The University of Pittsburgh will soon have a central home for all of its entrepreneurship activity on campus.
Trustee Bob Randall announced Thursday afternoon that the university will soon open the “Big Idea Center,” a physical incubation space and hub for mentorship. The Randall family is donating $2 million in seed funding toward the effort.
“We now have an address, we have a home,” he said to a few laughs from the crowd at the Charity Randall Theatre in Oakland during the university’s Randall Family Big Idea Competition.
The space will mean campus events like Startup Blitz and Startup Weekend will have a landing space, as will the university’s accelerator — the Blast Furnace, which will also be revamped this summer.
The announcement came amid the Randall Family Big Idea Competition, now in its 10th year. The contest awards $100,000 in total cash prizes to interdisciplinary student teams with the best one-minute pitches. The top prize is $25,000. It’s sponsored by the university’s 4-year-old Innovation Institute.
Four Growers, a startup building a tomato harvesting robot, took the top prize of $25,000.
The contest has churned out some of Pitt’s most noteworthy startup successes, including South Side-based retail software firm Powered Analytics, which Target acquired for an undisclosed figure in 2014; Harmar Township-based Interphase Materials, an engineering firm that won a U.S. Department of Energy grant earlier this month to improve the efficiency of Longview Power, a coal-fired power plant in West Virginia.
Mr. Randall — formerly CEO of Three Rivers Aluminum Co., a door and window company acquired by Alcoa in 2010, which is now a division of Arconic’s Kawneer division -— created the program to support the creation of innovative, small businesses on campus.
This year, 105 teams competed, with 55 percent being undergrad and a nearly 50/50 gender split. Forty went on to the final competition, selected by judges with that have no affiliation with the school.
Runner-up $15,000 finalists included Wheel Fit, a “fitbit for manual wheelchair users” that helps keep those constrained to a wheelchair active to prevent injury associated with improper use; Re-Vision, a company focused preserving and restoring vision after occular injury by accounting for not just structural repairs to the eye, but also neuronal fixes; and OccuDerm, a gel eye bandage for first responders to use on patients in hopes of preventing vision loss.
The city’s vital signs are healthy when it comes to the pipeline of young entrepreneurs.
Between Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University, the region has saw a 10-year high in spinout companies in 2017, according to the most recent investment report from North Side-based Innovation Works.
The report does not break down the numbers by specific school, but 186 patents were issued to all three institutions, in concert, along with 360 licenses, options or other agreements.
Pitt’s student entrepreneurial scene tends to be left in the dust, with Carnegie Mellon University spinouts and spinoffs eating up a large portion of local investment. Its Project Olympus incubator hosts a student pitching competition at the end of the school year, which often becomes a hotbed for investors to find new startups, though its not intended for that purpose.
Chancellor Patrick Gallagher said the new Big Idea Center is a way for Pitt’s entrepreneurs to get on the map.
“If you think about the experience of being an entrepreneur, there’s almost nothing like it,” he said. “It’s not really about the big idea, its about the big thing you can do with an idea.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
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First Published: March 29, 2018, 10:21 p.m.
