The Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has announced the winners of the fall 2018 Change the World Challenge student innovation competition. Each winning team was awarded a prize of $1,000 and is eligible for the $5,000 “Best of the Best” grand prize that will be given out at the end of the academic year.

The Change the World Challenge competition, established in 2005 and funded by Rensselaer alumnus Sean O’Sullivan ’85, is a bi-annual contest open to all Rensselaer students who have innovative ideas they believe can change the world. Overseen by the Severino Center in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer, the competition provides students with the opportunity to develop their ideas into viable business concepts. The contest serves as a second step in a rich set of entrepreneurship activities curated by the Severino Center.

“Thanks to the continued generosity of Sean O’Sullivan, we are able to provide Rensselaer students with the opportunity to develop and grow their ideas as well as use customer discovery to gain a better understanding of the problem they are trying to solve,” said Thomas Begley, dean of the Lally School of Management.

The following winners of the fall competition are students who exemplify the entrepreneurial and collaborative spirit of The New Polytechnic, the driving model for teaching, learning, and research at Rensselaer:

• Hayley Roy Gill and John Fantell created Clear Voyage, a headset and smartphone app designed to provide visually impaired individuals with an unparalleled degree of spatial environmental data in order to allow them to navigate everyday environments with comfort and ease.
• Daniel Lannan and Jonathon Koppelman created Deadeye Sensor Technologies, a training platform designed to be operated by a single user in order to provide performance feedback for athletes. 
• Tahsin Islam, Kelsey Meyer, Christian Sallick, Brett Moyer, and Anton Kapitman created EasyEpi, an epinephrine solution designed to save money, time, and lives. This product combats the cost, shelf life, and limits on effectiveness associated with current epinephrine auto injectors.
• Tony Chedrawee created Novento Foods, whose organizational strategy is to alleviate food insecurity and enrich western cuisine by modernizing insect production for entomophagy, the practice of eating insects.
• Nirav Patel created a high discount food platform designed to reduce food waste and save money for both retailers and consumers.  

“We congratulate the winning teams of the fall Change the World Challenge competition and commend their commitment to solving global challenges,” said Jason Kuruzovich, academic director of the Severino Center. “An immense amount of passion and dedication goes into transforming an idea into a viable solution.”