Gilmour Student Tackles Global Issues Through UN Innovation Challenge

Three students in Ms. Kendall White’s Entrepreneurial Mindset course — Wyatt Gerber ’26, Ayden Smelko ’28 and Danny Yuhas ’27 — were nominated for and recently participated in the UN SDG Innovation & Entrepreneurship Challenge, hosted by Ycenter and the Veale Foundation at Ashland University. They were sponsored by the Veale Foundation. The immersive two-day workshop was held at Ashland University’s Dauch College of Business. It invited high-school innovators to tackle complex global challenges using human-centered design and entrepreneurial thinking, culminating in team pitches to a panel of business and sustainability experts.

Ayden said that he joined the program to “learn about entrepreneurship and design thinking while working on real-world problems” — and that he quickly found both the pace and collaboration exhilarating. The students’ team developed EcoForecast AI, a startup concept designed to help companies reduce waste by predicting consumer demand so that products are produced only in the quantities that will actually sell, preventing excess goods from ending up in the ocean.

The team presented their project to a panel of experts, who provided feedback which helped them refine their solution to make it more realistic and scalable.