From an information aggregator that reaches even deeper than Google to a dietary supplement that helps cancer patients regain their sense of taste, the GW Business Plan Competition has helped launch a broad swath of ambitious enterprises. At the competition’s 2014-15 kickoff event on Thursday, members of the George Washington University community took their first steps toward becoming one of the next winners.
Packed into a space on the fourth floor of the Marvin Center, students, alumni and neighbors mingled, traded ideas and received an introduction to the 2015 program—and some even went home with thicker wallets.
The GW Business Plan Competition, founded by a grant from Florida Gov. Richard Scott (R) and his wife Annette, is all about experiential learning. Now entering its seventh year, it offers entrepreneurial teams of students, faculty and alumni the opportunity to kickstart their ventures and hone their business skills, ultimately competing for over $100,000 in prizes.
Besides the traditional first-, second- and third-place prizes, awards also will be given for the best older-adult focused innovation, best social entrepreneurship, best undergraduate team and audience choice, among others.
Jim Chung, founding executive director for innovation and entrepreneurship at GW, introduced the program. This year, he said, the competition will be enhanced by a comprehensive schedule of educational workshops, beginning Tuesday and taking place several times a week.
This year also will feature an even greater focus on mentorship. In addition to every semifinalist being assigned a dedicated mentor, new events like mentor office hours and speed dating are being developed for the fall, and a new matchmaking tool to help aspiring contestants find mentors and co-founders has been launched.
The Business Plan Competition is structured around the Lean Startup methodology, which emphasizes communication with prospective customers and values flexible “business models” over more traditional written “business plans.”
“GW is a leader among universities” in teaching Lean Startup, Mr. Chung said.
Business Plan Competition Acting Director Lex McCusker, who this year took over after the retirement of founding director Jim Rollins, communicated his excitement about the competition and said he hoped to get even more students involved. He also encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to take risks.
“This is more than just a competition,” he said. “Just by participating, students will develop lifelong skills.”
The competition is yearlong, with its first major deadline on Jan. 20, 2015.
One thing that distinguishes the GW Business Plan Competition from similar university programs is its attention to non-profit and for-profit social venture proposals, said Melanie Fedri, GW’s coordinator for social entrepreneurship.
The competition’s GWupstart Social Entrepreneurship prize track, established in 2013, awards $7,500 to the best nonprofit social venture and an equal prize to the best for-profit social enterprise. “A ‘social venture’ does not mean a dating service,” Ms. Fedri emphasized to laughter, but rather a venture that creates and sustains social value.
The Lean Startup methodology, with its emphasis on audience testing and measurable outcomes, is perfectly suited to this rigorous, fact-based approach to social change, she said. “It gets [social entrepreneurs] working directly with the communities they care about,” Ms. Fedri said.
Patrick Landers, senior advisor for strategy and innovation at the AARP Foundation, agreed. The distinction between dreamy idealists and hard-nosed businesspeople has broken down, he said, and cross-pollination between the two categories could lead to unprecedented progressive innovation without sacrificing profitability.
“You can have massive social impact while making large amounts of money,” he said. “There are opportunities to do good and to do very well while you’re doing it.”
The AARP’s Older-Adult Focused Innovation Award will give $5,000 to a proposal that solves problems for low-income seniors in one of the four areas that most affect them: housing, hunger, income and isolation.
“We’re very excited to work with GW because of the massive potential here,” Mr. Landers said. “The quality of intellectual capital at the university and in D.C. is enormous. We’re trying to get lightning to strike in an intelligence-rich environment.”
After these presentations, the audience members were given a challenge of their own. They had 30 minutes to form teams and come up with two-minute pitches solving an extant problem. Each lightning presentation would be instantly ranked, Olympic-style, by Mr. Chung, Ms. Fedri, Mr. Landers and Mr. McCusker—and the 10 top-ranked proposals would each receive $100.
“It was nerve-wracking,” admitted Kimia Ramezani, M.P.H. ’15, who presented SheWins, a reproductive and sexual health app targeted at college-age women that she says is already in the prototyping stage. “But this is a safe environment to get feedback.”
Better than safe: The environment was actually lucrative for Ms. Ramezani, who was among the winners.
Tom Sanchez, who with partners David Raffel, B.A. ’76, Anthony Shop, M.B.A ’11, and Daniel Zaslavsky placed first in the 2011 competition with their customized car brochure program, Lead Driver, said that participating in the competition was an “amazing” experience and not just because of the obvious rewards.
“The money is helpful, but the mentorship and the people you meet are even more so,” he said. “Our mentor has continued to work with us long after the fact.”
Mr. McCusker has been involved in some capacity with the competition since his move to Washington, D.C., in 2012, including as a mentor for the team that created Capital Kombucha. He said he looked forward to involving even more students from across the curricular spectrum.
“Teams that include people from non-traditional business backgrounds often have really creative and exciting ideas,” he said.
Mr. Chung agreed and said that entrants should treat the Business Plan Competition not only as an opportunity to win prizes, but also as a laboratory and training ground.
“You don’t have to come into this competition having solved all the problems of the world,” he said. “The competition is here to help you flesh out what those problems are and your ideas for solving them. If you have a half-baked idea—and even if you think it’s a whole-baked idea, it probably isn’t—going through this process will help you figure out if it’s a good idea or not.
“And even if you find that it isn’t, that’s valuable.”