The S.E.E.D. competition puts top collegiate business plans in front of a world-class panel of evaluators, early-stage investors, and product development specialists for two days to help transition start-up venture propositions from class projects into viable businesses.
Out of 46 original entrants, nine semifinalist teams were invited to
Team members Nick Rapagnani, a business law senior from Great Falls, Mo., Ahmad Bayomy, a bioengineering senior from Moscow, Idaho, and Sepideh Zolfaghari, also a bioengineering senior from Tacoma, Wash., created their product called “The Perspective,” a manual, height-adjusting wheelchair, to fill a need in the mobility assistive equipment field of durable medical equipment. The height-adjustment feature would offer both physiological and psychological benefits to people in wheelchairs, giving them greater reach, reducing neck stress, and enabling them to converse with others at eye level. They created their company name BERZ from the first initials of their last names.
The team began work on their business plan in their Entrepreneurship 496/Bioengineering 410-411 class. The new two-semester course is taught by Jerman Rose, director of the WSU Center for Entrepreneurial Studies in the College of Business, Denny Davis, bioengineering professor and director of the Engineering Education Research Center, and Marie Mayes, director of the WSU Innovation Assessment Center.
Mayes traveled with the team to
Allied Polymers from
BERZ’s next step is to attract money to build a prototype and finalize the chair’s mechanized seat. The team continues to network with potential investors and hopes to incorporate their business soon.
