UW-Madison School of Business - UPDATE Alumni Magazine - Summer 2002

Wisconsin students are competing-and winning-against teams from top business schools nationally and internationally. The list of Wisconsin's strong showing in team competitions over the past year alone is impressive. (See Winning Ways below.)

If there were poster boys for the value of team competition, they could well be Chad Sorenson and Jaume Villanueva. By the time they graduated last May with MBAs in entrepreneurship, they had developed a product, filed for numerous patents, launched a company and raised more than $250,000 in seed money. Not-so-coincidentally, along the way they successfully competed in a number of team competitions.

Sorenson and Villanueva were students in the Weinert Applied Ventures in Entrepreneurship (WAVE) program, a year-long program that prepares students to start, grow and advise entrepreneurial businesses. Students in the WAVE program work closely with area businesses and UW-Madison startups on strategic, operating and financial plans. Sorenson credits much of his success to experience gained from working on teams with other students in the WAVE program. "I began this project alone, and to be honest, my initial impulse was to continue working alone," Sorenson said. "In hindsight, I know that if I hadn't involved the people I did, this project would not have been nearly as successful."

Sorenson took a winding road on the way to winning team competitions. While he was pursuing a master's degree in mechanical engineering at UW-Madison, he created an electronic system to allow farmers to monitor fertilizer levels as they fertilize crops. A cousin, who farms in Iowa, had told him that farmers had no way to determine how much fertilizer was left in the tank while they were applying fertilizer to their fields. After much trial and error, Sorenson developed a solution, a microcontroller-based product to detect current fluid level in the tank and broadcast the data via radio frequency to a monitor in the tractor's cab.

The product, known as TankMate, has won several university awards, including first place in the College of Engineering's Schoofs Prize for Creativity in 2000. With this initial success, the next step was to develop a business plan for the product and to refine a working prototype. In 2001, Sorenson teamed up with another UW-Madison MBA student, Maria Kousathana, to develop a business plan for TankMate, taking second place in the campus-wide G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition as well as the Tong Prototype Prize. (For the results on this year's Burrill competition, see page 5). In 2002, Sorenson received an $11,600 grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA) to further develop the product, the first time a UW-Madison student has received funding from NCIIA.

During the past school year, Sorenson teamed up with Villanueva, who holds an M.S. in Economics from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has worked in international marketing for several multinational corporations. The two fine-tuned their business plan presentation through a series of business plan competitions held around the country. Each event, Sorenson said, helped him refine his goals and take steps toward launching the company.

In March, Sorenson and Villanueva beat out 12 other university teams in the infoUSA International Business Plan Competition held in Lincoln, Nebraska, earning them the opportunity to compete last May in Austin, Texas, in the Moot Corp Competition, which Business Week has called "the Super Bowl of World Business-Plan Competitions." The UW team was one of 30 from around the world to compete for a $100,000 grand prize. They placed among the top 10 teams who competed and were selected as having given the best presentation.

Just being chosen to participate in the high-visibility competition was a significant accomplishment and learning opportunity, according to Emeritus Professor Robert Pricer, the former co-director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship. "These competitions provide an incentive to take a comprehensive look at your business, your market and your competition," he said. Pricer added that selling a business idea to a panel of judges-often made up of highly successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists-can provide students with the credibility and confidence needed to get their ventures off the ground. "If you have success in top-level competitions, it says to investors that your plan is a really good idea."

For Sorenson the competitions were particularly valuable because they gave him "a short-term goal to strive for, and then provided me with support from classmates and faculty."

Over the past two years, Sorenson's project has won nearly $45,000 in prize money from student competitions and awards. The money helped launch his start-up company, Fluent Solutions, by helping to fund the costs of second- and third-generation prototypes. But the prize money was only a small part of the motivation to enter competitions. "The company is almost a direct consequence of all the work I've done on campus," said Sorenson. "The biggest value of these competitions is that they take a long-term goal and break it up into shorter-term steps. There's an immediate incentive to achieve something."

In December, Fluent Solutions was formed and quickly raised more than a quarter million dollars in capital. In May, the business school's WAVE program invested an additional $100,000 in the venture. A Madison firm, Design Concepts, helped complete product development, quickly followed by field testing and test marketing. Sorenson hopes to begin short-run manufacturing by fall, with widespread commercial introduction next spring. Judging from his past success, few would bet against him.

It's important to remember, though, that although Sorenson and Villanueva clearly are very talented individuals, they are also part of a larger picture. They had the benefit of an environment that supports entrepreneurial activity and assistance from previous trailblazers.

Among those lending a helping hand was graduate student Brian Pope, who served as an advisor for the team competitions this year. The previous year, Pope's own team won national attention by earning second place in the international Moot Corp business plan competition. "Preparing for and participating in business plan competitions took hundreds of hours of my time over the last two years," Pope said. "But I found the competitions to be the single best learning experience I had during my MBA career." Another member of that successful 2001 team, Jay Ebben, shared his competition expertise this year while working on his Ph.D.

Sorenson and Villanueva say this kind of unselfish help from many who shared their knowledge from earlier competitions was invaluable.

Students helping other students succeed: yet another example of Wisconsin teamwork in action.

Wisconsin Teams Up for Success