The Michigan Business Challenge, a four-month business plan competition sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Zell Lurie Institute, kicks off today in Ann Arbor. Student teams will compete for $60,000, gaining valuable feedback and broadening networks along the way. And the public is invited to watch at every step.

Tim Faley, managing director of the institute and adjunct professor of entrepreneurship, compares the Michigan Business Challenge to the March Madness basketball tournament.

“The Michigan Business Challenge is different from any other competition because it takes four months to get through all four rounds,” Faley said. “We use it as a feeder system to other competitions—it’s really fertile training ground.”

Round one has all teams (this year, there are over 40) presenting their business plans. The second round is where judges decide if the business plans are feasible. Advancing teams give their 15 minute pitch in the third round. In the final round, four teams meet with investors, including local venture capitalists and alumni from other regions, to give a three-minute pitch and follow it with a 20-minute conversation where the investors pick apart their ideas.

“I’ve had VCs tell me that 20-minute conversation the closest thing to what happens in their offices,” Faley said.

Are You a Human, a tech startup that developed an identity-verification tool called PlayThru after it … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Last week was the storm before the calm, as a warm front of high-tech news moved through the San Diego region before the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ve got the details here.

—San Diego-based DriveCam said it raised $85 million through a private placement that will be used mostly for its acquisition of RAIR Technologies. As I explained a couple of years ago, DriveCam puts its video data technology on the dashboards of fleet vehicles. Brookfield, WI-based RAIR provides technology that helps U.S. Department of Transportation-regulated fleet operators manage driver qualification requirements, vehicle inspection requirements, hours-of-service logs, and scoring for compliance, safety, and accountability. A New York private equity firm, Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, provided the $85 million in investment capital.

—The San Diego Venture Group awarded top honors—and $10,000 in startup capital—to San Diego-based SwoopThat at its annual PitchFest event. More than 70 early stage startups applied for the PitchFest competition, which ended last week in final presentations by SwoopThat, Gamer Grub, and Deal Current Network. SwoopThat helps college students at 2,347 schools nationwide save both time and money by purchasing their textbooks through Web-based technology that matches buyers with sellers of used textbooks. SwoopThat also operates a search engine that provides price comparisons for over 15 million products.

—A model fuels consortium formed six years ago by San Diego-based Reaction Design has developed software that can accurately simulate the formation of soot particulates during internal combustion. The modeling software was developed in anticipation of new engine exhaust regulations aimed to dramatically reduce the size and number of soot particles in gasoline and diesel-powered engines. As I had previously explained, Reaction Design develops software that models gaseous chemical reactions.

—A new San Diego startup, Swarmology, said it has raised $1.2 million as part of its emerging Web-based business, which mines social media as part of an integrated marketing approach for healthcare clients. Pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm founded Swarmology to analyze online conversations about specific health concerns.

—Austin, TX-based car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler North America, announced the debut of its all-electric car-sharing program in San Diego—the first in North America. The company began deploying 300 zero-emission smart “fortwo” electric-drive vehicles here Friday, and said they are now in service.

—First, IBM’s Watson beat the best players on TV’s Jeopardy! game show. At last week’s SuperData Summit, IBM executive Christine Kretz said the company is now working on … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

“Entrepreneurialism is a virus that must be spread.” So said Samuel Zell 12 years ago as he and Anne Lurie (on behalf of her deceased husband Robert) gave the University of Michigan Ross School of Business $10 million to establish the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies.

Since then, the Institute has extended its reach beyond U-M, playing an active role in the management of several statewide initiatives, and supporting regional entrepreneurial organizations that serve as a catalyst for economic development. Just last week, the Princeton Review named U-M as having the fifth best graduate entrepreneurship program in the country.

“What we’ve done in 12 years is codify what entrepreneurs really do,” says Tim Faley, managing director of the Institute and adjunct professor of entrepreneurship. “We have broken it into logical and learnable steps that span from ideation to success and that involve both classes and action-based learning.”

Faley says he collaborated with an unnamed serial entrepreneur in Ann Arbor to vet the steps he had in mind to teach his students. He said at first, his friend scoffed at him, saying entrepreneurialism was all instinct and couldn’t be learned. But as Faley explained his theory, the serial entrepreneur looked down at the notes pertaining to his latest project scattered all over the table and realized Faley’s methodology matched the way he was going about turning his “problem” into a fully realized business.

