The goal of this project was to discover more intricate aspects of the wedding planning industry as well as learn more about what it takes to get started in wedding planning, then apply this knowledge to the launch of my own company. I conducted research of the wedding planning industry throughout the United States then moving to Arizona and later to the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. I discuss the importance of wedding planners, the skills they bring as well as the knowledge they must have to offer their clients. Then I go into the launch of my company Maria Catherine Events and what the research means for my company launch.

In the current age of global climate crisis, corporations must confront the rising pressure to mitigate their environmental impacts. The goal of this research paper is to provide corporations with a resource to manage waste through the implementation of a circular economy and by increasing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Navigating this large and complex system required the use of various methodologies including: the investigation of the relationships between waste management systems and sustainable development across major companies; literature reviews of scholarly articles about CSR, circular economies, recycling, and releases of company reports on sustainable development and financials. Lastly, interviews and a survey were conducted to gain deeper insight into the problems that make circular economies so difficult to achieve at scale.

This paper will analyze the growth of a student-founded business as a result of ASU entrepreneurship resources and in-depth market analysis. Promotional merchandise is any product branded with a logo or slogan and distributed at little or no cost to promote a brand, corporate identity, or event. The market size is $24.7 billion with temporary tattoos accounting for $716.3 million of this market. The typical promotional product supplier does not specialize solely in one product and often has minimum orders of 500 tattoos or greater. The format to purchase has a single logo submission forum and no option to customize the design further.
Millennials" aged 18-36 make up the largest consumer group in history. Traditional promotional products offered by businesses are not resonating with young adults who are driven by engaging experiences. Festival Ink provides a “promotion that sticks”, selling temporary tattoos specifically designed with millennials in mind. Temporary tattoos are a wearable promotional product that are cost-effective, eco-friendly, and interact with a customer for up to three days. The arrangement of this thesis is as follows: The arrangement of this thesis is as follows: Chapter 1 will take a look at the history of temporary tattoos as well as provide background information on Festival Ink. Chapter 2 explores market research and validation including target market and competitive analysis. Chapter 3 follows the seed funding process and pitch materials featured in Venture Devils pitch playoffs and demo day as well as founder feedback. Chapter 4 will address web development and practical marketing techniques. Finally, Chapter 5 will conclude with the future of the business and practical lessons from ASU classes and resources.

Innovation Space is Arizona State University’s capstone style project in which upper division students gain real experience in the startup and product development world by solving real-world problems. These problems were presented to my team by sponsor; LG Electronics. Innovation Space uniquely offered an interdisciplinary glance into “real life” in the months before college graduation. Students are placed on teams with designers, engineers, sustainability majors, and business majors to better reflect the real world. As a business student of this program, I was able to gain and share knowledge from my teammates’ distinct backgrounds; as well as gain the interdisciplinary experience that is key to a college education, specifically to a business student. LG Electronics, our sponsor, brought our team the task of expanding their product line in their “wind comfort” business unit. LG Electronics has created a lighter, more efficient motor for a fan; likely as an answer to their dominating fan competitor, Dyson. LG Electronics wanted to see what our team could do to alter the way people cool their homes, and we responded with three original ideas: a modular, non-centralized A/C unit; a hands-free hair dryer; and a portable 360 degree fan. Our team developed the latter product, and named it Torus. The product was developed over the course of August 2018 to May 2019, ending in a working prototype formally presented to the sponsor and industry professionals. On top of this project, I was directed to also analyze the Innovation Space program for its benefits and drawbacks to a business degree from the W.P. Carey School of Business.

I'm a business major. As a matter of fact, I don't have a lot of opportunities to participate in projects where I can design and build things as my engineering friends do. In fact, I'm not good at building things. And perhaps that's why I soon figured out that Engineering school isn't for me. But business alone seems to be not enough; I crave for something new and exciting and there is nothing more satisfying than seeing a design on paper becoming a tangible product in hands. For that reason, I decided to join InnovationSpace after learning about the program from my professor and my friends who were in the program. My goal through the program is to deliver a product that people find useful, and hopefully, has an impact on their lives.

