Last night I attended my second "Evening With Innovators"; however, instead of having to pitch like last time it was a nice to be there in support of other fellow students and practice my networking skills. I found the event to be highly productive personally and with respect to our project for this semester.
At the beginning of the event things were a little awkward but as the night progressed it became rather easy to start up a conversation and move around the room. Many times I found myself in the middle of a conversation with several guests. It was amazing how much I learned in such a short period of time by simply listening to many of these individuals talk to each other about their own businesses and experiences. For example, I learned a great deal about grants and licensing through my discussions with Kip. After my experience this evening I definitely see the importance of networking.
Probably the most important individual that I met with respect to NYX was a fellow by the name of Oliver. Oliver owns his own custom suit company (Charlie & Co) and has some great connections with overseas manufacturing which will be useful in the future when we are looking to start manufacturing. The other individual that provided a great deal of insight after I pitched our idea was Jeff Robinson (he does business consulting). Jeff suggested that rather than initially targeting high performance athletes, another possible market could be the physiotherapy industry. Jeff pointed out that a shirt like the one we are looking at developing would be a great tool for helping individuals through rehabilitation. He also mentioned that we could potentially get a government grant due to the fact that it would be designed for physiotherapy.
Based on some of the knowledge gained from last nights event, we plan on tackling our initial prototype this week. Tomorrow Ian, Casey, and Christa are going to be meeting up with a 4th year kinesiology student from the U of C to help with the mapping of the micro muscles. The plan is to slap a white shirt on Ian and together the girls are going to map out with a colored marker where the important muscle groups are so we can determine exactly where we are going to put concentrated resistance.
Once we've established the location of these muscle groups, our next step will be to begin the process of testing out different resistance methods. Much of this process will be trial and error. For this reason we will be doing most of our initial testing and modification on Ian before we take our prototype to a professional athlete for further testing.
I've also stumbled across some new technology that could potentially be used in our shirts that I will post as an infobit shortly.
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