THANK YOU again for donating to our seed funding campaign. We had a luncheon on November 13th with a broad range of student pitches across social innovation, new venture development, the McMillon Innovation Studio, Enactus, and many more. We were able to support 7 student innovation teams with customer discovery and prototyping needs. Here is an article with more details about the winning teams, and I've included a couple photos of the students below.

Thanks again for your generous donations, as this funding will be a catalyst for these student innovation teams to develop and implement their amazing ideas. We hope to continue this momentum for future campaigns.

Jessica Salmon

Meet the FLARE team: Financing a Sustainable Future. 

The methods of harvesting power will shape the future, and the depletion of fossil fuels requires a robust solution. By researching loan practices and the tax benefits granted to solar converters, they believe they can implement a sustainable energy solution that offers solar to all residential consumers. The inevitable pivot in the power industry holds immense opportunity to those who can capitalize, and Flare’s mission is to create a mutually beneficial power economy. By analyzing the current methods of solar financing and implementing improvements, we hope that residential solar conversion will become mainstream. The team plans to finance solar panels by taking bank loans and issuing this money at a higher interest rate to borrowers in order to generate a profit margin on the interest rates. Since the profit margin for loaning companies is typically more long term and there is already competition in our target area, we hope to implement solar advertising to gain private access to solar producers. The team hopes to improve the loan process to make solar power mainstream, the consumer will save money, we will make money, and energy production will become renewable.

Students: Cody Parrish, Aaron Rieth, Hawkin Starke, Prudhvi Tavva, Coleman Warren; Mentor: Dr. Timothy Yeager

Additional funding would have allowed the team to travel around the region to do extensive interviews to better identify the needs/wants and their target market and refine their minimum viable product.

DONATE NOW to help students like the FLARE team on their Innovation learning journey.

This is the next generation of leaders!

Meet Jake Hopper. 

Jake was a Senior Biomedical Engineering student last year. He participated in a McMillon Innovation Studio design team tackling the problem of how to create a smart, unified solution that reduces the mental stress of managing diabetes care. Jake and team spent over 60 hours interviewing users, empathizing with them by spending a day "simulating" what it would be like to live with diabetes and prototyping real solutions by creating a digital platform to connect existing data and systems into one management tool. They had mentorship from the American Diabetes Association, Reckitt Benckiser and Washington Regional who helped them understand industry context to the problem. Jake had limited resources, and could have used the help of donors like YOU to leapfrog his project from idea to impact. 

DONATE NOW to help students like Jake on their Innovation learning journey.

This is the next generation of leaders!

Build the Block Initiative

Teen Action Support Center/The Station

As part of the fall 2018 Social Innovation Challenge, students from Adrienne Callendar’s Social Justice and the Arts class partnered with The Station, a youth innovation lab in downtown Springdale, to develop a transferable and scalable model to build connection and community engagement through events promoting creative artistic collaboration. The team created the "Build the Block" initiative, a block party designed to engage neighborhoods surrounding The Station in music, art, design, and culture. This winning project from the 2018 Social Innovation Challenge inspired what is now an annual community block party at The Station.

Additional funding for this project could have helped these students create MORE social impact by giving them resources for further customer discovery with these at-risk youth in Springdale. 

DONATE NOW to help students like this team on their Innovation learning journey.

This is the next generation of leaders!