WMU's Venture Studio Turns Design Students into Founders

KALAMAZOO, Mich.—If they were nervous, it was hard to tell. On a Friday evening in late April, a group of product design juniors stepped before a panel of five judges at the second annual WMU Venture Pitch Event and pitched the businesses they had spent two semesters building from scratch. And they were prepared.

The event, presented in collaboration with Liminal Group and the Richmond Institute for Design and Innovation, distributed more than $25,000 in cash, service grants, scholarships, and resource memberships across five student finalists. To secure funding, students had to convince a formidable and diverse panel of judges: Ryan Bradley, Director of Design at Stryker; Khalil Adams, Executive Coordinator at KABUNDANT; Tim Murphy, CEO of Audio Radar; Dr. Remzi Seker, VP of Research & Innovation at WMU; and Phil Swanson, Senior Director at Newlab.

The annual pitch event is the culmination of a two-semester journey that begins in the fall, when students complete a full product development cycle and compete at the IHA Global Innovation Awards Excellence in Student Design competition in Chicago. Those who want to go further can opt into the Venture Studio as a rigorous, real-world track where design thinking meets startup methodology. Students explore the feasibility, viability, and desirability of their ideas in the actual marketplace, not just in a classroom critique.

Rethinking design school

Michael Seeley, the adjunct professor who built the program and curriculum, describes a deliberate departure from how design has traditionally been taught. In the Venture Studio framework is the starting point for problem-solving itself.

"Design becomes the lens through which opportunity is identified and defined," Seeley explained. "Students learn to connect traditional design methods with real-world business and startup frameworks — thinking in terms of product-market fit, value creation, and solution viability."

The payoff reaches well beyond the students who pursue entrepreneurship. The experience of translating a design vision into something a business leader or investor can evaluate fundamentally changes how students present themselves in the job market. They leave the program understanding not just their own discipline, but the perspectives of engineers, business leaders, and stakeholders across the process. "They enter the workforce not just as designers," Seeley said, "but as well-rounded problem solvers who can bridge gaps between teams, align ideas with execution, and contribute to making ideas real."

From real problems to real ventures

What makes that preparation tangible is the nature of the work itself. Students identify genuine, unmet human needs and build toward market-ready solutions. The ventures that took the stage in April reflect that grounding.

Tori Dwyer opened her pitch with a show of hands. How many people in the room knew someone with diabetes? Nearly every hand went up. Nearly 48 million Americans live with the condition, and roughly 12 million of those have dexterity challenges that make routine blood glucose monitoring genuinely difficult, a problem Dwyer witnessed firsthand working as a pharmacy technician.

Her answer, Glucare, consolidates the entire workflow into one device and one button press. A suction mechanism draws the skin away from the nerves before the lancet fires, reducing both pain and fear. A multi-lancet cartridge holds up to a dozen sterile lancets, eliminating the fiddly loading process that defeats users with limited hand strength. Her go-to-market plan is a phased roadmap that reflects a genuine understanding of how healthcare products reach patients.

First-place winner Garrett Phelps was inspired by his own experience dealing with the hard water in Kalamazoo. Retrosoft offers an innovative soft water experience that allows renters to shower in safe, clean, water with a retrofitted system that is noninvasive and apartment friendly. But the program's emphasis on viability pushed him past the hardware itself. The real business, he came to understand, was in the data. "A big 'aha' moment was when Seeley suggested we pursue water quality data brokerage," Phelps explained. "The data brokerage is the real key to this product reaching a broad user base." Long-term, he envisions distribution through water treatment companies like Canney's and Culligan, bringing his product to consumers through the same channels that already service their homes.

Phelps is ready to put the funding to work. His immediate next step is building the first working prototypes for alpha testers to ensure the hardware and data collection work flawlessly in actual apartments.

Both students also navigated the university's intellectual property process by filing provisional patents. "The IP process through WMU is extremely unique," Phelps said. "In the design world, it offers designers a piece of the pie that most designers don't ever have access to." That exposure alone, and understanding how to protect and commercialize an idea, is the kind of fluency that sets these graduates apart before they've sent a single résumé.

The results

This year's junior class shared $20,000 in combined awards across the top three finishers:

1ST PLACE: Garrett Phelps with Retrosoft
$5,000 cash · $2,500 service grant (Liminal Group) · $2,500 scholarship (RID+I)

2ND PLACE: Louise Rozewicz with Evo
$3,000 cash · $1,500 service grant (Liminal Group) · $1,500 scholarship (RID+I)

3RD PLACE: Joeb Wuerthele with Groove
$2,000 cash · $1,000 service grant (Liminal Group) · $1,000 scholarship (RID+I)

This year's junior presenters

Tori Dwyer
Garrett Phelps 
Janik Olszewski
Charles Hetletvedt
Samson Mass
McKenzie Covington
Joeb Wuethele
Louise Rozewicz

Two seniors from last year's pitch event cohort — Anna Reinhardt and Jacob Meyer returned this year as commercialization candidates — each received a one-year co-working membership at Startup Zoo in downtown Kalamazoo, valued at $2,500, and are now eligible for up to $10,000 in additional support from the RID+I venture development fund.

A pipeline, not a competition

What distinguishes this program from a typical pitch competition is what happens after the event ends. Students leave with next steps, mentors, co-working space, legal pathways through the university's IP process, and a growing network of community partners invested in their success.

The ambition, for the program's founders, is something larger than any single venture: to build an intentional, sustainable pipeline for student talent and innovation in Kalamazoo. One that treats design as a force capable of generating real economic and social value and that also treats students not as competitors vying for a prize, but as builders being developed into something the world actually needs.

Year two suggests the model is working.