“ The Business Innovation Competition provided students the opportunity to
                            develop a new product or innovate on an existing product or process from
                            conception to proposition. It exposed students to the resources of the Dingman
                            Center for Entrepreneurship and provided a creative opportunity to demonstrate
                            the skills they acquired from their first year core coursework,” said Cherie
                            Scricca, associate dean for the masters programs and career management.

                            The presentations were professional, creative, enthusiastic—and out of necessity concise. Eight minutes seems like a fairly long time until you’re trying to explain a complex and highly detailed business plan. There were quickened voices and occasionally signs of incipient panic as the “three-minute” and “one-minute” signs went up, followed at last by the dreaded “stop” sign.

Proposals ranged from the highly technical to the more whimsical. Some teams proposed entirely new products, while others combined existing products or technology in a new way. Two teams capitalized on the fact that modern cell phones are equipped with global positioning system data, two other teams found new uses for RFID technology, and three suggested new services for already-existing corporations.

After their presentations the teams faced tough questions from the panel of judges, which included Dean Howard Frank; Steve Dubin ’74, president of Martek Biosciences Corporation; Charles Heller, professor of practice for the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, managing director of Beacon Global Advisors and senior managing director of Beacon Global Private Equity; and John La Pides, professor of practice for the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and president and CEO of Snow Valley, Inc.

Dubin was impressed at the aplomb with which teams responded to the questions. “It can be hard to judge the real quality of a team just from reading their business plan. It’s much harder to present something and then go through the firing line of questions than it is to write the paper. When I go out to present to Martek’s investors they give me the same types of hard questions. It is one’s ability to answer questions that will make investors want to invest, or that gets you a contract.”

First place winners received $500 each; second- and third- place winners each received $200.

• First-place proposal Legal-ease, an “H&R Block”-type legal services shop with stores in malls and affordable basic service, was presented by James Schlick, David Miller and Melissa Murphy Lanzo.
• Second-place proposal Demand-Based Price Adjustments for Single-Event Ticket Sales, a pricing model for Ticketmaster that varies prices based on the popularity of the event, was presented by Darren Goode, Craig Lowenstein and Mike Mausteller.
• Third-place proposal mFinder, a system using the GPS technology in cellphones to create buddy lists that would let you know where fellow cell-phone users are located, was presented by Clarence Grant. Fellow team members were Jonathan Ho and Evgeny Chebotarev.

Other proposals included:

• Plants to gasify coal in order to produce electricity in a ecologically-friendly way;
• Adding customer wood shops to Home Depot stores;
• A wireless detection system for broken traffic lights;
• Product tracking on trucks through integrated wireless services;
• Using cell phones and GPS technology to generate real time traffic information;
• Using RFID-equipped golf balls and readers to give golfers instant feedback on their stats;
• A broadband video-on-demand rental system for Blockbuster Video.