OSU students helping cool your cans
Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Media Contact: Jeff Hopper | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-1050 | jeff.hopper@okstate.edu
We’ve all had ideas spurred on by conversations with friends that we’ve furiously scribbled down on the closest napkin, never to be thought of again. For a couple of Oklahoma State University students, nothing could be further from the truth.
Jack Pitts, a sports management junior in the Spears School of Business, and Keenan Holsapple, a soon-graduating computer engineering senior in the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology, experienced one of those epiphanies while spending time with friends during football weekends last fall.
“Inevitably, we’d go buy refreshments for the weekend and then forget to put them in the fridge before we went to the game,” Pitts said. “Then we’d come home to warm drinks and have to try and cool them as quickly as possible, which never worked as well as we’d like. That’s when Keenan and I thought of a drink holder that would always keep your drink cold.”
That set the duo off on a 7-month, whirlwind adventure that brought BlooKooz to life. On the business side, the team reached out to the Riata Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Spears School of Business for advice and guidance. The Riata Center serves as the entrepreneurial catalyst for OSU students, faculty and staff, alumni and the state of Oklahoma. The center offers state-of-the-art experiential programs and valuable resources to help elevate and inspire future generations of thinkers and doers.
The team at the Riata Center has been instrumental in the team's development thus far, helping establish a strong business foundation that can be scaled up as the team continues to grow.
“The folks at the Riata Center have been amazing,” Pitts said. “They’ve really helped us put together a plan to move our product through the different phases, leading to a working prototype and beyond. Also, the ability to connect with other entrepreneurs has been invaluable. Learning from people that have been through the process, sometimes multiple times, has provided a great knowledge base for us to refer to.”
The engineering aspect has been challenging to say the least. Developing a product from scratch was difficult for the team, but one that has provided a plethora of learning experiences.
“Starting with a blank canvas was both exciting and nerve-wrecking,” Holsapple said. “We could pursue any avenue we wanted, but it was a struggle to get started. However, once we came up with the first couple of ideas it became much easier to identify what would and wouldn’t work.”
Holsapple decided to explore resources that CEAT had to offer and met with the team at the newly formed Zink Center for Competitive Innovation, whose mission is to mentor, instruct and inspire by enlisting faculty, alumni, industry sponsors and technical staff to engage with OSU's student design and competition teams.
In learning more about BlooKooz, and with Holsapple beginning his senior capstone project, the Zink Center partnered Pitts and Holsapple with a team of engineering students to continue to develop and refine the product design as a senior design project for the CEAT students.
A senior design team is given a project at the beginning of the semester and goals to meet throughout the semester, culminating in a presentation of the team’s work during the CEAT Senior Design Expo held at the end of the semester.
“It’s been a weird and humbling experience to say the least,” Holsapple said. “Balancing being a project sponsor and student worker on the team has been a learning experience for me. It’s challenged me from both engineering and leadership perspectives, but I’m very grateful that we were able to have this experience. I don’t think we’d be where we are without the Zink Center and our senior design team.”
The team was able to provide a “proof-of-concept” prototype at the Senior Design Expo on April 26. That design will be further refined and polished in the hopes of having a reliable, working prototype by fall 2024.
“It’s exciting,” Pitts said. “I can’t wait to see where we are six months from now. Hopefully we’re speaking with investors and industry partners at that point to begin production, but we’ll see. Hopefully BlooKooz will be in your hands in the not too distant future.”