Campus Entrepreneurship

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 [...]

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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. [...]

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Big prizes in this contest. The Minnesota Cup — a business plan competition in the land of 10K lakes  has doubled its prizes. Winners gets 50K in cash! From the Pioneer Press:
The Minnesota Cup, a statewide contest that promotes innovative business ideas, has doubled the prize money it will award its top three winners this [...]

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A few years ago when I wrote my first paper on bplan contests, most folks thought I was nuts. But I knew something was going on. I was aware that contests and prizes were growing. I observed that groups outside of the business school and the university were holding contests. I began to see stories [...]

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Connecticut Business Plan Competition; “The Connecticut Venture Group’s tenth annual Connecticut Business Plan Competition is seeking business plans from undergraduate and graduate students attending colleges and universities in Connecticut. Winners of the spring 2008 competition are eligible for cash prizes of up to $35,000.”
Wake Forest’s 9th Annual Elevator Competition; “Thirty percent of the applications for [...]

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Great piece by Zachary A. Goldfarb in the Washington Post about Daylert, a venture created and launched by a campus entrepreneur at Virginia Tech. Moreover, its early activities appear to have made use of the campus as market model. The articles goes through the successes and struggles that the social networking firm/website has experienced.
From the [...]

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Just noticed that the Big Idea with Donny Deutsch is having an elevator pitch show tonite (28 Feb). No doubt it will play again multiple times (probably over the weekend). Here is the elevator pitch section of the show’s site.
Calling all entrepreneurs! If you’re looking for an angel investor, our new segment “Elevator Pitch” could [...]

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Elizabeth Willet, an MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is here pitching her new venture, an ISP and tech support business targeting ‘old fogeys.’
It sounds like older folks would pay a monthly fee for her firm to install and maintain computers, internet, printers, etc as well as offering training to the [...]

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Most academic administrators and researchers who look into entrepreneurship on campus focus on technology transfer — namely, how scientific advances made at the university can be commercialized to a) aid economic growth, thus letting society/the economy benefit from knowledge accumulation and b) provide $$ for the school and the professors.
Here is an update from the [...]

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Just found Size Me Up — a website to help online shoppers better understand the variations in sizing among retailers. It looks like the founders (bios here) came up with the idea while doing their undergrad business degrees at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler business school. Founder Melissa Adelman, who is 5′ 10″ and has experienced the difficulty [...]

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