Business plan competition winners announced

Anca Maria Copaescu and Florentina Popovici won the $10,000 top prize in the G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition at the University of Wisconsin–Madison today, April 27.

The team presented their business plan for Metagenomics, the Soil Genome Project, to a panel of judges, faculty, students and professionals. The Copaescu and Popovici business plan involves building “gene libraries” and a database by extracting and cloning DNA from the soil.

The students have been working on the concept for a year. Kopaescu is in the School of Business; Popovici is studying Computer Science.

Second prize of $7,000 went to Fluent Solutions, a company that designs and markets products to North American crop farmers. Its principal product is TankMate, an electronic system that allows the continuous monitoring of fluid levels with the field tank as well as the application rate per acre during fertilization. The team consists of Maria Kousathana, business, and Chad Sorenson, engineering. This team earlier won the $2,500 Tong Prototype Award bestowed by the College of Engineering.

Third prize went to the SMARTparts team and their product, Trail-A-Brake, a mechanical system designed to apply braking force to the wheel of a trailer bike. This team consisted of Christoph Heinzer, engineering, and Seth Werner, business. Werner was a first-prize winner in last year’s competition.

Fourth prize of $1,000 was presented to a team who worked on the plan for a remote positioning device for MRI-guided breast biopsy. The team developing the business plan for The Radiologist is made up of Eric Dvorak, engineering , Sharib Haroon, business and Justin Kolterman, engineering.

The annual technology business competition encourages interdisciplinary cooperation between students in business and technology. Each team had at least one student with a scientific and/or engineering background and one with a business expertise. Seven teams competed with commercial ideas ranging from improving procedures on MRI-guided breast biopsies to picture frames that display multi images to instant messaging platforms for wireless handsets.

Burrill, who has helped fund the competition, gave a speech on entrepreneurship and business creation. He is a 1966 alum of the business school, CEO and founder of Burrill and Company, San Francisco, Calif., and an authority on life-sciences business development.