Xavier University professor Mike Halloran wants students in his entrepreneurship program to look for big problems.
Problems that need fixing. Problems with solutions that generate excitement from consumers – and even before that, big funding from venture firms and outside investors.
A pair of XU seniors seem to be on the right path and recently earned a big nod from the Big East Conference for their big-picture idea: An "ADT-like" early warning system that could help solve the wildfire problem in California.
Environmental Solution Technologies, led by seniors Tucker O'Neill, a Stoneham, Mass., native, and Beck Apple, originally from Oak Creek, Wis., placed second in the Big East Startup Pitch Competition held Feb. 25, a Shark Tank-like event that featured 11 projects from the 11 universities that make up the Big East athletic conference.
Halloran, teaching professor of management and entrepreneurship, said the company’s tech works a lot like ADT, or an early alert monitoring system. The No. 1 cause of forest fires is lightning strikes, but emergency crews don’t always know where and when those strikes occur until the fire is already burning.
Environmental Solution Technologies is building an industrial IoT, or Internet of Things, system, using complex sensors placed every square mile, supplemented by high-resolution camera footage via drones. The sensors, Halloran said, could track lightening strikes, smoke and heat. Data shows the system could reduce response time by two-thirds.
"The idea is to reduce damage," Halloran told me.
And the problem is massive. In California alone, wildfires caused an estimated $17 billion in damages in 2019. But it's also not an issue isolated to the Golden State. In 2020, 58,250 wildfires burned 10.3 million acres in the U.S., the most acreage impacted in a year, per the Congressional Research Service. California accounted for 40% of that amount. Halfway around the world, fires in Australia devoured more than 20 percent of that country's entire forest cover last year, according to Nature Climate Change.
“Our company is innovating to solve the largest and fastest-growing threat that the climate crisis presents to the human race,” Apple said in a release.
The second-place finish, the second year a Xavier team placed in the competition, was coupled with a small cash prize. Xavier won during the Big East pitch's inaugural year in 2019 with transFarm, a solution for tracing the source of tainted meat products using blockchain technology.
The 2020 event was canceled due to the pandemic.
This year's winner included a team from Providence College, led by students Owen Delaney and Faith Linscott, for a project called UMeal, a Blue Apron-like alternative that can be assembled from ingredients found in a college dining hall.
Halloran said the Big East honor makes for a good stepping-stone for Environmental Solution Technologies to a larger, full-blown accelerator, likely outside Greater Cincinnati, given its target market.
"It’s about making a dent. These guys are working on making a really big one," he said.