“We knew we got it right when the steps applied to both the family business entrepreneurial model and the technology entrepreneurial model, and all other entrepreneurial models in between,” Falhey says.

Faley says now is the perfect time for students to delay their entrance into the workforce for a few years while they work on bringing an idea hatched and honed in college to business fruition. To that end, in 2008 the Institute “blew up” the way they did their annual business-plan competition, doing away with the typical format where students form teams, make pitches, and are … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Comixology’s small staff of 24 comic-book freaks are working around the clock these days, preparing for one of the biggest changes their industry has ever seen: On Aug. 31, mega-publisher DC Comics will begin releasing its titles digitally and in paper form on the same day. Until now, there’s been a lag of at least a couple of weeks, giving retailers plenty of time to profit off the traditional, paperback comic books that fans love. The transition to digital, says Comixology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger, has left retailers “by turn scared and anxious—and very interested.”

Ever since it was founded in 2007, Comixology has been catering to all the stakeholders in the small but passionate world of comic books: the publishers, the retailers, and of course, the collectors. The rise of digital has been particularly hard for the retailers, who for decades have relied on comic-books nuts filling their stores every Wednesday to snap up the latest editions of Spiderman or Walking Dead, Steinberger says. To ease the path to digital, Comixology has been rolling out a host of services for retailers—including, most recently, a digital storefront. The service allows retailers to have websites powered by Comixology, where they can sell comic books and pull in affiliate revenues.

The movement of the comic-book industry to digital may be a hard adjustment for retailers, but it’s been a boon to Comixology. The company has secured the rights to digitize comics from all the major publishers, including the dominant players, DC and Marvel. Comixology now derives most of its revenues from selling digital comics online and via apps it has developed for smart phones and tablet computers.

Steinberger is himself a comics nut, having collected more than 7,000 comic books as a teenager in the 1980s. He originally trained as a classical musician—he earned advanced degrees in vocal performance from the Manhattan School of Music and Julliard—but ultimately decided that entrepreneurship would be more suited to his creative personality.

A phone discussion with his parents in 2006 inadvertently led Steinberger to dream up a business plan. “My parents called to say ‘Come and get your comics out of our basement. We don’t want to store them anymore,’” recalls Steinberger, who at the time was studying to get his MBA at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He picked the books up, dumped them in a storage unit in Manhattan, and promised his wife he would sell them.

But when Steinberger looked for a way to catalog his collection, he came up empty. So he started to develop an application for cataloging and appraising comic books. Then he called up his friend and fellow comic-book collector John Roberts, who was an expert in software development. Turns out Roberts was in the process of … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

The concept for a life sciences startup put together by neuroscientists, a psychiatrist, and MBA student received the top prize—and $57,000 in cash and services—in UCSD’s fifth annual student-managed business plan competition.

The proposal for NeuroMap, a seed-stage life sciences startup, was pulled together by Alexey Terskikh, a neuroscientist specializing in development and aging at the Sanford Burnham Medical Research Institute; Dmitri Sivstov, a psychiatrist at UCSD Medical School; Andrew Rabinovich, a bio-engineering researcher at UCSD; and Daniel Norton of the Rady School of Management. They outlined a commercialization plan for assays developed to determine the efficacy of antidepressant medications for individual patients, an approach to personalized medicine with the potential to reshape a specialty now dominated by “trial and error” prescriptions. The team estimates its technology would be able to save insurance providers and patients $2,500 per patient.

The second prize, which includes $28,000 in cash and services, was awarded to DevaCell, a molecular diagnostics startup led by UCSD electrical engineering doctoral candidate Inanc Ortac and recent Ph.D graduates Ahmet Erten and Corbin Clawson. DevaCell has focused on using advanced detection technology to help healthcare providers screen for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the potentially deadly multi-drug resistant bacteria.

Third prize, and $15,500 in cash and services, was awarded to Interra Energy leader Thomas Del Monte for a system that turns biomass products into natural gas and soil amendment.

The 5th Annual UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge Business Plan Competition also awarded $2,000 prizes to the top entry in five categories: iConsent Medical (HighTech/IT); Oculeve (Biotech/Life Sciences); Interra Energy (Clean Technology); Mobcuts (Social Entrepreneurship/Consumer Product); and Lifelens (Undergraduates). The competition has operated as a wholly student and volunteer organization that hosts a series of free, public educational workshops on the commercialization process, networking events, and competition events each year.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Besides snow and rain (and other April Fool’s jokes), ‘tis the season for business plan competitions around Boston. You might know all about MIT’s $100K contest and Harvard Business School’s equivalent, but there’s a lot more going on out there—and a lot of talented young people vying for a taste of entrepreneurial success.

