UCI management students put their ideas to the test

Christine Carrillo

Entrepreneurs start with an idea.

They turn their idea into a business undertaking.

They organize it, manage it and assume a certain amount of risk

holding on to the high hopes of turning around a profit.

This case is no different.

ThinkTank and UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management have, for

the fourth year in a row, given students an arena to test their

entrepreneurial talents through its annual Business Plan Competition.

The competition, which began in January, allows students

campuswide a chance to test their creativity, teamwork skills,

research abilities and commitment. Now, three months into the

competition, which has consisted of workshops, business plans and

presentations, only 15 teams remain. And they still have more than a

month to go.

“We’re really expanding the educational aspect of the program and

reaching out to more students,” said Nicole Scarcello, competition

director. “There’s a lot of really great ideas at UCI, not just in

the [Graduate School of Management], so we’re trying to help

entrepreneurs by expanding it out.

Ideally, a lot of these finalists will go on and start these

companies,” she said “They’re all very serious.”

The teams, now working on fine-tuning their business plans,

presentations and financial pitches, will gain the assistance of

local business professionals that competition officials expect will

give participants an even deeper understanding of what it takes.

“Hopefully, they’ll all say that it was a good use of their time

and that it helped them develop relationships and ways of thinking

about a problem that they didn’t have before,” said Bruce Hallett, a

partner with Miramar Venture Partners in Corona del Mar and a member

of the competition’s advisory board.

Hitting the gamut of local business leaders, the advisory board

will assign coaches -- business professionals -- to each team during

a reception at UCI tonight. The coaches will be expected to mentor

and guide the teams, which consist of anywhere from three to nine

members, until the competition’s winners are decided in May.

The first-place team will win a $50,000 cash award, and second

place will win $10,000. Although those awards can help the winning

teams turn their plan into a reality, the process of the competition

will leave them with much more.

“The discipline of the competition really pushed them to have both

a better appreciation for the difficulty of what they’re doing and a

sense that in whatever they do in the entrepreneurial world that

they’ve really learned something important in the competition,”

Hallett said.