Karl Maack, Adli Abozeedan and Thomas Hedner, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract: Venture Cup is the largest business plan competition, dating back to the 1990´s when McKinsey and Company initiated these competitions in close collaboration with Universities and Business Schools. In 1998 Venture Cup was established in Sweden and especially from the western region this competition has been strongly rooted and grown. Today Venture Cup exists as non-profit organizations in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Each year about 400 participants in western Sweden alone is going through the activities in the competition such as workshops, rocket pitching, writing of business plans, coaching and mentoring as well as courses at the University connected to the competition. Venture Cup has become the largest business plan competition in the world and has inspired many others. The concept was from the beginning derived from similar competitions in the USA and the global interest in business plan competitions has grown substantially during the last decade. A Google search on “business plan competition” gives 707 000 results, where competitions at Harward Business School, UC Berkeley and MIT were in the top 5 results. This paper aims at mapping the success factors of Venture Cup, as an example of a well established Business Plan Competition, with a focus on its most successful region in western Sweden. Factors that will be analysed are stakeholder value, academic cooperation, type of management and operative incentives, responsiveness to change, native or foreign participants, openness and how the growth process has occurred of the competition itself. Other factors include some of the offerings provided such as networking, entrepreneurial orientation and attitude shift of the participants, as well as their tacit and narrative business training. Could there be that there are rather clear differences in some factors between more and less successful competitions, and could perhaps these be modelled into a best practice concept. Perhaps this concept could be a suggestion for regional development with a grass-roots drive and a high return of investment for society.
Keywords: Business Plan competitions, entrepreneurship, innovation, regional development, and empowerment.
