Virtual Elevator Pitch: Disruption or Opportunity?

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many on-campus activities worldwide in this Spring, and one of them was the annual elevator pitch competition at Stevens Institute of Technology. The circumstances required us to teach all the courses remotely, reexamine the competition rules, and enable teamwork and intense competition. The semi-finals and finals were traditionally held as 3-minute live pitches made in front of a panel of judges with a follow up of 3 minutes of question and answer period. Due to COVID-19, our university went entirely online after seven weeks of in-person classes in the Spring semester. While coaching can be online, the elevator pitch competition required a new format for the pitch competition. This paper will talk about our revised remote competition format that was utilized last year, and will be utilized this coming year. It will also report some of our results which included several benefits to the competition including enhancements to the judging rounds. Preliminary data analysis suggests that due to the judges' increased thoroughness, the total scores were lower than in previous years, as the judges drilled down deeper into each project. This paper provides an in depth understanding of how we decided to add a due-diligence phase into the semi-final and the final rounds of our elevator pitch competition for engineering students.