Recognition for Innovative Startup Excellence
Doing our part.
In 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 crisis, Aurora Consulting announced the RISE Award to help small businesses and inventors through the unprecedented, challenging times. Consistent with our mission to support emerging growth companies, we felt that weathering this crisis should not come at the loss of hard-fought R&D efforts.
We’re proud to announce that we’re bringing the RISE Award back for 2022 and beyond, as the Recognition for Innovative Startup Excellence Award. We're offering a free provisional U.S. patent application or $5,000 towards a non-provisional U.S. patent application to a selected applicant. We hope that this award will continue to help provide stability and encouragement to diligent innovators.
How can the award help me? |
For the selected applicant, we will work closely with you and your team of inventors to provide one of the following: A free provisional U.S. patent application or $5,000 towards a non-provisional U.S. patent application
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Is my business eligible? |
This award is eligible to any SMB or inventor. The only requirement is that you must have an impactful innovation that you want to share with the world. We welcome applicants from all subject matter areas and zip codes. We deeply appreciate that innovation knows no zip code boundaries.
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What criteria are used for evaluation? |
Eligible applications will be reviewed by an internal panel based on equal weighting of the following criteria: Technology Maturity, Market Relevance, Economic Impact, Societal Impact, and Need.
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How do I apply? |
To get started, just click the Apply button below and you will be directed to a Google form that will help collect your application information. The application is short and should take less than 30 minutes to complete. Rest assured, all information is held in the strictest of confidence.
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What can I expect after applying? |
The application process will be open until 11:59 PM ET on May 15th, 2022. We will be diligently reviewing applications over the coming weeks and hope to make an announcement in early June. All applicants will be contacted once we make our final decision. The winner must use the award within 60 days of the announcement.
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Looking forward to hearing from you!
Meet Past Recipients.
For our March podcast episode, we’re sharing a great sit down with three very innovative, up-and-coming inventors – all past recipients of the RISE award. Listen in to learn more about their companies and how the RISE Award has helped in their journeys.
2022 RISE Recipients.
Selection process
There are problems and then there are good problems. The quality of your submissions once again blew us away! This made for an incredibly difficult selection process – so many incredible innovations, all backed by stories of personal inspiration, focused solutions, and true entrepreneurial grit. Even though the world is far from back to normal, your resolve, steadfastness, and creative spirits have not been tempered one bit. After much vigorous deliberation by our selection committee, and our desire to help as many inventors as we can, we opted to once again lift the constraints of the original plan beyond the single $5,000 award to include the addition of awards to two other exceptional finalists.
Using a weighted matrix, our team scored applications based on the following criteria:
Using a weighted matrix, our team scored applications based on the following criteria:
- Potential societal and economic impact of the innovation
- Innovator/team potential to see through to commercial success
- Time and market relevance
- Application quality
We can't say it enough, but the recipients are a truly gifted collection of entrepreneurs who will surely do great things. We couldn’t be more thrilled about the potential to be a part of their journey!
Drumroll please! And the 2022 awards go to...
heARsight LLC
We're so very pleased to announce that the first place, full $5,000 award, goes to heARsight LLC. heARsight's mission is to empower people who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing (HOH) with innovative tools that contribute to better speech comprehension and an overall higher quality of life. Their innovation is a pair of augmented reality smart-glasses that provide subtitles to a user during their in-person conversations. The need for assistive tech like this is massive – the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the number of people globally who suffer from hearing difficulties to be 430 million. This number is expected to grow to 2.5 billion by 2050 due to the aging global population and unsafe listening practices. This mission is a personal one for the heARsight team – the company was founded by Danny Fritz and Riley Ellingsen during their time as Master's students at Notre Dame, where Danny conceived of the idea from his lived experience watching his girlfriend, Meg, struggle with hearing difficulties in everyday settings.
Our thought bubble. When we look for ideal RISE recipients, we look closely at potential for societal good matched with a team that can execute. heARsight is just this type of impactful innovation, backed by the kind of DNA it takes to see through to market success. Assistive technology is a corner of the market that unfortunately still has too much white space and we’re happy to help them fill it, in any way we can!
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We're proud to have been recognized as the winners of the 2022 RISE Award and appreciate Aurora's interest in making the world more accessible for people who are d/Deaf or hard of hearing. We're grateful for Aurora's assistance in defining and protecting heARsight's IP strategy and are incredibly thankful for how accommodating they've been in adapting the scope of the award to meet our most pressing needs. |
ThermoVERSE
We’re excited to share that we’ve selected ThermoVERSE as our first runner-up, to receive a $4,000 award. ThermoVERSE is focused on pioneering technology that will deliver cost-effective heating and cooling energy retrofits so that low-to-middle income (LMI) housing property managers can reap the benefits of an energy efficiency (or building code) upgrade without having to open up the walls. Low-to-middle income housing constitutes approximately 30% of all housing stocks in the U.S., and retrofitting buildings to accommodate new HVAC installations often comes with the surprise of required building code upgrades that can triple expected costs! The goal of ThermoVERSE's highly modular thermoregulation systems will be providing thermal comfort without the need for these costly energy retrofits.
Our thought bubble. Their innovation is both timely and necessary. Given skyrocketing energy costs, soaring home prices, and housing shortages across the country, disruption in this space is essential to maintain viability for as many LMI properties as possible.
The RISE award offers the peace of mind for IP management that ThermoVERSE has been looking for. As an early-stage, unincorporated company it is often difficult to navigate IP without financial assistance, let alone attract the interest of investors. The team at Aurora Patents seems to be cognizant of this, and is coordinating with my local economic development hub, Ann Arbor SPARK, to ensure that any additional IP needs of ThermoVERSE are taken care of.
– Shantonio Birch
Spirit Fire Aftermarket
We are delighted to report that we've selected Spirit Fire Aftermarket as our second runner-up, also receiving a $2,500 award. Spirit Fire developed a solar powered light that activates at night when in motion. With traditional truck cab lights, you have to drill holes and rewire the whole vehicle to connect the light wires to the car battery. With Spirit Fire's lights, you just peel and stick the lights where you want them and they turn on at night when you're driving due to special sensors detecting light and certain kinetic energy. Luciano and his team have bootstrapped the entire mission, right down to the creation of the custom tool required to make the lights.
Our thought bubble. We love gritty entrepreneurs who roll up their sleeves and find ways to innovate. Spirit Fire's story is a great example of finding a real market need, self-bootstrapping, and doing a practical thing well.
Going forward
We're firmly committed to the RISE award being an annual fixture. We love helping entrepreneurs. It's what gets us out of bed in the morning. Getting to help even more in an epically difficult time has proved to be exceptionally rewarding for us and we're certain it will prove to be such for the recipients. Please stay tuned for updates on these great companies.