Tag: business plan competition

Looking to turn your smart phone into a wallet? Manage anxiety? Build a better hamstring? There’s an Olin Cup finalist for that.

Ten finalists in the 2014 Olin Cup Competition are offering novel solutions to real-world challenges and will vie for $70,000 in seed money to start a new company. The Olin Cup is sponsored by the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Olin Business School.

Twenty-one semifinalists competed in the “elevator pitch” challenge, held Nov. 6 at Washington University, where each team gave a two-minute presentation of its business idea, then participated in a five-minute Q&A session with judges representing the St. Louis entrepreneurial investment community.

After presenting to the judges, the teams pitched their ideas to a public audience, with prizes for the audience member who came closest to picking the judges’ selections and for the team that received the most No. 1 votes from the audience. Pai Liu, a PhD-candidate in the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, received a $250 prize  for selecting nine of 10 finalists who were chosen by the judges. The audience’s favorite team was Applied Particle Technology, which received a $1,000 award.

Before announcing the finalists as selected by the judges, Emre Toker, managing director of the Skandalaris Center, used the occasion to also announce that the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies has changed its name to the Skandalaris Center for Interdisciplinary Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

“This reflects the mission of the Skandalaris Center as the inclusive training center for all students and all faculty interested in new ideas and new ventures,” Toker said. “This year’s finalists represent five of Washington University’s seven schools. We will work with the teams in the next several weeks to help them refine their business plans for January presentations to our judges to determine who is best prepared to win funding and equipped to succeed with their venture. We look forward to even more participation from students and faculty in all schools next year.”

This year’s finalists are:

• Applied Particle Technology, providing innovative air treatment and filtration solutions for specialty applications that require high efficiency removal of ultra-fine particles, inactivation of pathogens and/or removal of toxic fumes and odors.
• Dabble, an online marketplace for in-person classes in the community revolutionizing an $8-billion social education market.
• DataDog Health, striving to manage and reduce anxiety. By leveraging wearable devices and evidence-based therapies, the DataDog app and Web portal provide anxiety-coping tools with real-time feedback.
• EnteroGauge, a medical device startup poised to revolutionize how single balloon enteroscopy is performed, radically altering the diagnosis and treatment of pathologies in the small intestine.
• GeoDataDepot, a data service provider of aggregated geocode-indexed big data with many implications and uses. GeoDataDepot will exponentially increase the value of datasets by reshaping and reimagining data through geocoding, linking by geography, and enriching with community and neighborhood characteristic.
• HamStrong, a prosthetic hamstring, which, along with two workout protocols, (one for rehabilitation and one for injury prevention) dramatically reduces recovery time for those suffering from hamstring injuries.
• kit-case, a platform technology that transforms your smart phone into a fully functioning wallet – with kit-case, you can “Simply Take It With You!”
• Love Will Inc., developing block-chain based financial tools. Its first product, Pheeva, is a mobile bitcoin wallet and peer-to-peer transaction application that enables individuals and businesses to store, send and receive money instantaneously, and for no cost.
• Nanaya, providing a Web service to the consumer, a market of approximately $4 billion, that offers objective affirmation of romantic and social decisions through algorithmic decision analysis. Data obtained from consumers, required for the algorithm, is highly personal and valuable for marketing and industrial analytics, a market of approximately $9.5 billion domestically.
• PIXI Medical, a healthcare company developing the PIXI™ Portal, a counter-top device and software to automatically dispense medication, record user data, and improve compliance – making missed medications a thing of the past.

The finalists will compete again in January 2015, with each submitting a business plan and oral presentation to the judges in the final phase of the competition.

The Olin Cup winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in January. Created as a cross-campus activity in 1988 by Olin Business School, the Olin Cup has awarded funding to winning commercial ventures since 2003.

The competition is sponsored by Olin Business School and the Skandalaris Center; accounting firm RubinBrown; law firm Polsinelli; and the St. Louis Regional Chamber.

By Julie Hail Flory, WUSTL Newsroom

Image: by Mad African! Flickr Creative Commons, Finish Line

A mobile solution to the severity of epileptic seizures. Helmets designed to reduce concussions in high impact sports. A locally sourced grain-to-glass spirits distillery.

These are just a few of the seven final teams, announced Nov. 7, vying for $70,000 in seed money to start a new company during this year’s Olin Cup entrepreneurship competition.