“InnovationSpace is an entrepreneurial joint venture among the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, W.P. Carey School of Business and the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. The goal […] is to develop products that create market value while serving real societal needs and minimizing impacts on the environment. Put simply, we seek to create products that are progressive, possible and profitable. At the same time, they must have a meaningful impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. InnovationSpace utilizes two fundamental strategies for creating sustainable innovation: a model of new product development known as Integrated Innovation and the emerging field of biomimicry.” — InnovationSpace program syllabus

The focus of the project outlined by Cisco is “to understand the needs of people who face physical, cognitive or sensory disabilities, and develop new products and services for them utilizing the potential of the new technologies called the Internet of Things.” In other words, I am challenged to leverage the Internet of Things technologies to develop a device that benefits individuals with disabilities.
 
The final product is an automated airport cart — Chariot. Based on stakeholders’ needs interviews, we find that visually impaired people experience difficulties navigating the airport when they need to travel. Many airports attempt to solve this problem by offering wheelchair. However, visually impaired people feel that they are treated unfairly and become dependent on the wheelchairs. Chariot strives to solve this problem by applying the same concept in autonomous vehicle to guide the users through the airport. The users receive their itinerary email that will link to the Chariot app on their phones. When they arrive at the airport, the users simply connect their phones with Chariot and information such as gate number and departure time will be updated in the cart so that Chariot can guide the users to the desired destination. Ultimately, Chariot aims to give visually impaired people more control over their lives.

This project was completed as part of the InnovationSpace collaborative thesis, an entrepreneurial joint venture program that allows students to develop products that create market value while serving societal needs. This collaborative thesis was done in a team of students from various disciplines under the sponsorship of Cisco Systems, and the goal was to develop an assistive technology project for the disabled that incorporated the internet of things (IOT). This project was broken out into several different phases. Initially, the team came up with a variety of ideas based on our market research. We narrowed down the ideas to a list of three potential products and built a business model and prototype for each of them seen in phase 5. After reviewing them further, we ultimately selected the MecX, an assistive technology designed to increase physical activity for a disabled person. We built a working prototype for this product and created a full design with all stakeholders in mind. Once this was done, we ran surveys to test the feasibility of our product to its demographic. Finally, we presented this product to a panel of judges and sponsors.

The attached files show the business write-up from phases 5, 6, and 7 from the project followed by a personal reflection.

Leagle LLC will be a cloud-based case management software company that helps local governments manage their hectic case loads. Leagle LLC will be wholly owned by another LLC and run by two of its co-owners. One will earn a bachelor’s degree in Business Law in May of 2019, while the other holds a degree in Accounting and has over eight years of corporate financial experience.
Leagle LLC will operate in a very niche market with low barriers to entry. The information contained in the full business plan is highly valuable. This is the reason that only the summary of the business plan that was created as the honors thesis will be published. The details regarding sales forecasts, marketing strategies, and trade secrets are highly sensitive and could lead to the compromise of Leagle LLC’s future business and its parent company’s current business. Leagle LLC’s parent company currently works in a market closely related to the market Leagle LLC seeks to penetrate and it wishes to remain anonymous until this plan is realized.

LeagleCMS will be an online based application accessible from Leagle LLC’s website. Users will login to their account and be redirected to their dashboard, where whatever abilities assigned to them by the administrators in the target market are listed. These abilities include creating and editing user info, including administrator profiles and regular profiles. The ability to generate reports based on different data ranging from revenue collected to number of specific violations per month. LeagleCMS will also include an authoring system based off of its parent company’s current technology that allows users to generate a document from a pre-made template. One of LeagleCMS’s key values is operating in the cloud. All data will be stored on an encrypted cloud-based server hosted by Amazon Web Services. Users will access their data through LeagleCMS. This way, users can work from whatever operating system or device they choose.

