As we welcome 2025, we want to celebrate the remarkable achievements of the past year, driven by significant investment through our founding philanthropist and a targeted growth plan by CEO Paul Efron and Executive Director Jim Jindrick.
Building the team
Two former Innovate-A-thon (IAT) student participants and interns joined the team and serve as key ambassadors, program builders, and communicators—breathing life into our online presence, reaching out to students, and bringing fresh eyes to everything we do. Get to know Nataly Ghiotto and Isabel Cruz.
Founders recruited a full-time Innovate-A-thon director, Steven Szymeczek bringing extensive engineering entrepreneurship, innovation, and university experience to refining and scaling the Innovate-A-thon process, program, student recruitment, and spectacular outcomes.
Onboarded an outreach and partnerships professional, focusing on communications, brand development, industry and nonprofit partnerships, and sponsorship and grant support.
Get to know Sherry Hoskinson.
Today, our combined team holds over 100 years direct experience in entrepreneurship, innovation, and tech development.
Building student access
Highlights from our 2024 IATs – moments of growth, collaboration, and impact.
In Q4-2024, IAT adopted a target of adding 5 universities to our partner list—doubling the prior number. Well, we exceeded that—utilizing popular university recruitment and placement platform, Handshake—students from over 830 universities can apply for Innovate-A-thon!
Adoption of REMO virtual collaboration platform makes it easy for students from a wide range of fields of study and any geography, work together to create great new solutions, exercise their innovation muscles, build their professional networks, and fuel their career paths.
Students from universities including University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, Purdue University, Northern Arizona University, Boise State University, and University of California have participated in Innovate-A-thons (to name a few). All are welcome to apply!
Ramped up presence and communications
From a refreshed website, to weekly press releases and multiple social media posts each week, the team has put their best foot forward to attract students, industry, philanthropists, mentors, subject matter experts, and lovers of innovation! Take a look at us and join us at iat1.org, LinkedIn, Instagram, & Facebook)
Conducted our first nationwide vote for IAT topic
In Q4-2024, Innovate-A-thon conducted a nationwide vote to determine the next IAT topic. Topics of choice included Closed Loop Agriculture, Pedestrian Safety, Water Reclamation, and Advanced Recycling and Sustainability. The winner was Advanced Recycling and Sustainability which will be the topic of an Innovate-A-thon sprint the first three weeks of January 2025! Other topics will be addressed in future IATs, and nationwide votes will continue.
Gained our first exclusive sponsor
Innovate-A-thon is a nonprofit organization committed to advancing an innovation workforce and developing great solutions to key problems of society, environment, and economy. All costs are supported by sponsors, philanthropists, and individual donors. Sponsorships range from $2,000-$15,000. Industry members that would like to focus an IAT on a specific topic—enabling 3-5 teams to focus on the challenge with all derived intellectual assets going to the sponsor—can sponsor an entire event and engage with top students. We are pleased to announce that the first exclusive sponsor will support an IAT in Q1-2025. Stay tuned for more information!
Whether you are a student, member of industry, or an interested philanthropist, we would love to hear from you and share how you can be engaged with this amazing program! Contact us at info@iat1.org, steven@iat1.org, or sherry@iat1.org.
Happy New Year! We look forward to abundant innovation in 2025!
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