Congratulations to the 2018 winners of the annual Donald L. Lucas Business Pitch Competition.
$10,000 Grand Prize Winner: Echo Made Easy
Team: Alejandro Rendon (MBA student) and Dilip Ponguru (MBA student)
The Idea:
Echo Made Easy is a computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) system, which assists physicians in the interpretation of medical images. Imaging techniques in X-ray, CT, MRI, and ultrasound diagnostics yield a great deal of information that the radiologist or other medical professional must analyze and evaluate comprehensively in a short time; a complex process with large amounts of data that increase the chances of interpretation errors. The Echo Made Easy solution prevents many of these errors using CADx to analyze and interpret medical images more accurately and precisely.
$1,500 Cancer CAREpoint Prize Winner: Boujee on a Budget
Team: Maria del Carmen Ortega-Flores (Biology Major), Reece Jackson (Computer Science and Engineering Major/Entrepreneurship and Math Minors), and Polina Edmunds (Communications Major)
The Idea:
Boujee on a Budget is a platform that provides healthy recipes, meal plans, cooking instructions, and budgeting advice for young adults eating on their own for the first time. Boujee’s mission is to educate college students on how to live a healthy lifestyle, showing them it’s affordable, enjoyable, not time consuming, and not as hard as it may seem.
$1,000 Runner-Up Prize Winner: Pakk’d Inc.
Team: Chad Calnon (Finance Major/Entrepreneurship Minor)
The Idea:
Pakk’d is a branded smoking glassware company. The founders invented and designed an invention that automatically “packs” smoking devices, which solves multiple market pains by eliminating spilling.
Judges
- Richard Boberg, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Innovation Quest, Entrepreneur
- Frederik Clausen, SCU Alumni
- Steve Foster, Managing Director at SF Advisors, CIE Advisory Board
- Shawn Lange, CEO and Co-Founder of L2F, Inc., CIE Advisory Board
- Elizabeth Powers, Counsel at Turner Boyd, LLP, CIE Advisory Board
Scores were evaluated based on the following criteria: Company Overview, Product/Service, Marketing/Marketing Strategy, Operations, Financial Viability, Management, and Overall Presentation.
Thank you to all who applied to compete, our competitors, judges and volunteers. We look forward to continuing this competition next year!