Goodyear sponsors college contest to create high IQ tires

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. imagines a world where it makes tires with high IQs – in a sense, recreating the wheel.
Does this mean there is a set of GeniusTred tires in your future? Or perhaps tires named SmartTred? BrainTred? How about Mensa Max?
Who knows? All smart-ass naming speculation aside, the Akron tire maker is turning to a Northeast Ohio university for help in exploring the future of tires with built-in intelligence.
Goodyear is sponsoring a design and innovation competition, the Goodyear Innovation Challenge, with the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University “to redefine the tire for the Internet of Things”. The “Internet of Things” means products, in this case tires, that can send and receive data.
The Goodyear-Weatherhead competition invites teams of four to five business school graduate students to submit an intelligent tire business case by Oct. 10. Five teams will get a chance to compete in a two-day hackathon at Case Western Reserve’s Larry Sears and Sally Zlotnick Sears think[box], a center for innovation and entrepreneurship.
“There is no question that you can improve vehicle performance by adding intelligence to tires. It’s already happening,” Jim Euchner, vice president of global innovation at Goodyear, said in a statement. “The question is what are you sensing, and how do you integrate that data with the vehicle in a way that adds value not only for the automaker, but also for the driver.”
Five team proposals will be selected to participate in the Nov. 10-11 hackathon in Cleveland. Students will be asked to design a service by validating user needs, brainstorming concepts, prototyping the best fit, and developing “back of the envelope” business model calculations.
Teams will have access to 3D printers, laser cutters and other equipment.
“We believe it is time to reinvent the wheel, literally!” the contest brief says in part. “We want your help reinventing tires in the digital economy so they become part of the connected world. ... What we mean by reinventing the tire is not to redesign a product but to rethink the user experience of mobility in a connected world for a company like Goodyear.”
This is not like a typical app development contest, Case Western Reserve design and innovation professor Youngjin Yoo said.
“We are seeing a moment where an industry is literally being reimagined,” Yoo said. “It is as real as it gets when it comes to digital innovation.”
Goodyear executives and Weatherhead professors will select the first, second and third place winners for awards of $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000, respectively.
The first place team will have the opportunity to interview for a position on Goodyear’s global innovation team.