Here’s a quick sampling of five university-based contests going on around town, and their finalists (certainly not a comprehensive list):

—Tufts University is running its seventh annual $100K business plan competition. The final pitches are happening next week, April 6. Here are the five finalists in the social entrepreneurship bracket: Educate Lanka (student scholarships, Manjula Dissanayake), Give 2App (smartphone apps for nonprofits, Artem Efremkin and Shabazz Stuart), Kabuk (earthquake kits, Mustafa Tuzcu), Saathi (sanitary pads, Nithyaa Venkataramani), and Sanergy (green toilets, Gaurav Tiwari).

And the six finalists in the classic competition: InstaCard (cash in gift cards, Warren Davis), Rentcycle (local business rentals, Kevin Halter and Sean Zinsmeister), Roof For Two (motorcycle accessories, Andrew Altman), RxCap (smart pill containers, Nathan Scott), Salary View (college career services, Kenny Berlin), and Saves on a Plane (airfare deals, Ade Baptista).

—Babson College, which says it founded the first college business plan competition in 1984, is in the midst of its $100K+ undergraduate and graduate business plan competitions. The final round takes place on April 14. Here’s a rundown of the three graduate finalists: Atiken Renewables (agricultural waste to energy), Golden Health Guide (online reviews of home medical products), and SkyCrepers (fast-serve crepe franchise).

And the three undergrad finalists: Down to Earth Waste Solutions (small-business waste collection and composting), Nodes (online collaboration and group social networking), and Redeemr (business intelligence and customer retention for small to businesses).

—Boston University’s $50K “new venture competition” is down to its final four, just like March Madness. The BU finals are next week, April 6. Here are the four finalists: ACCEasy (accounting software for Russian businesses, Katsiaryna Akhlopkava), Handlebikes (better bicycles, Fredrik Fjellsaa), Nyumba (pneumonia diagnostics by cellphone, Andrea Fernandes), and RayVio (efficient ultraviolet LEDs, Yitao Liao).

—The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition’s $100K business plan contest is well underway. The semi-finalist teams (five teams in five tracks, plus wild cards) are currently in their mentorship program hurtling towards the finish line on May 11. You can see a full list of the semi-finalists, which were announced in early March, here. A few that caught my eye, mostly because they have interesting names: SaferTaxi (mobile track; cab rating and registration system), iHelmet (products and services; no idea what they do), Boss (life sciences; bone graft tool), Waste to Watts (emerging markets; sounds self-explanatory for power generation), and All Cows Eat Grass (music lessons) and VisualizeMe (social graph), both in the Web/IT track.

—Lastly, Harvard Business School’s business plan contest is just getting started. Business plan entries are due next week, April 7; there’s a “business venture” track and a “social venture” track. The whole competition is done by the evening of April 26.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

Startups are constantly using biology jargon—phrases like “incubation,” “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” “symbiotic relationships.” I never fully appreciated these analogies until this year, when my team and I became the sleep-deprived but happy parents of Lark Technologies, Inc., or Lark for short.

We have been diligently incubated by many university competitions—kept at a suitable temperature in a thoughtfully constructed mini-ecosystem until we develop enough to be hatched into a fledgling company with a higher likelihood of survival.

I’ve come to think of well-run business plan competitions like the MIT 100K and the Rice International Business Plan Competition as a simulation of reality that helps, ironically, to counterbalance real reality.

For Lark, these competitions provided us with an artificially optimal entrepreneurial ecosystem with project deadlines, project deliverables, mentors, and judges. They created structure, provided a name brand, and supplied a continued sense of urgency and priorities in an otherwise chaotic process.

They also almost killed our company before it hatched. But that’s the beauty of these experiences.

Commitment to an Idea

I started with a problem, an annoyance really, and if it weren’t for the MIT 100K’s Elevator Pitch Competition, I would have never committed to solving that problem by creating a company.

When I moved in with my boyfriend last year, we were already sleep deprived because of our workaholism, so it drove me crazy that he woke me up everyday with his alarm clock an hour before I had to get up. I had a bunch of ideas swimming around in my head about silent alarm clocks, but MIT’s first competition forced me to commit to the best of my half-baked ideas by pushing me in front of an audience for a 60-second Elevator Pitch. That’s how Lark got started.

