{"id":43226,"date":"2026-09-15T08:44:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=43226"},"modified":"2026-09-15T08:44:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:44:36","slug":"furman-students-take-on-bmw-as-catalyst-fellows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/furman-students-take-on-bmw-as-catalyst-fellows\/","title":{"rendered":"Furman students take on BMW as Catalyst Fellows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six hours is all the time Furman University students had on Feb. 20 to form teams, dissect a real-world problem and pitch a solution during the Next Big Idea, the Hill Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s biannual innovation challenge that pulls students from across campus into fast-paced, cross-disciplinary teams.<\/p>\n

For most participants, the day ended with a pitch, feedback and a great story to tell. For a handful of students, it was the start of something much bigger: a summer as BMW Catalyst Fellows.<\/p>\n

The Hill Institute selected top performers from Next Big Idea to spend the summer embedded with teams at BMW in the Upstate, tackling a live business challenge alongside company mentors. The specific problem the fellows worked on remains confidential, but the path they took to get there was anything but a straight line.<\/p>\n

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The Catalyst Fellows standing outside of the BMW facility in Greer, South Carolina.<\/p><\/div>\n

Natondi Mokeba \u201926, who graduated in May with degrees in health sciences and Chinese, signed up for Next Big Idea mainly to get outside his comfort zone and ended up on the winning team. Anastasia Sideris ’27, a business administration and Spanish major from Cleveland, Ohio, heard about the competition from Dr. Steven Stewart, the Robert E. Hughes professor of business and accounting, during his entrepreneurship class. She’d never done anything like it, but her energy that day caught BMW’s attention. Luana Kuehn Reis ’29, a business administration major from Santa Catarina, Brazil, said she was surprised to find herself tapped for the fellowship as a rising sophomore. “I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect,” she said. “I’m going into this and I’ll figure it out as I go.”<\/p>\n

Once the fellowship began, that figuring-it-out took the same shape for all three: interviews, and lots of them. The students talked with potential customers about their experiences, quizzed dealership staff and car buyers, sat down with hotel and restaurant workers to understand what quality service looks like far outside the automotive world.<\/p>\n

“I never thought I’d just walk into a business and ask if I could interview someone,” Reis said. “After that, I’m feeling much more confident just starting conversations with people I don’t know.”<\/p>\n

Sideris found the same lesson from a different angle, working alongside her collaborators to research how organizations deliver service well. “BMW took the time to invest in us, meet with us and mentor us,” she said. “We’re in college, we’re not automotive experts, but it felt like the perspectives we brought really helped them see a new way to deal with this challenge.”<\/p>\n

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Natondi Mokeba \u201926 listens during his time at BMW and the Catalyst Fellows.<\/p><\/div>\n

From there, the work moved into brainstorming, prototyping and a string of presentations, each one reshaped by fresh feedback. Reis drew on her economics coursework to build financial models behind her team’s proposal, all while wrestling with the thrilling reality that a billion-dollar company might put their ideas to work in its global sales strategy. Mokeba, meanwhile, settled into the role of team strategist, pressure-testing ideas and turning over every angle, a habit he expects will serve him well as he heads into a career in healthcare administration and consulting.<\/p>\n

All three credited the Hill Institute’s staff \u2013 Senior Director of Entrepreneurship Programs Eric Cooperman, Business Operations Manager Rachel Morris and Executive Director Bryan Davis among them \u2013 with pushing them past their first instincts. Dave Breeze, design lead at BMW, said the experience confirmed how well the Hill Institute\u2019s process aligns with BMW\u2019s approach to innovation.<\/p>\n

“They were true mentors throughout this experience, and pushed us to think beyond our initial approaches,” Mokeba said. Reis put it more simply: “They give you all the support you need and the autonomy to work on your own.”<\/p>\n

It’s that combination of real stakes, real mentorship, and the freedom to run with an idea that turned a six-hour pitch competition into a summer none of them expected, and a partnership BMW sees as a strong foundation for future opportunities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat discovery-first approach is essentially how we pursue new opportunities inside BMW, so the fit felt natural from the start,\u201d Breeze said. \u201cPairing academic curiosity with real business problems tends to produce sharper thinking than either side would get alone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three Furman students spent their summer as BMW Catalyst Fellows, using skills sharpened at the Hill Institute\u2019s Next Big Idea challenge to research and pitch solutions for the global automaker. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":389,"featured_media":43234,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21,3065,16,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-and-accounting","category-health-sciences","category-hill-institute-for-innovation-and-entrepreneurship","category-modern-languages-and-literature","category-top-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43226"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43256,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43226\/revisions\/43256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43234"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}