Industry Partnership
Medrock Pharmacies.
A compounding pharmacy brought us a bottleneck off its own floor. Student teams built the machine that answers it.
Five teams, one brief, a machine that compounds on its own.
With Medrock and MedDots, building on the first cycle's machine.
Who is on it
The pharmacy
Medrock
Owns the problem and the floor it sits on. Compounds prescriptions by hand today.
The engineers
MedDots
The engineering firm leading the build. Wrote the criteria and sat on the panel that scored them.
The teams and coaches
ITKAN
Fielded three of the five teams, hosted the program at the Innovation Hub, and put its own coaches on the designs.
The collaborator
FIRST in Texas
Runs the competitions these students came up through, and got the brief in front of them.
How a cycle runs
01
The brief
A company puts up a problem it has not solved, and writes down what a good answer has to do.
02
The teams
ITKAN fields student teams and puts coaches on the designs and the groundwork.
03
Live validation
On a fixed cadence, every team is tested against the company's criteria, with the company's materials, revealed on the day.
04
Demo on the floor
The final demonstration happens where the work would actually be used, scored by the people who set the bar.
What got built
Accuracy was the wall most teams hit. Powder that has already left the doser is still falling when the scale reads. The full story is in the news.
In their words
“The way that they think about solving the problems, the way that they do the designs, and the way that they code, all of these are different approaches than what we saw from the big companies.”
Ashraf Ahmed
Founder, Medrock Pharmacies
“You don't just get fresh eyes on your complex problem. You get to introduce the next generation of engineers to some of the problems that you're encountering today.”
Grant Powell
Lead Engineer, MedDots
“We really overcame that more with our mechanical than our software. Often we would actually shoot under the target in order to make sure that we're still within that accuracy.”
Omar Ebeida
Design Lead, Piada
Bring us a problem.
If your company has something real that has not been solved, and someone technical who can set the bar and turn up to see it tested, ITKAN can put student engineering teams on it. We bring the teams, the coaches, the Innovation Hub and the cadence.
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