On Oct. 10 and 11, the Chicago Connectory hosted an IoT training facilitated by Kevin McQuown, the founder and principal engineer at Windy City Lab.

The training was integrated with a challenge that Bosch proposed earlier in the week. MBA students from University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business were challenged to conduct research and present a market entry analysis and strategy for Bosch IoT solutions provided by the Bosch IoT Ecosystem Project.

With only four days, the 17 students broke into four groups and conducted market research on Bosch, its competitors and IoT challenges in the market. Then, they created proposals, such as partnership programs with developers, partnerships with other companies and more.

During the IoT training with Kevin, the students had to create a connected device from scratch. Only one of the students had experience with programming, so almost all of the students had the opportunity to learn how to “create IoT.”

“I definitely liked the hands on thing. It was a lot of fun and something that I never got to do before,” said Brian McCrillis, an MBA student from Notre Dame “You always hear about things like IoT – actually getting hands on to see how it works and what can be done with it is completely different from reading about it.”

“All students did very well. By the end of the class they were doing a mood/status dial that can be controlled by an app and also a motion detective with push notification to their phone,” said Kevin McQuown.

The final presentation was held on Thursday afternoon and was presented to Bosch and Chicago Connectory representatives. Chicago Connectory members were encouraged to watch the presentations as well.  

“It was impressive, to see what the four different groups of students were able to come up with in short time. There were many interesting ideas, some that verify our own thoughts and other possibilities we have not considered,” said Martin Orgill, IT Manager at Bosch. “I was impressed with the level of detail in research and financials that some of the groups displayed. For sure the insights gained will be helpful to determine short to midterm strategic actions. I look forward to another such event.”

Watch the livestream from the event in HERE.