New EPICS Idea to Product™ Competition at Purdue

March 28, 2004

The first EPICS I2P™ Competition took place March 26-27 following the Purdue Entrepreneurial Symposium. The EPICS program is a large multidisciplinary and engineering design program. Each team works closely with a project partner in the community to define, design, build, test and deploy systems that provide their partner with new capabilities to serve the community. Since EPICS started in the Fall of 1995 with 5 teams, more than 140 products have been delivered to the community. The range of real-world products that EPICS has developed includes an artificial wetland that removes agriculture-related chemicals from streams, a remote control and associated mechanism to unlock/lock and open/close school lockers for students who lack fine motor skills, and kiosks with custom software that enable users to quickly determine how to obtain the social services that they need.

Many of these products clearly have the potential to be developed into commercial products. Verification of this fact is provided by a first-place finish in 1997 and a fourth-place finish in 2000 of two EPICS projects that entered the Burton Morgan Entrepreneurial Competition here at Purdue. In recognition of this potential to commercialize EPICS products, and in an effort to create an environment in which EPICS students can learn about entrepreneurship and even become entrepreneurs, we have launched the EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative. The funds to launch the Initiative have come from the Lilly endowment grant for Discovery Park. The initiative is part of, works closely with, and will be housed with other entrepreneurship programs in the Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship.

More information on the EPICS Entrepreneurship Initiative.

 

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