Santa Clara University runs an annual extracurricular competition that promotes a comprehensive Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) by having student teams design, fabricate and sell small scale items for a targeted on-campus client. The winning team typically receives a grand prize in the range of $2,500 - $5,000, and there are often smaller cash prizes for runner-up teams. The products are typically SWAG-like items designed to meet the marketing or commemoration objectives. Examples include:

• A gift item appropriate to give to donors who have donated up to $100K to the SCU $1B capital campaign
• Giveaway items to provide to alumni at an event commemorating the School of Engineering's 100 year anniversary
• Inexpensive booster items to promote SCU Bronco sports teams

The competitions are typically run in 2 phases over an 8-10 week time period (sometimes across academic quarters). In the first round, all teams prepare a pitch for their concept which includes:

• A description of the design (with sketches, diagrams, etc.) to include how it is intended to create value for clients,
• A fabrication plan (50%+ of fabrication must be performed in our maker lab) that describes required materials and manufacturing/assembly processes
• A marketing plan discussing issues such as any validation of client value generation, a pricing strategy description, how the items will be marketed for sale in the bookstore (to include packaging, display, etc.)
• How the teams have coordinated their concepts with needs and requirements of specific competititon stakeholders, to include the product sponsor (such as the donor relations personnel who want a gift item for donors), maker lab staff (to assess manufacturability issues), bookstore staff (since selling requires adhering to their standards for pricing/display/packaging/etc. - these can be significant since our bookstore has become a Barnes & Noble enterprise), and SCU brand representatives (to ensure consistency with the SCU and unit brand, the use of logos/seals/colors, etc.);
• A budget and schedule for fabrication of ~20 units

We typically have had 15+ teams consisting of 60-90 students who are part of the Phase 1 competition. Since we are unable to support that number of teams through a fabrication/sales round, Phase 1 judging downselects the number of teams to 3-5, with those teams advancing ot Phase 2. 

Teams that make the 2nd round fabricate ~20 units and sell them in the campus bookstore (with one retained for the judges to evaluate). Based on their Phase 1 fabrication budget, teams are provided with an expense account to acquire materials and possibly support a limited amount of external fabrication/processing (e.g., in one case, a team fabricated their product but had the items anodized by a local company). The fabrication phase is typically on the order of 3 weeks.

The teams then stage their products for sale in the campus bookstore, with the sales period typically on the order of a week. We note that, given the ease of a team simply buying all of their own stock, the actual number of units sold is less of interest than the quality of the marketing/sales campaign and the professionalism shown in packaging/display/pricing.

The Phase 2 deliverable includes a final version of a design description, fabrication report, and marketing/sales report. It also includes a real quote for the team to provide their product in a quantity of hundreds. This quote is "real" in the sense that the primary product stakeholder/sponsor may exercise the quote in order to get a large number of items for actual use in the event/program that is the inspiration for the product. This requires a fairly realistic and refined costing estimate given that the teams may be held to meeting on order based on this estimate.

Phase 2 judging is based on the quality of the various components of the Phase 2 submission package. Based on the evaluation criteria, the teams are ranked by the panel of judges. We typically announce competition winners as the featured part of an event associated with our innovation and entrepreneurship program. The winners and runner-ups are acknowledged and awarded "big checks" for display, with actual award money awarded in any of a variety of ways (often as a function of tedious university financial guidelines based on if the student is an intern, a scholarship holder, etc.; funds may be provided via a check, possibly with tax withholding, as a gift card, etc.).

Independent of the offical competition judging for ranking the winners, the primary competition stakeholder may decide to exercise one or more of the production bids. They are not required to do so if none of the entries will provide true cost-effective value for their program. Furthermore, they are not required to select the competition winner, who may have done the best from the point of view of a comprehensive array of criteria but whose product is less compelling than another teams. Finally, it is possible for multiple teams to be offered a contract to produce their items. 

