Tomorrow, a team of Auburn students will join eight other teams from colleges around Alabama in Huntsville to participate in a competition awarding innovative business plans.
The Alabama Launchpad Governor's Business Plan Competition will award $175,000 to the top three teams, $100,000 of which will go to the winning team.
"(The competition) helps to stimulate new business development and job creation and helps to get our technologies that are developing out of the University and in the private sector up and running," said John Weete, assistant vice president for technology transfer.
Auburn's teams, including this year's team, Construction Solutions, have made the finals all four years of the competition's history.
Steve Williams, professor in building science, said Construction Solutions is an entrepreneur in conjunction with Auburn University and has proposed a business which will take ideas generated by students, make the product and sell it.
"(Construction Solutions) submitted to (the competition) and focused on our efforts to create a business plan and to also win and get some seed money and the momentum to form a company to bring some of these products to market," said Brian Wright, associate director for commercialization in the office of technology transfer.
The annual Auburn team is organized around an interdisciplinary class started in fall 2006.
Wright said the basic plan is to use the class as an R&D engine to create new products to keep Construction Solutions maintained.
"(The class) is a collaboration between building science students and industrial design students," said Williams, one of the founders of the class. "I don't think anybody's done that before."
Williams said the class and competition are explorations of the practical application of design, which will hopefully one day end with a business and taking products to the market.
"What happens basically now, and we've done it for four years, the building science students and the building science faculty go to people in the constructions arena and say, 'What are your problems? Bring me some problems,'" Williams said. "So we start each year with about 50 problems."
The 50 problems are then distilled to 15 at the beginning of the semester.
Then, building science students explain those 15 problems to the industrial design students, Williams said.
"We would like to get these products, not stopped just at the end of the semester, demonstrate them and we would like to take them to the marketplace," Williams said.
Finalists' presentations are set to begin at 8 a.m. tomorrow at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Winners will be announced at approxiamately 2 p.m.
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