About the Competition

Founded in 1999, the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition has continued to evolve as a leading Bay Area event and one of the nation’s foremost business plan competitions.

The competition gives students, alumni and local entrepreneurs the opportunity to work together to turn innovative ideas into real businesses. The event also brings together the finest research and technology ideas from both UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. Each year participants develop business plans that are based on some of the most exciting new technologies. Last year more than 200 aspiring entrepreneurs entered plans in areas as diverse as nanotechnology, biotechnology, computing services and software, consumer goods, financial services, and the Internet.

The UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition provides a year round forum in which UC Berkeley students and alumni can develop and test their business vision and plans. Students and alumni form teams, develop their business ideas, and compete for cash prizes. The competition provides a network of resources for mentorship, team creation, education, networking and new venture financing for these aspiring entrepreneurs. In addition, all participants receive feedback from qualified judges on the business plans they submit.

The competition was founded in 1999 by Melissa Daniels and Keval Desai, two Haas MBA students. The event continues to be organized entirely by MBA students from the Haas School of Business, and is supported by a growing network of former student organizers. The organizers continue to develop the event, with the original goals of the competition in mind: To support students and alumni in their entrepreneurial endeavors to create real businesses, to encourage commercialization of promising ideas emerging from UC Berkeley's strong research centers, and to build bridges between UC Berkeley and the Bay Area entrepreneurial community.

The competition is hosted by the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Walter A. Haas School of Business in cooperation with The School of Information management and Systems, the College of Engineering, and the US San Francisco Innovation Accelerator.

The Competition Timeline – A Year Round Event

Pre-Competition Events

Pre-competition events are held throughout the Fall, including mixers and entrepreneurial exchange events, designed to bring business, engineering and life sciences students and alumni together to form teams and exchange ideas. In addition, there are various pre-competition workshops, to help teams working on their Executive Summary submissions. The formal Launch event of the competition takes place the last week of October, and features the winners of last year's competition as well as prominent venture capitalists.

Registration & Submission of Executive Summaries

The first step of the competition is for teams to register and submit a short executive summary, which details the business concept, market opportunity, competitive advantage, resources required, and team membership qualifications. The executive summaries are due on January 28, 2009, and are then judged by area VC’s in Febuary. These VC judges determine which teams qualified to advance to the semi-final round. The competing teams are invited to participate in a series of workshops throughout February and March, covering topics relevant to completing a business plan. They each also have the opportunity to wok with a team mentor who has expertise in their industry.

Semi-Final Round

Around mid-March, all teams submit their final business plans to the competition. At this judging event, the teams pitch their ideas and answer questions on their business plans from the venture capitalist judges. After a day of presentations, and much deliberation, the judges select the finalists to proceed to the final round of the competition.

As one of our semi-finalists, you will be invited to showcase your business plan idea at the annual UC Berkeley Bears Conference on February 12,2009 at 1:30pm.  The event is hosted by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering.  You will have the opportunity to present your business plan in the form of a poster and network with a large number of Venture Capitalists attending the conference.

Final Round

The finalist teams each give a private presentation to our panel of distinguished final round judges around end of April. The plans are evaluated on the basis of the originality of the idea, viability of the business model, and the potential for future financial success. The winners receive cash prizes and the possibility of venture financing.

Each year we close the competition with a Finalist Presentation & Award Ceremony that is open to the public. The finalist teams pitch their ideas to the audience who vote on the People's Choice award. At the end of the ceremony, the winning teams are announced. We invite you to join us this year for the Finalist Presentation & Award Ceremony to be held in the Andersen Auditorium at the Haas School of Business as the final Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum of the season.

2009 Competition Summary

The 2009 competition was extremely successful with a record number of entries and over 100 business plans submitted. Past competition participants have raised over $150 million in venture capital financing, resulting in one IPO (ZipRealty), a $138 million acquisition and many fast-growing businesses.

Last year AutoTB took first prize:  More than one-third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis. Improved diagnostics are crucial in combating this growing epidemic. AutoTB’s device automates sputum microscopy, thereby decreasing analysis time, increasing sensitivity and eliminating human error present in current procedures while integrating into existing infrastructures and remaining affordable for developing countries. The medical and economic benefits of this device will provide a competitive advantage over existing technologies and make it marketable to NGOs and governmental health departments.

Second place went to Novophage, which provides an advanced biological solution to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in a clinical setting. Current antibiotic strategies suffer from declining effectiveness against multidrug-resistant bacteria. The engineered bacteriophage that Novophage plans to commercialize will provide a highly effective biological alternative to the current standard of clinical care. The benefits from using this genetically engineered bacteriophage include suppression of the evolution of antibiotic resistance, high efficacy in combating bacterial biofilms, and a broad activity spectrum of activity against different bacterial species.

Last year’s 3rd place winner and winner of the People’s Choice Award was Integrated Diagnostics, a biotechnology company developing a novel, easy-to-use, patent-pending, point-of-care device for early stage, accurate HIV detection. We have applied CMOS IC technology to encapsulate the performance of a laboratory immunoassay in the palm of the hand at a cost comparable to current strip-based tests. Hospitals, private practice physicians, and decentralized healthcare facilities will use this device to expedite accurate diagnosis of incoming patients while foregoing the overhead associated with traditional laboratory-based testing.