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While Olympic athletes were going through their last grueling preparations for the winter games in Salt Lake City, a group of young entrepreneurs at Wharton were flexing their business plans for a very different type of competition.
Chris Pienkowski, a junior at the Wharton School, has already convinced seasoned educators and technological experts to buy into his dream of a business to offer learning technologies to elementary and secondary school students. He and his partners convinced a school district in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, to install his software for a pilot program. He convinced himself that he could overcome his own weaknesses in mathematics to pursue his Wharton degree and then believed in his business, CoolSource Technologies, enough to make it a reality.
Now he only needs to convince a set of judges in the Wharton Business Plan Competition that his proposal is the best.
Going for the Gold
The business plan competition, now in its fourth year, has attracted 160 teams of students from across the University of Pennsylvania campus. "It is really frenzied," said Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs associate director Anne Stamer, in the middle of the academic equivalent of an Olympic training camp. "Students are in and out of the office. It is very high energy at this point."
As the contest moves through its several phases, students continue to tighten their business plans and judges narrow the field to eight finalists — the "Great 8" — who will compete in a marathon of presentations at a Venture Fair on April 22. The finalists, who are guaranteed a $1,500 award, vie for the top prizes of $25,000, a second prize of $15,000, and third prize of $10,000.
In addition, for the first time this year, the competition is offering a supplemental prize for educational related projects of up to $10,000 and a $7,000 prize for the top Wharton undergraduate team plan.
But the real prize is advice and feedback from experienced faculty and entrepreneurs. The competition sponsors lectures and information sessions around campus. Nearly one-third of the 160 participating teams have taken advantage of one-on-one mentoring, an increase from previous years. "This has been something we are very happy about," Stamer said. "Education is what the competition is really about. The students who enter are often just looking to get people in their industry to read their idea and give them feedback."
Lessons of Defeat
Pienkowski said the reactions from last year’s competition helped him refine his plan for his educational software firm. "Last year I was so disappointed because most of the feedback I got was really negative," he said. "They said there was no market for what I am going to do. Of course, that just made me more determined to make the business work. As an entrepreneur, you have to be thick skinned," he said. "More people than not will think that you are crazy."
While he didn’t take a top prize last year, he did become the first company founded by an undergraduate selected by the elite Wharton Venture Initiation Program (VIP), a business incubator for University of Pennsylvania students managed by the Wharton Small Business Development Center. He also won the Gloeckner Award in 2001 for the best undergraduate business plan.
Pienkowski came up with the idea for CoolSource Technologies, based on his own challenges learning math while preparing to attend Wharton. After setting up an auto shop as a teenager, he worked as a carpenter and helped establish a family real estate business focusing on handicapped-accessible housing. But when, at 24, he decided to go to Wharton for business, he recognized that with a general math background he had a lot of catching up to do. "So that I could get accepted to Wharton, I had a year to learn algebra through pre-calculus," he said. "I had to take math at accelerated rates."
That experience came back to him when he was thinking about starting a business a few years later, and he decided to try to create software that would "help kids through technology." For instance, in one program, students learn math by playing the role of a spy and penetrating an underground layer by solving equations.
In his first competition, he started with ideas for seven different businesses. This year he has a single business concept with a clearer focus. "This competition is important because it really does make you focus and it gives you certain goals to reach, because you have deadlines within the competition," he said. It also provides good feedback and advice. Even the bad feedback was good. We are going to win this time."
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Week’s coverage of last year’s Business
Plan Competition Competition reveals some emerging trends in entrepreneurship
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