Nonlinear pricing is a term that looks at the relationship between price and quantity. Normally firms bundle breakfast cereals together and then sell them at least a price that is a third of the single unit price. This shows a lack of linearity between the price and the quantity. Most of the breakfast cereal brands like Kellogg’s , Post and others employ nonlinear pricing schedules as a way of motivating consumers to purchase their products. They use these methods to increase their product sales and boost profits respectively. An example of nonlinear pricing is when a consumer is given an option to buy two boxes of cereal and get and the third one for free.
According to Market Watch (10/08/2018), 85% of breakfast cereal brand companies use the nonlinear pricing model. This is a very popular and competitive market strategy used by other companies as well. The purpose of this thesis is to therefore evaluate the effectiveness of the nonlinear pricing strategy popular in the breakfast cereal industry, as well as ascertaining whether this strategy fosters loyalty amongst cereal consumers. I have always wondered if breakfast cereal companies that use nonlinear pricing models shortchange themselves by recycling their own customers instead of attracting new ones. To respond to that question, l used data from the breakfast cereal industry for the year 2017. This data received integrity research and assurance approval at Arizona State University . Moreover, the study used breakfast cereal data as the backbone of the analysis because consumption of breakfast cereals happens throughout the year and breakfast cereals have a longer shelf life. The data is based on receipt uploads from over 400,000 users of the Omni panel website. My goal with the thesis is to evaluate the effectiveness of nonlinear pricing schedules in relation to increasing sales and fostering customer loyalty. At the end of the study, l would like to have developed a strong and data-based opinion on why consumers choose the breakfast cereal they purchased and also on the relationship between nonlinear pricing and consumer loyalty. I hope to use my findings to propose a better model which, if used by these businesses, can enable them to generate more returns and cultivate customer loyalty.

After traveling to both Germany and Austria and attending traditional festivals such as Oktoberfest in Munich and the famous Christkindl Markets in Salzburg and Innsbruck, we were both inspired by our cultural and culinary experience. This also fostered confusion as to why German and Bavarian cuisine was an underrepresented food category in the U.S.

We completed in depth secondary research, focusing on environmental trends (social, economic, technological, political/legal, and natural) that affect the business environment in America, as well as produced a current market analysis of the American restaurant industry. This market analysis includes the discovery and evaluation of the history of the American restaurant industry, its evolution, its forecasted trends, and more specifically, taking a closer look at the nearly visible presence German cuisine establishments currently represent in America’s marketplace. By uncovering forecasted trends and determining the important presence the restaurant industry holds in America’s economy, we confirmed that designing and opening a German inspired restaurant is a great investment in an industry that continues to grow and prosper.

Before settling on a concept, we tested three unique German inspired models. Option 1, Prost, uniquely resembles a bar. Prost is described as a very casual and spacious beer garden placing an emphasis on quality German beer and small shared plates or appetizers. In contrast, option 2, Geister Haus is described as an upscale sit down restaurant that not only provides a wide selection of beer, wine, and spirits, but also an extensive menu with traditional German plates. Geister Haus is meant to provide its consumers with the authentic German experience. Lastly, option 3, Das Good is a modern concept that creates a fusion of German and American culture by providing traditional German specialties with a twist.

After conducting a survey testing all three concepts, the feedback we received from our test subjects (41 individuals representing diverse demographics) confirmed that Das Good was the most interesting German inspired concept that they would most likely visit. However, Prost was a close second, and many respondents suggested a combination of the two concepts; that is how the finalized Das Good restaurant was formed. Das Good’s business plan includes:
Company mission and values centered around diversity, community, and celebration
Target consumer profile otherwise known as Jackson Nelson that represents the specific demographic and psychographic qualities of a potential consumer we intend to attract
Competitive analysis of three carefully selected primary competitors (The Yard at Culinary Dropout, Brat Haus, and Pedal Haus Brewery) located within the Valley
Beyond the details of our business plan, we placed an emphasis on the marketing campaigns and design aspects of Das Good. For example, we researched three specific locations in which we will consider to invest, and developed a full menu including item descriptions and prices. We focused on physical evidence of store blueprints including indoor seating and outdoor patio layout and explained the value of our community centered open floor plan. Finally, we crafted a two-fold marketing plan that integrates digital exposure via local influencers and customer engagement via prize-worthy games featured at music, arts, and food festivals.