Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

CU NEW VENTURE CHALLENGE

Many universities have some sort of business plan competition. In Chapter 9, I’ll give you a deeper perspective on a different kind of university involvement in a startup community. For now, I’ll give you a taste of the CU Boulder equivalent of a business plan competition. Brad Bernthal, a professor at CU Law, and one of the creators of the CU New Venture Challenge (http://startuprev.com/d4), describes it below.

If you cross a beauty pageant with a debate, plop it into a contrived startup competition format, and surround it with a revivalist atmosphere filled with entrepreneurial gospel, then you get the glorious mess known as the campus business-plan competition.

Such competitions are inevitably flawed. Time frames are artificial. Companies are at various stages of development. Hard emphasis on planning is at odds with lean startup practices. And only in the bizarre environs of a campus competition does a nonprofit seeking a sustainable way to fund an orphanage in Africa compete with a carbon-capture technology that would store greenhouse gases in the ocean.

Here is an even more curious thing. It somehow works.

CU Boulder launched its New Venture Challenge in 2008. We were not—and to this day are not—the first, best, or biggest competition. On the large side, Rice University is the gold standard of the campus business pageant world. Rice’s competition is really an economic development event for Houston and its surrounding region. In 2012, the Rice ...