A Brown University team has won the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition for the fifth consecutive year. Azavy, named the winner of the student track of the competition, is developing an online store for 3D printed goods that crowd-sources manufacturing, enabling consumers to buy products designed and 3D printed by users. The team has been part of the Brown Venture Lab and Brown Entrepreneurship Program and includes Tyler Benster '13, an applied mathematics and economics concentrator, Lucas Eggers '13, a physics concentrator, Mark Fischer, a senior at Northwestern University, and Michael Anderson, a senior at Yale University. The group will receive $15,000 in cash and services valued at $24,000.
Another one of the three finalists, Optitrum, won $5,000 in cash and services valued at $9,250. The group consists of students from the School of Engineering's Program in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship (PRIME) master's degree program: Jenny Yu, Lu Liu, Xinming Shi, and Jing Feng. Optitrum is working on a handheld, non-invasive glucose meter to manage diabetes that utilizes a small saliva sample to determine glucose concentrations in the body almost instantaneously.
The contest awarded more than $200,000 in prizes. In order to receive prizes, applicants must agree to establish or continue operations in Rhode Island. Established in 2000, the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition has awarded more than $1.2 million in prizes since its inception, and has been named one of the top 40 business plan competitions in the country.
Previous winners of the competition from Brown include Overhead.fm (2012), PriWater, now Premama, (2011), Speramus (2010), and Runa (2009).
Date
May 15, 2013