Ford, who graduated fromÌęÌęwith his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2014, has been a self-proclaimed maker his entire life. Now, as a senior design engineer at with his Steady Scope technology moving to production, he can call himself an inventor.

Manzella, who graduated from with his master’s degree in business administration in entrepreneurship, is a senior digital marketing specialist at FirstBuild, where he established their revolutionary Blitz Process for idea development which helped Steady Scope become a reality. Manzella also is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at UofL, where he mentors student-led start-ups, provides support for initiatives at the and teaches courses in management and entrepreneurship.

UofL News caught up with Ford and Manzella to learn more about their accomplishment and how their time at UofL helped fuel their passion for entrepreneurial creativity and innovation.

UofL News: What is Steady Scope and what makes it different from other fish-finding technology on the market?

Ford: Steady Scope is a gyro-stabilized transducer mount. And that’s just a complicated way to say, it’s a pole that turns. But what’s unique about Steady Scope is that it’s a solution to a problem that came about with the advent of forward-facing sonar in fishing around 2018. Traditionally, fish finders were just a cone that would go downward. I like to use the analogy of an underwater flashlight. If you just shine it straight down, it doesn’t really matter if you turn because your flashlight is just a downward cone, but when you face that flashlight forward, like the headlights on your car, they have to shine in the direction you want to see. So, Steady Scope keeps your sonar facing in the direction you are wanting to see no matter how much your boat is moving with the wind or the wave.

As a fisherman myself, I was adopting this new technology, which led me to look for something to buy and put on my boat, but there wasn’t anything that actually solved the problem. The options that were out there for what was essentially a pole that turned were $700 to $900, which were ridiculous prices for the technology. So, we immediately identified that there was room for a high margin product in the space where the technical feasibility was pretty easy to accomplish.Ìę

UofLNews: FirstBuild is typically known for its home appliances, so how did the idea for a fishing product come to fruition?

Manzella: Something that’s amazing about FirstBuild is that we are here to explore new markets for GE appliances. While Steady Scope is definitely not a typical appliance, it kind of fits into GE’s mission to “enable happiness and wellbeing in every home.” Gus was able to use our Blitz Process, which is how we validate that anyone cares about these new invention ideas. It involves a lot of what we call customer discovery, or going out and talking to real customers at the very early stages of idea development to make sure that these people actually care about what you’re working on.

I’ll be honest, when Gus first explained Steady Scope to me, I didn’t understand it at all, but he did such a great job of going out and performing customer discovery and engaging with the fishing community that the data he gathered was irrefutable. The people were so excited about this product that Gus knew that he had a winning idea early on.

UofL News: What was your process for customer discovery and what kind of response did you receive?

Ford: At FirstBuild, our whole mission is co-creation. So, I initially put out some Facebook posts with some CAD (computer-aided design) drawings and kind of verbally described what the idea was, and the response was lukewarm. But then I posted a video of me just holding a 3D-printed prototype in my kitchen and rotating it and – Boom! – people actually understood it. Once the idea was understood, it kind of went viral. That rough video shared on my personal Facebook page – not even backed by FirstBuild – was liked and shared with hundreds of comments on it.

UofL News: Does the feedback you receive during customer discovery influence product development or design?

Ford: Absolutely! When we shared it on the FirstBuild YouTube channel, we started getting a lot of feedback about different control options and mounting applications. That feedback drove us to try to create a universal product that would work for multiple applications beyond my initial scope. That is FirstBuild’s process of co-creation. Being very open and forthright with your development process let’s people kind of guide you and help identify a market that you didn’t initially target.

While Steady Scope started as a 20-foot bass boat type product, it has grown into a product that is more or less universal. Kayak fishing is growing to be a pretty big market segment, so coming up with a solution that fit all those different consumers not only expanded our markets and sales potential, but also helped us develop our product to be more of a universal fit for everyone.

UofL News: At FirstBuild, what is the process for launching new products, like Steady Scope?

Manzella: When we launch new products, we want to have confidence that there is enough demand for the product to justify launching it. So, we try to understand how large the market is through some very in-depth data and analytics and then set an appropriate crowdfunding goal from there. Part of the goal is usually used to justify the cost of tooling up the product – ‘What is it going to take to manufacture this product?’ And then another part of the goal is that we really want the community to pull this product into the market, not just us pushing it into the market. So, we want to make these goals kind of challenging to the point where there is a high enough volume that customers are pulling the product from us.

UofL News: Now that Steady Scope met its crowdfunding goal, what’s next?

Ford: We are moving toward production. We’re finishing our validation and starting to work with our micro-factory, which is largely student labor. It’s basically any college-age students, but we get a lot of UofL students. We do low volume production and house. The unique thing about FirstBuild is we can take an idea from prototype to production right here. So, that’s where we are now. We are putting together our manufacturing plan, shipping and logistics, starting to cut tools and get the manufacturing process ready, so that we can start delivering these this year.Ìę

UofL News: Is there anything else you all would like to mention?

Manzella: Sure. We have a fully functional micro-factory at FirstBuild and many students, specifically UofL engineering students, come to FirstBuild to work in our micro-factory, which provides a lot of hands-on experience. We’d love to see more UofL students working on projects in our free Makerspace, because it is a resource right here on campus.

Ford: Go Cards! And go fishing!

by Karen Coombs, Office of Communications & Marketing

“The alum, she talked about her experiences in leadership at GE Aviation, and she kept repeating they needed engineers who could communicate,” said Reinersman. “I thought, ’Well I can communicate and I could learn the technical information, and I would be filling a need.’”

From there, she attended a GE Explore Engineering series through her school that further piqued her interest in the field.

“They just did a really good job of explaining the types of engineering and the roles that they had within the company,” she said. “I also liked the idea of having a professional career where I would dress up to go to work and interact with clients and apply technical knowledge.”