Examples of the actual products that have been developed as part of this competition include (an attached document provides more information and photos of several examples):

• A set of 4 coasters that fit together as puzzle pieces and which individually had images of historical events in the 100 years of the SCU School of Engineering's history [this was for the competition for items to commemorate the School's 100th year anniversary]
• An aluminum annodized ruler with standard and metric units, with SCU branding elements etched into the ruler;
• A balsa glider kit, laser cut and engraved with SCU branding elements and callouts to the "Montgomery Glider" [the Montgomer Glider was the first plane capable of sustained and controlled flight, designed and flown by SCU professor John Montgomery several years before the Wright brothers first sustained powered flight]

Overall, this competition has become one of the extracurricular 'main events' at Santa Clara University. It started as a KEEN-oriented activity wtih a focus on undergraduate engineers. However, it has evolved, with the 2023 competition being conducted with students across the university at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Participation in the program has also been approved as a significant extracurricular activity that can be used to help fulfill requirements for SCU's minor in technical innovation and entrepreneurial thinking.

The 2023 competition announcement is provided as an attachment to provide details on how the program is currently run. It includes many details regarding logistics, schedule, process, evaluation criteria, the use of IP, etc.  As an example of implementation, for the 2023 competition:

• The budget was roughly $7.5K (not including personnel time), approximately consisting of $6,500 prize money, $1,000 prototyping budget for Phase 2 teams; we note that the first year we did this, our budget was less than $2,500 and the grand prize with $1,000;
• The competition was run over a period of ~10 weeks, spanning our Winter and Spring quarters, with the Phase 1 deliverables due at the end of the Winter quarter and the Phase 2 teams starting fabrication at the start of our Spring quarter;
• In terms of participation, there were 17 teams with 67 participating students. The student profile consists of: 54% male/46% female; 12.5% graduate / 87.5% undergraduate students; 61% engineering / 21% business / 7.5% sciences / 7.5% humanities / 3% education students;

Broad objectives of this competition - which we believe we meet in a distinctive and compelling manner - include the following:

• Provide a fun, compelling, distinctive, competitive,and interdisciplinary opportunity for exercising an EM;
• Provide a simple but comprehensive, end-to-end opportunity to participate in a full product development cycle, from understanding customer needs, to design/engineering, to fabrication, to marketing and sales;
• Provide a design opportunity in which students gain first hand experience in how their designs translate to production in the tens (and possibly hundreds), to the needs of stakeholders that will competitively select and fund top teams, and to the ability to provide value to the ultimate customers/recipients of the products;
• Tie the design process to real customers, with real sales, and with the potential for exercising a competitively bid option for scaled production;
• Create cost-effectively developed items that provide value to real customers/recipients of the products

Feedback received regarding this activity include:

• From student participants:
  • Participants routinely express enthusiasm about the real world and comprehensive nature of this competition;
  • Many students point to this activity as being the event that attracted them to further involvement in SCU's innovation and entrepreneurship program, to include KEEN and other opportunities;
• From design/product stakeholders:
  • The primary sponsor has been pleased enough with results that they have exercised the full scale production option for the top team every time the competition has been run; in one year, the top two teams were engaged for full scale production.
  • Value for the sponsor comes in a number of forms. First, there is an item of some sort that hold value in terms of its function and/or its realization of an SCU and program-specific objective. Second, there has also been great value in having these items be student-developed.  Third, the fact that our own maker lab has been instrumental in prototyping and in many cases full scale fabrication has proven valuable (for example, for the 2023 competition, the donor campaign included fundraising for the new SCU STEM building for which the maker lab is a primary architectural feature).
• From product recipients, alumni, and external observers:
  
  • Many of the top entries are lauded for their creative and distinctive nature (such as the set of coasters previously described) and as being kept and used for years (such as the ruler previously described);
    
  • We often receive comments from graduates and others to the effect of "I wish I would have been able to participate in an activity like this when I was a student!"
  • We have had industry partners state that the competition is an impressive event given that it requires students to immerse themselves with the needs of a real customer, a complete development lifecycle, and a broad set of design/engineering/business skills.
  • One local (international) company, upon hearing about the 2023 competition, offered to initially support the award event at the level of ~$1,000, but then offered to contribute $5,000; given that level of support, we are alternatively discussing with them the sponsorship for a 2023-24 competition that would feature some aspect of their technology / product portfolio.