MIT Entrepreneurship Competition: Main Page

MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition | 70 Memorial Drive, E51-355 Cambridge, MA 02142; (617) 258-0232

The MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition

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Overview

The MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition is designed to encourage students and researchers in the MIT community to act on their talent, ideas and energy to produce tomorrow's leading firms. In its ten-year history, the Competition has awarded over $200,000 in cash and business startup services to outstanding teams of student entrepreneurs who submitted business plans for new ventures showing significant business potential. The refinement process of the Competition, its network of mentors, investors and potential partners, and the cash prizes awarded have helped many of these teams to act on their dreams and build their own companies and fortunes.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition provides teams who enter with valuable resources in the following areas crucial to successful entrepreneurship:

Networks of world-class entrepreneurs, investors, and potential partners
Mentorship by successful and seasoned professionals
Education in specific business planning skills as well as general entrepreneurial insight
Teambuilding opportunities to create a winning team of founders
Funding to help start the ventures of winning teams in the Competition

Students from all five schools at MIT (Sloan, Engineering, Science, Humanities, and Architecture) at the undergraduate and graduate levels have entered and been successful in the Competition. Multi-disciplinary teams that combine members from technical disciplines with members from the Sloan School have proven the most successful competitors. These teams bring together the pieces necessary for making the bridge between technology and the marketplace. Their business plans are judged by a panel of experienced entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and legal professionals.

Real Ideas, Real Companies

Many of the teams that have been successful in the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition have gone on to be successful in business. Direct Hit was featured in a Wall Street Journal article in the Summer of 1998. The 1995 overall winner, SensAble Technologies was profiled in July of this 1997 by Fortune Magazine as a "Fortune Top 25 Cool Technology Company." An article in the Boston Globe in 1996 highlighted successful startup technology firms in the Boston/Cambridge area: of the companies listed, over 60% were started by MIT students, and of those, 75% were founded by teams from the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition. More press mentions.

The 1998 overall winners were Direct Hit Technologies, Volunteer Solutions, Inc. and CarSoft.

The 1997 overall winners were Imagen, Actuality Systems and Virtual Ink.

The 1996 overall winner was WebLine Communications, makers of the WebLine Call Server for Internet telecommunications. Other winners include OnCyte Technologies, a biotech startup developing specialized polymers for localized chemotherapy treatment, and InterSense Technologies, makers of an intertial motion sensor for virtual reality applications. Our $50K Alumni page gives further information on previous years' entrants.

Past success stories include 1991 winner Stylus Innovation. Stylus was co-founded by MIT graduates John Barrus, Mike Cassidy, and Krisztina Holly. After licensing their original bar code technology for $8 million, the Cambridge-based company shifted business focus and began shipping telephony applications and developer toolkits. In February 1996 they sold to Artisoft for $13 million in cash; the founders still owned 75% of the company at the time they were acquired. Now, they are one of the Competition's sponsors. This link lists more $50K success stories.

Getting Started

The Competition begins in the fall, with an easy to enter $1K Business Idea Warm-Up Competition. This short contest in November requires only a 1-2 page summary of your business idea, including a description of your market, your products and technology, any team members you have already begun to work with, and other information that you believe relevant to the evaluation of your concept by the judges. The purpose of this early stage is to help you prepare for the main Competition, which begins in February. Over the course of the year, the $50K Organizing Team will hold various events and provide resources for you in the areas of mentorship, education, networking, funding, and teambuilding that will help you put together the pieces of the entrepreneurial process. In the spring, entry kits for the $50K Competition will be available for at the E-Center, E51-355. $50K Executive summaries are due Tuesday, 2/23, 1999, at 4pm in E51-355.

The most important thing for you to understand is that the Competition can help you and your team produce a successful venture, but it is up to you and your own entrepreneurial initiative to seek out the people, ideas and support you will need to make your venture a real world winner.

If you have questions concerning the Competition, please browse this web site fully. Sign up for the Competition email list. We will begin sending out information to our list, 50k-announce, in the upcoming weeks.