Inventureworks Campus Collaboration Allows Students
to Get Down to Business for Corporate Clients

The best and brightest of UC's business students, along with students from the university's prestigious design programs, have been brainstorming tomorrow's brands as part of a new collaboration between UC and a range of international companies.

In the new collaboration, called inventureworks, clients of Northlich's BrandStorm brand strategy and new product consulting group tap into the creativity of young designers and business students while the students build real-world skills. After a pilot run in summer 2000, the UC students began brainstorming for Procter & Gamble winter quarter 2001. Northlich will offer the program to other Brandstorm clients which include Starkist, Whirlpool and Speedo

"Cincinnati has tremendous resources from a new product and brand development standpoint," said Mark Serrianne, Northlich CEO. "Just as Stanford University created the talent pool that was the genesis of the high tech industry, we believe inventureworks has the potential to bring independent resources together and help transform this region into a global center for new product innovation."

Dale Murray, assistant professor of industrial design, added, "...we have students involved from marketing, accounting, industrial management, information systems, digital design and industrial design. In the future, we'll have students from engineering to fashion design. The students are a door into the future for the clients. Plus, they represent a valuable marketing demographic, a way to find out what young consumers value and how they think."

UC is the perfect incubator to grow new concepts for tomorrow's products, according to Jay Chatterjee, dean, UC's top-ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). First, UC colleges like DAAP and the College of Business Administration (CBA) have long, strong histories of partnerships with industry. Second, UC students garner impressive professional credentials while still undergraduates through the university's prestigious cooperative education program. Through co-op, which was founded at UC in 1906, students work throughout the world in such fields as design, architecture, planning, finance, management, marketing, engineering, English, economics, political science, languages and international affairs.

During winter quarter, the 52 students participating in inventureworks pooled their talents on a project for Procter & Gamble. Because of confidentiality requirements, specifics on their design and marketing ideas cannot be revealed.

"Everyone has ideas and is creative," said Tim Behring, a third-year industrial design student who is teaming with two other industrial design students as well as an industrial management and information systems major. "It's great to have a team effort. It doesn't matter where you came from in terms of major, it's pretty exciting."

Christine Williams, a marketing major, added that differences among the students sparked creativity. "We have so many challenges to solve in this project. It's neat to see how different majors work. The business students tend to have only seen 'end' products in the past. We've not seen the design process before. It's the same for the design students. They're now seeing the marketing process."

Regina Schneider, also a marketing student, perhaps best explained what the students get out of the project: confidence. She said the new collaboration has shown her new parts of herself. "I could never do some of the things the design students do, but I can now say, 'I'm business, and I'm creative,'" she said.

All the business students involved in inventureworks are members of Carl H. Lindner Honors-PLUS program, an innovative undergraduate initiative to educate Cincinnati's best students and then retain them in the Cincinnati area after graduation.

In addition to gathering in a design studio three times a week with Murray and with Marty Plumbo, assistant professor of digital design, the students are also taking business courses together. These courses have been led by James Kellaris, associate professor of marketing, and Martha Ann Welsh, associate professor of management.