Two Commerce students on winning team at Queen’s Summer Innovation Initiative competition - Their 3-D colour printing venture nabs $40K prize

Kingston, ON - Sept. 9, 2014 - An intense summer of hands-on work building new ventures from the ground up culminated in a business pitch competition on August 21 at Goodes Hall.  At stake was $140,000 in funding towards the launch of the new ventures created by 37 students from various Queen’s faculties and, new this year, also from St. Lawrence College.  Each of the nine teams had only 12 minutes to impress the judges with their business plans, which had taken three and a half months to develop.  It was a fitting end to the Queen’s Summer Innovation Initiative, a joint initiative between Queen’s School of Business and Queen’s Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science that debuted in 2012.

Mosaic Manufacturing’s 3-D colour printing venture, nabbed the top prize of $40,000, thrilling its five members (pictured).  “It was an intense summer,” says Heather Evans, Comm’16. “We had a great mix of skill-sets on our team, with the engineering students contributing the technical expertise, and Chris and I providing the business foundation.”  

Chris Labelle also credited the multidisciplinary approach for the team’s success. “We had access to faculty from the business school, engineering and law faculties, and made full use of the Integrated Learning Centre’s resources, including tens of thousands of dollars-worth of prototyping equipment. We could never have gone from concept to prototype in such a short span of time without the incredible resources we had at our disposal.”

Their 3-D colour printing venture is in the quiet phase, given its proprietary technology. Its potential has captured the imagination of the Mosaic team, with the three recent grads committing to the enterprise on a full-time basis. Students Heather Evans and Danny Lloyd also plan to stay involved. The next stage is to unveil a video product demo before launching a crowdsourcing campaign to raise the funds needed to go into full production.

Queen’s Innovation Connector Executive Director Greg Bavington has been impressed with Mosaic’s product.  “Imagine a device that could convert your old black and white printer into a colour printer. That’s what they’ve invented, but for 3-D copiers. I think that what their venture involves, what they’ve accomplished, could be as significant a revolution in 3-D printing as the advent of colour printing was to 2-D printing.”

For more information, visit the QSII site.