Momentum

After getting to the top five in the competition, I realized how much my problem resonated with other couples. It gave me a new type of momentum and discipline. Instead of trying to fix our lives with some sort of hack job to deal with the problem ungracefully, my team and I pushed ourselves in defining Lark so that our technology could enable people to wake refreshed everyday.

The Focus After The Unfocus

The PR from the competition brought a flurry of interest, and as our team, product and business was taking shape, I was brainstorming with everyone. It was at once confusing and exciting. “What if Lark also solved snoring, what if Lark was a vibrating watch, what if…” The ideas grew and grew into an amorphous cloud of what the product and company could be.

But maybe these were necessary growing pains.

Through the sifting of all the great and sometimes contradictory advice, I realized a simple truism: Every mentor will have a different opinion, and it is your responsibility as an entrepreneur to be open to these ideas, but not to idealize them.

The benefit of having many mentors is that certain pieces of advice are consistently repeated, and those naturally rise above the white noise. This is why I don’t believe it’s … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Business incubator Ann Arbor SPARK is asking Michigan startups to take their best shots at five open spots in a business pitch competition it plans to host on June 4, the group announced today.

The winner will get up to $50,000 in business acceleration services and a one-year incubator lease at SPARK East in Ypsilanti, MI. The competition is co-sponsored by the Eastside Innovation Campus (EIC), which hosts small businesses.

“The EIC collaboration is helping to expand the region’s entrepreneurial success by delivering critical services to startups,” Michael A. Finney, CEO of Ann Arbor SPARK, said in a prepared statement. “The pitch competition is a celebration of that success to date and signifies a continued commitment by SPARK East and its partners to growing startup businesses.”

The event will showcase five “innovation-based entrepreneurs” who will have three minutes each to pitch a panel of judges who are “noted funding and business experts,” the group said. The winner has to set up shop at the SPARK East business incubator. Applications are due by close of business May 14 and finalists will be notified by May 21.

An online application is available here. Those who want to attend the free event can register here.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The organizers of the MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which is celebrating its 20th year in 2010, announced last week the newest addition to their lineup of contests: a $500 Twitter pitch or “Twitch” competition. Anyone can enter by tweeting their business idea in 140 character or less, reserving 11 characters for the required hash tag “#100kTwitch”. Organizers say they’ll judge entries based both on creative quality of the pitches and their “virality”—ideas that get retweeted by Twitter users with lots of followers will earn more points. A winner will be announced May 12. The full rules for the Twitter pitch contest, which will kick off at 9:00 a.m. on April 20, are here.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Harvard Business School (HBS) says that it will hold a new business plan competition open to HBS alumni from all over the world. Qualified ventures will compete for a cash prize of $25,000.

The contest—which was formally announced online by the business school’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship and Alumni Relations—will be open to teams that have at least one HBS alumnus. The business school said on its website that more than half of HBS alumni consider themselves to be entrepreneurs, and the school hopes that this competition, called the Alumni New Venture Contest, will become an annual event.

The business school has been holding an annual business plan contest for a dozen years or so, but that competition is geared toward current HBS students. (Here are the details of that contest from our recent list of New England business plan competitions.) The new competition, however, is targeting HBS alumni—and not only those from the U.S. and Europe but also alumni in the emerging markets of Brazil and India.

There will be preliminary contests for the competition held at separate sites—including Boston, San Diego, New York, London, Brazil, and India, among others—in March. Those regional contests will be followed by a final round here in Boston on April 26. Deadlines for entries vary from site to site, according to the business school.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says Panoramic Power, a wireless sensor startup based in Kidron, Israel, is the winner of the first QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power has developed energy monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy Smart Grid technologies within their existing facilities. Panoramic Power, which previously won $100,000 as a QPrize regional winner, was awarded another $150,000 and the opportunity to compete in a global business plan competition held at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Depending on who you talk to, you get conflicting views about where real innovation and growth come from in today’s economy.

One school, well represented at the established venture capital firms on Winter Street in Waltham or Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, says that there are only a few truly disruptive technology ideas in each business cycle; that these ideas end up generating most of the wealth and job creation in the technology industries; and that wise investing is mostly a matter of finding the right teams of entrepreneurs with the rare and magical combination of ingenuity and experience needed to build strong companies.

