HIRAM, Ohio – A team of four Hiram College entrepreneurship students walked away with $1,000 to share earlier this month after winning first place at the 2025 Ideablitz!, the college’s annual Shark Tank-like competition in which student teams promote their business ideas to a panel of local entrepreneurs.
The team of Macy Fry, Elizabeth Doup, Ilyana Sterrett and Ayrica DeHart won the competition by promoting their product, FlowCrate, a stacked six-bottle holder designed to fit over a six-pack of Gatorade squeeze bottles to enable faster, mess-free refills during sporting events.
Ideablitz! is one of two annual entrepreneurial competitions hosted by the Hiram College Center for Integrated Entrepreneurship. The follow-up event in the spring, Ideabuild!, allows student teams to further develop their project ideas in pursuit of potentially bringing such ideas to the market. Both events are made possible by a grant from the Burton D. Morgan Foundation.
“The event was exceptional and is reflective of the great things happening at Hiram and in our entrepreneurship program,” said Russell Ormiston, director of the Center for Integrated Entrepreneurship. “The students brought forth impressive business ideas and were exceptionally prepared and polished in front of the panel, a testament to their hard work and the guidance of David Kukurza, director of Academic Programming for Entrepreneurship.”
The event featured six student teams of two to four students each. Groups had five minutes to present their business idea in front of an audience, with two minutes of Q&A from the panel of successful local entrepreneurs.
“The best student team presentations resulted from their practice and making key changes based on feedback from the class and me. They were ready and motivated for the competition,” Kukurza said.
The team of Tristan Martin-Marshall, McKayla Carpenter, Donald Davey and Kevin Ina won second place. They will share a $600 prize for their product, AURA Emotion Oil Diffuser, which creates custom oil blends based on an AI-generated survey that inputs the user’s answers.
The team of Elijah Southern, Ben Hamilton and Jake Colwell won third place. They will share a $400 prize for their product, Lens Buddy, a disposable, stick-on lens protector for professional camera lenses.
The $300 Sustainability Prize went to the team of Kendrick Miller, Evan Seawell, Tez Carter and Nate Brown for Solar Spark, a compact portable solar charger to be used in emergency situations.
Pictured at top: David Kukurza, director of Academic Programming for Entrepreneurship at Hiram College, poses with first-place team members Ayrica DeHart, Elizabeth Doup, Macy Fry and Ilyana Sterrett.