Students in Rodney Hill’s ENDS 101 classes came up with 26 of the final 40 best ideas in the Ideas Challenge contest sponsored by the Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship ( http://cnve.tamu.edu/ideas/ ) at Mays Business School. Additionally, five more ideas from Hill’s previous classes made the contest’s final 40.

The contest accepted ideas, innovations and inventions from Texas A&M students and had a small group of business entrepreneurs narrow down the field to the top 40.

May 3, 60 CEOs, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs gathered at the business school to select the top 10 projects. Hill’s current class took five of the eight $1,000 third-place prizes and a team from a previous class placed second, earning $2,000.

“ Design thinking pays off,” said Hill. “Several Colleges of Business around the?country have hired professors out of design schools to teach design thinking?to their MBA programs.

“The groups in my class are formed by a majority of business, biotech and engineering majors and are split evenly by gender,” he continued. “They had to do patent searches, write business plans and defend their ideas to two different groups in a 5 minute period.”

Hill said he plans to assign the project again next spring and is currently looking for more competitions for his students.