Second Annual Innovation Center Challenge

Bailey Gent, Student Director of Innovation Center, and Paul Hunter, CEO of Repurpose and winner of last year’s challenge //Frances Meng-Frecker

By: Natalia Zreliak, Co-Editor-In-Chief

Yesterday the Anderson College of Business held its launch party for the 2018 Innovation Challenge. The event was in the Innovation Center on the third floor of Clarke Hall from 5:00pm-7:00p,  allowing community members to come and learn more about the challenge and celebrate the launch. In attendance were also some of the returning mentors from last year’s challenge, ranging from professors to alumni along with a member of last year’s winning team, Paul Hunter from Repurpose, to offer advice to those interested in these year’s challenge.

The Innovation Center was created in 2016 with the mission to “innovate business education by bringing together students, faculty, alumni, and the community to design solutions for the curriculum and the world” according to their website. The Innovation center really wants to stress that anyone can participate in the challenge, you do not have to have a business background. The top three teams will receive $10,000, $5,000, and $1,000 along with a co-working space in the Innovation Center and the ability to utilize the Alumni Matrix. This year they will also be offering a prize to anyone who has a brand new idea but is in the beginning stages of developing it.

Each team must have at least one student but the Innovation Challenge is open to all students, faculty and staff. The challenge itself is to build an innovative business that is desirable, feasible, and viable. Questions that will be asked of the ideas include: Does the world need it? Can it be done with the tools the groups have and are asking for? Lastly, will people actually pay for it? The teams will be judged on these three criteria along with their presentation.

“This is a business competition, we use the pitches as a metric to evaluate but the reality is this is about you starting and running a business that becomes a part of the community. This is where the stewardship mission comes into play” said Ken Sagendorf, Ph.D., a professor in the College of Business and Economics at Regis. Eighty percent of the judging is done by the panel of judges selected from areas all across the business sector and 20% of the judging is done by those in attendance of the final pitches.

“I am excited about the innovation challenge to see the process for the different teams and the ways that they develop over the year of mentoring, learning, and growing. I’m really just excited for them to take something and build on their education in a way that will be really feasible and tangible going forward after graduation,” said Bailey Gent, a Senior at Regis and this years Student Co-Director for the Innovation Challenge.

Important dates coming up:

Monday, November 12: Open House in the Innovation Incubator from 5:00-7:00 pm
Monday, November 26: Open House in the Innovation Incubator from 5:00-7:00 pm
Monday, December 10 through Wednesday, December 12: Semi-Final Pitches, 15 minute slots between 6:00-8:00pm.

To learn more about the Innovation challenge you can contact them on their website and join their mailing list or follow them on Twitter and Instagram @RegisInnovation or on Facebook as RegisInnovation. Or email them at innovation@regis.edu or contact the co-directors Bailey Gent at bgent@regis.edu and Zach Pearson at zpearson@regis.edu.

TAGS: Regis, Regis University, Anderson College of Business, Innovation Center, Innovation Challenge, 2018 Innovation Challenge, Alumni Matrix, Ken Sagendorf, College of Business and Economics, Bailey Gent, Jesuit, Business, Natalia Zreliak

Humans of Regis: Meg Thams

(Photo: Emily Schneider)

By: Samantha Jewell, Humans Editor

What brought you to Regis University?

Well I was teaching at the time, and I had just had my son, I was teaching as an adjunct. I was teaching a little bit at Metro and Community College of Denver just to see if I wanted to teach. I had left the industry because I was raising my son. What appealed to me about Regis was that I could teach to essential values. That I could question the profit motive and those kinds of things and I wouldn’t get harassed about it. Businesses are in business to make a profit, but my argument has always been you can’t be for a profit. That philosophy is harder at some schools to speak your mind on that and for students to explore that idea. That is not the Harvard model, so that appealed to me.

How did you get into the business world?

