Students win $10,000 for business plan

A team of students walked away April 26 with the top prize of $10,000 for a technology-based business plan.

The students were competing in the G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition, which seeks to encourage entrepreneurial activity and interaction between science and business students at UW–Madison. Students had worked on their business plans for months and presented to a panel of judges from industry in the all-day competition.

Winners of the $10,000 grand prize were Garima Goel, an MBA student, and Chung Hoon Lee, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering. Their plan was for LifeSonics, a company developing electronic pulmonary drug delivery-products. The firm believes its technology will outperform pills and injections for certain types of medical treatment.

Nine student teams with a wide variety of business plans competed for more than $24,000 in prize money in the competition, which is now in its fifth year.

Each competing team had at least one student with a scientific and/or engineering background and one with business expertise. Contestants presented plans on ideas ranging from improved snack products to complex drug-delivery systems. Previous winners have leveraged their success to get funding for their business plans and see their ideas become reality.

The second prize of $7,000 went to the team representing MEMS Innovations (MI), which plans to provide the market with reliable micro-electro-mechanical machine measurement devices.

The third place winner of $4,000 was Dairyland Biomass Renewable Energy (DBRE) which has developed a process to convert agricultural residues, wood and paper wastes into simple sugars in order to produce ethanol.

The fourth place winner of $1,000 was ToxImmune, Inc., which has as its principal product a test that shows in 10 minutes whether a person has antibodies protecting against the bacterial toxin that causes Toxic Shock Syndrome.

In addition, a $2,500 prize for best prototype, the Tong Prototype Award, was a three-way tie between LifeSonics, MEMS and OZ Innovations.

Judges for the competition were Scott Button, partner in Venture Investors; Patricia Lipton, executive director, State of Wisconsin Investment Board; Greg Lynch, partner in Michael Best & Friedrich; Jeff Rustinow, managing director, Silicon Pastures; and Richard Wilkey, president and CEO, Fisher-Barton.

The G. Steven Burrill competition is supported by the Technology Enterprise Cooperative, the School of Business, the College of Engineering and the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Major funding is provided by G. Steven Burrill, a 1966 graduate of the School of Business and CEO of Burrill & Company, who is an internationally known spokesman for the life sciences and high-tech industries.