Just two years after Matthew Wilcox, Donovan Morrison and Wesley Youman created Luna Lights, they received a $50,000 investment to help launch their company—and they’re all under the age of 24.
The two 2014 McCormick graduates and one McCormick senior first met during a six-week Design for America (DFA) summer program in 2012. Luna Lights is an automated lighting system meant to prevent older adults from falling. Though it may seem that starting a successful company so young is a result of sheer luck, the team attributes most of its success to Northwestern and the resources it provided.
The team says DFA played the largest role in helping them develop the concept of Luna Lights. DFA, which started at Northwestern six years ago, is a network of student-led teams working together to solve social problems through human-centered design. It’s expanded to 21 universities nationally with more than 550 involved students, says Sami Nerenberg, DFA’s associate director.
After finishing the summer studio program, the Luna Lights team was introduced to Billy Banks, a DFA adviser and Northwestern adjunct professor who pushed them to think bigger.
“He and the other mentors we’ve been put in contact with through Northwestern have been paramount to our success. We couldn’t have been where we are today without them,” Morrison says.
In addition to the guidance mentors provided, Nerenberg says the overlap between DFA’s work and Northwestern’s curriculum makes the University a great resource.
“There’s always professors that want to help,” Nerenberg says. “It’s been a really neat process for [Luna Lights] to work on it as an extracurricular, but also find coursework and professors that can help them develop their product and business model.”
DFA offers sessions during the school year and a six-week summer program. Each student team is given a different social problem and has varying types of success. Nerenberg says some teams disband after their sessions, some fail to make solid prototypes and others don’t receive enough funding to get off the ground. However, launching a profitable company is not DFA’s end goal.
“In DFA we don’t measure our success by the number of startups, we measure our success based on the impact we’re able to make with our projects and our students as leaders,” Nerenberg says.
DFA is just one of the ways design projects emerge from Northwestern. Jeff Coney, the director of economic development for Northwestern’s Innovation and New Ventures Office, estimates 95 percent of the research at Northwestern is conducted by tenured faculty, who are not likely to quit their jobs to start companies. Instead, they sometimes work with students who are willing to make something of their findings.
“They need to find somebody to take the ball and run with it,” Coney says. “Somebody young who’s got some fire in the belly who doesn’t have a family and kids yet is a better profile.”
For Luna Lights, even though the odds of success may seem small, the team stays positive.
“We all really are passionate about this and really believe in it,” Youman says. “We see the risk, putting our lives into it, but we see that it will be worth it, and we think it’s a great opportunity.”