Apr 2, 2018 4 min read

They say necessity is the mother of invention.

For Trinity High School graduate Ryan Leckie and his business partner, a medical emergency was the catalyst for an award-winning interactive technology project.

Leckie and Jakub Straka, both students at Miami Ad School Europe, in Hamburg, Germany, won the Student Innovation Award at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in March, beating out four other finalist teams from around the world.

The pair came up with the idea after Straka, who suffers from seizures, struck his head on the corner of a table after he collapsed while on a trip to Toronto, Canada.

Straka recovered, but lost a significant amount of blood.

The friends began discussing the challenges U.S. hospitals face in managing blood supplies.

“We found that every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood, and there’s a big demand for blood going on all the time,” said Leckie, 31. “We learned that hospitals are constantly struggling to maintain proper blood supplies. This presents a serious challenge for a number of reasons. What if there’s a crisis – a mass shooting or a natural disaster? Are hospitals going to have enough blood to handle these situations? We looked at the blood industry and it’s kind of been the same forever. We thought, how do we get people in the doors to donate blood?”

And so began Blood Type Bots, a mobile phone application that connects blood donors and hospitals via ChatBot.

Donors simply add ChatBot and allow it to access their blood type in the health app. Blood Type Bots monitors hospital blood supplies in real-time and notifies donors when they come within less than a mile of a hospital in need of more of their blood type. Blood donors also can search for local hospitals in need of blood.

SXSW has become well-known to investors and entrepreneurs as one of the places to find early-stage technology ideas and businesses, especially in interactive media.

The appeal of Blood Type Bots, Leckie believes, lies in its simplicity.

“A lot of the entries that get into SXSW are tech-driven ideas, super cool, super-innovative ideas, but they can be hard to implement in real life. Blood Type Bots is so simple, it could be implemented tomorrow,” said Leckie.

“At the SXSW Exhibition Day, we set up a stand and judges walked around and asked questions, and they said, ‘Wow, this is an amazingly super simple idea, why aren’t we doing this today?’ The ease of implementation and the positive impact it can have probably got the attention from the judges.”

Leckie, who graduated from Denison Univeristy with a degree in economics and received a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Pittsburgh, said he was stunned when he learned, via email, that he and Straka were chosen as finalists at SXSW.

“After we won, it was crazy,” said Leckie. “The whole experience was really cool.”

Among the benefits of winning at SXSW are the exposure and the opportunity to network with experienced technology entrepreneurs and investors who can help overcome hurdles and challenges, and make the project a reality.

Leckie said he and Straka have already received offers from businesses who are interested in Blood Type Bots, including an advertising agency that would like to use the project to promote World Blood Donor Day.

“I think Blood Type Bots is a really cool project that needs to happen at some point in time,” said Leckie. “I’d like to continue to pursue entrepreneurial projects that will make peoples’ lives better. Whether it’s us or somebody else who does (Blood Type Bots), it will be a benefit to the industry and, most importantly, to people.”