Five of the finalist teams are student-owned or supported ventures and in the running for an additional $5,000 prize given to the best business proposal submitted by a Washington University student team.

“The quality and diversity of the ideas was exceptional this year and once again our judges asked, ‘How is it that the entrepreneurs and ventures keep improving every year?’  We think that the answer is that the culture of entrepreneurship continues to expand and improve,” says Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center.

Contestants submitted an executive summary of their proposed business to enter the competition. From that initial field of 40 entrants, 17 semifinalists were chosen to compete in the “elevator pitch” challenge that required a two-minute presentation of the business idea to a diverse team of judges representing several regional alumni, service providers and other members of the support community for entrepreneurs.

This year’s finalists are (* indicates student-owned or student-supported venture):

• Epi Squared*, developing an implantable mobile solution to reduce severity of epileptic seizures;
• Farmplicity*, an online marketplace making it easy for chefs to source local food;
• Genetix Fusion*, developing the next generation of transfection kits for biomedical researchers;
• Nanopore Diagnostics*, developing products that provide immediate molecular diagnostic testing;
• Stumpy’s Spirits*, locally sourced grain-to-glass premium spirits distiller;
• SynerZ Medical, developing an outpatient device for treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes; and
• Zymplr, developing a helmet designed to reduce concussions in high impact sports.

The final hurdle for the entrepreneurs will be writing and presenting a full business plan in January 2014. The finalists will each submit a business plan and give a 25-minute oral presentation to the judges with a question-and-answer period as the final phase of the competition.

The Olin Cup winners will be announced Jan. 30, 2014, at an awards ceremony.

The Olin Cup was created as a cross-campus activity in 1988 by Olin Business School, and has awarded funding to winning commercial ventures since 2003.

The competition is sponsored by Olin Business School, RubinBrown, Polsinelli and the St. Louis Regional Chamber.

-News Release by Neil Schoenherr, WUSTL Public Affairs

Photo credit: Ken Yee, Flickr

The Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies announced 18 teams will compete for the Olin Cup this year. These semi-finalists will work with mentors and advisors on their business plans and elevator pitches before the next round of judging takes place Thursday, Nov. 7.

·         ARE Systems

·         Epi Squared

·         Farmplicity

·         Genetix Fusion LLC

·         Jenesis Project

·         JetLink Prime

·         Juntos

·         Made for Freedom, LLC

·         Modern Gym, Inc.

·         NABR

·         Nanopore Diagnostics

·         Pixi Medical

·         Priority Compass

·         Stumpy’s Spirits

·         SynerZ Medical

·         TeleDietitian

·         Turcosa

·         Zymplr

Next up for the semi-finalists is the Elevator Pitch Competition on Thursday, November 7.  The semi-finalists will compete privately that afternoon in front of judges, then at 6 p.m. they will present at the public Elevator Pitch Competition.  At the public event, the audience will have the opportunity to select their picks for best pitch. The person who comes closest to the judges’ evaluations will win $250.  Plan to attend now and register here.

The winners of the private Elevator Pitch Competition become the finalists in the 2013 competition. The round of the competition will be held on Thursday, January 30.

Photo: Florida Memory State Library, Miami bike race, circa 1922

For the first time ever, an all-undergrad team made it to the final round of the Olin Cup business plan competition and received one of three awards granted.

Sparo Labs, a medical device company that has developed a new spirometer to monitor lung function, was awarded $30,000. The team consists of four WUSTL undergraduate students.  The team is pictured above: Jon Koo (A&S), Abby Cohen (Engineering), Andrew Brimer (Engineering), and Chris Cassidy (Olin).

Each of the three teams also received a $5,000 cash prize, as they include current students or young alumni who worked on the ventures while they were students.

“The student grant means a lot to us because we are the first team of only undergraduate students to win it,” says Abigail Cohen, one of the Sparo Labs team members and a senior biomedical engineering major. “For us to be named one of the winners and also to get a $30,000 investment was a big milestone for us, and it means a lot to us.”

The ceremony was the culmination of a four-month competition among the contestants.

“We’re a hardworking team,” Cohen says. “Hard work pays off sometimes and it has paid off for us. We’ve got a good product, and people see that, and people also see that we’re really passionate about it and really excited about where it could go. We’re going to work our best and hardest to get it where it needs to be.”

Read about all the winners in Olin News.