Applications are open through Friday, April 5, for the School of Information Studies Raymond von Dran (RvD) Fund for Student Entrepreneurship competition and the Hunter Brooks Watson Spirit of Entrepreneurship Award. The competitions will be held on Friday, April 12, from 12:30 to 4 p.m. in Bird Library. The combined prize total is $30,000. The competition is open to all full and part-time undergraduate and graduate students at Syracuse University. Individual students or teams can pitch ideas for products, services, technologies or creative ventures as for-profit or nonprofit enterprises and can be conceptual ideas or go-to-market businesses.
2023 RvD iPrize competition: Scott Warren, Syracuse University Libraries (left) and Bruce Kingma, School of Information Studies (right) presented check to Ben Ford ’23 (Martin J. Whitman School of Management), founder of Fundwurx.
Last year’s RvD iPrize winners included Ben Ford ’23, founder of Fundwurx; Adya Parida ’25 and Oliver Raycroft ’25, co-Founders of Scale Sense; Motolani Oladitan ’24, founder of Ta; Jeremy Shinder ’24, founder of Jere Bear Films, LLC; Travis Ghirdharie G’22, founder of Many Hands; Sai Krishna Bolla G’23, founder of Cognition X; Aidan Mickleburgh ’23 G’23, founder of Intervea; Kai Patricio, founder of Farm Loop; and Rob Goldblatt ’23, Paul Sausville and Nicole Byrnes, co-founders of Tree-Spun.
The 2023 Hunter Brooks Watson Spirit of Entrepreneurship Award was given to four student teams who best exemplified “The Spirit of Entrepreneurship.” Prizes honor the memory of Hunter Brooks Watson, a Syracuse University student who died tragically in a distracted driving accident. Last year’s winners were: Rabia Razzaq G’23, Kai Patricio G’23, Priscilla Cruz ’24, and Peyton Sefick, members of Re-mend team; Motolani Oladitan ’24; Jeremy Shinder ’24; and Ethan Tyo ’17 G’22, AlterNative Project and cookbook author.
