Spurred by class project, visual communication design students advance to regional EEC ideaLabs competition

Kent State University visual communication design students
Rachel Volcheck, Allison Frasier and Joshua Bird hold
their winning first-place Idea Olympics check for their venture,
Crazy Capes, a children’s interactive retail experience.

An assignment for Kent State University Visual Communication Design Professor David Middleton’s Packaging, Promotion and Retail Environments class turned into a winning business idea. Crazy Capes, a children’s interactive retail experience created by senior visual communication design majors Allison Frasier, Joshua Bird and Rachel Volcheck, took home the top prize and $1,500 in the 2015 Kent State annual idea competition. All three teammates are members of Middleton’s senior visual communication design class.

Crazy Capes was one of 10 finalist teams to pitch its business venture on March 5 before a panel of five regional entrepreneurs, which included Sharlene Chesnes, CEO of InterChez Technologies; Jim Cossler, CEO of the Youngstown Business Incubator; Karen Hilderbrand, CEO of Creative IP LLC; John Friend, senior vice president, The Fedeli Group; and John Heck, president of Innovative Prototype Design LLC.

“As a designer, I never would have thought that I would enter an entrepreneurial competition, let alone win first prize,” says Frasier. “My teammates and I worked very hard to get to this point, and I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for our business.”

“We are particularly proud to have received applications from a record 23 different majors in this year’s annual Idea Olympics competition,” says Julie Messing, executive director of entrepreneurship initiatives at Kent State’s Blackstone LaunchPad. “The diversity of the students’ ideas provided this year’s competition the strongest pool ever and made it challenging for the judges to determine overall winners.”

Runner-up teams included second-place winner ($1,000), Oleg Lougheed, a junior Russian translation major, for QuickSwitch Cover and third-place winner ($500), Kirsten Warner, a senior fashion design major, for OnePrize Performance. New to this year’s competition was a social enterprise category sponsored by the Business of Good Foundation. Michael George, a sophomore environmental and conservation biology major, took home the $1,000 social enterprise award for GroundUp Compost.

Crazy Capes will represent Kent State at the 2015 ideaLabs competition, a regional competition sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Education Consortium (EEC) whose membership is made up of 11 Northeast Ohio colleges and universities. The 2015 EEC ideaLabs competition will be held at Lorain County Community College on March 31.

For more information about the EEC ideaLabs competition, visit www.immersionweek.org/ideaLabs.htm.

For more information about the Blackstone LaunchPad program at Kent State, visit www.kent.edu/blackstonelaunchpad.