Electronic Tongue to Revolutionize Industrial Processes MBAs Win Texas MOOT CORPÆ Competition with Plan to Market UT Chemistry Department Technology
An MBA student team won the Texas MOOT CORPÆ Competition, earning a free year in the Austin Technology Incubator, a spot in the prestigious International MOOT CORPÆ Competition this coming spring, and $2,000. Kent Bradshaw, Richard Burgess, Paul Kunko, and Jason Levin intend to grow their technology development company, Vusion, in the Austin area.
Vusion will introduce to the pharmaceutical industry a sensor chip capable of remitting real-time data to control the quality of a liquid process. Solutions mixed in a processing plant will flow over this "electronic tongue," relating the exact chemical makeup at any given time to a central computer, which in turn controls the chemical process. The electronic tongue was developed by a team of researchers in UT's Chemistry and Engineering Schools, including chemists John McDevitt, Eric Anslyn, Jason Shear, and electrical engineer Dean Neikirk.
The technology is projected to save millions of dollars as it becomes an integral part of industrial process quality control systems. Once established in the pharmaceutical industry, Vusion plans to expand and apply the product to the clinical diagnostic market, developing equipment that will help physicians diagnose patients at the bedside. "By saving time at the point of care," says Levin, Vusion's team leader, "it will save lives. That's the whole point of commercializing this technology."
By the spring, the team hopes to have secured Vusion's first round of seed capital and finish a second-generation prototype of the electronic tongue, which they will present in the International MOOT CORPÆ Competition in May. They will also have signed a license agreement with UT that will allow them to go forward with their plans for the product. "All the balls are in the air at the same time," says Levin.
What did it take to put together a winning business proposition? Levin says he came to the UT Business School with the intention of locating an emerging technology with compelling applications, competing in the MOOT CORPÆ Competition, and launching a business. His team members, on the other hand, had not been so focused, but they each had very specific and complimentary skill sets, and Levin was able to convince them all to join him in the endeavor. "Part of the process was studying a lot of plans put together by currently successful businesses and then modeling ours after them," says Bradshaw, Vusion's director of finance. "Through the MOOT CORPÆ class, students study videotapes of past winners, so you learn from their mistakes, and all the teams learn how to make their presentations to the judges better each year."
"I'm especially excited about this team," says Gary Cadenhead, Director of the MOOT CORPÆ Business Plan Competition at UT-Austin, "because it's a team of MBAs commercializing a technology developed by UT scientists. It will bring prestige to The University." Cadenhead says the competitions, which are now expanding to all areas of the globe, are improving the quality of entrepreneurship education worldwide.
The entrepreneurial concentration in the MBA program at the Graduate School of Business at UT Austin links theory with practice. The curriculum combines an integrated set of multidisciplinary courses with hands-on projects, access to the Austin Technology Incubator, ties to other academic and business organizations involved in entrepreneurship education, and the opportunity to participate in the world-renown MOOT CORPÆ Competition, which draws contestants from top Universities around the world. UT Austin is ranked among the top 25 Best Business Schools for Entrepreneurs by Success magazine.
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Jason Levin, [email protected], 512-454-4998 Gary Cadenhead, 512-471-5289
or Pam Losefsky, [email protected]
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