May 1, 2001
Contact: Jim Aisner
Harvard Business School
(617) 495-6157
Winning Business Plans at Harvard Business School Feature Solutions to Pressing Health-Care Problems
Fifth Annual Business Plan Contest Includes
Social Enterprise Ventures
BOSTON, May 1, 2001--The bubble may have burst on dot-coms but entrepreneurship is alive and flourishing at Harvard Business School (HBS). A total of eight teams of students—four of them representing social enterprise ventures—competed yesterday in the final round of the fifth annual HBS Business Plan Contest held on the School’s campus.
The two winning teams—representing for the first time separate tracks for traditional and social enterprise contenders—address important global health-care issues. Potentia Pharmaceuticals has discovered a way to help drug companies do better at developing new products, 90 percent of which now fail in the clinical testing phase. Representing the social enterprise track, Low Cost Eyeglasses has developed a solution to meet the needs of the one billion people in the developing world who need eyeglasses but can't afford them.
Each team received $10,000 in cash and $10,000 in in-kind professional services. As winner of the traditional track, Potentia Pharmaceuticals also won the Dubilier Prize, established in honor of the late Martin Dubilier, a member of the Harvard MBA Class of 1952 and cofounder of the leveraged buyout firm of Clayton, Dubilier, and Rice.
Contest runners-up represented new ventures in wireless technology and next- generation optical test and measurement technology. The social enterprise runner-up will provide goods and services to Mexico’s low-income housing market.
Forty-one teams, involving some 100 Harvard Business School students, submitted plans to the contest, eleven of them in Social Enterprise. More than 30 HBS faculty served as advisors.
Two separate panels of judges drawn from areas such as venture capital and non-profit consulting determined the winning teams.
Among those addressing the large audience in Burden auditorium were two of last year’s winning team members, Bob Rosin and Sarah Boatman, both graduates of the Class of 2000 and cofounders of Bang Networks, a developer of an intelligent routing network for the Internet. Former runner-up Jon Burgstone, a member of the Class of 1999 and cofounder of Suppliermarket.com, recently purchased by Ariba, urged students not to be discouraged by the "gyrations of the stockmarket." "The quality of people wanting to join new ventures is still high," he observed, "and there is a high level of satisfaction to be had from creating something."
The HBS Business Plan Contest is the capstone of the School’s extensive entrepreneurship curriculum. The contest aims to educate students in the process of creating and evaluating new business ventures; to prepare them for opportunities in traditional and social entrepreneurship during their careers; and to harness the unique resources that HBS offers.
The addition of the Social Enterprise track reflects the considerable interest among HBS students in entities with a social purpose. In 1994, with the support of the John C. Whitehead Fund for Not-for-Profit Managers, the School launched its Initiative on Social Enterprise to develop programs for both Harvard MBA candidates and Executive Education participants.
Founded in 1908 and located on a 35-acre campus in Boston, Harvard Business School offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and doctoral degrees, as well as a portfolio of more than 40 Executive Education programs. With a faculty of more than 200 distinguished scholars and unmatched resources, the School aims to shape the practice of business by building enduring knowledge, educating leaders, and effectively communicating important ideas to meet the challenges and opportunities of the new millennium.