ATTENTION: ENTREPRENURS AND INNOVATORS
October 29, 2011 is the deadline for the 2011 Innovation Competition! Don’t miss out on your chance to with $5,000 to put toward your ideas!
Details and Prizes
• Participants must develop and submit a business concept for market a tangible, manufacturable product. (we are not looking for software, services, apps, etc.)
• Winning concept will receive $5000 to put toward development of their product.
• VT KnowledgeWorks will throw in a package of start-up services for the contest winner – the FirstOffice package in their JumpStart Community.
The FirstOffice package provides office space and numerous other resources including: local and regional start-up press releases, commercial insurance offerings overview, human resources issues and answers, financial and administrative set-up, banking services primer, Public relations tips, internet impact tips.
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Important Dates and Deadlines:`
Oct 28/29, 2011 – Each team must submit a 200 word abstract summarizing the business concept and intended use of awarded funds. The abstract should show the strengths of the proposed innovation.
In a separate document, each team must develop a maximum 1,200 word business concept following our submission guidelines (to be posted).
To encourage creativity, specific submission constraints have been removed, only the 1,000 word text constraint remains. We want each team to frame their product in the best light, whatever they decide that may be! Remember, we will be looking for STRENGTH within the proposals… “be creative but be careful”. You can see several frameworks for generating business concepts in our Information Session Presentation.
Nov 1, 2011 – Following submission review, Five finalist teams will be selected to present at the 2011 CIbM Innovation Workshop on November 8th for a chance at final prize.
Nov 8, 2011 – Finalist teams will each deliver a 10 minute presentation to an audience of local industry-members, investors, faculty, and students at the 2011 Innovation Workshop. Presentations will be judged by panel of local investors, industry-members, university faculty, and workshop attendees.
Following presentations and judging, the winning team will be announced and $5,000 in development funds/ First Office awarded.
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Submission Guidelines:
• Hardcopy submissions, paper, posters, etc. may be submitted to 250 Durham until 5:00 PM October 28, 2011
REMEMBER: There is NO set submission format!! If you prefer to convey your ideas in a poster, diagram, etc you may do this, BUT the submission may have no greater than 1,200 words.
• Electronic Submissions should be sent to vt_cibm@vt.edu by 11:59 PM October 29, 2011 to be considered eligible.