Innovation Quest is an event put on by the Cal Poly center for innovation and entrepreneurship. This event was created in 2004 by Cal Poly graduates to let students showcase their startups and businesses. Innovation Quest is essentially a competition with the winners sharing a 30,000 cash prize to go towards their businesses. This year the event was held virtually over zoom and it was also open to the public. The process of this year’s event started with an online submission where several finalists were announced. The finalists then pitched their businesses to a panel of judges. The judges then announced the winners of the event and handed out cash prizes.
Although this was not our group’s first choice, we were happy to cover Innovation Quest for the Intrepid. We were unsure of how the event was going to take place over Zoom. We did not know how we could talk to the competitors and someone who is involved with putting on the event. Yasel Hurtado, who was in charge of interviews and the written portion of the project, was able to make things work. She was able to get an interview with the first-place team, Fearless Fitness, and a judge from the competition, John Townsend.
“What I enjoyed most about this project was hearing each competing team’s pitch. The talent and innovation from each team were so exciting to watch. I can’t wait to see their ideas come to life!”, said Hurtado, considering what she appreciated most about the event.
Grace Smith was our videographer and due to the event being on Zoom, it was not easy to capture Innovation Quest on video. There was a lot of thought that went into what she could do to get enough footage from the event to make a video that encapsulated the entire experience.
“Doing video was a challenge because it’s not my best skill. There was also the extra challenge of having to create a video of an event that took place over zoom.”, Smith said when asked about how the process went. “There were a lot of obstacles, but I put in a lot of work and learned a lot in the process”. Although this was not her forte, Smith was able to screen record the event and gather enough B-roll to make a great video.
Ivy Yahnke took care of the interactive part of this project. Yahnke was able to imbed the social media of Fearless Fitness and pictures of the event from the Zoom meeting.
“I loved this project because it was very interesting to hear about the behind-the-scenes of this event”, Yahnke said when reflecting on her experience. “It’s also rare to know in-depth about competitions that other majors/departments participate in, so I really enjoyed learning more about the entrepreneurship side of Cal Poly.”
We think that we were able to cover this event to the best of our abilities. Even though there were many challenges that we faced we were able to find ways to accomplish our goals. I think the Intrepid will be pleased with our project and we hope that our coverage will promote this event to readers.