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IPFW Business Plan Competition
The Lilly Endowment and Purdue University sponsored the first ever IPFW Business Plan Competition in Fall 2004. Entrepreneurs throughout northeast Indiana were invited to submit visions for new products, services, and technologies to the competition. Submissions consisted of formalizations of the visions as business plans that communicate commercial promise.
DSBMS students and faculty were very much engaged in this initiative. John Wellington of DSBMS and Karl LaPan of the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center (NIIC) designed the pre-competition program to assist would-be competitors in preparing good business plans. The program consisted of six sessions dealing with research methods, marketing, finance, entity selection, business plan format, and critique. Francine Segars, Zoher Shipchandler, and William Todorovic, and John Wellington of DSBMS joined Karl LaPan and Remound Wright of NIIC in delivering the program.
Our DSBMS students made significant contributions to the second place winner, Zoom Information Systems. Team Zoom consisted of DSBMS students Chris Aker, Josh Arnold, Rachel Vinson, and Jan Wade. The team worked with entrepreneur Mike Fritsch of Zoom in researching the commercial potential of Mike’s vision and other aspects of the plan’s preparation. Mike’s vision and plan won second place and $15,000. Our students helped in researching Mike vision of a technology that would allow the collection, storage, and sharing of real-time transportation information useful to movement of vehicles (trucks). It included driver information, traffic management, road conditions and repair, fleet management, and many other applications. Team Zoom consisted of students in the School’s Cole Entrepreneurship Program.
Although the vision was not our students, their efforts contribute to Zoom’s success in the competition. Thanks to DSBMS faculty members Kel Preston, Jim Moore, and Remound Wright for working with our students in this initiative. Congratulations to our students and thanks to the Cole Foundation for making their participation possible.
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