A native of Northern Kentucky, Reinersman graduated Speed School in 2021 with her BS in Mechanical Engineering. She is now pursuing her Master’s in ME as well, with an anticipated graduation in July 2022. She will also have completed an Environmental Engineering Certificate. Reinersman will be one of the first students to graduate focusing on the newly offered Global Engineering Track.

As part of that focus, she traveled to Germany as a foreign exchange student in high school and participated in an International Service Learning program in Peru in 2019. In addition, the track requires 30-plus hours of cultural growth and awareness activities, and six credit hours on cultural diversity. Reinersman is also the current president of Engineers Without Borders & Water Professionals Joint Chapter.

She said her experience in Peru solidified her avid interest in water and sanitation issues, while she also learned lessons about the nature of community.

“We were working with a nonprofit organization called the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development, and they just had an amazing working relationship with the community, living there full time in Peru and learning the native language,” said Reinersman. “They respected the community and they worked really hard to gain and maintain that trust, and because of that, they were able to fully understand the context of the issues that the community was experiencing, the history on how those issues came about, and could truly work together as a team to solve those problems.”

Between participating in regional Engineers Without Borders conferences and attending Water Professionals conferences, Reinersman said those experiences influenced her decision to focus on water.

“Ultimately, everyone needs clean water and it’s a huge impact on peoples’ quality of life,” she said.

Currently working as a part-time researcher at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute, Reinersman recently accepted a full-time job at HDR Engineering for August 2022, a job she said is in her ‘dream industry.’

“Part of the reason I was able to get that offer was because of the Environmental Engineering certificate,” she said. “I am looking forward to moving back home to the Cincinnati area to make a difference in the water sector there.”

Reinersman said Speed School has given her opportunities and skills that shaped her career path. She remembers coming as a freshman to her student orientation at Speed School and immediately feeling at home.

“UofL is a great school; it’s small, but still has all of the big school perks. There’s a sense of family, like we’re all in this together,” she said. “[The Speed School has] given me confidence to move forward with my plans and dreams.”

From 2015 to 2020, Salas served in the U.S. Navy as a Culinary Specialist onboard the Los Angeles Class Attack Submarine the USS Newport News. In spring of 2021 Salas enrolled in UofL’s Mechanical Engineering program as a sophomore.

During his five-year Navy career, Salas earned two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement medals: the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and the Global War on Terror Expeditionary Medal. Although he cited his proudest decoration as earning the coveted Submarine “Dolphin,” signifying his expert knowledge about every system on-board the submarine. While serving on the Newport News he deployed twice, including visits to Scotland, Gibraltar, and Diego Garcia.

Salas has been a UofL fan since he and his family moved to Louisville when he was seven. From that point on, he knew he wanted to attend UofL to study engineering.Ìę

He is a proud member of UofL’s Formula SAE team, an engineering design competition to design and produce a prototype race car for prospective investors. While the goal of the season is producing a competitive race car, there are many more aspects of the project than simply design and production.

Salas envisions using his Mechanical Engineering degree to pursue a career with the motorsports divisions of BMW, Toyota or Porsche.Ìę

UofL celebrates Salas’ service in the U.S. Navy in recognition of the 246th birthday of the U.S. Navy on October 13.Ìę

Story written by Kyle Hurwitz, UofL’s director of Military and Online Initiatives.Ìę

Seniors taking professor Gary Osborne’s mechanical engineering class were tasked with designing Capstone Projects and inventing prototypes to present during the end of the year showcase last weekend.

“It is a culmination of everything they learned in their undergraduate curriculum and how to go through and design a project from stage one,” Osborne said.

Local companies and organizations asked students to design products that could solve a company’s problem. For example, the UofL Police Department asked the students to develop a new, less expensive anti-theft bicycle alarm and tracker system. UofL engineering student Elizabeth Cross not only created a working tracker but may have also designed something that could be used beyond bicycles.

“It uses an easy-to-use smartphone application, so anyone with a smartphone can track any of their products whether it be a bike or a backpack or a car,” said Cross.

Check out some of the students’ stories below:

But this isn’t Silicon Valley — it’s a capstone class at the University of Louisville’s J.B. Speed School of Engineering, taught in two sections by Dr. Sundar Atre, of the mechanical engineering department, and Dr. Thad Druffel, of the Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research.

Enrolled students were put into teams, and told to build a startup company around a product. This semester, a few have even taken their products to competitions, including the statewide business plan competition, .

In Druffel’s section of the course, students built companies around solutions for renewable energy and energy efficiency. One student startup redesigned a solar-powered lithium ion scooter. Another developed a new way to cheaply and efficiently create bleach for medical facilities in third-world countries.

Druffel also included a handful of art and business students, plus mentors from the greater Louisville community to work alongside the engineers. He said working across disciplines prepares the students for real-world jobs that increasingly ask them to communicate with, rely on and learn from people with .

“There’s going to be a lot of people, and you have to learn, and learn really quick from them,” Druffel said. “We spend the first part of the course just talking about how you communicate as a team — and it’s serious.”

In Atre’s section of the course, teams were paired with graduate researchers to build companies around . Among other things, teams used 3-D printing to design custom surgical tools or bone implants. You can read more about Atre’s teams .

And for students who wanted to go further, Atre also offered to pay for the 10-week LaunchIt lean startup training program at UofL’s J.D. Nichols Campus for Innovation and Entrepreneurship downtown. Several students have taken him up on it.

“While entrepreneurship is not for everyone, I want to expose more of them to it,” he said. “Maybe some of them will take the next step.”

The course ends with a , where those in the industry are invited to see what the students have accomplished. The public portion of the event is from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on April 19 at the UofL Engineering Garage.