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Session 1754

Description and Assessment of a Business Plan Competition and New Venture Fair at San José State University

By Malu Roldan, Ph.D., Asbjorn Osland, Ph.D., Michael Solt, D.B.A., & Burton V. Dean, Ph.D.

College of Business, San Jose State University

Abstract: After the first business plan competition, in May 2003, San José State University (SJSU) faculty and community entrepreneurs serving on the university’s Silicon Valley Center for Entrepreneurship (SVCE) concluded that the process should be spread over an academic year. Hence, the New Venture Fair (NVF) was born, which was held Dec. 16, 2003. The feedback from all sources has been very positive regarding the NVF. A significant NVF exhibit was the Hewlett Packard Mobile Computing Grant (HPMCG). All teams completed projects that were impressive to most observers from the university and greater community but additional lessons were learned that will be important to subsequent comparable projects, as well as next year’s NVF.

During 2003 a team of faculty from the Colleges of Engineering, Humanities and the Arts, and Business at SJSU and also several entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley focused on new venture creation by students. First, we’ll briefly summarize our experience with the SJSU Silicon Valley Business Plan Competition (SVBPC) that took place in spring 2003. But the bulk of this paper will focus on the NVF held on December 16, 2003. The two are intertwined in that one of the primary lessons learned from the SVBPC was that students needed more than one semester to ramp up from the ideation stage to a completed business plan. The Dec. 16, 2003 NVF was to foster more ideas for the June 2004 SVBPC. One key to the success of the NVF was the involvement of student teams that were part of the HPMCG. The HPMCG used cross- disciplinary Entrepreneurial Teams (E-Teams) to develop mobile computing applications. SJSU began using E-Teams in its first SVBPC. E-Teams are promoted by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance [1] and are composed of students engaged in innovation from various colleges within the university.

The SVBPC, including the NVF, process is in part modeled after the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business Plan Competition [2]. Wharton divides the process into three phases and a culminating event called the Venture Fair. Phase I is for idea generation and in Phase II the teams provide more detail in a business overview that focuses on issues that must be addressed before the business plan is developed. The best 25 Phase II teams then progress to

Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

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Michael, S., & Roldan, M., & Dean, B., & Osland, A. (2004, June), Description And Assessment Of A Business Plan Competition And New Venture Fair At San JosÉ State University Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--13528