Finalists at the ASAC 2025 Spark Tank will have no more than 180 seconds to convince a panel of judges and the audience that they deserve to win:
$3,500 for faculty / $1,500 for student
Here’s how it works…
Finalists selection process
Abstracts of conference best paper and best student paper award winners (those who had opted in when submitting) will be blind reviewed by the Spark Tank Finalist Selection Committee.
The committee, made up of board members, ASAC members and representative(s) from industry, will review and score the 120-word abstracts of winners based on the following criteria to determine the finalists:
- Innovation: Your innovative approach to research to solve a key problem in your field.
- Potential impact: The potential impact your research has had or will have in the area of your research topic. Keep in mind that impact can mean many different things. It boils down to solving a problem. What problem does your research address, and how well does it help solve that problem.
- Suitability: How suitable is this research for the intended format and purpose of the competition.
The competition
Finalists will each have a total of 180 seconds for their Spark Tank pitch. This isn’t your typical academic presentation and finalists won’t be judged on the merits of their research—they’ve already won an award, we know it’s good!
We want to hear the story. What drove this research? How does this research make an impact? Bonus points for those who can tie in the conference theme, telling us how your research innovated to find solutions.
Finalists will be judged based on their ability to tell a good story, entertain and captivate the judges and the audience.
Winners will be selected based on a combination of judges scores and audience voting.
Presentation criteria
The judges and audience members will give each finalist a score out of 10 based on the following criteria. The judges scores will be combined and averaged for half of each finalists total score, the other half will be the average of the audience’s scoring.
Presentation
- Audience Engagement: How effectively does the presenter engage the audience?
- Creativity and Originality: Does the presentation offer a unique and creative approach?
- Story Arc: Is there a compelling and clear narrative structure to the presentation?
Impact
- Need: Does the presenter clearly articulate the need they sought out to address?
- Approach: Does the presenter make a good case for how they approached and conducted the research?
- Impact: Does the research move the dial based on the problem they identified? How well does it move the dial?
Bonus: Innovation
Does the presenter highlight how they innovated in their research, or how their research leads to new ways for innovation.
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