Pitching solutions: UTC’s Inventanooga 2024 encourages innovation across all ages

STEM School Chattanooga students Neal Khera, left, Maliki Lee and Josh Bun take a selfie with Inventanooga Program Director Kyle Carrasco and Dr. Subin Im after their team won the Inventanooga 2024 executive pitch competition. Photo by Angela Foster.

On Dec. 12, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga hosted its third annual Inventanooga competition—where K-12 students could pitch solutions to real-life problems like runoff water pollution and damage, efficient grocery packaging and rampant cheating at local pickleball courts.

An eighth-grade team from Ocoee Middle School made up of Jackson Kahn, Will Seaborn and Graham Hines didn’t have to look far for an issue that affected them.

The three tennis players at OMS decided to focus on making the game of pickleball more fairly officiated by using cameras to assist if the ball landed in or out of the court boundary.

“We thought for a while and thought of something we can relate to; we enjoy and love playing tennis and pickleball,” Kahn said. “We thought of this product to help and make sure there’s no more cheating.”

Michael DelBonis, a business marketing teacher at OMS, discussed the benefits of his students pitching these ideas in the UTC environment.

“They’ll see the merit of doing something like this and it allows them to speak in front of people and actually talk about what they’ve invented,” DelBonis said. “With the ideas they came up with and hearing people say, ‘That’s actually a cool idea,’ makes them feel good.”

These pitches are at the core of what UTC strives to accomplish by empowering future entrepreneurs to develop their passion.

Dr. Subin Im, the George Lester Nation Professor of Marketing in UTC’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business, has been a key part of Inventanooga as one of the event directors.

Im highlighted the participation of Thrasher Elementary because this was the first year elementary school students could participate in the competition.

“We would like to cultivate a creative and entrepreneurial culture in Chattanooga, Hamilton County and the state of Tennessee,” Im said. “Having a creative and entrepreneurial mindset and skill set at an early age really helps young kids become drivers of innovation in our society.”

Kyle Carrasco, program director of Inventanooga and a teacher at STEM School Chattanooga, said there were over 100 submissions this year.

“As we’ve opened it up to the public and we’ve received more and more pitches,” Carrasco said, “the quality has only risen. It continues to amaze me the amount of dedication and ingenuity that goes into some of these ideas. I’m consistently surprised by what we get submitted to or the submissions that we receive.

“When I first started this, we were very small—localized just with the STEM school—and it was just a competition that we held in-house. The second year, we partnered with the College of Business and Dr. Subin Im, and from there, it’s just kind of ballooned.”

Ocoee Middle School students Jackson Kahn, left, Will Seahorn and Graham Hines presented a pickleball solution to assist with boundary calls.

Inventanooga 2024 was a collaboration between STEM School Chattanooga, the Rollins College of Business, UTC’s College of Engineering and Computer Science, Hamilton County Schools, the Global Center for Digital Innovation and Transcard. The events allowed attendees the opportunity to vote on the winners of the competitions through QR codes.

The competition had three categories: elevator pitch, designer pitch and executive pitch.

The winners of the executive pitch were given scholarships to the Rollins College of Business or the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

The winner of the executive pitch was Nexus Corporation—a team made up of Neal Khera, Maliki Lee and Josh Bun—three seniors from STEM School Chattanooga.

The group pitched a concept to make the roads safer with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

“We had an idea to create safer driving by restricting distracted drivers. We tried to utilize the newest technology in eye tracking and AI so that we could send the AI hundreds of photos of a person. Whenever it detected a strain and vision or fatigue of vision, it would alert a driver,” Khera said.

“We noticed that we personally have newer cars but some of our fellow students don’t have newer cars and the technology in them,” Bun added. “We decided how to create a way to put this technology in older cars.”

The students were excited about the potential of continuing their education close to home.

“It means a lot considering that this scholarship is for business and going into this semester, our big idea was to turn this small idea into a big business,” Lee said. “It was also really surprising to hear that it’s also for engineering as we come from the STEM School of Chattanooga. Those are the kinds of fields that we want to go into.

“Hearing that gave us that kind of, ‘OK, we have a home to go to if we want to.’ I was really touched by that.”

Jim David, principal of STEM School Chattanooga, discussed what these opportunities mean to students.

“This is a culmination of events of letting kids actually empathize with real problems, ideate some real solutions, come up with a business pitch and really solve real-world problems,” David said. “Tackle what is both important to students and what’s important to society as a whole.

“It’s those 21st-century skills that we’ve been talking about that we want kids leaving elementary, leaving middle school, leaving high school with. This is an opportunity for them to gain all of those skills while also working with the real industry, getting to work with the local UTC campus here, their professors and getting to see a college campus.”

Dr. Thomas Lyons, Clarence E. Harris Chair of Excellence in Entrepreneurship at UTC and a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship, echoed Im’s desire for growth.

“It’s safe to say that everybody who’s involved with this from Hamilton County Schools and everybody from UTC all envisions this continuing to grow,” Lyons said.

Lyons added that these are the same teaching tools he uses in college courses.

“I use pitching in my classes,” he said. “In fact, I don’t give a final exam. I do final pitches. I see that as kind of a capstone activity. You learn about recognizing problems and thinking about solutions to problems. You learn about communicating your solution to somebody else in a very clear and concise way.”