Alanna Gillis

Opinions Editor

amg7393@psu.edu

Innovation Commons here on campus is a great way for students to gain real-world experience, and in more ways than one. A brilliant example of this was when Behrend students helped a local entrepreneur, Jonathan Meighan, plan and create dog toys for his company, One Leg Up. Meighan works with Lake Erie Rubber, and created the One Leg Up company because he wanted to diversify the products he produced. “Also, I just like dogs,” he said, “and pets, and I figured out that other toy brands were being made on the same type of equipment that we have here. The pet industry is a great industry to be in.”

Three now-graduated Behrend students were involved in the process from creation to completion. John Nowakowski, Aaron Smith, and Quinlan Barnes were all valuable members of the initiative. 

Meighan sought out the Open Lab here at Behrend while trying to diversify his company’s customer base. Meighan says that his company was a small company, and didn’t have the resources themselves to create this project. “That’s why we reached out to the Behrend group,” he explained. 

The students “acted as the engineering group of the company.” Meighan said, “Where strategically I could bring an idea in and then collaboratively we take that idea from just a sketch on a piece of paper and then turn it into a physical model.” Nowakowski echoed Meighan’s statement, saying that his part in the process was taking the idea from drawings to three-dimensional models. Smith’s part in the process involved finishing the work Nowakowski had started. He took over finishing the fire hydrant product once Nowakowski graduated. 

All-in-all the process took about a year until products hit the shelves of over 100 retail outlets. It only took the team one day to draw up the models. “But then, things kind of fluctuate when we’re working in the lab,” Nowakowski said, “all of the sudden you’re working on one job and then you’re working on three.” Going from the initial design to the finalized prototype only took the team two months. From there, the team worked on perfecting the smaller details. “It was another three or four months before we really got it into production,” Meighan explained, “It was probably about six months from when we started to actually producing a product.”

Meighan said that his favorite part of the process was seeing a real product come off of the press. “It’s pretty neat to see an idea we had go from literally just an idea to an actual, real product,” he said. Both Nowakowski and Smith echoed this sentiment. 

The most difficult part of the process is where the group understandably had different feelings. For Meighan, as the founder and CEO of the company, it was writing the very large, very expensive purchase order. “Yeah, John and I didn’t have as much at stake as him,” said Smith. For Nowakowski and Smith, the most difficult aspect of this project came in the modeling phase. “Just the tweaks and fine tuning to get it where it is. I’d say trying to get the logo in the right place and be centered and play with that, and then just some of the fine-tuning of the design,” Nowakowski said, “Just some of the funky little angles you gotta do in the design work, actually, that was some of the most difficult parts.” 

While the toys have only been “moderately successful” in Meighan’s own words, the “project as a whole was incredibly successful”. He claimed that part of the reason he feels this project was successful was because of the amount of jobs he was able to create because of it. “You’re looking at at least a couple jobs in Erie related to this project because we were able to add this additional work that we probably wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. To me, that’s a big win.” 

Just because these toys have hit the shelves does not mean that the Open Lab and Innovation Commons here at Behrend is done with them. Testing and prototyping for the products still occurs here, as well as some other very interesting projects. In fact, Behrend students, through the Commons, are helping to design parts for a particle accelerator. The students are designing a vacuum seal for Cornell University’s particle accelerator. Students “are reverse engineering these parts, because we’re pretty sure they’re at least 60 years old,” says Meighan, “They’re all deformed, they’ve all been used, and so we’re making 3D prints and then we’re shipping them to Cornell for review. It’s been pretty tedious, but I think it will be pretty exciting.” 

On the topic of Innovation Commons, Meighan said that “If it was not for the laboratory, we would have never designed and produced dog toys out of this company. And if it wasn’t for this lab, we would have never taken on the Cornell particle accelerator project. For small manufacturers in the Erie community, it helps us do things as if we were a larger company than we really were.” As far as student perspectives, Nowakowski said that it was a “great experience and a great time being able to work on a project that came to fruition,” and Smith agreed. “It was a win-win situation.”