Meet Benjamin D’Amour
As a second year graduate student, Benjamin D’Amour is more than motivated to get his ideas developed and run with them. He came to Generate this past semester with his big idea, TropoGarden. TropoGarden is an aesthetically pleasing, self-watering, self-lighting, contained environment to grow various plants or vegetables within the comforts of your own home and, most importantly, with little maintenance needed. With the goal of enabling even the most inexperienced gardener to grow and nurture their own fresh vegetables, Benjamin hopes that urban residents everywhere can experience the joy of growing your own produce that he has been able to grow up with from an early age.
Benjamin was born in western Massachusetts in agriculturally inclined community. Growing up, picking fresh vegetables and produce was a regular part of life for Benjamin and his family, which has played a big part in his inspiration for TropoGarden. With a busy schedule and heavy graduate level workload, he chose to work with Generate to get outside objective design opinions to improve and develop his product. Working throughout this semester, Benjamin and the TropoGarden team have looked into developing this new and innovative way of hydroponic growing that has not been done before. In the innovation cycle, as Benjamin describes, TropoGarden would be categorized under radical innovation, and as such, requires a radical amount of effort from those working to develop it. Because of the innovative nature of TropoGarden, the road has proven difficult but he is optimistic that progress has been made.
Throughout the past few months working with the Generate team, Benjamin has came away with many valuable experiences he believes will better prepare him for the future and for TropoGarden’s development. Solely being a part of the product development process has been eye opening. As Benjamin remarks, objective technical views are invaluable in the developmental process because sometimes he is unable to see certain opportunities by being too close to a product. Having a team of motivated and experienced engineering students has allowed these opportunities to be brought to light. By having various people with different ideas working on the same project, new ideas and ways of approaching problems has ultimately improved this process. Overall, Benjamin says he has loved his time working with the Generate team and he is grateful for the opportunity. He believes having this experience working from a client perspective will prove valuable in his future endeavors as he continues developing his product and future business.
