Students win business plan competition

Two graduate students from the School of Business took first place March 2 in the International Business Plan Competition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Sponsored by the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship, the business plan submitted and presented by Chad Sorenson and Jaume Villanueva won over 12 other business schools including Purdue, Vanderbilt, and the universities of Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas.

The Wisconsin team won $10,000 and the opportunity to compete Wednesday, May 1, for the $100,000 grand prize in the Moot Corp, considered the Super Bowl of international business-plan competitions.

The Wisconsin MBA students entered the competition with the business plan for Sorenson’s invention, TankMate, and his new business, Fluent Solutions. TankMate is a remote monitoring device that enables farmers to know how much liquid is in their anhydrous ammonia tanks and calculates the amount of fertilizer used per acre.

Sorenson holds undergraduate and graduate mechanical engineering degrees from UW–Madison and has been working on TankMate since 1999. Villanueva holds an MS in Economics from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and has worked in international marketing for several multinational corporations. Like Sorenson, he will graduate from UW–Madison’s MBA program in May.

Both are part of the Weinert Applied Ventures in Entrepreneurship Program, a yearlong program that prepares students to start, grow and advise entrepreneurial businesses. Students in the WAVE program work closely with area businesses and UW–Madison startups to create and implement strategic, operating and financial plans.

Advisors for the team are Brian Pope, who was part of the team that won second place in Moot Corp business plan competition in Austin, Texas last year, and Jay Ebben, a Ph.D. student who has also competed and won in international business competitions.

This is the second WAVE team to take first place in a major entrepreneurship competition this year. On Feb. 23, a team of five UW–Madison WAVE students won first place in regionals at the Venture Capital Investment Competition in Austin, Texas. That team will compete in April in finals at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“The success of our students in these competitions is consistent and well deserved,” says Ted Baker, co-director of the WAVE program. “It comes from their ability to apply the wide variety of business skills taught in the program, and enables them to leverage their diverse backgrounds and experiences to develop effective business strategies.”