• Safety Communication System for Schools Wins E-Business Plan Competition
• BYU E-Business Competes with Schools from Around the World

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Rachel Finley
574 TNRB
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
(801) 422-3598
prspecialist@byu.edu

BYU E-Business Competes with Schools from Around the World

After taking first place in the Northwest Venture Championship in March, Justin Bergener and his team for School Tipline took their business plan to the highest level of competition play.

The Global Moot Corp Competition, often called “The Superbowl of World Business Plan Competition,” took place at The University of Texas at Austin 30 April 30 through 3 May . Here, thirty seven teams from top MBA programs around the world presented their plans to competition judges and potential investors.

Bergener’s business came in as a semi-finalist and was awarded $2,000. The team also won the Outstanding Presentation award for their division. To date, BYU had only had one team make it to the semi finals. This year the university had two with School Tipline and Klymit, an innovative outdoor clothing business, which won first runner up overall.

The champion of the Moot Corp Competition was NeuroBank from Carnegie Mellon University, a company that has developed new methods for extracting and preserving adult neural stem cells. The company received a prize package worth $100,000, which includes faculty aid from the McCombs Business School, a launch package that will help start their company, prosecution of the first American patent by the company Ropes and Gray, and the opportunity to open the NASDAQ Stock Market on 15 August. Top schools with novel business ideas made for tough competition.

“A lot of those teams take entrepreneurship pretty seriously,” says Bergener, a sociology major from Zillah, Washington. “We were mostly a young team with only one grad student. We were up against good competition.”

Teams submitted written business plans and presented their ideas before judges and investors.

Rob McMillen, one of the team members and an MBA student from Twin Falls, Idaho, said, “I think the biggest learning opportunity for me was to learn to pitch a deal. The pitch was what we focused on and I think we focused on the right area.” He says that is what helped the team get to the semi-finals.

All team members agree that the competition was a valuable learning experience and encourage other students to enter such competitions.

“Get out to as many as you can, even if you have to pay your own airfare,” says Barrett Edgington, a strategy major from Orem. “In the long run it’s worth it.

The team isn’t planning on entering anymore competitions this year. However, they are not putting School Tipline on hold either.

“We’re going to focus on our service, the market, market needs, and see if our plan needs some more tweaking,” Bergener says.

For more information about School Tipline, visit www.schooltipline.com.