
Concluding a semester-long program designed to bring University of Cincinnati students together to work on a product or business
idea, new app, Motiv wins the final pitch competition. The Motiv team competed in a pitch competition against 17 other teams. The team came out victorious, winning first place overall and earning a total of over $4,000 for competing and participating.

Hosted by the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, in conjunction with the Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation Challenge was originally designed to encourage engineering students to get involved with entrepreneurship. Packed with incentitives, such as scholarships and free prototyping materials, the semester-long program saw a record amount of participants this past semester (Fall 2023). The program allows students to network with interdisciplinary students and come up with new products to solve any problem. It then walks teams through the process of prototyping and how to pitch their new product effectively, teaching them entrepreneurial concepts such as TAM SAM SOM and market research. At the end of the program, teams' pitches are judged by faculty and members of the Cincinnati startup ecosystem in a final pitch competition.
The Motiv team originated from Innovation Challenge. The team first came together a few weeks into the program. Upon their first meeting, it was clear the team had a collective motivation like no other, and was determined to come up with an effective, market-changing product. Bridging the gap between computer engineering, finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship, the team could be classified as the dream team when it came to interdisciplinarian skills. The team saw this first and foremost as a learning and growing experience, individually challenging themselves to hone in on their current skills and develop new ones for the sake of the team's vision.
Jaden Walton, CEO, originally came up with the idea for Motiv, sighting his past experiences in the school sports industry and how there was a major lack of a centralized communication system for sports teams. The team quickly began production, launching market research and app development simultaneously.
The tech team spent countless hours on Swift, an open-source, general-purpose programming language for Apple development, which up until this point, the team had never worked with before. They also explored several databases before settling with new Tembo, the Postgres developer platform for building every data service. Ultimately, by the final pitch competition, the Motiv team was able to showcase a functioning app for the judges to view in matter of only two months. Concurrently, the marketing team was surveying consumers, consisting of parents, coaches, and athletes alike, with the intention of proving that the problem was definite and a solution was much needed.
Through Innovation Challenge, the Motiv team was able to gain access to a Macbook Air and purchase a Mac Mini so that app development could continue following the end of the semester.
The team plans to participate in the program again next semester, in order to continue accelerated growth.
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