Columbia Business School Announces Winners of Eighth Annual Outrageous Business Plan Competition
NEW YORK, March 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Columbia Business School today announced the winners of the $14,000 A. Lorne Weil Outrageous Business Plan Competition. The title of Most Outrageous Business Venture — accompanied by a $6,000 prize and the Audience Favorite award — went to Michael Dwork ’07 for GreenWare, a line of disposable plates, cups and bowls that are organic and biodegradable.
Brandon Kessler ’07 took second place — a $5000 prize — for his submission, ChallengePost, a market-driven, problem-solving website that facilitates group action. Three teams shared third place, with each team receiving $1,000: Stonington Cox ’07, Jenna Trabulus ’08, Mark Pederson ’07, Lynne Feldman ’07 and Chetan Reddy ’07 for BioDiesel, a biofuel retailing business; Jessica Feinstein ’07 and Rebecca Brown ’07 for KidsLunch.Com, a web service for ordering nutritious school lunches; and Zachary Toering ’07 for T- Source, a provider of customized apparel exclusively for online communities.
In the first round of competition, contestants — either alone or in small teams — submitted taped two-minute “elevator pitches.” (Watch pitches at http://merlin.gsb.columbia.edu:8080/ramgen/video3/admin/production/obp2007.rm ). Based on these short pitches, the judges — all of them business practitioners — narrowed the pool down to five finalists, each of whom gave formal fifteen-minute presentations to the panel and an audience of their peers. Plans were judged based on their ambition, innovation, creativity and the persuasiveness with which they were presented.
The Outrageous Business Plan Competition, hosted by the School’s Entrepreneurship Program and the Columbia Entrepreneurs Organization, encourages Columbia Business School students to explore creative entrepreneurial ideas beyond the everyday scope of business. Students typically use their prize money to develop their businesses upon graduation.
“We are very pleased to recognize this year’s winners,” said Glenn Hubbard, Dean of Columbia Business School. “Bold, original, and thoughtful, this year’s entries demonstrated the kind of entrepreneurial thinking that we seek to cultivate in all of our students.”
The blue-ribbon panel of judges for the competition included executives from RRE Ventures, Call Street, Tango Media and Millennium Technology Ventures. Past winners of the Outrageous Business Plan Competition include Dream Tickets, which sells customized dream tickets to sports tournaments at deep discounts, and Flocabulary, which produces educational hip-hop music for high-school students.
About the Entrepreneurship Program at Columbia Business School
The Entrepreneurship Program aims to create a community of business practitioners with a lifelong commitment to achieving social and economic progress through entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is integrated throughout the core MBA curriculum, crossing all disciplines and touching all students. For students interested in launching their own ventures, the School offers a comprehensive program of specialized courses, labs, workshops and funding opportunities.
About Columbia Business School
Widely admired for its global and cutting-edge curriculum, Columbia Business School is led by Dean R. Glenn Hubbard, the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at the Business School and Professor of Economics in the University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The School offers MBA and Executive MBA (EMBA) degrees, as well as non-degree Executive Education programs. The School’s faculty comprises internationally respected professors and includes Joseph Stiglitz, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. For further information, visit http://www.gsb.columbia.edu/.
Columbia Business School
CONTACT: Keshia Mark of Columbia Business School, +1-212-854-2747, orklm74@columbia.edu
Web site: http://www.gsb.columbia.edu/