The recent Student Entrepreneurial Pitch Competition featured big wins for Texas A&M University Mays Business School. The competition occurred during the 2015 Southeastern Conference Symposium in Atlanta and offered a first-place win for students Brandon Sweeney and Blake Teipel, both Ph.D. candidates in materials science and engineering.
The winning pitch was based on innovative technologies that the students have established to deal with the problem of high-cost and unreliable prosthetic devices. With assistance from Startup Aggieland (Texas A&M’s student-run business accelerator), the students’ business tackles the problem using nanotechnology and next-generation 3D printing.
Torie Johnson, the executive director of the SEC’s academic initiative (SECU), commented: “This competition was a first for the SEC Symposium, and given the incredibly positive feedback we received from the students, judges and attendees, it proved to be a special aspect of this year’s event. All 14 teams should be commended for their achievements, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds for each of them.”
The competition, in its first-ever year, included teams from all fourteen of SEC’s universities presenting to a panel of SEC alumni judges. Teams that advanced through the first two rounds would then have the opportunity to present their innovative ideas to a new panel of judges as well as all SEC Symposium attendees.
In addition to a win by Mays students in the pitch competition, a number of other Mays students and faculty members were featured at the symposium, which has the goal of utilizing the strengths of each SEC university to address a particular scholarly issue. The theme for this year’s symposium was chosen as “Creativity, Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Driving a 21st Century Economy”.