iStart Company Investigations: Life Upgrades Group
Music meets robotics with RoboTar, a slide-on device that automates guitar chords. Here’s a look at where Kevin Krumwiede of Life Upgrades Group has gone with the product since placing high in a competition hosted on the iStart platform earlier this year.
Kevin Krumwiede has a burning passion for music that was passed down to him by his father. But when his father had a stroke and could no longer play guitar, the younger Krumwiede found a way to keep his dad’s passion alive by creating RoboTar, a robotic chord player.
The device attaches
Continue reading iStart Company Investigations: Life Upgrades Group
Three years after placing high in a competition through iStart, here’s a look at where natural juice producer Koa Organic Beverages, originally known as Eden Organic Water, is today.
When Adam Louras – a smoothie and juice lover from Texas – found out he was going to be diabetic, he envisioned an idea: creating the world’s first sugar-free juice. From there, Koa Natural Olakino was born.
A mix of 12 different fruits and vegetables, the beverage is fresh pressed from each piece of produce and doesn’t add any preservatives or sweeteners.
“What you get is all of the nutritional aspects
Continue reading iStart Company Investigations: Koa Organic Beverages
Traditional vs. Lean Startups
In traditional startup practice, a founder writes a lengthy business plan, pitches it to investors, assembles a team, builds out necessary infrastructure, and then works hard to sell his or her product. In the uncertainty and pace of the modern marketplace, startups operating in this way often struggle to keep up. According to research out of Harvard Business School, 75 percent of all venture-funded startups fail. Lean methodology, articulated mostly by Steve Blank and Eric Reis, seeks to help more startups succeed through a number of fundamental changes to the traditional model.
Lean
Continue reading Can Lean Startups Compete in Business Plan Competitions?
A Year of Learning
In the business world, SiNode Systems is becoming known for its success in recent business competitions as much as for its innovative, high-performance anodes for lithium ion batteries. The startup out of Northwestern University won the 2013 Rice Business Competition, the largest such competition in the world, as well as the 2013 Clean Energy Prize on the back of its cutting edge battery technology and a strong team of founders. Since the competitions, SiNode has gone on to secure private investment, receive a federal research grant, and form industry partnerships as it continues to grow
Continue reading Leading the Charge: Business Competition Lessons from SiNode Systems
Whether you are planning to run a business plan, a business model, pitch or idea competition there is a couple of things I have noticed from hosting a couple of hundred competitions in the last two years that you may want to consider.
Don’t run a competition just to check a box for your organization. Business competitions are a wonderful way to provide experiential learning for your applicants. If you can’t put in the time and provide a clear benefit to those applicants, education, mentorship or capital, let them know about other competitions and help prepare them. In a recent
Continue reading Best Practices for Running a Business Competition
83-year-old maker Hugh Lyman’s invention turns plastic pellets into affordable filaments for 3D printing
(SAN MATEO, Calif.) March 4, 2021 – The inventor of a machine that turns plastic pellets into affordable filaments for low-cost 3D printers is the winner of the first Desktop Fabrication Competition, a global contest sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation, Maker Education Initiative and Inventables.
Hugh Lyman, an 83-year-old inventor from Enumclaw, Wash., won $40,000 and a laser cutter, 3D printer and CNC milling machine supplied by Inventables for his machine called the Lyman Filament Extruder II. His extruder converts plastic resin pellets into filament
Continue reading Winner Named in Global Desktop Factory Competition
Global Entrepreneurship Week has officially come to a close; there were many activities and celebrations involving over 130 countries, 35,000 activities and 7 million participants! Whether or not you were one of the millions of people worldwide who participated in any of the thousands of Global Entrepreneurship Week events last week, you will enjoy this recap and find it uplifting and inspiring for the year head… Global Entrepreneurship Week is the world’s largest celebration of the innovators and job creators who launch startups that bring ideas to life, drive economic growth and expand human welfare. During one week each November,
Continue reading Featured Competitions and a Recap of GEW
Working at the Kauffman Foundation has it perks. For one, I have tons and tons of data and research at my finger tips. From this research there are a couple of things that relate directly back to all of the participants going through competitions on the iStart platform.
1. Networks are super important (access to funding, mentors, and co-founders) and 2. Experiential Learning is key to the success of the entrepreneur (one of the reasons we like business competitions).
I hear over and over that the most important moment in a founder’s journey is the idea. While it is an
Continue reading The Power of Networks
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