"Our program in entrepreneurial leadership's primary goal is to educate students,
and we see this competition as a way of extending that competition to a broader audience
and educating at a deeper level." – Pamela Goldberg, Program Director

Tufts Entrepreneurial Leadership Program is in the business of ideas—inspiring them, polishing them and putting them to work.

The program sponsors two annual business plan competitions that award a total of $100,000 in cash and in-kind services. The competitions encourage members of the Tufts community to take action on their ideas for business or social ventures.

50K Classic Business Plan Competition
50K Social Entrepreneurship Competition

Tufts 6th Annual 100K Entrepreneurship Competition Business Plan Competition Finalist Presentations $50K Classic Business Plan Competition $50K Social Entrepreneurship Competition Application Deadline: January 25, 2010 Teams must sign up on YouNoodle using the following link: http://younoodle.com/groups/tufts_bpc Tufts 6th Annual 100K Entrepreneurship Competition Business Plan Competition Finalist Presentations Wednesday, April 14, 2010 1-5 pm Tufts Gordon Institute 200 Boston Avenue, Suite 2400 Medford, MA 02155 Please join us as the competition finalists present their business plans to a panel of judges. An awards ceremony and reception will immediately follow the presentations. For directions, go to http://gordon.tufts.edu/about/directions.asp

50K Classic Business Plan Competition

The Classic Business Plan Competition will award a total of $50,000 in cash and in-kind services to the winning plan(s).
Frequently Asked Questions

Peelable Paint, Winner of the 2009 Classic Business Plan Competition
http://www.relaytm.com/Relay/Relay.html

This year's competition, which was held on March 25, 2009 featured a variety of business plans drawn up from some of the
most talented in the Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. The classic competition winners for 2009 were (pictured left) Michael Mintz (F'09), Kunal Gupta (F'08) and Matthew Hnatio (F'09) who developed Peelable Paint, an innovative product which goes on like regular paint, but once dry can be peeled off in one strip.
 
Now in its 5th year, judges of the competition come from varying backgrounds in business and law. This year's judges included Mark Kesslen (E'86), chair of the intellectual property section of Lowenstein Sandler Attorneys at Law and Diane Hessan (A'76), CEO of Communispace. Both are members of the Tufts Entrepreneurial Leadership board of advisors.

"We were honored to participate in this year's business plan competition and to win such a prestigious award," Mintz says. "It is wonderful that Tufts supports entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial student spirit at the university. The competition was a great opportunity not only for us to showcase our own products and business plan but to learn from and network with our fellow entrepreneurial students."

50K Social Entrepreneurship Competition

The Social Entrepreneurship Competition was created to encourage members of the Tufts University community to think about developing new ventures that benefit society. A total of $50,000 in cash and in-kind services will be awarded to the winning plan(s).
Frequently Asked Questions

The Strivers Foundation, Winner of the 2009 Social Entrepreneurship Competition

The social competition winners, (pictured right) were Jeremy Fryer-Biggs (E'11), Andrew Neville and Malcolm Cecil-Cockwell of The Strivers Foundation, a Uganda-based program seeking to "find an inexpensive alternative to traditional college, to stimulate middle class development by incubating white-collar businesses."

For Fryer-Biggs, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, Tufts' encouragement to step beyond his concentration and take one business class per semester played a key role in the future success of his company.

"I was taking courses in the entrepreneurial leadership and that started to teach me how to take this pie-in-the-sky idea and turn it into something that could be real, and helped me focus and push it in such a way that I could deliver it," Fryer-Biggs says. "Then they told me about the business plan competition and I was thought this is a match made in heaven."

Both highlighted profiles adapted from articles by Toka Beech and Kaitlin Provencher