Campus Entrepreneurship

Just found out about The Next Tycoon — a reality show business competition that will be filming in Atlanta in August and will air in September. (the name is a little ‘Trumpish’ for me, but I am just one)

The show/contest is being produced by an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, W. Cliff Oxford whose firm spent three years on the Inc. 500 list. (he also endows the Executive MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business.) From the article at Marketwatch.com:

The Next Tycoon is a new reality show that will give entrepreneurs from all ages and backgrounds a chance to present their business ideas to key decision makers and outstanding business and media leaders. The show will be a valuable educational resource as well as a fun opportunity for all participants to share and discuss new, exciting business plans…

While the competition is based and will be filmed in Atlanta, it isn’t limited to the region. Anyone who applies through the Web site, www.thenexttycoon.biz, is eligible as long as he or she has a plan for a viable business venture to present onsite.

It appears there is an $85 fee to apply, but that sounds more like a weeder fee more than anything else. This is another example of the various models and actors experimenting and extending the business plan competition.

Check out the site, there are some interesting things in there. For example, there will be at least 100 people presenting in preliminary rounds and they are not allowed to use ppt. Information on participating can be found here. Let us know if you apply.

Just received a news update that the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative at ASU has awarded another round of seed financing to student entrepreneurs on campus. According to the East Valley Tribune,

Sixteen fledgling businesses operated by Arizona State University students have received a total of $200,000 in grants from the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative to help them become established.

The student-owned enterprises will receive between $2,000 and $20,000 each in seed capital and will be provided office space at SkySong, ASU’s innovation center at McDowell and Scottsdale roads in Scottsdale.

Nearly 150 student entrepreneurs applied for funding this year. Winners were chosen based on an initial application process and a live presentation to a panel of seven judges.

Congratulations to all the campus entrepreneurs at ASU taking part in the Edson program. What a great resource to be taken advantage of and it appears there are plenty at ASU looking to do just that.

Why don’t more schools offer these types of programs? Any thoughts?

I think this is the first time I have seen a team of Executive MBA Students win a business plan competition. According to a report on VUCast (Vanderbilt’s University Network), a team of executive MBA students from the Owen Graduate School of Management, won the Jungle Business Plan Challenge.

Check out the members of this team (remember this is an exec MBA program, meaning these people are usually older than typical MBA candidates and likely earning the degree to improve performance at their current job):

The team developed a proposal for a start-up company, Organ Transplant Technology, to market a new method for preserving and transporting donor organs. The company would combine a newly developed perfusion solution for preserving transplanted organs with a transportable compressed-air driven perfusion system to replace the currently used method of transporting organs on ice in coolers.

Members of the winning team, all of whom graduate May 9 from Vanderbilt’s Executive MBA program, are Dr. Ravi Chari, professor of surgery and cancer biology and chief of the division of hepatobiliary surgery and liver transplantation at Vanderbilt; Ted Klee, vice president of Square D/Schneider Electric Company; Andrew Bordas, director, warehouse management systems, Ingram Book; and Fernando Sanchez, chief financial officer of Gibson Guitar. Clayton Knox, a Vanderbilt medical student, also assisted the team with the project.

A doctor (cancer surgeon/dept. head at Vandy) and the freakin’ CFO of Gibson Guitar? Thats krazy. That being said, as I think about this competition and the winner, I wonder, should people enter business plan competition is they have no intention of launching the idea/firm that they enter into the competition.

I don’t know if the team above is going to move forward with their organ transplant firm, but given their full time jobs (exec MBAs are on campus even less than part-times) I can only assume they are sticking with their day jobs.

Was it a mistake for the judges to give them top prize? Is this unfair to those who entered the competition and wanted to actually launch their firms?

I think the act of participating in the competition and exploring and sharing an idea and approach is valuable for both the participants, judges, and audience. If people are annoyed that some winners/entrants have no intention of launching their entries, then those annoyed people have to beat them in the competitions.

Next Saturday (April 26th) I will be attending the finals of the Mid-Atlantic Business Plan Competition. The event is put on by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington-Baltimore and Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. This competition is open to students at any university or college in DC, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware. (Pretty interesting that the Boston based MIT plays a prominent role).

The 20 semi-finalists represent an incredible cross-section of universities and students and is worth checking out. I am really excited to see some of them present this coming weekend. BTW, the finals are open to the public.

Found this really cool article by Albert Park over at Xconomy.com in which he (an MIT student) goes over and observes the entrepreneurial culture at local rival Harvard. When I think of Harvard entrepreneurs I think of Gates and Zuckerberg.

Parks does kind of a mini-ethnography and lays out some of the driving institutions in Harvard’s current entrepreneurial landscape. From the piece:

The most active entrepreneurship group at Harvard is the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum (HCEF), now in its second year. While there have been several instances of other student entrepreneurship clubs at Harvard, they have all died with the original founders. Entrepreneurship forum co-presidents Travis May and Michael Segal still face this issue of group sustainability. But they have rallied an impressive group of students. Recent noteworthy events include talks by entrepreneurship journalist Scott Kirsner, Emerge founder/MIT student Alia Whitney-Johnson, and Bessemer Venture Partner/HBS Professor Felda Hardymon. It is interesting to note that these events pull in not only Harvard students, but also MIT, BU, Babson, and BC representatives.

