All COA seniors are required to produce a capstone project, generally carried out during their final year. Based on present student interest and alumni experience, we expect sustainable business students will want to launch an enterprise as their project. In the 2009-2010 academic year, COA started a new venture "hatchery" to provide eligible students space and time to develop their for- or non-profit. Students selected for the Hatchery program receive office space, business mentors from the MDI and COA communities, and other support services to launch their enterprise. The ventures accepted to the Hatchery are also eligible for seed funding of up to $5,000. No other liberal arts undergraduate business program offers this resource; we regard it as key to fostering the transition from graduating student to functional entrepreneur.

Spring 2011 Ventures

Over the course of the Spring 2011 term, five ventures have been working in the Hatchery:

Bike Revolution — Jose Merlo & Alan Fernald
A cycle-taxi business providing an alternative means of transportation in Bar Harbor, Maine during the peak tourist season.

Faolan Photography — Zach Whalen
Fine art landscape and underwater photography, based primarily on and off the coast of Downeast Maine.

Gourmet Butanol — Nick Harris
Converts food waste to butanol, which can replace gasoline in cars and home heating oil in your furnace.

H-Bone Productions — Evan Griffiths
Amobile slaughterhouse providing a more humane and cost effective means of getting meat onto your table.

MDO Consulting — Matthew Doyle Olson
A means of building community consensus around finding more sustainable food systems and solutions to food sourcing issues.

Winter 2010 Ventures

In the winter of 2010, six ventures were accepted into the pilot year of the Hatchery program, beginning their concentrated work in the spring term. The six ventures are:

Nafisa Mohammadi — Mending Walls
Working with women in Afghanistan to import their custom embroidered pieces for decoration in people's homes.

Joslyn Richardson — Share The Harvest
Strengthening a program of the College and working with Beech Hill Farm to bring fresh, local, organic veggies to families in food assistance programs on Mount Desert Island.

Kate Christian — Hearing Other Voices
Focuses on international women's rights by creating a database of women's interviews.

Jake Weisberg — Vegmatics
Creating easily installed conversion kits for diesel autos, making them able to run on vegetable oil.

Noah Hodgetts — MDI 2030
Unifying various planning efforts on MDI together to allow the four communities on the Island and the Park to plan for their sustainable future as one community.

Jordan Motzkin — Big Box Farms
Growing organic vegetables in under-utilized industrial spaces.