42 teams selected from around the globe to compete in the world’s richest and largest business plan competition

BY MARY LYNN FERNAU
Special to Rice News

What do you need most when you start a new business? Money! And the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) will be awarding more than $1 million in prizes to aid new startup businesses at the 11th annual competition at Rice University April 14-16.

Forty-two teams were selected from more than 500 entries for this year’s competition, an application pool that was more than 20 percent higher than last year’s. The teams selected come from top universities around the world and were chosen based on their executive summaries to compete in six categories: life sciences, information technology, energy and clean technology, green technology, renewable and recycling, and social and other. The teams will have 15 minutes to present business plans, and the top six competitors will vie for the grand prize valued at more than $400,000.

New prize

The 2011 competition will feature the new $100,000 Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB) Prize for CleanTech Innovation. The KPCB prize is intended to encourage business and technology solutions for cleaner power, transportation and water. KPCB has backed entrepreneurs in more than 600 ventures, including Amazon, Amyris, Bloom Energy, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Netscape, Sun, Symantec and Zynga.

Record of success

Besides the impressive prize money, the greatest statistic of the RBPC is the track record of past competitors. Of the 312 teams who have competed during the 10 years of the competition, 102 have successfully launched their ventures and are in business today; they have raised more than $327 million in early stage funding. These companies have created more than 600 new jobs in their early stages.

”This 30 percent success rate is indicative of the quality of teams the competition draws,” said Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University, which hosts the competition along with Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. ”It is also representative of what we are finding to be an increased interest in innovation and entrepreneurship in the U.S. The current economy certainly affects this as well as the willingness by the millennial generation to take risks to start their own companies. These young entrepreneurs are vital to the U.S. maintaining its technology innovation leadership and its position in the world economy.”

Seven international teams from the United Kingdom, India, Thailand, Brazil, Sweden and Canada will participate this year.

The winner of the three-day competition will ring the closing bell at NASDAQ OMX Aug. 19.

The competition

The Rice University Business Plan Competition is the world’s largest and richest graduate-level business plan competition. It is hosted and organized by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which is the university’s flagship initiative devoted to the support of entrepreneurship.

The competition has grown from nine teams competing for $10,000 in prize money in 2001 to 42 teams from around the world competing for more than $1 million in cash and prizes. The 2011 competition title sponsor is again Insperity (formerly Administaff), the $1.7 billion Fortune 500 company founded in Houston in 1986 and industry leader in human resource and business solutions designed to improve business performance.

Prizes this year include the $150,000 Investment Grand Prize from The GOOSE Society of Texas, the $100,000 Waste Management ”Think Green” Investment Prize, the $100,000 DFJ Mercury Tech Transfer Investment Prize, and $100,000 Opportunity Houston/Greater Houston Partnership Technology Prize, the $100,000 Opportunity Houston/Greater Houston Partnership Life Science Prize, the $100,000 Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPCB) Prize for CleanTech Innovation and the $75,000 OWL Investment Prize.

More than 100 corporate and private sponsors support the business plan competition. Venture capitalists and other investors from around the country volunteer their time to judge the competition, with the majority of the 250-plus judges coming from the investment sector.

The competition is designed to give collegiate entrepreneurs a real-world experience to fine tune their business plans and elevator pitches to be able to generate funding to successfully commercialize their product. Judges will evaluate the teams as real-world entrepreneurs soliciting startup funds from early stage investors and venture capital firms. The judges are asked to rank the presentations based on which company they would most likely invest in.

”Great ideas are just that — great,” Burke said. ”But taking that novel idea, ensuring it holds a competitive advantage in the market, conducting market research and identifying opportunities, demonstrating management capability, financial understanding and investment potential are what develop that great idea into a venture and, hopefully, a financially successful business.”

–Mary Lynn Fernau is director of marketing for the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship.