School of Business > UPDATE > Summer 2002 > Article

Technology & Business Team Up

Grainger Hall had seldom been the scene of this type of activity. In one corner of the first-floor atrium, Tim Moser, an MBA student in supply-chain management, was taking blood samples from willing volunteers. In another corner, Paul Peercy, dean of the College of Engineering, was being offered samples of carrots pre-stuffed with dip. In still another section, students in dark business suits stood before a bale of hay, happily explaining to passersby their idea for converting agricultural waste to ethanol.

More Teams on Top

A team of School of Business undergraduate students won first place and $20,000 in the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition held in Singapore in June. More than 200 teams entered the competition and only six teams were selected as finalists based on a review of submitted written business plans. Purdue was the only other U.S. university to make the finals. The teams made presentations to a panel of judges at Singapore Management University. The Wisconsin team won for its presentation on Imago Scientific Instruments, a Madison, Wis., company developing technology for the semiconductor industry and other industries that employ nanotechnology. The students were Kelly Bruner, Dominic Foscato and Brad Krutsch. Doctoral student Jay Ebben accompanied the team as an advisor. Amy Gribb, an MBA student, was the team's supervisor.

Aileen Hagert and Sheryl Kennedy

Students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business took top honors in a national business case competition of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. The consortium is an organization representing 14 top business schools that provides scholarships and assistance to under-represented minorities in graduate business programs. The competition, sponsored by Procter & Gamble, involved student teams preparing and presenting solutions to a business problem. A panel of experts awarded first place and $6,500 in scholarships to MBA students Aileen Hagert and Sheryl Kennedy. Wisconsin won over teams from Dartmouth College, the University of Virginia, New York University and the University of Michigan, among others. Advisor for the competition was Director of Graduate Student Services Mark Matosian.

A team of graduate students from the WAVE program won the Central United States Division of the Venture Capital Investment Competition, outperforming teams from the University of Chicago, Northwestern and Indiana, among others. Students played the role of venture capitalists, reviewing real business plans from actual entrepreneurs seeking venture capital. The students interviewed the entrepreneurs, proposed investment decisions and presented their findings to a panel of judges composed of venture capitalists. The judges ranked the teams in terms of how the students' evaluations of proposed investments compared to their own. In some cases, judges decided to make real investments in the firms, following the students' advice. The team was made up of Sal Braico, Dylan Kaul, Jeff Prochnow, Craig Sterling and Jaume Villanueva.
A School of Business team came away with second place this year in the 11th annual Big Ten MBA Case Competition held in Columbus, Ohio. Each four-member team of first-year MBA students was allowed 24 hours to analyze a business case concerning a medical consultation firm, Health Resources & Technology, for presentation to a team of business experts. The event was hosted by Ohio State University and sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. The Wisconsin team was made up of students Jason Ginsberg, Aileen Hagert, Sheryl Kennedy and Ben Van Roo. Their coach was Peter Hong. Mark Matosian, director of graduate student services at the School of Business, was the team adviser.

It wasn't the aftermath of a particularly odd Halloween; it was this year's combination of technology, business and entrepreneurial potential - the G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition.

The displays in the Grainger Hall atrium this April were the tips of the iceberg of a year-long competition for the best business plan. Nine teams of students competed for a top prize of $10,000 and had their business plans on display. Eagerly answering the questions of the competition's judges, who slowly passed by each display, was the last thing on the students "to-do" lists. They'd already submitted lengthy written business plans, made multimedia oral presentations and answered tough questions from the competition's judges, Madison-area entrepreneurs. (In addition to the award for best business plan, some teams compete for the $2,500 Tong Prototype Prize.)

Now in its fifth year, the competition has grown into a major activity. Joe Saari, MBA '99, president and founder of Precision Information LLC, competed in the first competition and found it played a major role in launching his start-up company. "Since the Burrill competition in 1998, I've gone on to create a software company with some of the other competitors and judges that is running profitably today in 2002," he said. For Saari the most valuable aspect of the competition was the interaction with judges. "They provided real-world feedback, analysis and critique of my plan and challenged me to identify problems," he said. "They asked the sort of tough questions I later heard in the real world from potential partners and investors."

The members of the nine teams in this year's competition were not the only ones to benefit from the day-long competition. Students from across campus heard students make their presentations and listened to a talk by guest speaker Lance Fors, chairman and CEO of the high-tech firm Third Wave Technologies, Inc., on the challenges of launching high-tech start-ups.

This year's students, engineering, business and agriculture majors, formed teams at the start of the school year and developed a business plan to take technology- either their own or someone else's -to the marketplace.

The products did not have to be the invention of the students, although many were. They did not need to be "high tech." Osman Ozcanli, a junior studying industrial engineering, for example, had a business plan for an ingenious fabric and Velcro wrapper/carrier for books to be marketed in his native Turkey.

As it happened, the winner of this year's business plan competition did involve cutting-edge technology. Chung Hoon Lee, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, and Garima Goel, an MBA student, won for their business plan for a tiny electronic device that sprays an exact measure of medicine into the air that a patient can then inhale. Lee and Goel have formed a company, LifeSonics, to market the delivery system to treat asthma and diabetes.

According to Professor Anne Miner, who teaches technology strategy at the School of Business and directs the Burrill competition, it provides invaluable opportunity to students. "We've had students say it was the most powerful experience in their education," she said. "It's a chance to make their ideas become real. One student said his family treated him differently once they realized he had actually completed a realistic plan for a new business -- and how this made him think of himself as not just a student waiting for life, but as someone who can and will change the world around him."