SOU grad’s beverage cooler idea pivots toward humanitarian use

(Ashland, Ore.) — Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Build a better beer cooler, and you just may save lives.

Mark Morrison set out to do that – build a tech-heavy, personal-use cooler to keep a beverage cold – when he realized that his invention may have more humanitarian applications. The project quickly morphed into Cold Connect – an internet-enabled, solar-powered cooling and monitoring cap that screws onto standard vacuum-insulated hydration flasks to create a delivery system capable of transporting heat-sensitive vaccines to remote regions of the world.

“At some point it clicked that this technology could save lives instead of just saving my afternoon,” said Morrison, who grew up in Hawaii and then moved to Ashland to earn his bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science & Policy at Southern Oregon University. It was when he returned to SOU last year to earn a certificate in environmental communication that his thirst inspired an invention that may save both lives and money.

“I am a problem solver at heart; I simply cannot let a challenge go unanswered,” Morrison said. “When I discovered the magnitude of this issue, I knew I had to tackle it. I immediately began pouring my technical and creative energy into a solution.

“The need is massive, especially as international aid organizations face funding crunches,” he said. “Right now, nearly half of all life-saving vaccines destined for remote locations in the global south go to waste due to temperature excursions. That represents $34 billion a year in wasted inventory, but the statistic that keeps me up at night is that 1.5 million children die every year from diseases we already know how to prevent.”

Morrison, who currently works as an IT Infrastructure Specialist with the city of Ashland and Ashland Fiber Network, says he has always been a tinkerer and builder at heart. He considers Professor Erik Palmer of the SOU Communication Department to be his mentor, and he listened when Palmer encouraged him to pitch his latest invention, first at an “Innovation Jam” for a class and then at Raider Demo Day, an opportunity for SOU students to showcase business ideas, win prizes and potentially advance to other competitions – which Morrison did.

His idea took first place at last spring’s SOU Business Venture Tournament, a campuswide entrepreneurship contest, and then won the Visionary Award at InventOR – a state-sponsored, college-level competition that encourages students to take their inventions from concept to reality. It was the first-ever win for an SOU project in the contest for universities throughout Oregon, and the results included a short YouTube documentary that is now being used to generate support.

Along the way, as designs for prototypes were fine-tuned, Morrison brought friend and fellow SOU alumnus Elijah Anderson-Justis onboard to serve as the project’s lead architect. Mickey Fishback joined the team as operations manager, and Cold Connect was registered in July with the Oregon Corporation Division.

Morrison credits the InventOR competition for propelling his project from a business concept to a commercial and humanitarian enterprise.

“It’s much larger than a Shark Tank scenario,” he said. “It began as an intensive bootcamp where they brought us to Portland for training and connected us with mentors and subject matter experts. The final competition involved pitching to over 200 people and a panel of 30 judges, followed by a three-hour booth session.

“It wasn’t just a pitch; it was a pressure test for the entire business model.”

There were what Morrison called “Mr. Miyagi moments,” referring to the instructor from the “Karate Kid” movie franchise, and his meticulous “wax on, wax off” exercises – in this case, teaching that invention involves more than building a clever device.

“You have to focus on customer discovery, so you don’t end up with a solution in search of a problem,” Morrison said.

The active, intelligent and solar-powered Cold Connect units are designed to replace passive ice chests – which too often fail before reaching their destinations – by maintaining specific temperatures without relying on ice or the power grid. The invention will ensure that medicine is as potent when delivered to remote locations as when it left the factory.

Morrison and his team are currently finishing work on their “Revision 4” prototype, designed to achieve the World Health Organization’s Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) certification – a standard that prequalifies health care items such as “cold chain equipment” as products reliable for use by United Nations agencies and member states.

“We’ve moved beyond the ‘science fair’ stage and are now producing hardware that is getting closer to industrial-grade, field-ready tools,” Morrison said.

The Cold Connect Team is also seeking investors and partners, through conversations with humanitarian organizations including the Gates Foundation, Floating Doctors and the Oregon BioScience Incubator. Morrison can be reached at mark@cold-connect.org.

“We are still a startup, and we need subject matter experts, connections to NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and funding partners to help us bridge the gap between a working prototype and a global solution,” Morrison said.

-SOU-