I started back when I was in my teens essentially. I left my home when I was 17 and I started working right away. I worked in a factory and got promoted, and after doing that for a couple of years of I decided that I better go back to school. So I went back to school, and I had this position at a company called Guardian Industries where they gave me a car and helped me with my tuition a little; I started with them and stayed with them for ten years, I got my BA, and then I just liked it. I got my undergrad in political science and I wanted to go to law school, but I never stopped working to pursue doing that. I was in the business world, and I was good at it and I knew the ins and outs of it, so I stuck with it. I did not think I could afford law school so I just continued on and I did pretty well so I finished my MBA and went to work with medical devices and I loved that! I had a line mammography equipment that I represented, and it was great because it was a women’s issue, it was not like pushing pencils, and I got to work with engineers, I got to work with quality control, inventory, etc. So I enjoyed that and then I had my son, so I stopped working full and started teaching part-time to see if I liked that. By the time my son was in Kindergarten, I had started d my Ph.D. and after I finished that I started teaching full time.

What are your interests outside of teaching?

Well, I love gardening, and I used to run but I bicycle a lot, and I do a lot of walking. We once as a family rode the Katy Trail in Missouri. I thought oh well Missouri is pretty flat it should not be that hard, oh no, no no! It is not like Denver is at all! I love that. It is a great way to travel, and you get to see stuff. The Katy Trail follows the Missouri River, so it has all these tiny towns that were bypassed when the railroads came in. It used to be the river was the primary transport for all the good and exports and people and when the railroads came in it took all of these towns, and some are ghost towns, and it is fascinating. I love that; I love to travel and to see new places.  

What has been your fondest memory at Regis?

My fondest memories are honestly being able to work with students, and that is honestly why I am here. That is my favorite part of my job. I think that is where I can be the most help and that is what gives me meaning in my position. I have stories of students who had the odds stacked against them, and they came around. I had students that came here from other countries, and they were just lost, and no doing so well and then by just working with them and they become an excellent and happy student.

What classes do you teach?

I teach most of the suite of marketing classes and then BA250. In the past, I have spearheaded the BA250 courses because I think that it is so important to get those fundamentals down and so that is my very favorite class to teach. I think part of it is that students come in and they have their mind made up already about business, about what they want to do and what they want to be. So I get a lot of new students.

What is your favorite Jesuit Value? Why?

‘How ought we to live.’ I think that if you keep that in mind, in general, you are going to make better decisions. What kind of world do we want to live in? It is particularly pertinent when it comes to business because business decisions do impact how we live. IT is a social entity, so if we live by standards that allow us to pollute or to mistreat people and put them in unsafe working environments then we are cheap and do we want to live in that kind of world? So that is the foundation for that I teach business.

Is there anything else you would like the Regis community to know?

In general, I would like the Regis community especially faculty and students to realize how business is integrated into how everything goes on in the university and that we can all begin to think about doing business by making business decisions. I think you need to understand that to be good consumers you have to be good citizens. Again it is going to touch everybody that is in the university. This is something that we are all involved in, and we should have ground rules that are both prosperity, we want to be prosperous, and the university wants to be profitable, we want to be sustainable over time. Also from a meaning point of view, if you understand business principles and business decisions it is not unlike making decisions in other areas, and you are more apt to include the process of moral thinking, ethical thinking, but I think it is appropriate for everyone.

Regis Innovation Challenge gears up for launch

(Photo: Emily Schneider)

By: Samantha Jewell, Social Media Editor

               The Innovation Center, created by the Regis University College of Business and Economics, is a headquarters for students to design critical, creative and systemic solutions for our curriculum. Ethan Lockshin is the Innovation Center Intern and he told the Highlander, “We want to make it very clear that you do not have to be a business student or a computer science student to use the Innovation Center. If you are a student that has a business idea or you want to learn something like design thinking, you can come to us and we have the resources to help get your idea rolling.”

               The Innovation Center was created to so students would have a place to make their ideas become a reality. Lockshin said, “There are plenty of students that are walking the grounds of Regis University that have business ideas but they haven’t acted on them because there have not been readily accessible resources for them.” The Innovation Center is that answer.

               Lockshin wants to leave Regis University better than he found it and that is why he has been involved in creating the inaugural Innovation Challenge.

               “If you are a student and you have an idea, this year-long lead up is a great opportunity to build teams and connect with potential investors. You can use this Innovation Challenge as a vehicle to get your idea started.”

               If you would like to learn more about the Innovation Challenge please visit https://www.regisinnovationchallenge.com/ and please join them for their launch party at 6:00 pm Oct. 23, in the Innovation Center at Regis University.

Twitter: @RegisInnovation
Instagram: @RegisInnovation
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RegisInnovation/