The state of Massachusetts has pledged to pump $1 million over the next four years into MassChallenge, the Boston-based nonprofit announced today. MassChallenge, which awarded $1 million across 16 startups in its inaugural startup competition last year, opened up its 2011 program today, with an application deadline of April 11. Greg caught up with MassChallenge CEO and co-founder John Harthorne earlier this year when he was ramping up fundraising efforts for the program and expected no state contributions at that time. MassChallenge also announced today that it has received additional contributions from new and existing supporters and will maintain its Seaport District office space through 2014, thanks to an extended agreement with the Fallon Management Company and MassMutual.

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[Updated---12/13/10 at 8:55 pm Eastern time. See editor's notes.]  A major business plan competition has sent its winners home with cash and other prizes to help make their dreams become reality. The Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, which its organizers call the largest business plan competition in the world, has named the companies and student groups that took home prizes at last week’s final event in Ann Arbor, MI. And the top two company-track winners are spinouts from the University of Michigan.

The first is Armune BioScience. The Kalamazoo, MI-based company, which is focused on early detection of cancer, grabbed the $500,000 cash grand prize in the company category of the contest. And ReGenerate, a firm led by students from the University of Michigan, took the $25,000 grand prize for the student side of the competition. The students have plans for a system that converts organic waste into electricity and compost, according to the competition’s organizers. [Editor's note: the fist two paragraphs were updated to add that Armune BioScience and Arbor Photonics are spinouts of the University of Michigan.]

The competition, in its first year, narrowed down nearly 600 competitors to just 18 companies and student groups that won more than $1 million in cash, in-kind services, and software. Last week Xconomy of the contest’s main organizers, Ann Arbor SPARK CEO Mike Finney, told me in an e-mail that the competition is intended to “highlight Michigan as the destination for innovation.” In fact, companies from around the world were invited to submit business plans, making this a global competition. (Read on to see how much of the prize money is staying in the Great Lake State.)

Who knows—perhaps one or more of the companies that took home prizes in this year’s competition will become major drivers of economic growth for Michigan in the future. To help you keep these firms and students groups on your radar, here is a complete list of this year’s winners:

Company Prizes

Armune BioScience — $500,000 grand prize. Armune is developing a method of detecting the body’s immune response to cancer in a blood sample to enable early detection of prostate, lung, and breast tumors.

Arbor Photonics — $150,000 prize for first runner up. Arbor, based in Ann Arbor, is commercializing high-powered fiber lasers to increase productivity in manufacturing microelectronics, solar cells, and other advanced materials, according to its website.

Sproxil — $10,000 people’s choice award. Sproxil is a Somerville, MA-based … Next Page »

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The San Diego Venture Group says it awarded top honors in its 11th Annual PitchFest business plan competition—and a check for $20,000—to TakeLessons, a San Diego startup that operates nationwide as a full-service music and voice lessons provider. A venture group committee composed of representatives from Anthem Ventures, Avalon Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, and Windward Ventures reviewed 70 business plans submitted by startups in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange counties. Eleven companies were selected as semi-finalists, and three—TakeLessons, Aonori Aquafarms, and Corticare, were chose to give presentations at the venture group’s annual awards dinner. The audience voted for the company with most-promising business plan.

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The Elevator Pitch Contest is a leg of MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition where aspiring student entrepreneurs have just 60 seconds to wow the judges (and the audience) with why their idea is the Next Big Thing. That means getting their pitches down to as few words as possible. And this year, at the fourth annual installment of the fast-paced event last week, the words “collapsible air freight crate” did it for MIT-based team Green Logistics.

The team, led by Sloan School of Management student Anand Dass, won the $5,000 grand prize to help get its idea for cutting down on the fuel jets waste in shipping empty freight containers off the ground. Last year’s Elevator Pitch winner, C-Crete Technologies, also worked on a technology a bit off the beaten-path of software or life sciences: nanotechnology-engineered concrete developed in a much cleaner process than traditional concrete. That team went on to take the top prize at the overall $100K competition.

This year’s Elevator Pitch Contest, designed to simulate the chance encounter of running into a potential investor and only having a few seconds to pitch him or her, drew more than 300 contestant teams from 23 colleges in the region. The finalist group was narrowed down to 12 teams spanning the life sciences, IT, and social Web spaces. Supply Change, another MIT Sloan team working on sustainable supply chain awareness, took the $2,000 runner-up prize and the $1,000 audience choice award. Another runner up was Boston’s Best Bees, a team out of Tufts University that’s developing methods for delivering vaccines to bees, to enable them to better survive in the winters and avoid diseases. The team also develops and installs beehives for urban habitats.

