Students Innovate to Eliminate Invasive Pests

For years, Aditya Prabhu and his family plucked Japanese beetles off of plants in their yard. They’d have to do this several times each summer to try to contain the invasive pest, which is known for destructively feeding on hundreds of different plants in the Twin Cities and beyond.

“The tricky thing about it is, there’s really not a lot of solutions for residential growers outside of do-it-yourself,” said Prabhu, who graduated in May from the University of Minnesota. The other options, he said, would be using bug traps that often overflow with the live beetles they’ve attracted, or spraying insecticide, which can unnecessarily harm other bugs.

As Prabhu grappled with this pesky problem, he partnered with James Duquette, ’24 BSB. With support from resources at the Carlson School of Management, the pair invented a new kind of beetle trap called Alure.

“We came up with a unique solution,” Prabhu said. “It’s essentially a mesh that’s infused with the same active ingredient used in insecticides, specifically the ones that kill these beetles. You set it up in your yard at the beginning of the season, and throughout the season, beetles will come to it for the beetle-specific pheromone. They’ll land on the mesh, and within just about 90 seconds they get killed.” This method is easy for home gardeners, he said, and it’s much better for the environment than spraying large amounts of insecticide.

To create Alure, the team combined Duquette’s knowledge as a Finance and Entrepreneurship major at the Carlson School with Prabhu’s background as a College of Science and Engineering student. Their business development occurred through the Carlson School’s Entrepreneurship in Action course, which is designed to offer students real-life experience in launching a startup company.

The course supports students through all stages of starting a business, from developing and testing potential business opportunities to creating a plan and actually launching their startup.

“Entrepreneurship in Action, for me, was the ability to kind of break out of my shell and learn all the things about entrepreneurship and go out and do them in real life, in the real world,” Duquette said. “The class really helped Alure come from an idea to a solution and eventually a company.”

After Entrepreneurship in Action, Prabhu and Duquette took their idea to MN Cup, a statewide startup competition run by the Carlson School’s Gary S. Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship.

MN Cup offers months of mentorship to startups before awarding funding to winning participants. Alure won the Student Division, taking home $25,000.

“It’s been a wild ride,” Prabhu said. “You learn a lot, and the mentorship part of MN Cup is extremely valuable.”

Next, the team hopes to get Alure into the hands of customers. “We hope to work with mom-and-pop stores in the upcoming summer,” Prabhu said. “Ultimately, our goal is to see this on shelves and actually get this to a manufacturer and get it to a point where it could be a household product.”

As they continue to grow their business, Prabhu and Duquette expect to keep learning and growing as entrepreneurs—and they genuinely hope Alure can help make people’s lives a little easier.

“To be able to make a difference in people’s lives with our product and our innovation—it’s been a real dream come true to me,” Duquette said. “It really has been a very exciting experience, and it’s not over.”