Karl Maack, Adli Abozeedan and Thomas Hedner, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract: The concept of business plan competitions to promote entrepreneurship and venture creation originates from the USA where it was developed in the early 1980’s. Following this trend, McKinsey & Company started organizing competitions around the world in cooperation with local universities and business schools in the 1990’s. A successful example of one of these competitions is Venture Cup, established 1998 in Sweden and has since grown to become the largest business plan competition in the world. But what about the rest of the world, well, on a search on Google using the words “business plan competition” bracketed together we got 707 000 results, where Competitions at Harward Business School, UC Berkeley and MIT were in the top 5 results (march 2011). Having overviewed competitions worldwide it becomes clear that they have a lot of different focuses, where some of the competitions has a niche towards High-tech, Biotech, Health, IT or more socially oriented. Some competitions are only focused on ventures with product development and some on more service oriented businesses. In this paper we aim at analyzing the larger business plan competitions with a focus on the following dimensions; geographical coverage area, business sector focus, pedagogic model (theory/tacit), learning focus, outcome focus, supporting structures, gender, university linked, business/society linked, coaching/mentoring, ROI focus (Individual/society) as well as regional development perspective. Most competitions have an academic connection through a university or business school and they are often non-profit driven by students. There are also differences in the pedagogic side of the competitions, where some focus on team development (learning between competitors) and some are more individualized. Some competitions only have a focus on the written plan where others have mentoring, workshops and training in presenting business ideas orally. Some of the strengths of business plan competitions are networking, entrepreneurial orientation and attitude shift, tacit and narrative business training. The societal return of investment (ROI) has also been shown to be high and these competitions have a strong potential as instruments empowering regional development from a grass roots perspective.
Keywords: Business Plan competitions, entrepreneurship, innovation, regional development, and empowerment.
