Page 8 - CEMS Winter 2022 Newsletter

CEMS NEWS
New course & Crucible Prize appeals to future entrepreneurs
Professor Paul Dauenhauer is leading efforts to equip students with entrepreneurial skills for future commercial innovation.
This past semester, CEMS students participated in the first course on Chemical and Materials Technology Commercialization (ChEn/MatS 5803). This upper-level course taught by Professor Paul Dauenhauer focuses on the development of commercialization skills to move laboratory inventions to commercial innovations within startup companies and existing enterprises. Students begin the course learning about the commercial sectors for engineered products and continue on
to develop their own product value proposition and startup company; the semester culminates in a pitch presentation to sell their commercialization vision and raise seed funding.
The course is structured around the process of developing a product, a company, and a customer base in parallel. Beyond the existing business principles, students learn about the unique challenges associated with chemical and materials products, including high capital investment, product quality and failure risk, complex logistics, and integrated business and technical customer interaction. Lectures present the principles
of chemical and materials commercialization with historical and contemporary examples of successful and failed products and companies. Integrated within these principles are concepts of effective communication, planning and management, and ethical responsibility in leadership.
A key element of the course is the Friday guest lecture, which includes a short presentation followed by a Q&A session for all students. Guest lecturers are selected from a variety of materials and chemical companies working in sectors of consumer products, food, packaging, energy, sustainable materials, and healthcare, with expertise ranging from corporate leadership
to startup founder. The Friday sessions serve as an
opportunity to hear about commercialization principles in action, as well as an opportunity to practice information gathering skills and network building.
On January 14, the Department held the inaugural Crucible Prize competition. Students within ChEn/
MatS 5803 were encouraged to continue to refine
their pitch presentation from the class and enter it in the competition. Ten teams participated, and each presented a 10-minute pitch, followed by five minutes of Q&A to a panel of three commercialization experts. Andrew Jones (ChE ’09, Chem ’10), CEO of Activated Research Company and CEO of Carba, Michael Skinner, Entrepreneur at General Mills, and Cristina Thomas, Global R&D Services Director and R&D Global Process Owner at 3M, served as judges for the competition.
With generous support from Navjot Singh (PhD ChE ’94) and Nithya Iyer Singh (MS Pharmaceutics ’94), the Crucible Prize competition awarded prizes of $2,000, $500, and $250 to the top three performing teams.
The top prize was awarded to first-year CEMS graduate students Sophie Brauer and Katherine Vaidya for
their product, “VodkaBoost for an Elevated Drinking Experience.” The winners pitched the following concept:
8 www.cems.umn.edu
continued on page 13