August 31, 2016 at 6:30 PM EDT
It’s back-to-school season, but these students have taken their brainstorming outside the classroom to solve pressing, real-life problems. Visit a competition where teams of student inventors pitch their entrepreneurial ideas to guests posing as investors, who vote on the best startup ideas. Special correspondent Cat Wise reports from Portland, Oregon.
Kinnos was founded in December 2014 by three Columbia undergraduates Jason Kang ‘16ENG, Katherine Jin ‘16CC, Kevin Tyan ‘16CC in response to the Ebola crisis. We discovered that thousands of people were being infected due to ineffective decontamination — current disinfectants like bleach lack the ability to fully cover surfaces and cannot be easily visualized. This is a problem that affects not only healthcare workers and patients in epidemics, but in everyday decontamination situations as well, ranging from hospitals to transportation agencies to military biodefense. [Read Their Story Here].