C C A N N U A L R E P O R T

Programming Appeals to Students of All Backgrounds

olorado College, long recognized for the uniqueness of its Block Plan and named the nation’s third most entrepreneurial college in 2015 by Forbes, takes an intentional approach to innovation. Housed in the Morreale Carriage House, innovation programming at Colorado College comprises students, faculty, and staff and involves the broader community, including University of Colorado-Colorado Springs, the U.S. Air Force Academy, Pikes Peak Community College, Pikes Peak Makerspace, and the Cultural Office of the Pikes Peak Region.

An anchor gift of $8.5 million in 2015 from an anonymous CC graduate, with $6 million slated for construction of a building and $2.5 million for a chaired professorship in innovation and programming support, gave Innovation at CC an initial boost. The college is seeking another $8 million for a future purpose-built facility on

campus, which is envisioned as having a product realization laboratory, a recording studio, an idea space, and a food ecology laboratory.

“The innovation program helps students from any academic background translate what they have learned in the classroom into ideas for impact. It’s going to be an exciting year of program-building and student engagement as we explore opportunities for social engagement, social start-ups, art and cultural innovation, and incubation,” says Emily Chan, associate dean of Academic Programs and Strategic Initiatives and associate professor of psychology.

Dez Stone Menendez ’02 began her role as director of CC’s innovation program in September. Prior, she founded the Possibility Room, which began as a startup incubator in Seattle.

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2015–16

“I am honored to be in this position and I see it as an opportunity to create a container for young people to take risks and experiment with their ideas,” says Menendez.

More than 200 students participated in innovation-oriented events, mentoring, and classes in 2015-16. They sought advice from experience-rich innovators-in-residence, connected with start-up leaders at Innovation Thursdays and Innovative Minds events, and filled the Dynamic Half-Block Startup Crash Course and EV120 Topics in Environmental Science course on drones, remote sensing, and startup innovations.

Since its inception in 2013, the program’s annual Big Idea pitch competition has awarded a total of $200,000 to 16 teams. Altogether, 50

teams have vied for $50,000 in seed funding by presenting their ideas to a panel of judges during a popular public event. Fine-tuning their ideas and honing their pitch provides students with valuable experience, whether or not they make the cut for the Big Idea event.

In 2016, three teams split the Big Idea prize: King of the Sea, to grow a market for consumption of lionfish, exotic seafood that has negatively impacted oceanic ecosystems; Neonic, for developing an interactive way in which each concert-goers’ smartphone taken together creates a unique crowd-sized canvas of art and allows attendees to become part of the performance; and Spindle, for creating a sleep mask to improve memory retention and enhance brain function.

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Dez Stone Menendez ’02 is director of CC’s innovation program.

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uring Neonic’s Big Idea pitch, Nick Ravich ’19 showed photographs of a huge crowd in an extravaganza of lights and smoke.

“This is crazy. This doesn’t help you listen to music; it’s just total stimulus overload but it’s absolutely what people expect now,” said Ravich, who handles business operations.

The Neonic plan to turn the audience’s smartphones into pixels to paint a lightshow of ripples, waves, and psychedelic colors harks back to Woodstock when the audience used cigarette lighters to encourage a singer onstage.

“The Neonic brand is about taking what people loved at Woodstock and putting it into every concert in the 21st century,” Cormac Siegfried ’19, founder and CEO, said during the pitch.

Rounding out the Neonic team are Sam Miller, founder/COO/CFO; Greg Williamson ’19, designer and filmmaker; Noelle Edwards ’19, social creator; and Mishig Davaadorj ’19 and Malcolm Gabbard ’19, coders. Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Pennsylvania State University and led engine analyst teams at Honda before co-founding Neonic.

“It was recently proven that the attention span of a Millennial is now no joke shorter than that

of a goldfish,” said Ravich in the pitch.They described their platform as “as easy to use as a right swipe,” perfect they say for the attention span of “goldfishy Millennials.” They could have focused their pitch on technology and financials, but Patrick Bultema, former executive director of Innovation at CC and current student mentor for the Big Idea, had a better suggestion for impressing Big Idea judges.

“Patrick said, ‘you’re an energetic company, pitch your energy.’ That freed us,” Siegfried says.

“I’ve tried to strike a balance of being encouraging and supportive but at the same time giving direct and candid feedback,” Bultema says. “It wasn’t just about getting the pitch to fit better; it was getting the way they were thinking to go from cerebral and analytical to the ethos of the audience they were seeking to reach. Unless the customers really love it, all of that other stuff doesn’t matter.”

Sounding more like startup entrepreneurs than college students, the Neonic team describes their platform development as one that could revolutionize the concert and festival-going experience and turn merchandising and ticketing on its head.

“We believe the way the concert/festival industry is currently run, there’s a huge disconnect between the artist and the consumer. We hope

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Nick Ravich ’19 pitches Neonic’s idea.

2015–16

to take away every step that is now in between the artist and the audience member,” says Siegfried. “The light show is the most visceral, visual representation of that ethos. The venue would know attendees have a ticket through our technology. Concession stand transactions would happen automatically and with security. It can do peer-to-peer deliveries and localized notifications to increase audience members’ interaction and to help EMTs find them in case of emergency.”

They are refining the technology to connect the virtual world seamlessly with the actual physical concert and festival experience. When speaking about their work, the enthusiastic young entrepreneurs mirror the upbeat tenor of electronic dance music concerts, albeit with a methodical bent.

“We’re working on our beta right now. We’ve collected over a million data points doing tests on our algorithm,” says Siegfried.

Their target market for entry is an audience base of 18- to 24-year-olds who buy 147 million electronic dance music tickets annually to the tune of $20 billion worldwide. The Neonic students say they’re taking it a step at a time, starting by organizing their own small events, then by actively seeking investors.

“It will be a process that takes five to six years to start to really challenge and throw rocks at the concert/festival industry giants,” says Siegfried.

Neonic is made up of, front, from left: Nick Ravich ’19, Cormac Siegfried ’19, Noelle Edwards ’19, Mishig Davaadorj ’19; and back, from left: Sam Miller and Malcolm Gabbard ’19.