P™ draws most of its participants from fields other than business. The contest tries to offer an immersion in business practices for students from engineering, law, computer sciences and liberal arts. Judges are considered mentors, and pay as much attention to the students’ professional development as to the actual products.
“It’s more of a pre-business plan competition,” explains Rob Bishop, the director of this year’s I2P™ contest and an MBA student at the McCombs School of Business. “I2P™’s goal is to educate and inform inventors and potential entrepreneurs on issues relating to intellectual property, finding and researching markets, and beginning the process that leads to a business plan.”
This year, I2P™ judges included UT Austin professors, business executives, attorneys and entrepreneurs. The quality of interaction between the judges and participants was, said Bishop, a clear highlight of this year’s competition.
Another highlight, according to Bishop, was the diversity and quality of entrants. This year’s students represented four colleges, nine departments and a bumper crop of ideas. One student developed a product called “Active Voice Clarification,” designed to let the user hear their voice as others actually hear it. Another developed a real-time monitoring device that would let athletes monitor their heart rate and body temperature at all times. Still another presented an improved garbage receptacle designed to make the fast-food experience slightly more salubrious.
Sampat, a biomedical engineer and Jesrani, an electrical engineer, claimed first place with their system for Computer-Aided Detection of Architectural Distortions in Mammograms (CADAD). Architectural distortions, they explained, are one of three primary groups of abnormalities which may signify breast cancer when they appear on x-rays. Their technology would enable radiologists to recognize architectural distortions more easily, while at the same time boasting a low rate of false positive readings. “Keep in mind, our technology saves lives,” noted Jesrani, concluding the team’s business plan presentation.
Second place went to Ken Chuah and Liang Chen, a computer scientist and computer engineer, respectively, of Unipeak. They have already put a prototype of their product, an anonymous browsing service that affords internet users privacy and identity protection, online.
The third place team, OpTenna, was composed of three undergraduates: Matt Poplawski, a junior in chemical engineering, Vinay Raval, a junior in economics, and Gus Perez, a senior in biology. Their plan was to build an antenna optimized to be as small as possible, so that you could have a cell phone no bigger than a fun-size candy bar. “Would you want a cell phone that size?” mused Poplawski. “I don’t know, but we could make it!”
Team KPU rounded out the top four with a Kinematics Processing Unit hardware acceleration card that would let video game developers divert some of the complex processing work from the CPU to a separate, dedicated processor. KPU also won the “Bright New Venture” award from Haynes and Boone, a technology law firm. The firm will work with KPU on the various legal incidents of a new company, such as stock option and non-disclosure agreements and intellectual property advice.
A student organization, the Technology Entrepreneurship
Society, started I2P™ in 2001 at The University of Texas at
Austin, with help from the Murchison Chair of Free Enterprise,
the College of Engineering, the IC2 Institute and the McCombs
School of Business.
To learn more about Idea to Product, contact Betsy Merrick, (512) 418-8869 ext. 14,
betsy@thompson-group.com, or David Schieck, College of
Engineering,
dschieck@erson.com.
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
