Entrepreneurial success

Students at Trinity College’s Summit Innovation Challenge in January presented new inventions designed as part of a fellowship that gets them thinking critically and creatively about solving real-world problems.

Students taking part in the Tyree Innovation Fellowship—a two-year experience that builds innovative and entrepreneurial mindsets—meet weekly to identify problems that they would like to solve. They then iterate through prototypes to a final pitch presentation in front of a live audience and judges in a Shark Tank-style finale.

Nate Park ’27 created the challenge’s winning invention, Savor Sensor, a small device that detects allergens in food using a spectrometer. The runner-up was the Serenity app, presented by Abdulmohaymen Ghanaem ’27, Joshua Manswell ’27, and Raphael Ralston ’27; it aims to help informal caregivers provide healthy, nutritious meals for their loved ones.

Trinity students also presented six “ready for market” products. The winner in this portion of the competition was Alexander Cacciato ’25, whose Flippit is an early-stage start-up that uses mobile technologies to allow air travelers to send prohibited items to themselves quickly and securely rather than surrender them at security checkpoints. The runner-up was Nathan Sykes ’25, with The People Company, which embeds offshore talent in domestic sales teams to shoulder a company’s administrative burden.

Launched in September 2022, the College’s Entrepreneurship Center embraces Trinity’s liberal arts curriculum and engages students in co-curricular and extracurricular learning experiences. “The challenge really represents the front end of that process, teaching creativity, invention, and innovation skill sets so students can go on and engage in entrepreneurship programming later in their Trinity careers,” said Danny Briere, executive director of the center. “More than anything else, the challenge teaches students to look at the world around them through a different lens. We want students to walk away with a view toward creative problem-solving, seeing the problems in the world around them and having the confidence to tackle solving them.”

The Summit Innovation Challenge is the marquee program of the Tyree Innovation Fellowship, which recently was endowed by Kathryn George Tyree ’86, a founding member of the Entrepreneurship Center’s Advisory Board. The competitive admission program, for which participants must be accepted to take part, helps students advance their college and postcollege careers—no matter their intended major or direction—by providing the framework to learn the skills, tools, and connections necessary to thrive in college and beyond.

Judges for this year’s challenge were Tyree, Funston Trustee Shay Ajayi ’16, Trustee Liz Elting ’87, John Howard ’74, P’27, Tom Lazay ’95, and Trustee Lou Shipley ’85.