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The bane of bicyclists is the flat tire and a thief. AirLock, a combination lock and tire pump both secures the bike and spares the cyclist from getting stuck with a flattened tire. It was this year's winner of Pitch George, the entrepreneurial competition organized by the GW Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence in the School of Business. The pitch competition is embedded in entrepreneurship classes though open to any student who wants to test their ability to come up with viable business ideas.

First-year student Teddy Jack said he and GW alumnus Joe Edell, J.D. '09, a patent attorney, decided to enter Pitch George after meeting at a seminar offered by the GW Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, part of GW's entrepreneurship ecosystem along with GWSB CFEE.

Edell had been working on and testing the handy prototype, a steel cable encased in solid clear plastic tubing that has an air pump attached at the end. A survey of cyclists they conducted in the Washington, D.C., area found that 70% of cyclists carry a lock, and 60% thought a pump would be useful. AirLock saves the costs and weight of having on hand two separate and often heavy items-a standalone pump, and a lock.

Jack said they had a clear advantage over other pitches because they had a physical product with an excellent product-problem fit, a low-risk manufacturing process and transparent costs that was basically ready to go. First-place winners carry a $3,000 award.

"If you told me a few months ago, hey you would be winning a pitch competition, I would be like, 'Are you talking about the same person?'" said Jack, a political science and biotechnology major who wants to become a patent attorney.

The second-place $2,000 winner was the Fairwell Student Cleaning Service, great for students facing midterms amid the chaos of unmade beds, a laundry pile and overflowing waste cans. And an economic opportunity for GW students seeking work.

Hiba Ahmed had mulled over the idea since she was a first-year student, she said, since her peers marveled at how clean she kept her room and was disciplined enough to lend herself out-for a price.

"Seeing and engaging my demand as an individual cleaner, obviously it was something that I did if I had time ," she said. "It was a big joke among my friends. I had friends who had their parents come up here and clean their rooms!"

For Pitch George it was a problem-solving exercise for "my peer population to develop the business model," she said. The sophomore finance major worked with a team in her entrepreneurial class that included first-year students Zoe Papacostis, a business and entrepreneurship major, and Ayaan Gandhi, an entrepreneurship and innovation major, and Bahar Nahandast, a junior entrepreneurship and innovation major.

They researched companies like TaskRabbit and other cleaning services to gauge the price of services, number of cleaners and billable hours they would need to maintain a flat rate of $50 per service, an amount below the current market rate.

"The undergraduate population is a mix of economic backgrounds that our initial marketed efforts will be toward," Ahmed said, "and there is the potential to market directly to parents."

For now, it's just an idea. The cost of capitalization, about $150,000, is prohibitive, "but just from the weeks we have worked on it, people are curious as to whether it is going to start or not," she said.

For the brilliant students who have skills and expertise to share, or others frustrated by online courses that fall short of what they promise, the third-place $1,000 winner proposed LearnLoop, a university-based platform that would offer peer-to-peer learning.

In his pitch, Kosma Chelkowski, a first-year international affairs major minoring in entrepreneurship and innovation, offered as an example a student who has a talent in design and is interested in sharing her skills but can't through platforms such as EdTech, Future and SkillShare because she has no formal experience or certification.

"Skillshare is a hassle to learn from. It's not one-on-one, and it's expensive. It is just another video. You pay for a course, but you don't get personalized sessions with a teacher," he said.

His teammates, Kade Reavis, a junior entrepreneurship and innovation major, Aaron Tyler a senior majoring in computer science, and Murad Hassan, a junior finance major, helped develop LearnLoop, figuring out the cost of software that would include a review system like Uber's to ensure quality and build credibility, and deliver free lessons through the university instead of selling it directly to students if a pilot proved viable. It would allow young professionals to teach for credit and earn certificates that would be transferrable.

"LearnLoop would build that proof. We're the springboard," said Chelkowski, who thinks young people learn better from someone their own age, a pairing that he thinks reduces social anxiety.

Chelkowski said the class he took with Kathy Korman Frey, director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence in GW Business, prepared him for the Pitch George competition. "Theguest speakers she brought into our class gave us an insider's view of what a successful venture requires and what judges actually look for," he said. "We refined our venture idea after every new speaker and every tip she gave us. Without that guidance, we definitely would have walked into Pitch George feeling lost."

Awards of $500 each went to five other independent and classroom teams. Winning teams also won one-hour marketing consulting sessions with GW student run company, Brand Capture, coaching sessions with RevTech, a GW organization that specializes in innovation, and gifts from GW alumni businesses, Talula's Kitchen and Pearlescent Candle Co.

Frey noted that year after year the Pitch George venture ideas "keep getting better."

"We're incredibly proud of our entrepreneurially minded students at GW," she said. "Whether they start their own venture, or work for an established company, the skills they hone in this competition are directly transferable to the workforce."