A new product that cools room-temperature drinks to ice cold in less than a minute is one of four business ideas created by student teams at the University of Colorado at Boulder that will compete for $5,000 on April 28 during an annual business plan competition held on campus.
As finalists of the 2004 Ray and Dottie Joyce Undergraduate Business Plan Competition, the teams will make their final presentations before a panel of judges at 6 p.m. in room 224 of the CU-Boulder Leeds School of Business.
The other business ideas include an authentic East Coast delicatessen and restaurant in Boulder offering both quick option and traditional sit-down menu items, a surfboard company developing an innovative technology to create the strongest, most flexible surfboard available on the market, and a company that will produce school-specific guides and Web sites for the parents of college students, offering information on everything from local restaurants to issues faced by students.
The competition is the culminating event of a Leeds School of Business course called Business Plan Preparation, taught for the past seven years by Frank Moyes, an entrepreneurship teacher in the Leeds School of Business. Each semester students are required to bring their own ideas for businesses to the class, where the plans are then voted on by the students. Once the top ones are picked, teams are then chosen to bring the plans to life.
"Writing these business plans and then working as a team in the competition requires the students to use their business education and experience and apply it by creating a business," Moyes said. "It is as close to a real-world situation as they can get."
And the winners get real money to use as they see fit. The first prize winners will receive $2,000, followed by $1,250, $1,000 and $750 for second, third and fourth places.
Winners will be decided by a panel of five judges: Toby Hemmerling, associate director for MBA admissions and marketing at the Leeds School; Stephanie Smeltzer McCoy, a member of the investment team at Meritage Private Equity Funds; Rick Patch, founder of Odyssey Partners, an investment management and business development company; Michael Sherman, a principal of Crestone Capital Advisors and a member of the firm's investment committee; and Eric Wu, a manager of product planning for Seagate Technology.
The competition is hosted by the Robert H. and Beverly A. Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, a joint program of the Leeds School of Business and the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU-Boulder. The undergraduate entrepreneurship program was ranked 14th in the nation by U.S. News and World Report in 2004.