More than $200K awarded at Rice

More than $200K awarded at Rice’s annual business competition

BY LIZ CRAWFORD
Special to the Rice News

Students from 36 top MBA programs competed in Houston earlier this month for more than $200,000 in cash and prizes during the 2005 Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC). National and international teams from top-rated programs were hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice. This year the RBPC became the largest university-run intercollegiate business plan competition in the world, based on the number of teams competing, the number of judges and the total amount of prize money awarded.

Teams from the U.S., India, Canada, the U.K. and Colombia converged on Houston for the three-day event armed with plans representing a variety of industries and with business models ranging from drug-delivery technology to dehydrated Mexican food to micro manufacturing to virtual reality.

Walking away with the top prize was the team from the University of California–Los Angeles, with a suite of technology services for automatic tracking of broadcast advertising to help broadcasters with accurate ad execution.

Along with receiving the Hewlett-Packard Company grand prize of $20,000 in cash, the team also won a free Web site and hosting package from RentTheSite.com; free office space at the Houston Technology Center with support provided by 1-Service LLC; and free roundtrip airline tickets sponsored by Continental Airlines. Because the RBPC is one of the qualifying events in the United States for the MOOT CORP finals, the UCLA team also won the opportunity to compete at the International MOOT CORP competition held in May for an additional $100,000 in seed funding.

The Shell Technology Ventures first runner-up prize of $15,000 was awarded to the team from Northwestern University, which used proprietary patent-pending technology to revolutionize the economics of parking facility operations.

The Finger Interests second runner-up prize of $7,500 was awarded to the team from University of Michigan, which designed advanced microfluidic diagnostic medical devices that mimic human vascular systems. This team also won the $2,000 Cogene BioTech Ventures Life Sciences Award for the best life science business plan and the Houston Venture Capital Association Award for outstanding written business plan.

The Finger Interests fourth-place prize went to the London Business School team, and Administaff sponsored the fifth-, sixth- and seventh-place prizes awarded to teams from the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Louisville, respectively.

This year’s competition attracted more than 130 complete business-plan submissions from across the globe for the chance to be one of 36 student teams chosen to compete.

One reason for the increased interest was the announcement of a new $100,000 investment prize for the competition’s winner. To foster entrepreneurship and showcase Houston and Rice University as a center for rising stars and emerging businesses, Steve Currall, the William and Stephanie Sick Chair in Entrepreneurship, associate professor of management, psychology and statistics and director of the Rice Alliance, and Brad Burke, managing director of the Alliance, secured commitments from six entrepreneurs to award $100,000 to the RBPC grand-prize winner during the next five years. These business leaders include Rod Canion, Arthur A. Ciocca, Terry M. Giles, Jack M. Gill, Michael Holthouse and Leo Linbeck III, collectively known as the “GOOSE (Grand Order Of Successful Entrepreneurs) Society of Texas.”

Longtime RBPC supporter Canion said, “I believe that the driving spirit for all of us is to give back to the community. I believe that the entrepreneurial spirit is one of the most important strengths of America and that it should be encouraged and developed. The Rice Business Plan Competition has established itself as one of the top competitions in the world, and I believe by increasing the prize we will increase the number and quality of competing teams. In the end, this encourages all entrepreneurs while letting the world know that Houston and Texas are fertile areas for launching and growing new companies.”

Currall agreed. “This year we received four times the number of submissions than last year. The support we’ve received from the entrepreneurial community here underscores the opportunity and infrastructure available in Houston for entrepreneurs with new ventures.”

Aside from a single investment prize, the competition is designed to give most of the participants the chance to walk away with cash. This year 34 different cash prizes were awarded, and for the first time all the teams who reached the final round were guaranteed prize money plus a Web site and hosting prize package from RentTheSite.com. More category awards were added, complementing last year’s Cogene Ventures Life Sciences Award. The new prizes were the Chase Bank Hispanic Business Plan Award, the Conley Rose IP Powerhouse Award, the Energy Valley Award and the Houston Venture Capital Association’s Outstanding Written Business Plan Award.

More than half of the MBA schools that competed in this year’s competition ranked among the top 30 business schools in the United States, including Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Cornell University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Duke University, New York University, the University of California–Los Angeles, Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Texas–Austin, Babson College, the University of Southern California and the University of Maryland. Two of the top 10 international business schools, the London Business School and the University of Toronto, also competed.

Other institutions represented were Arizona State University, Brigham Young University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Washington, Rice, Boston University, Utah Valley State College, the University of the Pacific, the University of Louisville, Texas A&M University, the University of Arkansas, the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, Texas Southern University, the University of Georgia, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (India) and Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).

In addition to the high caliber of the student teams, the RBPC brought together more than 130 judges representing a “who’s who” in the entrepreneurship community. This prestigious group of individuals represented venture capital, early stage investors, investment banking, high technology, energy, biotechnology and other industry participants and successful entrepreneurs.

Capping the competition was the awards banquet, with keynote speaker Robert McNair, founder of Cogen Technologies and Cogene Ventures and founder and chief executive officer of the Houston Texans. McNair shared with the budding entrepreneurs some of the lessons he’s learned from more than 40 years of entrepreneurship, ranging from poultry wrangling and transportation ventures to the successful sale of Cogen Technologies, then the largest privately owned cogeneration company in the world.

Plans for next year’s RBPC are already under way, scheduled for March 30-
April 1, 2006.

—Liz Crawford is the events coordinator for the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.