Harvard Business School holds annual Business Plan competition

The contest began last January with 62 students teams. Eight of them made it through the various stages to the final round of presentations four teams in the traditional track and four in the social enterprise track, reserved for ventures with a primarily social agenda.

By the end of the day, the judges, representing an array of prominent venture capital, law, and accounting firms, had made their decisions. Second-year Harvard MBA candidate Sandra Nudelman and her sister, Michele, a student at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, won first place in the traditional track with their business plan for a product called Judicial Intelligence, a suite of computer-based tools that will help litigators strategically analyze the opinions of judges they will face in court.

In the social enterprise track, the winning team was Unite for Health!, made up of Dr Onil Bhattachaeyya, Lingling Zhang, and Anna Chodos all at the Harvard School of Public Health and Maria Fernanda Levis, a student at the Kennedy School of Government. The Unite for Health! team hopes to reduce the instances of heart disease in China by providing training in innovative, simple, and effective treatment and by working with existing neighborhood organizations to promote heart-healthy behavior.

Each first-place team received $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in in-kind legal and accounting services.

This contest is especially near and dear to my heart, said HBS dean Jay Light. It reflects the intense interest of our alumni in new ventures. Ten to fifteen years after graduation, about half of our alumni describe themselves as entrepreneurs. But the statistics for Business Contest participants go beyond that. Two-thirds of them start their own business only five to seven years after they graduate, and half of that group is working on an idea they first formulated for our Business Plan Contest. Year after year, I am amazed and inspired by the quality of the work I see at this event.

The judges also named a total of four runner-up teams.

C3 BioEnergy came from a team comprising of Tracy Mathews, HBS, Curt Fischer, MIT, and Andrew Peterson, MIT; they plan to produce bio-propane for the $21 billion US propane market, offering the only economically competitive, domestically produced, renewable source of this clean-burning fuel.

Clear Suppliers was an idea from Alex Zhang, HBS and Paul Morgenthaler, HBS, already in operation in Germany and China -- a global supply chain infomediary for manufacturers.

Katherine Kwei was a plan from Elenor Mak, HBS and Ying Soong, HBS. With their business plan, this team is helping a young luxury handbag company grow to make a mark in a $16 million market.
Charitable Donations Group was an idea from Matt Scherrer, HBS, and Paris Wallace, HBS. It intends to raise millions of dollars for non-profit ventures in Boston and other locations by helping them accept and liquidate real estate transactions. HBS senior lecturer Stacey Childress was their faculty advisor.

The runners-up all received $5,000 in cash and $5,000 in services, plus the Satchu-Burgstone Entrepreneurship Award.Organized by the HBS Rock Center for Entreprenurship, the HBS SocialEnterprise Initiative, and HBS students in the Entrepreneurship Club and Social Enterprise Club, the Business Plan Contest provides an integrative learning experience for participants, drawing on all facets of the Harvard MBA curriculum.