Business Plan Contest Has Many Winners

01 Sep 2005

Business Plan Contest Has Many Winners

Re: Karen Grajwer (MBA 2005); Rita Singh (MBA 2005)

Topics: Entrepreneurship-General Innovation-Innovation and Management Business Ventures-Business Startups

With its ninth annual competition last May, the HBS Business Plan Contest has become a well-established start-up that hits “home runs” every year. This year’s traditional track winner was Karen Grajwer (MBA ’05), founder of Uplift, an Internet and retail-store venture designed to provide fashionable and custom-fitted bras to fuller-sized customers and the 85 percent of women who wear the wrong size.

In the social enterprise track, the winner was India Info Village, a team featuring Rita Singh (MBA ’05) and several other members from across and outside Harvard. Their plan for entrepreneur-owned, for-profit centers throughout rural India would offer one-stop shopping locations for customers needing government-required permits and deeds, microfinancing, agricultural information, and other essential services.

A recently conducted survey by the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at HBS contacted the 705 alumni who took part in the Business Plan Contest between 1997 and 2004. The survey’s 269 respondents reported starting 254 enterprises, with nearly 200 businesses still up and running and generating $550 million in sales and employment for some 6,500 people. Half of the reported start-ups were based on ideas originally developed at HBS.