13 Year Old Creates Hiccupop, Lollipops To Stop Hiccups

The New York Times:

To silence her stubborn hiccups during the summer of 2010, Mallory Kievman tried swallowing saltwater, making herself gag, eating a spoonful of sugar, sipping pickle juice and drinking a glass of water upside-down. Nearly two years and 100 attempted folk remedies later, the 13-year-old is preparing to lead a team of M.B.A. students from the University of Connecticut in building a company that can bring her invention — Hiccupops, or hiccup-stopping lollipops — to market this summer.

“It’s very rare, when you’re evaluating businesses, that you can envision a company or product being around 100 years from now,” said Danny Briere, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Startup Connecticut, which nurtures new companies, including Hiccupops, and is a regional affiliate of the Startup America Partnership. “Hiccupops is one of those things. It solves a very simple, basic need.”

Read the whole story at The New York Times

Comments

[blackranger]

09:54 AM on 05/04/2012

It is the young that come up with new and fresh ideas. The colleges are a terrific resource and we ought to make that resource available to more folks. If universities, particularly business programs, would interface with entrepreneurs, many new businesses might be created. it would also give the students a glimpse of the real world instead of starting them off with banking and the horrendous dishonesty involved. The excitement of giving birth to a business, or a product is the "high" in the business world, money is just the score in the game. In getting a degree in economics one of the most memorable exercises was cutting a city budget by 10 percent. We were given real city budgets to work with, without the names revealed. Among my proposed cuts was the position of "golf course architect" which, as the professor revealed to me, was the mayor's brother being handed a job. Now I live in a city that finances itself thru the utility company which they own, I wish I had access to students who could come in and help us find ways to finance the city which made more sense.