Business Competitions
Written by admin on August 6th, 2011The idea of a business plan competition first started in the 1980’s at the initiative of some MBA students from Texas and has increasingly gained popularity. Such events happen yearly and rejoice a great affluence of contestants, which highly increases their competitiveness.
Business plan competitions are student entrepreneur events. The contests are organized either for graduate or undergraduate students and it does not necessarily have to be MBA students. The contestants may be student scientists, engineers, MDs or other specialists who strive to create a viable business plan hoping to enter such competitions.
The popularity of such contests also reached some other layers: business plan competitions are also organized with the purpose of giving people the possibility of starting a business. Business plan competitions usually happen as intercollegiate events, but this contest formula has also been taken over by companies who want to facilitate the founding of new businesses.
Besides the cash prizes, that, although quite important, will rarely suffice for financing the foundation of a company, there is the advantage of learning from this experience – this will enrich students’ knowledge in a greater degree than the mere theoretical aspects they learn from lectures.
Not in the last place, there is the valuable opportunity of pitching the business plans to quite a lot of investors in a very short time.
Innitially started as a valuable opportunity for the students with bright business ideas to express them within contest conditions, the business plan competitions have become a resource for some investors. There are two categories of results of such competitions:
However, having good results in an important competition does not necessarily imply launching a company successfully. There is the risk that some investors consider your plan an academic exercise before really studying it and thus the percentage of trust is substantially reduced.
Tags: business for student, business plan, business plan competitions, education and business, Graduate, mba