The NCAA is changing the current rules and regulations around a student-athlete’s name, image, and likeness. Previously, student-athletes were not allowed to participate in business activities or noninstitutional promotional activities. With the new rule changes, student-athletes will be able to engage in business activities related to their own name, image, and likeness. The goal of the team was to help “prepare athletes to understand and properly navigate the evolving restrictions and guidelines around athlete name, image, and likeness”. In order to accomplish this, the team had to understand the problems student-athletes face with these changing rules and regulations. The team conducted basic market research to identify the problem. The problem discovered was the lack of communication between student-athletes and businesses. In order to verify this problem, the team conducted several interviews with Arizona State University Athletic Department personnel. From the interviews, the team identified that the user is the student-athletes and the buyer is the brands and businesses. Once the problem was verified and the user and buyer were identified, a solution that would best fit the customers was formulated. The solution is a platform that assists student-athletes navigate the changing rules of the NCAA by providing access to a marketplace optimized to working with student-athletes and offering an ease of maintaining relationships between student-athletes and businesses. The solution was validated through meetings with interested brands. The team used the business model and market potential to pitch the business idea to the brands. Finally, the team gained traction by initiating company partnerships.

Battered is a socially responsible bakery focused on providing prevention awareness, education, and donations to sexual violence awareness and aid. The bakery model will provide education resources within each order on the problem and current availability of aid and donations for local and national charities that assist in sexual violence aid and awareness. In order to assist in prevention and aid, Battered will create a safe environment and non-confrontational outlet for a taboo conversation; offering sweet treats in conjunction with aid and education of sexual violence awareness. Additionally, the company will donate 10% of all profits to local and national organizations that help victims of sexual violence.

This thesis will bring together students to engage in entrepreneurship by finding, measuring and sharing strategic market opportunities. From a student’s perspective, it will take a deep dive into the world of startup ecosystems, markets and trends utilizing both qualitative and quantitative market research techniques. The information gathered has been curated into a productive, meaningful manner, through a report titled “The State of Startups: A Student Perspective.” <br/> The first key theme of this thesis is that market intelligence can be a powerful tool. The second key theme is the power of knowledge implementation towards competitive strategies. The first section of the thesis will focus on identifying and understanding the current “startup” landscape as a basis on which to build strategic and impactful business decisions. This will be accomplished as the team conducts a landscape analysis focused on the student perspective of the student-based North American “entrepreneurial” ecosystem. The second section of the thesis will focus specifically on the personal experiences of student startup founders. This will be accomplished through the analysis of interviews with founders of the startups researched from the first section of the thesis. This will provide us with a direct insight into the student perspective of the student-based North American “entrepreneurial” ecosystem.

Obesity rates among adults have steadily grown in recent decades all the way up to<br/>42.4% in 2018. This is a 12% increase from the turn of the century (Center for Disease Control<br/>and Prevention, 2021). A major reason for this rise is increased consumption of processed,<br/>high-calorie foods. People eat these foods at a young age and develop bad eating habits that can<br/>last for the rest of their lives. It is essential to intervene early and help adolescents form<br/>balanced, healthy eating habits before bad habits are already formed. Our solution to this<br/>problem is Green Gamers. Green Gamers combines adolescent’s passion for gaming with<br/>healthy eating via in-game rewards for healthy eating. People will be able to purchase healthy<br/>food items, such as a bag of carrots, and on the packaging there will be a QR code. They will<br/>then be able to scan the code on our website, and earn points which will unlock in-game items<br/>and other rewards. Video game rewards act as effective motivators for you people to eat more<br/>healthy foods. After the solution was formulated, a preliminary survey was conducted to<br/>confirm that video game related rewards would inspire children to eat more healthy foods.<br/>Based on those results, we are currently in the process of running a secondary market research<br/>campaign to learn if gift card rewards are a stronger motivator. Our end goal for Green Gamers<br/>would be to partner with large gaming studios and food producers. This would allow us access to<br/>many gaming franchises, so that rewards are available from a wide variety of games: making the<br/>platform appealing to a diverse audience of gamers. Similarly, a relationship with large food<br/>producers would give us the ability to place QR codes on a greater assortment of healthy food<br/>items. Although no relationships with large companies have been forged yet, we plan to utilize<br/>funding to test our concept on small focus groups in schools

Though about 75 percent of American waste is recyclable, only 30 percent of it is actually recycled and less than ten percent of plastics disposed of in the United States in 2015 were recycled. A statistic like this demonstrates the immense need to increase recycling rates in order to move towards cultivating a circular economy and benefiting the environment. With Arizona State University’s (ASU) extensive population of on-campus students and faculty, our team was determined to create a solution that would increase recycling rates. After conducting initial market research, our team incentives or education. We conducted market research through student surveys to determine the level of knowledge of our target audience and barriers to entry for local recycling and composting resources. Further, we gained insight into the medium of recycling and sustainability programs they would be interested in participating in. Overall, the results of our surveys demonstrated that a majority of students were interested in participating in these programs, if they were not already involved, and most students on-campus already had access to these resources. Despite having access to these sustainable practices, we identified a knowledge gap between students and their information on how to properly execute sustainable practices such as composting and recycling. In order to address this audience, our team created Circulearning, an educational program that aims to bridge the gap of knowledge and address immediate concerns regarding circular economy topics. By engaging audiences through our quick, accessible educational modules and teaching them about circular practices, we aim to inspire everyone to implement these practices into their own lives. Though our team began the initiative with a focus on implementing these practices solely to ASU campus, we decided to expand our target audience to implement educational programs at all levels after discovering the interest and need for this resource in our community. Our team is extremely excited that our Circulearning educational modules have been shared with a broad audience including students at Mesa Skyline High School, ASU students, and additional connections outside of ASU. With Circulearning, we will educate and inspire people of all ages to live more sustainably and better the environment in which we live.

The market for searching for food online is exploding. According to one expert at Google, “there are over 1 billion restaurant searches on Google every month” (Kelso, 2020). To capture this market and ride the general digital trend of internet personalization (as evidenced by Google search results, ads, YouTube and social media algorithms, etc), we created Munch to be an algorithm meant to help people find food they’ll love. <br/>Munch offers the ability to search for food by the restaurant or even as specific as a menu item (ex: search for the best Pad Thai). The best part? It is customized to your preferences based on a quiz you take when you open the app and from that point continuously learns from your behavior. This thesis documents the journey of the team who founded Munch, what progress we made and the reasoning behind our decisions, where this idea fits in a competitive marketplace, how much it could be worth, branding, and our recommendations for a successful app in the future.