Eureka! 2008 Hikes Prize Money to Rs 25 Lakh

This one remains my favourite business plan contest. Young, fun and always evolving. Eureka! 2008, IIT Bombay’s annual biz plan jamboree opens for applications on Monday, September 1. The event, as expected, gets even bigger this year. The total prize money is Rs 25 lakh against Rs 14 lakh in 2007. The Entrepreneurship Cell (E-Cell) expects 2,500 entries this year (last year saw 1,500 entries).

Here’s the lowdown on what to expect at Eureka! 2008:

• The first prize winner takes home Rs 5 lakh. The second and third runners up get Rs 3 lakh and Rs 2 lakh respectively.
• There will be a separate prize category for ‘cleantech’. Two winners will be awarded a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh and Rs 70,000 respectively. Plus, they will be given round-trip airfares to Carnegie Mellon University at Pittsburgh, where they will be eligible to compete in the Sustainable Technology Track of the McGinnis Venture Competition.
• Intel is a resource partner at this year’s contest and will send the first three finalists to the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition.
• PricewaterhouseCoopers, another first-time resource partner, will judge entries alongside a panel of judges.
• Registration starts on September 1 and closes on October 4.
• Seedfund will run a mentoring workshop for the top 40 teams.
• A venture capital panel will be set up to enable finalists to raise funding.

Eureka! 2007 — read about the making of Eureka! 2007 here (Mint) — got 150 overseas entries out of the total 1,500. The winner, Eight Point Systems (gaming solutions), founded by IIT Bombay students Vaibhav Goel and Puneet Kumar, took home Rs 4 lakh in prize money and Rs 50 lakh in angel funding from Indiagames founder Vishal Gondal. This company is now based in Mumbai but doesn’t seem to have a website. Anybody knows them, please let me know. The second runner up from 2007 is now a Delaware, US-based company — PhotonWave Technologies. The founders and students from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and Cornell University — read more about the winners here (Mint).

Some statistics on the participation profile last year (Source: E-Cell):

• 10 per cent of the entries were in rural products, while 10 per cent were portals. IT software and retail were 9 per cent and 8 per cent respectively. Other non-tech sectors were manufacturing, hospitality, environment (2.5 per cent), power and food processing.
• Btech and BE undergraduates made up 37 per cent of the entries, followed by management students, who made up 23 per cent. Working professionals constituted 9 per cent of entries.

This contest really beats all others because it perhaps the only one that is completely neutral. And it captures young talent at its raw best. True, most of the applicants, being students, never really go on to set up their own companies. In fact, even the organizers sometimes complain that for most student participants, the contest is just a fun college project. Which is why the E-Cell has been trying to woo working professionals into the contest for the past couple of years. This year it also has a big focus on foreign B-School participation, which it hopes will enhance the quality of competition.

The reason it is my favourite is because this is perhaps the only opportunity to catch pure entrepreneurial passion before it gets messed up with smooth talk and hardsell, just two steps outside campus.