David Talarico along with MBA students wins DOE's Clean Tech Competition

Professor Mitch Denda doctoral student David Talarico, along with Rutgers MBA students Ryan Annibali and Antoni Milewski, won the DoE-sponsored LaunchR pitch competition's grand prize of $50,000 in seed money for thier company based on a new wind power technology. Amongst the seven finalists were teams from Princeton, The University of Delaware, and NJIT. In addition to the seed money, they have been given a chance to compete on the national stage at the Department of Energy 's CleanTech Pitch Competition in Colorado this June. This team was formed though a new Rutgers entrepreneurial course sequence, “Collaboration for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (CTEC),” comprised of Ph.D. students from School of Engineering (SOE) and MBA students from Rutgers Business School (RBS). The courses help the students to acquire the requisite skills to build a new venture by adapting a teaching method called “The TEC Algorithm” that targets developing methods to cross the so called ‘Valley of Death’ separating scientific discovery from commercial value creation. SOE students can register for CTEC 1 (Discovery to Business Model) and CTEC 2 (Business Model to Venture) under the Advanced Mechanical Engineering Topics (16:650:606) course listings.