Today through Saturday, the University’s Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship will host the New Venture Championship, a competition for business plans developed by teams of students, in Portland.
“This is a competition open to basically any college or university on the planet,” LCE Director Randy Swangard said. The 20 competitors in this year’s competition include teams from Thailand and Colombia, as well as regional rivals University of Washington and University of California, Berkeley.
The first competition was at the University in 1992, according to the NVC Web site. Swangard said the event is held in Portland because many of the competition’s judges live in the Portland area and other teams have an easier time traveling to Portland than Eugene.
“It’s a real high-profile event for not only our center and the business school but also the University in the Portland area,” Swangard said.
The University’s representative for the competition was determined at the Quest for AdVenture competition in December. Eight teams made up of University master students of business administration competed against each other.
Perpetua, the winning team from December’s competition, marketed the “energy harvester,” a product of the research and development department at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
“It’s, in essence, a battery that lasts forever,” Swangard said.
The energy harvester creates electricity from very small variations in temperature — two or three degrees Celsius — and is used
in wireless sensors on bridges
and pipelines.
“We saw a huge market potential, when you talk about being able to provide power from an inexhaustible resource,” Perpetua member Mason Adair said.
Perpetua began to form last spring, and two of the five team members participated in the Technology Entrepreneurship Fellows Program last summer. The program, according to the Lundquist College of Business Web site, allows University law and M.B.A. students to evaluate and develop business plans for technology developed in University labs and at PNNL.
After winning the Quest for AdVenture competition, Perpetua participated in various business plan competitions. The team took first place at a University of Cincinnati competition and first runner-up at a tournament in Bangkok, Thailand.
Adair said presenting in a foreign country was an exceptional challenge for Perpetua, and the students translated part of their presentation into Thai. One of the students on the team speaks Thai.
Adair said he expects the upcoming competition in Portland to be a challenge as well.
“The level of competition will be stepped up,” he said, explaining that while Perpetua has already competed against many of the teams in the contest, all the teams have been continually refining their plans.
Perpetua co-founder Jed Cahill said in an e-mail that being the home team will make the Portland competition the team’s toughest yet.
“Not only will we have lots of friends, colleagues, and former and current UO professors in attendance, but we’ll also be presenting in front of people from the likes of Intel Capital and other powerful firms that have the ability to invest in us right now,” Cahill wrote.
Adair said NVC’s format will be similar to other competitions Perpetua has participated in: a 15-minute presentation followed by a 20-minute question-and-answer period.
“The Q and A is the biggest variable,” Adair said. “You never know what they’re going to ask. Hopefully, we’re prepared.”
Swangard said business plans are evaluated on viability, clarity and structure of writing and whether the judges believe students could carry out the plan.
“Fundamentally, it comes down to one decision: Who would you write a check to?” Swangard said.
Swangard said some plans presented at NVC and other competitions go on to become actual businesses.
“This is very real. We have folks in that room who can write significant checks,” he said referring to some of the judges and businesspeople involved with the competition.
KidSmart, a team from the University of Georgia that took second place at the 2003 NVC, marketed a smoke detector that allows parents to record a message, rather than a non-descript beep, to alert children of fire. Swangard said the team launched its business about a year ago.
“I believe they sold a million units to Home Depot,” Swangard said.
Perpetua also plans to eventually turn its plan into a business.
“That’s the goal of all of this, and we really couldn’t have the energy to go through this if it was just an exercise,” Adair said. He said that while more work, such as getting the license for the technology from PNNL, would need to be done to start the business, investors are excited about the plan.
The NVC winner will take home $25,000 cash and be admitted to the MOOT CORP Competition at the University of Texas, which Swangard described as the “Super Bowl” of business plan competitions. Perpetua is already guaranteed admission to MOOT CORP because it won prior competitions. CleanSmart, another team from the University, also gained MOOT CORP entry through winning competitions at the University of Manitoba and San Diego State University. Swangard said it’s unusual for a school to send two teams to MOOT CORP.

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