Big Idea Competition

Entrepreneurship at Cornell | Ithaca, NY

If taking dozens of engineering exams has taught me anything, it's that if you have an idea you push it as far as you can, even if you have no clue where it will lead you.

In April 2018, I won 1st Place at the Cornell Big Idea Competition in the For Profit track, a pitch competition open to any undergraduate student/team.

The first round was a written application about your idea, semi-finals was a 5-minute pitch for three judges, and finals was a live pitch in front of 10 judges and 400 peers. 

Pitching is scary and uncomfortable, but it's the coolest thing to bring an entire room full of people with you on a journey to believe in an idea as much as you do. 

Check out the press release (button below) from the Cornell Daily Sun!

My pitch was on Cowscope, the same project I won the P&G Technical award for (25 minute presentation), and a project that I worked on for a year from scratch with the iGEM 2016 team.  My slides from the pitch and transcription are below.

Photos from the event by Boris Tsang

Transcript

[1] My name is Sachiye Koide.  I am a senior biological engineer in the college of engineering.

[2] Dairy production in the United States constitutes over a 5 billion dollar industry.  This massive yearly production is the tireless creation of over 40,000 farms and 9 million cows just in the US alone.  But in this industry, milk imports and exports transcend national borders to create Ben & Jerry’s, gooey mozzarella cheese on your pizza, and the 2% foamed into your Starbucks every morning.  All part of the 440 billion dollar global dairy business.

[3] But all these cows and farms have one thing in common, bovine mastitis, the costliest disease in the industry.  Bovine mastitis is a bacterial infection that causes harmful milk contamination, especially when the contaminated milk makes it into the communal milk collector.

[4]  Imagine a two and a half thousand-gallon tank of milk ready to be shipped off and sold is found to contain too much contamination. The milk is discarded right then and there onto the grass, and the farmer loses all that milk, money and time. $9000 lost because a few cases of mastitis weren’t detected. In this case, it’s okay to cry over spilled milk. This is a massive problem, because mastitis happens in every dairy farm and at a rate of 30% of cows a year­.

[5] Currently, mastitis can only be detected through a complicated lab process.  Because it currently costs so much time and money, farmers only check their herds once a month. But farms produce a full tank of milk every one or two DAYS.  This detection is too slow, and too costly.

[6] We interviewed over a dozen researchers and farmers across the state and found that they really are desperate for a solution.

[7] My solution is the Cowscope, a 3D printable or machinable microscope technology that utilizes a smartphone camera to recreate the lab process of analyzing milk samples, right on the farm. Our system is faster and more accurate than current methods. It's designed to be light and sturdy for mobility around the farm. And it will prevent massive losses in the dairy industry

[8] Farmers can open their camera within the Cowscope Application.  And the application uses image-recognition to get a fast, accurate counts. No more wasted milk or time, and detecting the disease is the easiest and most efficient it's ever been.

[9] Other features of the system include Cow Data to identify herd trends (milk production, history of disease - create additional sources of revenue)

[10] Taking into account the losses due to undetected bovine mastitis every year, this is a $29 billion market.

[11]  The business model is a direct to consumer product of $1000 for the Cowscope System at a cost $150 to create the hardware.  We will also incur monthly revenue from the software and invaluable data they will be able to tap into. If farmers save only one tank of milk from being discarded, they’ve already benefited from the product 9 times over.

[12] We are the only product out there that is quantitative, fast and accurate, automated, and has analytic features.

[13] This technology was created for an already massive dairy industry. But will  save time and increase accuracy across many others. The expansion, evolution, and impact of this product technology into other facets of industry has great potential.

[14] This is my lovely team of brilliant female engineers.

[15] And thank you for listening!