Each year, Penn Engineering, Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship and the Penn Center for Innovation team up to host the Y-Prize at Penn, an invention competition in which entrants are challenged to pitch an innovative business plan for a technology developed at Penn Engineering. Finalists present their pitches to a panel of judges and compete for a cash prize of $10,000 to fund their idea.
This year’s Grand Prize winner was Metal Light. They plan to build sustainable, affordable lights that draw power from scrap metal, an ideal lighting solution for off-grid homes around the world.
Metal Light faced strong competition, and for the first time in the Y-Prize’s eight-year history, a second-place prize was awarded for the runner-up team. M-Squared, who proposed using the same energy-scavenging technology to build sensors for shipping containers, earned a $4,000 Y-Prize award, which was matched with a grant from FabNet.
The Metal Light team is composed of master’s students Ryan Goethals and Darsham Bhosale of Penn Engineering, Minhal Dhanjy and Kateryna Kharenko of Wharton, and Leo Li and Yumin Gao of Johns Hopkins University.
Read more at Penn Engineering.