There are two more events to come in this installment of the MIT $100K Competition. Next up is the Executive Pitch Contest in February, which will be followed up in the spring by the final Business Plan Contest, where more than $350,000 in prize money is at stake. So stay tuned to see what other unconventional technologies sprout up in the process.

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Today’s launch of a huge $1 million business plan competition in southeast Michigan gives flesh to the ambitious phrases thrown around back in June, when the new regional Business Accelerator Network that is overseeing the competition was hailed by local business leaders as “one of the most catalytic events for entrepreneurial activity and innovation in southeast Michigan.”

If this first effort by the network is any indication, we just might be witnessing the beginning of something that has eluded southeast Michigan for a long time—regional cooperation in support of business startups and entrepreneurship.

The Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition is launching today with more than $1 million in cash for Michigan entrepreneurs. It’s funded with an initial grant of $750,000 from the New Economy Initiative and will be managed by Ann Arbor Spark on behalf of the region’s business accelerator network, which also includes Automation Alley, TechTown and the Macomb-OU INCubator.

Organizers are calling it the biggest business-plan competition of its kind, surpassing a similar one at Rice University in Houston, according to Detroit Free Press columnist Tom Walsh. The contest will cover 17 awards in nine categories, including several for students. Among them, a $5,000 prize for most-promising 140-character business description, a la Twitter. Another is a $25,000 award for entrepreneurs older than 55.

The competition will focus on early stage businesses that are farther along than just a business plan, Ann Arbor Spark President Michael Finney told The Detroit News.

The competition kicks off today and will culminate with an awards brunch in Ann Arbor on December 11. The Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition concludes with the University of Michigan vs. Michigan State University “Big Chill” hockey game at Michigan stadium and includes a pre-game tailgate party for all judges and participants.

Company submissions are due by Oct. 6; student entries are due Oct. 22. Judging will be done by a panel of investors and other business and academic experts. For more information, visit the competition’s website or connect with it via Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

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Five companies ranging in focus from fueling to family planning will have a chance to compete for $50,000 in business acceleration services and a one-year incubator lease at SPARK East in Ypsilanti, MI, on June 4. Business incubator Ann Arbor SPARK, which first announced the competition at the end of April, listed the finalists today. Each of the following companies will have three minutes to make their case before a panel of “noted funding and business experts.”

• Urobiologics, based in Livonia, MI, has a product called the UroGender Test Kit aimed at couples that would like to know the gender of their children early in a pregnancy. The company claims a 95 percent success rate in detecting a fetus’s gender, based on the mother’s urine sample, between five weeks and 15 weeks after conception.
• Mobile Sign Language Systems, a University of Michigan startup, is developing smart phone software that translates spoken English into real-time sign language.
• Eco-Fueling is developing a way for diesel engines to run on a mix of renewable ethanol and diesel, aimed at the six million diesel trucks currently on the road that use no renewable fuel.
• Own, based at the TechArb incubator in Ann Arbor, MI, will present its combined Web and hardware point of sale (POS) system for coffeehouses. Own says its product replaces cash registers or software POS systems.
• Aeradigm will present an air conditioning appliance for data centers that it says fits in the same racks with servers, cooling adjacent equipment and reducing overall energy load by harvesting waste heat for power.

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A University of Virginia team developing miniature power plants that convert rice husks into electricity for use in rural villages throughout India won $250,000 in seed capital for winning a global business plan competition. Husk Power Systems of Charlottesville, Va., was named as the winner today by the sponsors, the Menlo Park, CA, venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and San Jose, CA-based Cisco Systems. Biological Dynamics, a UC San Diego effort headed by bioengineering graduate student Raj Krishnan, was among the 16 finalists that competed yesterday in final online presentations.

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The San Diego Venture Group today named TheSportsTV.com as the winner of its ninth annual “PitchFest” business plan competition. The startup, which was awarded $20,000, was among three finalists that made presentations to 280 people who attended the venture group’s annual meeting on Dec. 3.

TheSportsTV.com is a Web site that enables amateur athletes to post video and other information for coaches, college recruiters and professional scouts.

The competition was open to any Southern California-based startup that had raised less than $2.5 million in venture capital funding. A screening committee winnowed the field to 10 semi-finalists, who presented their business plans to a panel of venture capital judges in November. The panel selected two other startups as finalists: BidMyAtoZ.com, an online platform for bidding on household services; and LifeModeler Inc., which creates computerized models for orthopedic procedures.

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