What originally began as an insightful, yet sarcastic idea, helped to edge a group of University students to victory in this year’s Venture Quest business competition.
The winning group was composed of master’s students Andrew Cook, Walther Bucklers, Orit Ofri and Matt Eskue, who helped to develop a business plan for VisiRay, a type of patented camera that can generate a 3-D image of pests hidden in walls and various types of surfaces.
Each year the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship hosts two Venture Quest business plan competitions for students of the Lundquist College of Business. Teams of students give 15-minute presentations of their venture plans to a panel of top local business professionals. Among other things, teams are judged on the viability of their ventures and the quality of their presentations. Cash prizes are awarded to the top finishers.
Cook, a physics graduate teaching fellow and doctoral candidate, said the group chose the topic from 10 patented products as a part of the Technology Entrepreneurship program, based upon which one was economically feasible and technologically viable.
Bucklers, a graduate business student, said one of the most challenging parts of the competition was finding the right market for the group’s chosen topic, millimeter wave scans, which are currently used by the Transportation Safety Administration for its controversial, full-body scan machines at security checkpoints throughout the country.
“It took us a while to get to the right type of market,” Bucklers said. “Experts from the first few markets that we looked into said that they didn’t need it.”
Bucklers said the idea to cater their product to the pest-control industry came as an accident when an advisor facetiously suggested they could use the technology to find insects during one of the group’s weekly meetings.
“At this point, the product wasn’t going anywhere, so we called some people in the industry and they said, ‘Yeah, it would be really great to have this,’” Bucklers said. “The more people we talked to, the better it got.”
Cook said the marketability for the product in the pest-control industry is a good once, since many commercial companies use antiquated methods, such as stethoscopes and moisture meters, to identify areas of insect infestations.
“At least 20 percent of the time, customers do not trust the pest-control person, so you want to be able to give the customers a picture of what’s inside of the wall,” Cook said.
In addition, Cook noted the product may be used for a variety of other industries as well, including electrical contracting and building inspection. Cook even said the product can be used in the medical field to possibly identify burn depths and detect epithelial cancers.
Despite the large potential market for the product, Cook said the group’s victory was not an easy one. In the first round of the Venture Quest competition, Cook said the company was the last group chosen to advance to the final round.
“The judges panned us, so it was clear to us that we didn’t get our message across very effectively,” Cook said.
With about two hours to spare, Cook said the group redid its presentation and changed the focus of the product.
The final product resulted in a first place win that not only earned the company a $1,000 cash prize but also an opportunity to present its products to a national and possibly international audience. Don Upson, an instructor for the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship’s Technology Entrepreneurship, New Venture Planning, Venture Launch classes, said the group will compete against others from across the country next month at the University of Louisville’s 2011 Brown-Forman Cardinal Challenge. In addition, Upson said the group may also qualify for three additional business plan competitions at the University of Cincinnati; Carnegie Mellon University; University of Manitoba, Canada; New Venture Championship in Portland or the Venture Labs Competition in Austin, Texas.
“We were happy to be in the final round,” Bucklers said. “After we won, it was a really good feeling, because we worked on this for over half a year. It was a really good day.”
Upson attributed to the group’s success to its access to a unique, patented form of technology that “provides advantages that no other technology currently has.”
“They did the best job out of all of the teams that were at Venture Quest of convincing the judges that they not only had a viable business idea but a viable idea of how to execute that business idea,” Upson said. “It’s all about being persuasive, having done all of your homework and doing a complete job.”
In collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, Cook said the group is hoping to soon create a schematic sketch of the product, which can then be used to create the VisiRay device, which is estimated to cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to acquire the licenses for the product and develop the device itself. To help fund the company’s endeavors, Cook said the group is currently reaching out to Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in addition to other companies that have expressed interest in the product. Once the product is developed, Cook said the company’s product would be primarily geared toward commercial consumers and retail for approximately $10,000.
Despite the company’s ambitious goals, Upson said the future of the company and its product is promising.
“I think it has a really good chance of succeeding,” Upson said. “The technology is good and the plan that is coming together is really good.”
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