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March 21, 2012
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Five Finalists Compete for Million Dollar Open Innovation
Challenge at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business
In association with MIT's Smart Customization Group and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, Zazzle created the Million Dollar Open Innovation Challenge to encourage entrepreneurial manufacturers to embrace the growing consumer trend of real-time personalized manufacturing and mass customization. The winner will be announced:
Thursday, March 22, 2012
University of California, Berkeley
Haas School of Business, Wells Fargo Room
See the complete agenda: http://corporateinnovation.berkeley.edu/zazzle.html#agenda
The Finalists are:
- Republic Bike – Allows customers to pick, choose, swap and decide on designs for their bikes shaking up a familiar aesthetic and expectations of what a bike should look like.
- Selve – Modernizes the luxury, made-to-measure European footwear experience, while adhering to old world manufacturing techniques and utilizing only the highest quality materials.
- YouBar – Enables anyone to fully customize nutrition bars; including ingredients, portion sizes and packaging, addressing multiple needs and profiles.
- DODOcase – Creates an extended line of iPad and Kindle cases and accessories to protect, preserve and honor beauty, art, craft and purpose, while helping to build local communities by supporting artisan manufacturing.
- Designscape – Offers beautiful, unique, affordable and customizable accessories, products and home goods through sustainable materials, while applying a modern design sensibility.
Each of the five finalists’ business models will be refined for final evaluation and presentation to a panel of expert Judges, including Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, Jeff Beaver, co-founder of Zazzle, Professor Frank Pillar of MIT’s Smart Customization Group, Henry Chesbrough, faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, Professor Solomon Darwin, associate director of the Institute for Business Innovation at Berkeley-Haas, and Elizabeth Litten Miller, head of creative, global licensing and publishing at Hasbro.
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