Enterprise Experience: Ventures

Today is one of the last days of my project and we present on Friday to our clients, and I am very happy with where we are at in our deliverables. Our clients are researchers at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Civil Engineering. They have been working for years on a new pretreatment solution for industrial wastewater. This would reduce the cost of wastewater treatment for industrial clients and would reduce the burden on municipal treatment centers. We were asked to assess their potential industries to better inform the future development of this pretreatment into a real product.

We set out to find these answers

We started by contacting our local municipal wastewater facility. We were generously offered a tour of the facility by the director of the facility. He was so passionate about wastewater treatment. He was not just a welcome guide to his facility, but he enthusiastically engaged our tough questions. We also received a number of great datasets to help us narrow our search. Following these early insights we began to reach out to the primary wastewater contacts at a number of local companies. We organized interviews, both on the phone and in person. We toured production plants and saw their existing solutions. We realized insight after insight just by seeing the reality of industrial wastewater treatment.

And now

We are formulating our recommendation. My team and I am finalizing our PowerPoint presentation so that when we make our recommendation it sticks. Aside from all of the time researching companies, we also spent quite a bit of time learning about the technology and potential competitors. We learned about the other companies that install and service solutions like these. We even branched out to gather comparative data from other major cities. We hope that the clients see the work we have done and learn from the insights we have uncovered. That’s the best we can hope for, because in the end we are here to provide them information, not to make the final decisions.

By John Latterner, Class of 2019