A student team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School won second place and more than $142,000 Saturday (April 18) in the 2009 Rice University Business Plan Competition, the largest graduate-level business plan competition in the world. The Rice grand prize went to Dynamics of Carnegie Mellon University for its next-generation interactive payment cards that use programmable magnetic strips.
Left to right: Allen Mask, John Lerch, Justin Cross and Stephen Jarrett |
A student team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School won second place and more than $142,000 Saturday (April 18) in the 2009 Rice University Business Plan Competition, the largest graduate-level business plan competition in the world. The Rice grand prize went to Dynamics of Carnegie Mellon University for its next-generation interactive payment cards that use programmable magnetic strips.
NextRay Inc., the faculty-created spinoff business the UNC team presented, provides medical imaging technology that produces more detailed images than current x-rays with less than one percent of the radiation dosage. Notable UNC breast cancer researcher and vice dean of the UNC School of Medicine Etta Pisano developed NextRay’s technology.
In addition to the $15,000 second place win overall, John Lerch (MBA ’09), Justin Cross (MBA ’10), Stephen Jarrett (MBA ’10) and Allen Mask, a junior in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, also won the $100,000 Life Science Prize from Opportunity Houston and the Greater Houston Partnership Award in the competition. The team also took home the NASA Earth/Space Engineering Innovation Award for $20,000 and awards for the best business plan, best medical device and the best life science project.
NextRay is a participant in the Student Teams Achieving Results (STAR) program at Kenan-Flagler. The STAR program sends teams of top MBA candidates and undergraduate students to corporations and not-for-profits to help them build effective business strategies.
The NextRay STAR project from UNC Kenan-Flagler was chosen from 339 other business plan teams from around the world to participate in the Rice competition. The team competed against 41 other teams in Houston to win second place.
“It has been so exciting to see how effective it is to work across the entire UNC community,” noted Lerch, NextRay’s chief operating officer. “We took amazing technology from the medical school and involved people from the business school and the local venture community to help develop it. The money from the competition will be primarily spent on consultants and continued student help refining our plans to take this technology to market.”
The $100,000 prize requires that the company relocate to Houston. Lerch noted that the team has received no further information about other requirements of that award and will be evaluating the opportunity as it learns more.
In addition to the STAR program, multiple programs under the Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative (CEI) assisted the team. Lerch met Pisano while working in the Carolina Entrepreneurial Fellows program at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. In addition, entrepreneurs who work with Launching the Venture, a joint program of Kenan-Flagler and the UNC Office of Technology Development, coached the NextRay team before the competition.
“This outcome demonstrates that CEI’s innovative system supporting UNC entrepreneurs works,” noted Ted Zoller, executive director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. “Our programs connected a noted scientist on the faculty, with both graduate and undergraduate students trained in entrepreneurship, incubated the venture and supported its launch. This bodes well for the future of faculty entrepreneurship and for technology spinoffs at Carolina.”
Pisano is using her experience with NextRay to build a support system for entrepreneurial spinoffs for the School of Medicine under UNC’s new National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA), which she directs. The medical school is partnering with Kenan-Flagler and the Office of Technology Development to create the N.C. Center for Biomedical Innovation Translation (NC-CBIT), a program to support the efforts of faculty and others to bring life sciences projects to market.
“Rice is the preeminent business plan competition globally, and the success of the team from UNC tangibly demonstrates the leadership among our faculty and students in entrepreneurship, and the university’s commitment under the CEI to bring together the resources to support our innovators on campus,” Zoller said. “We look forward to the future success stories that will result from the collaboration among all our professional schools and academic departments, and the extraordinary entrepreneurial leaders across this campus.”
The Rice competition is designed to give graduate student entrepreneurs a real-world experience to refine their business plans so they can successfully bring their products to market. Judges evaluate the teams as real-world entrepreneurs trying to secure start-up funds from early stage investors and venture capital firms. The competition is hosted and organized by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which is Rice University’s flagship initiative devoted to the support of entrepreneurship.
Misuzu Miyata (MBA ’10) and Alex Lassiter (BSBA ’10) also are members of the NextRay STAR team, and the team’s STAR adviser is Tom Mercolino (Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from UNC, vice president, business development at Global Vaccines, Inc.).
STAR Web site: www.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/Leadership/Companies/STAROverview.cfm
Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative Web site: www.kenaninstitute.unc.edu/centers/cei/?y=home&t=Carolina%20Entrepreneurial%20Initiative
Kenan-Flagler Business School contact: Heather Havenstein, (919) 962-8951, heather_havenstein@unc.edu
News Services contact: Susan Houston, (919) 962-8415, susan_houston@unc.edu