Get Your Business Funded: Creative Methods for Getting the Money You Need

Other Competitions

Similar to business plan competitions, there are a host of other business/entrepreneurship/startup competitions that essentially seek to do the same thing: find and reward the best businesses with the best ideas. Google “startup competitions.”

Some of the ones you may want to check out are:

The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Challenge. Since 1989, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has hosted a series of yearly entrepreneurship contests, including an elevator pitch contest in which competitors have 60 seconds to woo judges. The top prize is $10,000. Another one of the contests is the Tweet Pitch, or “Twitch.” Contestants use 140 characters or less to win $500. (www.mit100k.org.)

The GE Ecomagination Challenge. “A $200 million innovation experiment where businesses, entrepreneurs, innovators and students share their best ideas on how to build the next-generation power grid.” (http://challenge.ecomagination.com.)

Amazon Web Services Start-Up Challenge. Winners receive $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS service credits.

The Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC). This is an international social venture plan competition, where teams propose commercially viable businesses that work to reduce poverty in the developing world.

The Mass Challenge. This is an annual global startup competition in Massachusetts, although “anyone can enter, with any idea, from anywhere in the world” since the goal is to “catalyze a global startup renaissance.” Winners ...