It isn't every day that a budding entrepreneur ends up standing in an elevator with the major CEO who could help turn his or her fledgling idea into a profitable business venture. Almost certainly, the fortuitous meeting will last less than a minute or two - every second must be used effectively to pitch an idea quickly and concisely.
That's the idea behind "elevator pitch" competitions, in which two Brown students took home top prizes at separate events this month, one state-wide and another hosted by the Brown Entrepreneurship Program.
The elevator pitch competition invites anyone with a burgeoning business idea to make a brief pitch for it, getting immediate feedback from a panel of business leaders and experts and the chance to win cash prizes. Presenters have no more resources than they would in an elevator - 90 seconds (sometimes less) and no fancy visual aids or PowerPoint slides.
Robert Neville '08 was named the winner of the Nov. 7 state-wide elevator pitch competition held at Johnson and Wales University and sponsored by the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition. He pitched a cardiac rehabilitation monitoring system that he and five other students are developing for DigiTRx, an incorporated venture started by students taking an entrepreneurship class in Spring 2006.
Amy Seibel '09 won the Entrepreneurship Program's pitch-off on Nov. 10 at Brown, taking home an $800 prize for her 45-second pitch for a television program that would teach English to adults.
The product being developed by DigiTRx, which Neville said already owns patents on some of its technologies, would allow patients recovering from a heart attack to avoid the hassle of commuting to medical facilities for supervised exercise and instead allow them to work out at home. With DigiTRx's system, the patient would wear a vest which measures his or her vital signs while exercising. After exercising, the patient would upload the data from the vest to a computer, at which point the company's patented software would send the information to the patient's physician, wait for approval and then generate a recommended exercise program for the next day.
"The goal of this group, and what we've created, is remote cardiac rehab," Neville said, though he emphasized that the technology is not designed to be a "stand-alone project." The remote system would only target low-risk patients, he said, since direct medical supervision is still important for many weeks immediately after a patient suffers a heart attack.
Originally founded to tackle a problem presented to the students by Peter Tilkemeier, associate professor of medicine and director of cardiac rehabilitation at Miriam Hospital, the company has remained entirely student-run - though it receives consulting and advising from Brown faculty.
Currently, the company is actively working to grow its business. Neville said that in December the students will apply for a $20,000 grant with the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance. The company is also working on writing a grant proposal for $120,000 from the National Institutes of Health.
The students are also reconsidering their business model, focusing on "partnering with traditional rehab centers as opposed to competing with them." The students are also constantly learning about the field their product plans to enter, Neville said.
"A big thing of what we're doing right now is learning about the industry standards we have to meet," he said, adding that some students had been at Miriam Hospital on Wednesday doing just that.
Seibel, who won the Brown pitch-off for her idea for a television program to teach English to adults, said she had "been thinking about it for a long time, in various forms" before deciding to enter the competition.
"It's very hard to survive in this country if you don't speak the language," she said. She added that adults who needed English training would find programming that was not directed at children to be "helpful."
Seibel, who described herself as "very interested in languages" - having studied Spanish, French and "a tiny bit of Catalan" at Brown - said she planned to take a business class next semester and would like to do something with her idea after she graduates.
"Right now, it's still in the planning stages," she said, "so I don't know exactly how it would work."
Jake Rosenberg '08, who was the runner-up to Seibel in the Brown pitch-off, took home a $600 prize after entering "on a whim" when he read an announcement for the competition in a Morning Mail. He pitched the use of 3-D cell culture technology to grow liver cells for transplant into patients with Type 1 diabetes.
Currently, Rosenberg said, transplanted liver cells are taken from cadavers, but there aren't nearly enough cells to go around. He suggests using a 3-D cell culture to grow a larger number of cells - possibly even "better" ones.
A biology concentrator, Rosenberg said he was inspired by his experience this semester in BIOL 2130: "Techniques in Molecular and Cell Science," taught by Associate Professor of Medical Science Jeffrey Morgan. Morgan and a team of biomedical engineers, Anthony Napolitano GS, Peter Chai '06 MMS'07 MD'10 and Dylan Dean '00 MD'07 GS, an M.D./Ph.D. student, invented a 3-D Petri dish that allows cells to make normal cell-to-cell contacts and form "microtissues." Their results were published in the August issue of the journal Tissue Engineering.
"In your body, cells don't grow flat on a plate," Rosenberg said. "Very important for cell growth and differentiation is the stuff they're up against," he added.
Though he placed well in the Brown competition, Rosenberg said he doesn't plan to pursue his idea any further in the immediate future.
"Right now, I don't have the time to pursue that, specifically," he said, adding that he plans to take a year off after graduating.
Jesse Maddox '08 and Matt Prewitt '08, a Herald opinions columnist, earned two fourth-place finishes in both the Brown pitch-off and the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition's event at Johnson and Wales for their pitch to help students purchase textbooks online.
"Savings and convenience are the two things we're selling here," Maddox said. Currently, students find it inconvenient to buy textbooks online, he said, though doing so could save them "20 percent off normal book prices." While he said he couldn't go into details about the idea because he and Prewitt are "still working on it," he said they hope to launch their Web site at "a northeastern school" in time for the spring semester.
Maddox said he and Prewitt hadn't actually been selected to pitch for the state-wide competition they placed fourth in - too many entrants had registered and some were turned away - but they went anyway and convinced the organizers to allow them to make their pitch.
"We won't disappoint," Maddox said he told those in charge. He said he and Prewitt used their $150 prize to throw a party for students in their class, ENGN 1010: "The Entrepreneurial Process: Innovation in Practice."
Neville, who won that competition, was also not selected to pitch, but he attended anyway to support another group he was involved with, he said. When some entrants didn't show up, he was able to get himself back into the program.
Giving the pitch was a challenging experience, Neville said. "There's a lot of pressure to be able to consolidate something that you've been working a year and half on into a minute in a half," he said.
Maddox agreed. "You have to be able to break down your idea and give someone a pitch within a limited time frame," he said.
"You're supposed to leave them a little bit hanging and make them want to talk to you more," he added.
Seibel said she found "it was a little bit nerve-wracking - getting up in front of people."
Rosenberg said he was glad to have had a business encounter that was outside his normal experience. "It kind of put me in a crowd of entrepreneurs and business people that I probably wouldn't have contacted, as a biology person," he said.
He added, though, that if he were to do it all again, he would change one thing.
"I don't have a suit," he said, "and I think it would have been better if I had a suit."
