Two Tufts Gordon Institute Teams Finalists in Tufts $100k

It is an exciting time of the year and Tufts Gordon Institute is proud to announce that students from the M.S. in Innovation and Management (MSIM) & M.S. in Engineering Management (MSEM) are finalists at this year’s $100K New Ventures Competition.

As part of their fall semester Innovation Sprint, MSIM students were tasked with developing a new product or service idea that solves a real-world customer problem, and thus OnGuard was created.

OnGuard is a concussion warning system that provides instant impact alerting, data tracking, and analysis. This product has tremendous potential to make contact team sports safer while reducing risk of injury to athletes.

The OnGuard team is comprised of MSIM students Trish O’Connor, Barton Liang, Edith Hu & Paget Stanco. According to Trish O’Connor, “We liked our idea and our team worked well together throughout the process. We realized that our learnings from the MSIM program, especially developing the business plan, prepared us well to succeed.”

M.S. in Engineering Management student, Javier Garcia EM ’17 and his teammate (John O’Sullivan), are also finalists for their business, Qipo.

“The current set of tools for organizing people are too disjointed and separate people into silos,” says Javier about why his team created Qipo. “Many existing tools work well within organizations, but fall apart when working with people from outside.”

Qipo solves the “many groups with many apps” problem with a shared messenger, calendar, and to-do list. Their company brings all your groups into one interface and saves time while improving efficiencies. Qipo syncs with the tools working groups are already using, making inter-group collaboration painless.

“We’re both productivity geeks to our core, ambitious individuals focused on optimizing our workflow,” Javier says. “We’re able to achieve this by (1) integrating our data model with all major complementary messengers, calendars, and task managers, and (2) organizing workflow into a global hierarchy, streamlining large-scale collaboration.”

According to Javier, “I’ve been applying the MSEM learnings (e.g. developing business plans, marketing strategy and financial projections) since being in the program, and they have been directly applicable and incredibly helpful when approaching investors, new business partners and building a solid team.”

For further information about the $100K New Ventures Competition and M.S. in Innovation and Management and M.S. in Engineering Management programs, please visit Tufts Gordon Institute. /