Union Students Win $1500 Prize for Bark Tank Project

On Friday, Oct. 2, nine teams competed between two tracks in Union University’s first ever Bark Tank event in the Ethos Forum, with Project: K-9 Canteen, presented by Cooper Baily, Bobby Perry, Lane Pyron and Cody Tjomsland, and Project: Mobile Conversation, presented by Joshua Santhosh, winning first place in their tracks and a $1500 and $1000 prize, respectively. 

“We created a water backpack for your dog, so you don’t have to reach into your own bag, if you’re hiking with your dog,” Tjomsland said. “Our main pitch was marketing to pet owners because there’s a huge pet business in the United States, and Yukon Outfitters hasn’t really taken advantage of that, so this was something new that we could pitch to them.”

Tjomsland noted that the team had to work on this project all the way up to the morning of the competition, but he also explained that their team worked well together, leading to a great experience.

“[It] turned out to be a really fun project, and we also won, which was just an added bonus,” Tjomsland said.

Bark Tank was the culmination of a week-long workshop series called Innovation Week, where students competed in either the Yukon Outfitters Innovation Challenge track or the Bring Your Own Idea track. While this event was open to students of all disciplines, the majority of participants were either business or engineering majors. Students worked under the leadership of engineering professor Georg Pingen who played a major role in the organizing the logistics of this event, his wife, Betsy Pingen, April Rowsey, Yukon Outfitters Founder and Managing Director Adam Scherer, and Union’s current Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Sarah McCracken. 

“April Rowsey reached out to me as she started thinking about doing some design thinking work, and it just blossomed into Innovation Week,” McCracken said.

Throughout the week students identified problems and worked through engineering solutions to meet such needs during the design thinking cohort workshop series. They also analyzed the cost associated with their designs, as well as created a slideshow, poster, and prototypes to display their inventions to the judges. On Thursday night, students were invited to participate in a Leadership and Innovation Dinner with McCracken, university leaders, faculty, entrepreneurs, industry partners, and community leaders. 

“Whether you ever want to be an entrepreneur or you’re working inside a large organization, you always have an idea that maybe you want to bring forward,” McCracken said. “Now they have the ability to go, ‘Oh, I totally have this tool, and I can think through things in a different way.'”

Journalism professor Ted Kluck served as the emcee for this event. Other projects presented included Project: MagNetGuard, Project: Solving Self-Service, and Project: Tether Pod.