The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, in collaboration with the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, is sponsoring a hackathon-style competition to identify innovative ideas related to future transportation.
The Goodyear Innovation Challenge invites graduate business and design students from across the U.S. to submit a business case by Oct. 12 in response to the challenge, “How does Goodyear make a play beyond tires?” for the chance to compete in a two-day event at the university’s Larry Sears and Sally Zlotnick Sears think[box], a world-class center for innovation and entrepreneurship. The think[box] is a 50,000 sqft makerspace offering tools and equipment including 3D printers, laser cutters, routers, saws and much more.
Recognizing the fast-changing world of mobility, especially in urban areas, Goodyear already has focused on “beyond tires,” with engineers, business designers and data scientists at its innovation labs in San Francisco, Akron, Luxembourg and Shanghai working on many possibilities.
Building on this, the upcoming competition challenges some of the best young minds to mirror that kind of future-state thinking.
Vehicles of the Future Will Be the "Third Space"
The project brief describes a high-level view of what the challenge is looking for:
"Many futuristic high-tech vehicle startups are popping up, completely changing the paradigm of production, ownership, and the way we interact with vehicles. Electrification, connectedness, car sharing, and autonomy intersect to transform mobility and the world as we know it. People are shifting from driver to rider, and the vehicle cabin is morphing from “car” to “room”.
The product being sold is no longer just a car, but is now the service of providing physical movement from point A to point B, while enabling life to happen in between. People used to design their lives around the stable things that are not moving – but what if we move towards the opposite, and movement is our only constant? Vehicles are beginning to be seen as a “third space” in addition to the home and office.
The third space is the social center of life; it was once the urban plaza, then the shopping mall, and now it can be inside the high-tech cabin of an automobile. It is a connected home away from home where relationships can be built. It is also a connected office away from office where work can be done. This is particularly pertinent as identities, relationships and businesses are increasingly constructed in online spaces, not tied to any permanent physical space, and perhaps not to physical possessions such as cars, and therefore tires."
How to Participate
Interested in taking on the challenge to go "beyond tires?" Participation is easy and starts with registering your team! The full details of the challenge and registration are available at the Goodyear Innovation Challenge website, but can be summed up in 4 steps:
STEP ONE: TEAM INFO
Submit names and contact info of 4-5 team members. Multidisciplinary teams are strongly encouraged!
STEP TWO: SUBMIT PROPOSAL
Submit a proposal in response to the Brief. Only one proposal per team!
STEP THREE: INVITATIONS
Jury will select and invite teams with the top 5 proposals to the Hackathon
STEP FOUR: HACKATHON
Final teams will travel to Cleveland for two-day hackathon at think[box], working alongside students from other schools and Goodyear Innovation Lab associates for a $5000, $3000, or $2000 cash prize
Five team proposals will be selected to participate in the Nov. 8-9 hackathon in Cleveland, where students will be asked to bring their ideas to life with both physical prototypes and “back of the envelope” business model calculations. Proposals need to include a definition of the problem, an understanding of the market size and target users, those users needs and the team's proposed solutions. (Don't forget the PowerPoint deck!)
A jury of Goodyear leaders and digital innovation scholars will select the first-, second- and third-place winners for awards of $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000, respectively.
For more information, including rules and how to submit a team proposal, visit https://design.case.edu/.
Source: Goodyear Newsroom