Tyler Salem, a Mechanical Engineering major [1], took home top honors in the inaugural Business Model Competition (BMC) for developing Care Capture, Inc., a HIPAA-compliant software application used by senior living communities to send wellness updates to family members. Salem won $3,000 and was one of eight semi-finalists that participated for the chance to compete at Harvard University in the $25,000 International BMC Awards Program in May.
Malic Dekkar, a doctoral student in Modeling & Simulation [2], came in second place and won $1,000 for developing Light Cloud which provides subscribers with a cloud-based 3D repository database of dense, millimeter accurate 3D data. Student James Davis won $750 and third place for At Your Side Laboratory Services, which provides onsite clinical laboratory testing with immediate results. The other five semi-finalists included: Adventure Fix (James Ceparano/Travis Sherman); Automated Cytometry Solutions (Antoniay Petkova); Chore Credit (Justin Castillo); KIDDS (Todd Stephenson) and Legleze (Terry Warren).
Judges for the event included: Biff Godfrey, local attorney; Jan Conrad, the 2012 recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for the Success in Entrepreneurship program; Adora English, award-winning television executive; Carol Ann Dykes, site manager, UCF Business Incubator; Kai Isaac and Eddie Bradley, the founders of Filmscape Productions; Isabel Perry, president of TheSafetyDoctor.com; Michael Judith, engineer; Ron Ben Zeev, international economist and business expert; and Robin Phelps, startup strategist and team leader for UCF’s statewide program for second-stage business growth, GrowFL.
The inaugural event was hosted by the UCF Blackstone Launchpad, an initiative of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, located in the College of Business Administration [3]. Rather than focusing on developing a robust business plan, complete with financials and slick presentations, the business model competition focuses on identifying and precisely defining the assumptions of the new venture, testing those assumptions in the field, and then changing (pivoting) based on the lessons learned. Students must demonstrate how they tested their assumptions rather than gathered data and how they validated their learning rather than merely wrote a business plan.
Visit the CEL website [4] to learn more about other upcoming competitions.