Teams of business and engineering students unveiled the fruits of their combined labors at the Eagle Biz Awards competition on Saturday before a crowd of judges and proud family members and friends.
Taking top honors was the eight-member team that devised IlluMitize, a system that encourages health-care workers and visitors to sanitize their hands before touching patients, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection.
The engineering students who designed it are Joseph Mukuri, Brian Bradley, Allie Sundermeier and David Fleck; the students who worked on the business side of the system are Nicholas Camacho, Jaquelyn Damico, Dixibeth Villarraga and Brian Perry. Villarraga is a special education major; the others are business majors. Their mentor was Beattie DeLong, a Bonita Springs retiree who spent his career working on startups and start overs in the health-care.
The team hopes to be able to test its invention in a local hospital in the near future. The group also will compete against other inventors at the Florida Venture Forum next spring. Another FGCU team won that competition in 2013 with its AquaRamp, a device that helps disabled people get into and out of pools on their own.
Other winners in Saturday’s competition, held at Sugden Hall on the FGCU campus, included a cutting board with two sections to keep foods from cross contaminating. The third-place winner was a tripod that makes attaching a GoPro or video camera faster and easier.
All three teams received six-month memberships to The Rocket Lounge, a business that creates and invests in incubator businesses, which will be opening a branch in Fort Myers in January. Its CEO and founder, Dieter Kondek, was one of the judges for the event.
The competition was the culmination of a course that pairs groups of business and engineering students and teaches them how to communicate and cooperate with each other. Over the course of a semester, teams devise new products, create business plans and present them – an activity rooted in the real-life practice that brings new products to market, according to Sandra Kauanui, director of the FGCU Institute for Entrepreneurship.
“This year’s competition was much better than last year, both in the quality of the presentations and the products,” says Kauanui. “I think it has a lot to do with the community mentors who helped us this year and that we gave the teams more time to work in the classroom together.”
- Read more about the course in an earlier FGCU360 post