News Roundup: Making the Most of Mangos

Can too many mangos ever be a bad thing? Turns out, the answer is yes, and entrepreneurial teams at WPI came up with some interesting ideas about how technology could address that challenge.

Mango-derived ethanol. Furniture, home accessories, and other goods made from 3-D printed mango fiber. Mango-derived water filtering materials. These were the potential solutions that nine WPI students enrolled in the WPI Business Development Lab’s Goat Innovators Summer Accelerator (GISA) submitted to the Mango Challenge, an entrepreneurial competition sponsored by the Centro de Innovación at the Ciudad del Saber in Panama.

The competition sought to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship that focuses on creative and practical solutions to problems related to the harvesting, processing, logistics, and use of abundant mangos in Panama. 

Although none of the WPI entries won, the contest proved to be a useful learning experience for students enrolled in the eight-week GISA program, which is designed for students who want to launch their own businesses, says Rosanna Garcia, Beswick Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in The Business School. 

“We focused the GISA teams on the Mango Challenge because the process of developing ideas for the competition helped them learn important lessons about starting a company,” Garcia says. “We wanted students to learn the importance of understanding their customers’ needs and the environments where those customers operate. By focusing on customers, whether it’s mango growers or someone else, students learned to start businesses and build technologies that can succeed in the marketplace.”

The central issue was to find technological solutions that could make the most of mangos grown in Panama, especially those not processed for consumption in Panama or for export.

The WPI students—a group that included undergraduates, graduate students, and a recent graduate—settled on ideas aimed at turning mangos into new products. One group proposed a business called MangO2 Energy, which uses fermented mango pits to produce ethanol that could be sold as fuel. A second group pitched Mango Bricks Panama, a start-up that would process mangos for fiber that could be turned into a sturdy and environmentally friendly material for 3-D printing custom housewares, décor, and even furniture. The third group proposed EcoMango Lab, which would use mango skins to produce a bio-adsorbent material for water filtration and purification.

The teams gained feedback about the viability of their proposals from Universidad Technológica de Panamá undergraduates who recently visited WPI during a trip to Massachusetts. The Panamanian students spent a day in early June at the Business Development Lab, reviewing the WPI teams’ business proposals and participating in practice business pitches.

—Lisa Eckelbecker