Students

Innovators: A professor's idea goes to market

The Innovators series profiles a special group of graduates: our Ph.D. alumni. Dawn Gregg (Ph.D. 2000) is on the faculty of the University of Colorado Denver Business School. There she teaches, conducts research and runs the Bard Center for Entrepreneurship as its interim director. In 2002 she combined her information systems knowledge to solve a close-to-home problem: she wrote software that allows the specialists who are involved in her son's therapy and education to share records and notes. Developing Minds Software is now a successful business with a unique story of how one educator teamed up with students to bring a needed application to market.

2011-06-30

The definition of innovator is trailblazer: "one who opens up a new line of research or technology." Through its doctoral program, the Department of information Systems has prepared a cadre of scholar/innovators, who are research leaders in universities across the nation. Their work enhances our understanding of the concepts behind information technology, and their new ideas move into the field to change and improve the way we do business. The "Innovators" series profiles these very special alumni. In her years as a graduate student at the W. P. Carey School and in the decade she has spent on the faculty of the University of Colorado Denver, Dawn Gregg has been a prolific researcher, authoring dozens of journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers. While she has followed a number of different research streams, her focus has consistently been on how to organize and maintain web-based content to meet the needs of business. So when she was getting her family ready to move several years ago and faced the prospect of packing up three or four boxes of records concerning her son's therapy, her thoughts turned to technology. The result: Gregg founded a company called Developing Minds Software, which produces a data collection and monitoring system used by special education schools across the United States and in three other countries. This was no ordinary entrepreneurial venture, however. Gregg made the business development of her idea into a class project. Two students from the original team continue to work alongside Gregg and her husband operating the company. And today, in addition to her teaching a research, Gregg heads the Bard Center for Entrepreneurship at her university. Academics Gregg got her start as an engineer, graduating from the University of California Irvine with a degree in mechanical engineering. She had been working as an engineer for more than a decade when she decided to continue her education. She enrolled in the MBA program at Arizona State University's west campus. Her interest in the way technology changes business led her to pursue her Ph.D. in the department of information systems. As an academic, Gregg has enjoyed great success both in the classroom and in her research, some IT groundbreaking. She was among the first researchers to recognize that software applications can advance from their traditional role of improving individual productivity to lifting what is known as the "collective intelligence? of organizations. Gregg was also one of the first to use eBay as an experimental laboratory. Comparing businesses on eBay, Gregg discovered that enterprises can reshape their images online, enabling them to attract more customers and to charge higher prices. Gregg joined the faculty at the University of Colorado in 2000. "I believe that understanding how programs are constructed and used is essential to being a capable information systems professional," she wrote in her statement of teaching philosophy. "This is more than understanding how specific programming logic is used. It involves understanding why we do certain things and when to choose one option over another. It is my goal for all my students that they develop the critical thinking skills necessary to apply concepts and techniques learned in my course to real problems they encounter in their jobs." Among the subjects she has taught are website development, web services, programming languages, and electronic commerce. Mentoring is a key element in her philosophy, so it's no surprise that she's the faculty advisor to the school's Information Systems Association  — an award-winning student group. And she has supervised or served on committees for 10 doctoral students. Her accomplishments as a researcher and a teacher have put her in the spotlight at her school. In 2008, the Business School at University of Colorado Denver gave her the Dean?s Scholar Award for best researcher of the year, and in 2005, the school named her the Outstanding Tenure Track Teacher of the Year. Developing minds software While she was building her academic career, Gregg was caring for her son, Daniel, who was diagnosed with autism at an early age and began therapy when he was two. Therapists visited her house every day and recorded his progress on sheets of paper, which were kept in three-ring binders. "We would fill a three-inch binder every four to six months," said Gregg. "When we were leaving Arizona to move to Denver, I had to think about whether I was going to move the three or four paper boxes full of data on my son's therapy." Data stored on paper, besides being difficult to move, soon become too unwieldy to be of much value in a child's special education plan. What she ultimately decided to do was to write a software program that could be used to store data so that information about her son's progress could be shared and analyzed by his therapists and teachers. "It was a fairly simple initial application — just a few data collection pages and simple reports that we could generate from the data," Gregg said. The software was a useful tool, but not a product at that point. Then in 2006, the members of the Information Systems Club voiced an interest in entering the next year?s business plan competition sponsored by the university's Bard Center, which promotes entrepreneurship in Denver and the Rocky Mountain region. The winning entry would receive a $10,000 prize. Gregg mentioned to the students in the club the software she had developed for her son as a possible commercial product. "The students thought that was a great idea," Gregg recalled. "It not only involved software, which the students all have expertise in, but as a program for special needs children, it is something that could help people." At first, nine students were part of the project, but three dropped out as the work became more demanding. "We met every Friday night," Gregg said. "We started meeting from 6 to 8, then it wound up going 6 to midnight. We did this for nine months right up to the business plan competition." The club didn't win the prize that year, but it did gain something perhaps more valuable: its first customer. As part of the competition, Gregg's student club filed incorporation papers for Developing Minds Software and also put up a marketing website. About a month later, a special education school in Pennsylvania asked to purchase the software. Gregg knew then that the company was viable. She and her students worked quickly to get it ready to grow. "The website had been on a $10 a month server," she said. "I worked almost around the clock to get it ready to be on a dedicated server that would be suitable for a commercial application." In the next year, the company got five more customers, including one from Denmark. Gregg and her club members decided to enter the business plan competition again in 2008. This time they won and received the $10,000 prize, which they put back into the enterprise. Gregg said that launching Developing Minds Software was a valuable educational experience for her and the students. "You learn about every aspect of the business, and you have to come up to speed quickly or you won't be successful," she said. As the company's business grew, Gregg had to re-write the simple program she had developed for her son. "I obviously had to make it so all of the data could be attached to different students because most schools serve more than one student," she said. "We've added hundreds and hundreds of pages for things like charts and graphs and other ways of analyzing data." For schools, the software has immediate advantages. "It is a way of sharing information," said Gregg. "Quite often these children have speech therapists and occupational therapists plus two or three aides working with them in the classroom. They're all working toward the same goal, but if you don't have some way of sharing the information, you may wind up working at cross-purposes." The software also helps schools comply with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires states and agencies to develop education plans for special needs children and document their progress. The company upgrades the software every few months, according to Gregg. "Usually the upgrade is based on suggestions from our clients. If they say they want to take data a certain way, we'll add a feature that allows them to change the way the data is collected." A rewarding venture Gregg runs company with her husband and former students Michael Erskine and Lynn Sargent. "We all work part-time for the company," said Gregg. "I think the future of the company is solid," Gregg said. "It's never going to be the next Google. The market just isn't large enough. But we have a fairly sizable portion of the market at this time, and I see our growth steadily increasing over the next 10 years." For Gregg, the venture has brought many rewards. "It really touches many aspects of my life," she said. "It's a personal project because of my son's autism. I've also been able to link two or three research projects to what I did in developing the software. I had a couple of papers published in academic journals." Daniel is now 18. In his years of therapy, he has made considerable progress, although he remains largely non-verbal. "I do feel he is much higher functioning than he would be if we hadn't consistently done therapy with him," Gregg said. "We are still taking data actively, and he's continued to make progress every day." July, 2011

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