The i3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge, which the HCEF is organizing, along with the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and Harvard Student Agencies, is a business plan competition in its first year that offers up a very respectable $32.5K in prize money. The competition is divided into tracks, akin to the MIT $100K Competition, with categories for for-profit ventures, social entrepreneurship, creative non-business ventures, and campus services.

I find the entrepreneurship club data/observation pretty fascinating and wonder what it tells us about entrepreneurs, students, faculty, and administrators. Is this a Harvard phenom?

Just a few business plan competition updates that have come in to the mailbox the last few days…

People love reading about QCUE, which just buzzed through the Rice Competition/FSB Competition. BTW, it offered $675K in cash and prizes. From the story on QCUE at CNN Money; “Kahn’s startup, called qcue, hopes to slash that surplus by helping ticket sellers properly price their products. “While getting my Ph.D. in economics, I got really bothered by inefficient markets,” says Kahn. “And the ticket market is as inefficient as it gets.” I think people like QCUE b/c it promises to thwart ticket scalpers and their distortion of the ticket marketplace.

The Alabama Launchpad Business Plan Competition just finished its second year and awarded 100k in cash and prizes. If you are in Alabama, the state wants you to launch a biz, so pay attention and take advantage of their offerings.

Website XConomy.com has a brief overview, including winners, from 4 business plan competitions at 3 schools in Massachussets. Stories include coverage of the winners and brief descriptions of their firms.

Just read an interesting story by Kimberly Cornuelle covering BU’s Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC) competition. In this competition, there will be real time voting for finalists by audience members. While it doesn’t appear that these votes are not counted in a specific way, according to the article, the judges will take audience votes into account.

While the decision of the judges — a panel of venture capitalists and business leaders — will not be based solely on the number of votes, Goldstein says votes in favor of a particular team can only help. “The judges will definitely take the votes into consideration,” she says. “They will be looking at the actual plan proposed, how the finalists articulated their goals, plus the audience votes.”

This is an twist in determining the winners of a competition that I had not seen before. The business plan competiton has come a long way from its birth at the University of Texas. And it is good to see that different competitions are trying different techniques to expand the reach of business plan competitions.

As discussed previously, we have seen social venture competitions, corporate sponsored competitions, media led efforts, economic development competitions (ie Gov’s Contest in Wisconsin), market based competitions (ie the Boomer Contest), and online contests (ie Vator.tv, StartupNation). This latest innovation is cool because it brings the audience into the contests and presumbly asks them to consider the viability and growth potential of the firms presenting. Ideally this helps spread ‘the gospel’ and ‘ideals’ of entrepreneurship.

From the article,

The final projects are AutoNAIS, which proposes a new product that helps biologists save time and effort with sample preparation; RemesaTel, which hopes to provide inexpensive access to credit and trading opportunities through mobile text messaging in Mexico; Nakama Media, which will sell its online multimedia language learning tool MediaLesson in Japan and Korea, and Essense Medical, which develops disposable medical tools, initially focused on colorectal cancer, to diagnose and treat cancer in real time. (more…)

I was lucky enough to work in Dayton a few months back with the Creative Class Group. They have some great people there and some great universities. Today I found out about a really cool student venture that won the University of Dayton’s Business Plan Competition.

Salud del Sol, an innovative new business from a team of University of Dayton students aimed at bringing the ‘health of the sun’ to medical treatment in developing countries, took home the $10,000 first prize to help get the venture off the ground.

Winning the 2008 University of Dayton Business Plan Competition, the team of Lauren Dokes, Lori Hanna (pictured above), Daniel Hensel and Anna Young created a business plan to developo and market solar cookers and solar-powered sterilizers.

Here is a video interview with Lori Hanna. According to Hanna, b/c many villages in Nicaragua lack electricity, “nurses have to travel to bigger health centers or hospitals to use sterilizers, sometimes traveling long distances by bus and spending precious time and money to have access to equipment.” If they solve this problem I’d imagine they’d be bringing a lot of value to those people in Nicaragua.

I am not sure how much it costs to manufacture solar cookers and sterilizers, but it demands that we delve further into the social entrepreneurship debate. How do we measure social value? While entrepreneurs have always created social value (sometimes negative), we would primarily measure their ventures via income and shareholder value. These new ventures demand new metrics and measures related to social impact or value. Any thoughts?

When it comes to bplan comps, we almost always hear about the winners. This is good old selection bias. Tiffany Petrosino over at the Yale Daily News has a great piece on some Yale entrepreneurs who lost in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society Competition.

After losing in the competition,

Robert Henehan ’10 and Vincent McPhillip ’10 did not give up on their dream of building a T-shirt design company. Instead, they took their business proposal to another group — the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute — an institutional organization designed to support new student ventures and help keep them in the area. A month later, McPhillip said, they had procured a $5,000 living stipend through the YEI Summer Fellowship Program to stay in New Haven over the summer to develop the Catalyst Company, their startup T-shirt design company. (more…)

When bplan comps first appeared they were student led initiatives. At some point they became more corporate oriented, with law firms, vcs, angels, and bankers taking a role. Then came policy makers (Govs/Ec Dev Offices) and media companies. In that last category — Forbes is back with its 2nd annual 100K Boost Your Business Contest. Entries will be taken until May 31st.

The first round is tough in that it asks for 500 words. So, you better be a pretty good writer, or find one, if you are going to get outta that first round. Here are the submission instructions. Here is a video with Forbes.com Entrepreneur Editor Brett Nelson.