Have a dream but starved for start-up capital? Enter one of these 15 university-sponsored contests.
As students at MIT, Lucchino and his team were eligible for the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Entrants to the contest need only present a business plan; proof of concept helps, too. Lucchino and his team, at what would soon become Semprus BioSciences, bagged the grand prize: $30,000 in cash. (Back then the "100K" refers to the competition's entire purse.)
Semprus then hit the business plan circuit, winning top honors at small-business contests at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Rice University, Oxford University and Cambridge University. Total take: about $75,000 in cash and plenty of "street cred" with deep-pocketed investors. "It's a good spring training exercise," says Lucchino, who went on to raise $2 million in 2007 from private investors and another $8 million in venture funding in December 2008.
To read the full, original article click on this link: The Biggest Small Business Competitions - Forbes.com
Author: Maureen Farrell
