Convergence of Innovation & Entrepreneurship

The third week of the Summer Sprint 2018 concludes the final presentations for this year’s program. Each team displayed incredible progress in their presentation skills and evolvement of ideas. While some teams received more positive feedback among others, all five teams were consistently complemented once providing an update on their total interviews, target customers, hypotheses, user journey maps and prototypes thus far.

Top-Left: Eckstein GuideWires: Daniel Eckstein, Nengi Charles-Ogan, Octavia Larentis and Akihiko Ishihara kick off the student presentations by introducing themselves.
Top-Right: Merciless Motors: Nader Ahmed and Anna Eva Kotyza introduce their team and backgrounds.
Bottom-Left: SmartFire Technology: Richard Vo and Eirik Humlen explain the specifics about their firearm idea.
Bottom-Right: YDK Chinese Yifei An and Denis Kaydanov discuss their mobile application idea.

The first team, Eckstein GuideWires, aims to: “provide a variable stiffness endovascular guidewire for use by cardiovascular surgeons to simplify guidewire exchange.” The students in this team include Daniel Eckstein (CBE, NYU Tandon), Nengi Charles-Ogan (BME, NYU Tandon), Octavia Larentis (BME, NYU Tandon) and Akihiko Ishihara (BME, NYU Tandon).

The next team, Merciless Motors, explained their idea to develop a new, better performing electric motor. This idea developed by Nader Ahmed (NYU Tandon) and Anna Eva Kotyza (NYU Gallatin) addresses saving head engineers at small, premium, and electric bicycle/motorcycle manufacture companies time and money. SmartFire Technology is developing: “a trackable (firearm) magwell-lockout device able to deter firearms theft and aid in recovery primarily for FFLs (gun stores).” Created by Richard Vo (CS, NYU Tandon) and Erik Humlen (MAE, NYU Tandon), they both have a personal interest in firearms with Richard earning 2nd place in the MO Monster Match 2014 and Eirik being a former Lance Corporal (Royal Norwegian Navy) Programs Expert.

The YDK Chinese team, focuses on “a mobile keyboard application that shows tones and meanings of each word when users type.” With their keyboard, intermediate and advanced Mandarin Chinese learners can maximize their study time and learn Chinese while doing what they enjoy: texting their friends. With 42 interviews conducted by Yifei An (NYU CAS) and Denis Kaydanov (NYU CAS & Tandon), the YDK Chinese team confirmed they will determine their pricing model as they continue with customer interviews, have finished building their website and will begin exploring their hypotheses on the business model canvas.

The last, but certainly not least, team to present is G-Ware. They aim to develop a “smart wearable device, which visits nurses from skilled nursing homes to provide efficient and effective care to geriatric patients with intermediate patient acuity levels through batch data readings.” Led by Paramjot Kaur (NYU CAS), Rhea Patel (NYU CAS) and Girish Palteru (NYU Tandon), the team addresses the ability to save nurses time in monitoring geriatric patients vitals and providing safer and applicable interventions to geriatric patients through reducing gaps in medical history. When reflecting on lessons learned, Richard concludes: “Summer Sprint was an excellent opportunity for us to really critique and explore the core hypotheses of our project. Regardless of the outcome, the mentorship and processes taught at Summer Sprint will remain indispensable for many pivots and new ideas to come.”

Picture: The last team to present is G-Ware, conducted by Paramjot Kaur and Girish Palteru.

Following the five presentations, questions from the audience were answered with regards to next steps. After today, all teams have completed their presentations. Lastly, a group photo was taken.

Picture: The five Summer Sprint 2018 teams and assisting professors gather together after the last  presentation concludes.

This concludes the Summer Sprint 2018 team presentations. Please keep in mind that the deadline for teams’ reimbursements, as well as follow on funding reimbursements, is Friday, June 22nd. Do make sure to send your submissions before the deadline.