RALEIGH – One team created a smart home fire detection system that cut overall fire response time in half through smart monitoring and early detection.

Another came up with a way to analyze drone inspection data.

And yet another developed a virtual reality concussion assessment for college athletes.

Photo Shoot: NCSU Product Innovation Lab teams showcase possible future of IoT

These were among the startup company concepts presented by eight multidisciplinary teams of graduate students as part of NC State’s Product Innovation Lab, a Jenkins MBA graduate practicum course offered in the university’s business, design, engineering and textiles colleges.

In partnership with RIoT, a crowd packed The Cannon Room in downtown Raleigh on Tuesday night to check out the latest class projects, with attendees given “investor dollars” to invest in preferred teams.

At a time when the internet of things (IoT ) is quickly on the rise – just check out the latest announcement by AT&T on the release of 5G service in the U.S. – the event provided a sneak peek into what up-and-coming techies have in mind for the future. Many of the projects – though not all – were designed to incorporate IoT.

In the end, the team called Chirp, which innovated a fire detection system for the home, took home first prize.

“It’s affirming,” said  student Andrew Bowker, who was part of the winning team. “We’re excited that people think that we have something awesome here, and we might be able to move forward with it.”

RIoT’s Tom Snyder at Product Innovation Lab’s project showcase.

 

The winners will now have free access to its prototyping and support space, RIoT Labs, as well as introductions to the organization’s mentors and programs.

”We’re amazed, enthralled,” added student Joel Matthew. “The next step is we have a team meeting and find out if we’re all on board. Most of us are. Let’s see.”

The Product Innovation Lab is led by Jonathan Bohlmann, professor of marketing and innovation in NC State’s Poole College of Management, in collaboration with faculty members in the participating four colleges.

As part of the semester course, each  team must research and understand market needs, conceptualize and prototype a solution, and create a viable go-to-market plan.

“We try not to steer them too much,” Bohlmann told WRAL TechWire. ” A big part of it is that discovery process of learning the landscape, understanding what the opportunities are, and trying to prioritize what’s going to be a compelling solution. We’ve had some projects over the past years where they are still working on it and forming entities. It’s interesting to see where they take these.”

Developing go-to-market plans

Among the other projects included runners up, Care, which developed a product called Easy Roll, helping nurses turn patients without injury and reducing the risk of low-mobility patients from getting bedsores.

Another team created an open source platform called Gather to share, disseminate, diagnose and report outbreaks of emerging diseases.

“The main customer will be the government who will be using this tool to track what is happening, and send critical text messages to people in critical areas,” said student Mahesh Ganesh, adding: “It’s not IoT right now, but it could be IoT. We are planning to extend to Whatsapp integration and web-based integrations.”

Uttam Patel (right) explains his team’s winning project called Chirp to attendees.

Meanwhile, MBA student Christopher Hoina was on the team that came up with the solution called And Counting, which enables medium to small municipalities and non-profits to count and analyze visitors and the impact of their investments in public spaces.

“For me as a student, it was interesting to work with other MBA students, engineers, developers, and designers,” he said. “This was the first time where we had a team assembled like that, working with different personalities and styles of working, and learning how to lean on people’s strengths and communicate and create that team dynamic that actually works. For me, that was the course.”

RIoT Executive Director Tom Snyder co-instructs the course out of NC State’s electrical engineering department.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “We’re trying to use this course as a launch pad for entrepreneurs and innovators that want to create their own companies and teach them what we can on how to do that, and provide resources to move beyond university.”

The Product Innovation Lab was founded in 2002 by former NC State Zelnak Professor of Marketing and Innovation Dr. Mitzi Montoya, who is now dean of Oregon State University’s College of Business.

The program has refined its focus over the years, moving alongside the market changes in the tech sector more toward innovation. It won national recognition in 2010 by Forbes’ 10 Most Innovative Business School Courses list.

Several local startups have spun out of the course, including VitalFlo, which went on to land a NC IDEA SEED grant and winning prizes at Lulu eGames, Big Launch Challenge, CIMIT’s Student Technology Student Technology Prize and NASA Tech Briefs; civic parking app dropark, part of Innovate Durham’s 2017 cohort and a winner of US Ignite’s reverse pitch contest in 2017; and OpenGait, a low-cost modular prosthetic kit supported by Raleigh nonprofit LifeNabled.