Keith Block Entrepreneurship Fund

Overview

Keith Block, an executive vice president at Oracle and proud alum of the Heinz College, has generously donated funds to promote entrepreneurial activity among Heinz College students. In this spirit, we are holding a competition this semester to foster new business ideas in the IT space.

Last spring, the Bracketz proposal generated via the Keith Block Entrepreneurship contest won the competition and is now supported by CMU Alpha Lab. The previous year's winner, BlackLocus, became a capstone MISM project. The BlackLocus business idea, supported by CMU Alpha Lab and Idea Foundry, has now raised $2.1 million USD in venture financing.

Heinz College would like to sincerely thank Keith Block for his generosity and passion in supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of our students.

The Contest

Proposals are expected to be entrepreneurial ventures that solve a problem in the marketplace and have a significant IT component. A proposal should have the potential of being a viable and possibly transformative growth-oriented startup company. We expect you to form teams of two or more students (no solos) to present your business concept. Each team will deliver a fifteen minute presentation followed by questions from the review panel. The presentation and accompanying PPT deck should address the following questions:

• What is the problem in the marketplace?
• What is your proposed solution?
• Who is the target market?
• What is the business model for the proposed venture (how will it make money)?
• What is the competitive landscape?

Deadlines

Project proposals must be submitted to Sean Beggs (sbeggs@cmu.edu) by Monday, March 26th, 2012. The competition will be held on Saturday, March 31st, 2012.
 

Capstone Project Potential

Fall 2012 graduating ISM students can present their business proposal as a capstone (95-720) project submission. The deadline for these submissions is August 13th. These project proposals may or may not come from the March 31st contest.