UIUC Senior Design Collaboration with Innovo Markets

During the 2025 fall semester, Innovo Markets partnered with a Senior Design team from the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Through this collaboration, and through the Senior Design program, we set out to address a pressing product challenge in the renewable energy market: transforming fragmented Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) data into clear, auditable, and compliance-ready reporting.

The collaboration brought together current UIUC students, Illinois alumni, and Innovo’s team to design a new reporting feature from the ground up, one intended to be built directly into Innovo’s platform and used by real customers as part of the next generation of the Innovo product.

The project originated through Manav Shah, who had interned at Innovo during the summer leading into the semester. As Manav prepared to return to campus, he helped make the connection between the company he had worked for and the class he was about to take, aligning a real product need at Innovo with the capstone experience.

Danny Koch, a mechanical engineering graduate of The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois and former Senior Design student himself, now found himself supporting the experience from the opposite side. Together, Manav and Danny helped bridge Innovo and the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering to bring the project to life.

At Innovo, customers made it clear that REC reporting was still heavily manual and resource-intensive. Compliance and voluntary frameworks vary widely by state and standard, registry data is scattered across systems like M-RETS and PJM-GATS, and assembling audit-ready documentation often demands substantial internal effort. Reporting has consistently been one of the most significant pain points shared by our clients, and Innovo saw this as a critical market gap. 

Jerry Chen, Praneel Midha, Manav Shah, and Alejandro Yepes took on the project knowing it would be different from a traditional senior design assignment. Instead of improving an existing system, they were asked to help define and help shape a new feature for a fast-growing startup. The work required abstract thinking, system design, and comfort operating in uncertainty, the same conditions faced by early product teams working alongside product and engineering to bring new functionality to market.

Throughout the semester, the students worked closely with Innovo advisors Danny Koch and Melina Slone, alongside Jim Anfield, Adjunct Professor at UIUC and the project’s academic advisor. Together, they helped guide the team through both the technical and product context, building an understanding of the U.S. REC market, how it is expanding, and why reporting accuracy and traceability are becoming increasingly important.

“From the beginning, the team showed a real commitment to learning a complex and unfamiliar market,” says company advisor Melina Slone. “Their curiosity and openness to feedback allowed them to grow quickly and deliver strong work.”

The students gained firsthand exposure to how startups surface and prioritize customer pain points, translate those into concrete product requirements, and design features that must satisfy regulatory expectations, scale operationally, and deliver a clear, intuitive user experience.

Throughout the semester, the students worked closely with Innovo through regular check-ins, incorporating feedback from company advisors and the product team to refine their approach. The team also presented their work to the broader Innovo organization, walking through their progress and focusing not only on the solution itself, but on how to create practical handoff materials as the feature moves toward production.

“The team did outstanding work over the course of the semester. Accomplishing this level of progress speaks to both their technical ability and how seriously they approached a real product problem,” shared CTO John Tavares.

The result of the semester-long effort was a comprehensive design and meaningful progress toward an auditable REC reporting feature, core to Innovo’s evolving product roadmap. The team documented reporting requirements across compliance and voluntary standards, mapped registry data to unified outputs, designed transformation workflows. 

Beyond the technical deliverables, the project reflects the value of close collaboration between industry and academia, and particularly the role the Senior Design program plays in connecting students with real-world challenges. Students worked on a problem that exists today in a rapidly growing market. Innovo gained a well-researched, thoughtfully designed blueprint for a critical product feature. And Illinois alumni had the opportunity to collaborate with and give back to the same program that helped shape their own careers.

As Innovo continues to bring this work into production, the collaboration reflects more than a single feature build. It reinforces Innovo’s broader mission to modernize renewable energy market infrastructure by turning complex, fragmented data into tools that are usable, verifiable, and trusted by market participants. By embedding reporting, traceability, and audit readiness directly into the platform, Innovo is helping customers move faster, reduce operational burden, and meet rising expectations from regulators, auditors, and corporate stakeholders with confidence.

Innovo extends sincere appreciation to the University of Illinois Senior Design program, Senior Director of Project Design Activity Dr. Tom Titone, and Academic Advisor Jim Anfield for their guidance and support, as well as to Jerry, Praneel, Manav, and Alejandro for dedicating their semester to this effort. We will miss working with this team. This project demonstrates what is possible when students are empowered to solve substantive, real-world problems and when companies commit to collaboration, mentorship, and shared learning.