Wharton Undergrads Steal the Show
A little ways down the Northeast Corridor, another business plan competition vied for attention even amid the onset of final exams. At the 2016 Wharton Business Plan Competition (BPC) last Friday, April 29th, the Perlman Grand Prize—with its $30,000 cash award—went to student team BioCellection for its inventive solution to cleaning the Earth’s oceans with bioengineered bacteria. Founded by Penn undergraduates Miranda Wang, Alexander Simafranca and Eric Friedman and their teammates Jeanny Yao and Daniel Chapman, BioCellection is the first-ever undergraduate team to take the grand prize. But they weren’t stopping there. BioCellection also won the Wharton Social Impact Prize, the Gloeckner Undergraduate Award, the Michelson People’s Choice Award and the Committee Award for Most “Wow Factor” to become the first team in BPC history to win five awards. In total, their multiple wins amounted to $54,000 in cash.
The idea for BioCellection—which uses genetically engineered bacteria to convert unrecyclable plastics into valuable materials—began as a joint high school science fair project in Vancouver, British Columbia, by Wang and Yao. Though they headed off to different colleges (Yao to the University of Toronto at Scarborough), they pair continued to pursue relevant scientific research and this year teamed up with other classmates to found BioCellection.
Other winners at Wharton’s Friday BPC include brEdcrumb, which took the $15,000 second-place prize for its online platform connecting current high school students with current college and graduate students who can help guide them through the college admissions process, and WeTrain, which came in third and pocketed $10,000 for its on-demand, affordable personal training service.
As at Harvard, the Wharton Business Plan Competition is open to any University of Pennsylvania student. Managed by Wharton Entrepreneurship, the BPC has churned out its fair share of business successes, including eyeglass giant Warby Parker, leading Brazilian baby e-commerce site Baby.com.br, and drug R&D company Integral Molecular.
Haas MBA Teams Compete Against Teams from Around the World
Unlike the HBS and Wharton business plan competitions described above, the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) hosted by UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business is not limited to teams that include a member who attended Haas. Quite the contrary: This year’s contestants included almost 500 start-up social ventures drawn from 178 universities across 50 different countries. And for the first time in its 17-year history, the GSVC finals were held somewhere other than Berkeley.
A Haas team was one of the 17 finalists selected to travel to Bangkok, Thailand, for the final round of competition on April 1st and 2nd, but other finalist teams heralded from around the globe. Top-performing countries in terms of first-round entries included Italy, China, the United States, France and India, with Morocco and Nigeria having strong showings as well. Teams from Cameroon, Colombia and Turkey represented their countries for the very first time this year.
Ultimately, though, bragging rights and the $25,000 first prize went to an Austrian team called BLITAB for its first-ever Braille tablet, which employs an innovative exponential technology to create tactile relief outputting of Braille, graphics and maps for blind and partially sighted people. The affordable device requires no mechanical elements to display a full page of text in Braille.
Second place went to a name that might be familiar: Astraeus Technologies—the HBS venture developing an inexpensive, portable breath-based screening test for lung cancer. Preceding the $50,000 grand prize it would claim in its hometown of Boston, Astraeus picked up another $15,000 in Bangkok.
The $7,500, third-place prize went to Agruppa, a team from Colombia, for its solution using mobile phone technology to let mom-and-pop shops in low-income neighborhoods collectively place orders for fresh fruits and vegetables at wholesale prices.
