Godson Ebenezer Adjovu, with the Aero AI team, helps give a presentation during the President’s Innovation Challenge at UNLV Wednesday, April 6, 2022. Nine student teams competed for $25,000 as they submitted solutions to Southern Nevadas biggest challenges.
Friday, April 8, 2022 | 2 a.m.
A hyperloop public transportation system. An initiative to funnel students from marginalized communities into tech-related fields. A plan to brand Las Vegas as a “medical tourism” destination.
Those were just some of the ideas pitched by UNLV students Wednesday at the Thomas & Mack Center during a “Shark Tank” style contest called the President’s Innovation Challenge.
Following two hours of presentations by nine teams of students — about three dozen in all — judges chose a proposal for growing and displaying microgreens as winner of the top prize of $25,000 in startup money.
The idea is to grow quick-maturing and nutritious vegetable greens in boxes that can be stacked and displayed in restaurants or schools.
The winners were graduate students Shaimaa Abdelhaleem, G Liu and Jonathan Kim and undergrad student Jacob Gross.
“Anytime you get up and present, it’s always nerve-wracking,” Abdelhaleem said. “But you get up on stage and start talking to people, you don’t get as nervous anymore. You have a message you want to send through to people.”
Members of the group said they’ve already been in touch with at least two Las Vegas restaurants that are interested in their concept.
Following their brief presentation, members of the winning team handed out small plates of cultivated greens — broccoli, speckled pea and radish plants — to judges to sample.
“These are basically condensed versions of the foods that we eat every day,” Abdelhaleem said. “We wanted to gauge the market reaction from today to see if this is something that could really sell. It went well. Restaurants are our first customer segment, but we also want to sell to individuals and to schools, where students could learn about sustainability.”
The contest was the culmination of a program that started last year when some 75 students on 16 teams launched a quest to brand the next big idea to help Las Vegas diversify its tourism-reliant economy.
The original plan was to award only the $25,000 top prize. But additional funds were secured for a $15,000 second-place prize a $10,000 third-place award, university officials said.
Second place went to a group with a plan to market environmentally friendly packaging and straws to replace single-use plastic products on the Strip.
The third-place team proposed using drones to map out 3-D “data libraries.”
UNLV President Keith Whitfield said he was impressed by the competition.
“We saw some incredible ideas,” Whitfield said. “You can see how much thinking went into these presentations.”
Other ideas included melting down plastic products to use as clean-burning fuels for cars and a financial platform that would allow people to invest in local businesses.
Andres Rodriguez Lombeida represents one-third of the second-place team that called itself A More Sustainable World. The other two members are his brother, Alejandro Rodriguez Lombeida, and his sister, Anyelina Rodriguez Lombeida.
The siblings are from Spain.
“We think sustainability is something that is really important, and something that is important in Las Vegas,” Andres Rodriguez Lombeida said. “Almost 50 million tourists come to the Strip every year, so we thought we could make a big impact with plastics use on the Strip.”
Judges included former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones Blackhurst, Caesars Entertainment executive Jason Gastwirth, Latin Chamber of Commerce CEO Peter Guzman and Shaunt Sarkissian, CEO of XCo, a tech accelerator with offices in Reno and Las Vegas.
“When you see events like this, you really have hope for the future of our region,” Sarkissian said. “We saw people who were very focused tonight. It was very promising.”
In addition to the prize money, members of the top three teams will also receive scholarship money, ranging from $1,500 to $2,500.
Each team also had mentors from the UNLV faculty or the Las Vegas business community.
