The Contest

Competition Structure and Timelines

The Challenge will run each year from September to April. It starts with a series of workshops designed to help participants better understand what’s involved in starting up a new company and covers the basics of writing effective business plans, intellectual property issues and raising capital. In addition, there will be several guest speakers and expert panelists on hand to share their unique experiences and answer questions. While it is recommended that entrants attend the workshops, it is not required. In addition to the large milestones below, there will be ongoing mentoring, alumni involvement and other teambuilding events to help teams produce better entries.

$1,000 start-up prizes for selected teams. MGD505, from 10:30 to 11:30am. There will be feedback from judges at the awards ceremony.	Friday, November 29, 2002
Business Plans Due for grand prize. Teams must email and attach their business plans to the following address: contest@campusincubator.com. We recommend that files larger than 1 megabyte be zipped. Click here to submit your business plan.	January 30, 2003
Finalists are selected and announced	Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Finalists Present their business plans to judges.	Tuesday, March 18 7pm - 9pm in MGD 505
$25K Final Award Ceremony	Tuesday, March 18 7pm - 9pm in MGD 505

Competitors

Students from all faculties at McMaster (Engineering, Health Sciences, Humanities, Business and Science) at the undergraduate and graduate levels can enter and be successful in the competition. We envisage that multi-disciplinary teams that combine members from technical disciplines with members from the MGD Business School will prove to be the most successful competitors. These teams bring together the pieces necessary for making the bridge between technology and the marketplace. A panel of experienced entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and legal professionals will judge business plans.

All full-time and part-time McMaster students at all levels of education and from any department, registered with McMaster for the current semester, are eligible to enter the McMaster CampusIncubator Business Plan Challenge. Those recent alumni who registered on the website and started writing business plans in anticipation of the 2001 contest are all eligible for the 2002-2003 contest. People who do not meet these requirements may join or form teams, provided that at least one of the principal contestants on the team is a current full-time McMaster student.

Teams are encouraged to seek the involvement of McMaster faculty, alumni, post-docs, researchers, and staff. Always check the entry kit for the appropriate year's Competition for complete eligibility guidelines.

Non-Competitor Involvement

While current McMaster faculty and students run the McMaster CampusIncubator Business Plan Challenge, we rely on the help of people outside of the current McMaster population. People can be involved with CampusIncubator in many ways:

Attend Events

You are more than welcome to join us at our startup workshop in September. Other events are being considered and will be found on our website www.campusincubator.com.

Judge the Competition

Some people like to help the review the entries and chose the winners of the $25K. The Judges will be made up of a small, select group of Faculty, Entrepreneurs, Professional Services Providers, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists. The typical path to becoming a Judge starts with showing your commitment to the true nature of the competition by giving to the competition as a mentor and/or sponsor. If you are interested in being a Judge, please send a bio or resume and a statement explaining why you want to be a judge to our Lead Organizer, Dr. Khalid Nainar, at nainar@mcmaster.ca.

Mentor a Current Team:

Some people are interested in helping a current team of students through the competition process and the beginning stages of forming a company. We expect to have structured mentoring time offered to teams in need of feedback. If you are interested in being a mentor, please email Bob Basadur at bob@brainbanx.com.

Speak at an Event:

We often look for interesting people to speak at one of our events either as a keynote speaker or a panelist. Entrepreneurs and people involved with entrepreneurship provide a great perspective and are quite often able to give tips and advice that will help our current participants. If you have a strong background in a particular area such as Marketing or Finances, you may want to speak at one of our Startup Workshops.

Sponsor the Competition:

To learn more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Marcel Mongeon or Dr. Khalid Nainar, our Sponsor Relations Managers, at marcelm@mcmaster.ca or nainar@mcmaster.ca. All sponsors will get their logos prominently displayed on the CampusIncubator web site homepage. We believe this is a great opportunity for sponsors as the publicity for such a program is anticipated to be tremendous. We plan to promote the Challenge extensively throughout the McMaster community – alumni, faculty and students. In addition, the depth and breadth of different faculties should make for a diverse cross-section of business plans.

Ask the Expert

The CampusIncubator web site is a Virtual Business Network. The site is powered by Venngo software, a leading-edge virtual business network building software. It allows contestants and teams to communicate their ideas within a closed, interconnected network, share files and manage their projects online. The Ask the Expert feature gives participants the ability to ask specific questions to registered experts for feedback and expert knowledge. We are looking for outside people to lend their expertise for this feature.

How does judging work?

Choosing the $1K Semifinalists and $25K Finalists consists of three phases to each judging round.

1. Plans (or summaries) are broken into groups. Each group is read and rated by (typically) four judges individually, before the actual judging day.

2. On judging day, each group of four judges selects a subset of plans to advocate in the last phase.

3. All judges come together and select the winners or the plans that advance to the next stage in the Challenge, as appropriate.

In choosing the $25K Winners, all judges read the business plans of all finalists, and then the finalist teams make 20-minute oral presentations of their plans, including demos if appropriate. The judges then have about 10 minutes of Q&A with each team. After all teams have presented, the judges select the runners-up and the winning teams.

Who are the judges?

The judges are a panel of professionals who dedicate many hours during the year to reading plans and providing feedback. They can be segmented into three general categories: venture capitalists and angel investors; successful entrepreneurs; and professional services providers working in the venture community. Most have strong ties to McMaster, but this is not a requirement.

Awards

While the CampusIncubator Business Plan Challenge organizers do recognize a few teams as winners of the Challenge, everyone who participates in the Challenge is a winner due to the tremendous learning opportunity. Each participant learns about entrepreneurship, how to identify a business opportunity, how to form a team, how to write an executive summary, how to write a business plan and how to build a successful network of contacts. All of this occurs in the unique environment of McMaster where leading edge technology is combined with forwarding thinking business skills and people.

McMaster $25K Awards:

Each spring, $25,000 will be divided among the winning entries. The grand prizewinner will receive $25,000. In addition to the cash awards, there are many in-kind services that are donated to the winning teams.