The Y-Prize Competition kicked off this week with a well-attended event held in Steinberg-Dietrich Hall. Now in its thirteenth year, the Y-Prize challenges students to hone their entrepreneurial skills by creating business plans using cutting-edge technology developed at Penn Engineering. The team that comes up with the most promising commercial application wins $10,000 to bring their idea to life.
During the kickoff event, Penn Engineering professors Mark Yim and Cynthia Sung introduced the technologies that will be featured in this year’s competition. Sebastian Jaramillo and Terry Bray, from co-sponsors Venture Lab and the Penn Center for Innovation, offered insights on the resources available to participating students. Finally, representatives from last year’s winning team LilyLoop, a group of all first-year students who proposed a line of “smart” period products that can be used to diagnose menstrual disorders, shared their experience with the competition and navigating Penn’s startup ecosystem.
This year’s featured technologies are a snakelike robotic arm that is both highly precise and adaptable, and a magnetically-controlled origami material that folds, unfolds, and reconfigures on-demand. The technologies were developed in Prof. Yim’s ModLab and Prof. Sung’s Sung Lab, respectively.
If you’re interested in participating in this year’s competition, it’s not too late to get involved! Check out the website for more information, and use this collaborative document to find teammates.