The other school, represented by the dozens of startup incubators, business plan competitions, and angel-investing groups currently popping up across the country, says it’s better to let a thousand flowers bloom, even if they turn out to be dandelions. According to this point of view, there are far more entrepreneurs with good ideas than the established venture-capital business can handle, and the important thing is to find ways to connect these innovators with capital, at least in small amounts, so that they can test their ideas in the market.

Chris Hurley belongs to this second group. He’s the founder and CEO of Revolutionary Angels, a new investing group based in Cambridge, MA. Revolutionary Angels isn’t a traditional angel investing group where members pool their own money to fund startups. Rather, it plans to run a quarterly business plan competition where the prizes—currently pegged at $250,000 for the first-place winner and $50,000 for second place—are financed by entry fees from the competitors themselves. The group began soliciting submissions for its first competition on October 1, and plans to announce the first two winners in November. In return for their fees, Hurley says, entrants will get not just a chance at the big prizes, but enough advice from a group of experienced advisors and service providers that the $4,995 entry fee could be a good investment even for teams that don’t win.

“The pool of people looking to get a business of the ground is growing, while the pool of venture and angel capital available to help them is shrinking, and what occurred to me is that there has got to be a better way to do this,” says Hurley. A longtime sales executive and IT consultant, Hurley was until recently a member of corporate development group at Sun Microsystems. He says he resolved to leave Sun after Oracle announced plans to acquire the struggling maker of business software and servers.

“I decided it was better to control my own destiny than to have someone else control it,” he says. “I’m hoping this is an opportunity that will not only provide that control but help a lot of other entrepreneurs out there, because it’s a challenging environment.”

Despite, or maybe because of, startups’ thirst for capital, Hurley’s model may prove to be a controversial one. The $4,995 fee to enter Revolutionary Angels’ first competition is not inconsiderable to a business in need of cash. Hurley’s plan is to … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick today announced the creation of a $1 million annual business plan competition designed to attract more high-growth startups to the state. The competition, which will get underway next year, will be modeled on similar contests at MIT and other universities, but will be open to all teams of entrepreneurs willing to headquarter their companies in Massachusetts, Patrick said.

The so-called MassChallenge Venture Funds Competition, organized by a new Cambridge, MA, nonprofit called MassChallenge, will provide seed funding to some 30 startups each year. Each finalist will receive a combination of cash and equity investments worth roughly $1 million—far more than the $100,000 top prize handed out by the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, the nation’s most famous university business plan competition.

The governor made the announcement at the end of a speech to a group of several dozen infotech sector stakeholders known informally as the Massachusetts Information Technology Collaborative. The group was invited to Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center today to discuss how to expand the infotech sector in Massachusetts.

Patrick said the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is seeding the competition by contributing $100,000 to the prize pot, with the actual funds coming out of the budget of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s John Adams Innovation Institute. Boston-area technology entrepreneur and philanthropist Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Microsoft, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation have also signed on as founding sponsors of the competition.

Greg Bialecki, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, told Xconomy after Governor Patrick’s announcement that the new competition will contribute to the governor’s larger effort to draw attention to Massachusetts as an epicenter of business creation. “We think the program itself, and the fact that people will be applying to create companies in Massachusetts, and the recognition that comes to the winners, will attract attention and will be a tangible sign that Massachusetts supports innovation and entrepreneurship,” Bialecki said.

“The other thing we find potentially very powerful…is that it’s an opportunity for people to work together on something that is bigger than any single industry,” Bialecki said. In other remarks at the Information Technology Collaborative meeting, Bialecki said state agencies are working to promote not just the infotech sector but clean energy, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing.

The MassChallenge competition will welcome startup teams in all of these areas and more. The formal competition categories will include clean technology and energy, information technology, healthcare and life sciences, nonprofit, and software and gaming. To be eligible for the competition, companies must agree to base their companies in Massachusetts and must commit to creating at least five jobs in Massachusetts during their first year of operation. (Also, their employees must be U.S. citizens or have work permits.)

In remarks immediately prior to the MassChallenge announcement, Governor Patrick said the U.S. economy is undergoing a shift unlike any since the Industrial Revolution. If Massachusetts wants to be an incubator for the companies that will create tomorrow’s new jobs—whatever industry they’re in—then “we had better lay a foundation for collaboration and entrepreneurship,” Patrick told meeting attendees. “Our job [in state government] is not to … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share: