Eight student projects took the stage at MU’s first entrepreneurs showcase on Friday, pitching to a jury of two local business owners, a teacher and the student council treasurer — a panel organisers described as “friendly, but not a pushover.”
The projects ranged from software to craft: a homework planner app built by two juniors, a small-batch hot sauce operation with a waiting list, hand-bound notebooks sold at the cultural festival, and a bicycle repair stand that operates Thursday afternoons by the bike racks.
Each team had five minutes to pitch and five of questions, with the jury pressing hardest on the same two points for everyone: who actually pays, and what happens when the founders graduate.
I came in thinking we had a product. The questions made clear we have a product and a succession problem.
Bike-stand founder, senior
No prizes, by design
The showcase deliberately awarded no ranking. “The moment there’s a first place, the pitches turn into theatre,” said organising teacher Daniel Roth. “We wanted the questions to be the prize.” Each team instead left with written feedback from every juror.
Several projects reported concrete outcomes within the week: the planner app gained a teacher pilot in two classes, and the notebook makers took their largest single order to date from a parent in the audience.
The showcase will run again in spring, open to any student project — commercial or not — that can survive ten minutes of polite interrogation.
The rules of entry
The showcase’s entry rules were designed to keep it honest: projects must be genuinely operating — no concepts or pitch-deck-only ideas — and any money handled must go through a parent’s or the school’s oversight, a requirement Roth said filtered the applications “from fourteen ideas to eight realities.” The rule drew grumbles and, he argues, produced the day’s quality: “Every question the jury asked was answerable from experience, because everyone on stage had actually sold something, shipped something or fixed someone’s brakes.”
The audience, too, was part of the design: attendance was open, and the question round after the jury’s was public, producing what several founders called the day’s hardest questions — including, for the hot-sauce team, a detailed interrogation about label regulations from a parent who turned out to work in food safety, and has since been recruited as the showcase’s first informal mentor.
