Elevator Pitch Competition 2012
What do fingerprint payment systems, reducing carbon emissions, caffeinated chocolate milk, and hearing aid translators all have in common? They are the winning ideas from the 3rd annual Elevator Pitch Competition, an event sponsored by the Calvin Entrepreneurship Club and SoundOff Signal, a local company producing lighting systems.
Fourteen Calvin students representing numerous disciplines pitched their next great idea to a panel of three judges on Wednesday, October 17 at the Ladies Literary Club downtown. Each student had 90 seconds to sell their idea – about the time of an elevator ride, before a crowd of 30 people.
The Elevator Pitch Competition is one of three competitions held at Calvin, open to students of all academic endeavors, to foster creativity and innovation. (The others are the Big Idea competition, sponsored by the Enterprise Center, and BizPlan, a collaboration of Calvin’s engineering and business departments, and the Entrepreneurship Club.) Elevator Pitch contestants faced three judges: Gwen Vryhof-Bultema, a Calvin graduate with a Master of Science in Communication from Northwestern University and managing partner at Bultema Lambert Communications, Andy DeVries, former entrepreneur and corporate marketing executive prior to becoming a Calvin regional gift officer, and Kelly LeCoy, a Calvin grad, founder of Uptown Kitchen, and winner of the 2011 Calvin College and regional business plan competitions and winner of a $5,000 5x5 competition in Grand Rapids.
This year’s Elevator Pitch winners were:
First place, $1,000: Jake Mantel, a senior accounting major from Michigan, for his idea to develop a payment system using fingerprints for authorization.
Second place, $600: Chinedu Nchekwube, a freshman civil engineering major from Nigeria, for his idea on how to reduce carbon emissions.
Third place, $300: Ben Franz, a freshman business major from Illinois, for promoting caffeinated chocolate milk as a healthier alternative to sugary energy drinks.
The Peoples’ Choice Award and $100 was given to Nathan Snippe, a senior electrical engineer from Michigan, for pitching a translator-hearing enhancement device.
Mantel and Nchekwube will represent Calvin College at the Regional Elevator Pitch Competition on Wednesday, November 7 at Aquinas College. The event will include competitors from Grand Valley State University, Cornerstone University, Calvin College, Aquinas College, Hope College, Davenport University and Grand Rapids Community College.
