UC Irvine Plans Contest to Display Business Savvy, Foster Start-Up Firms

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has one. Stanford has one. UC Berkeley has one.

And now UC Irvine has one.

Following the lead of some of the nation’s premier universities, UC Irvine has announced it is creating a contest to encourage students to create plans for fledgling businesses. The competition, which will take place in May 2000, is designed to showcase students’ start-up ideas and help them transform their blueprints for companies into viable businesses, said Barbara Claybaugh, an assistant dean at UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management.

The competition will “give our students exposure to investors and hopefully help them attract money to get their businesses started,” she said.

Claybaugh expects 15 teams, each with four to five students, to participate in the competition, which will be judged by a panel of venture capitalists, lawyers and executives, among others. At least one UC Irvine MBA student must be on every squad.

The winning team will receive a cash prize of up to $15,000. The runner-up could take home as much as $10,000, she said.

Every year universities in the United States stage an estimated 55 business-plan tournaments, which are far more than academic exercises. They are increasingly incubators of hot new companies. Chemdex, for instance, a business-to-business e-commerce chemical company with a market value of $3.3 billion, was launched through a Harvard competition.

Between 1989 and 1998, MIT’s competition created 30 companies that together raised $43.6 million in capital and generated 500 jobs, organizers say.

Given Orange County’s growing strength in the information technology, biotech and biomedical fields, Claybaugh believes UC Irvine’s contest might spawn some of tomorrow’s cutting-edge firms.

“I’d like to see several Broadcoms started here,” she said.