Wharton graduate student Onne Ganel and his colleagues have been working on a bone disease-detecting MRI add-on for years.
On April 22, they got a thumbs-up from prestigious judges and a check for $25,000.
Ganel's company and team, Envisia, Inc., won the grand prize in the Wharton Business Plan Competition's Venture Fair after competing against seven other finalist teams and making an in-depth presentation to judges from big-name firms like Goldman Sachs and Johnson & Johnson.
The Venture Fair, which was held in Houston Hall's Hall of Flags, was the culmination of the year-long competition that involved cultivating a business idea, working with a mentor to develop the idea and eventually writing up a full business plan.
The competition, organized by Wharton students and the Wharton Entrepreneurial Program, was held for the first time in 1998 and has grown to include non-competitive workshops on topics like identifying a business plan and the legal side of starting a business. Its main goal is to foster entrepreneurship in the Penn community, and any team of people is allowed to enter as long as one member is a Penn student.
Wharton MBA student Mike Boyden, whose biotechnology team was one of the eight finalists, said that the competition compelled his team to start thinking about their business idea in a new way.
"It really forced us, in a lot of respects, to put down in paper what we knew in our heads and really crystallize that and take it several steps farther than we had before," Boyden said. "It gave us a real strong reason to, in a timely fashion, really finish out the aspects of our plan that we hadn't thought through yet."
Boyden added that he and his fellow entrepreneurs are planning on starting the business in the real world and are meeting with some potential investors in the near future.
Boyden said that he and his team members have been working on the business plan since October and recently have each worked up to 20 hours per week finalizing and perfecting it.
The top three winners of the competition receive special assistance in starting their businesses. On top of the money they receive, they are guaranteed offices and benefit from the services of the Venture Initiation Program at the Wharton Small Business and Development Center.
In addition to helping young entrepreneurs think through their ideas, the competition encourages participants to focus on certain industries.
A new addition to this year's competition was the education track, which awarded $10,000 in supplemental prize money to the top-scoring education business plan. Cool Source Technologies and Transitional School Management were this year's co-winners.
The top-scoring Wharton undergraduate team, Q Systems, received the Frederick H. Glockner Award in Entrepreneurial Studies along with $7,000.
