Tracie_ReedTracie Reed, a Masters of Architecture student at UMass was awarded one of two second prizes in the UMass Innovation Challenge for “Turf Builder”, a web-based election canvassing tool. This prize carried a financial award of $1,000. Tracie has attended many BCT classes and her faculty sponsor for this competition was Alexander Schreyer, Lecturer in NRC.

Each team in the executive summary competition conceives an innovative product or service based on technology created on campus, then produces a five-page executive summary for its commercialization. All the executive summaries were reviewed by the judges before the competition to help determine the overall scores in the contest. On the night of the competition, each team leader presented a two-minute presentation, or elevator pitch, to the judges, who then grilled the team about its concept.

Judges dished out more than $10,000 in prize money and other incentives Dec. 8 to six clever, timely and promising ventures conceived by students, faculty and alumni as part of the Executive Summary and Elevator Pitch phase of the two-stage $85,000 Innovation Challenge.

The competition had four teams that won $2,000 each and two teams that won $1,000 apiece. There were originally 13 competing teams.

You can find more information on the competition in the UMass News Loop.