Students Challenged to Innovate

Student entrepreneur Chen B. Fang ’10 currently funds laddertoheaven.com, a site where users can share good deeds, with the money he earns from three jobs. This spring, a new undergraduate business competition may provide him and other innovators on campus with some much-needed cash.

Yesterday marked the official launch of “I^3,” the Imagine Invent Impact Harvard College Innovation Challenge. The competition will award $80,000 in cash grants and provide up to $40,000 in services for students to pursue innovative ventures.

Michael Segal ’08, co-president of the Harvard College Entrepreneurship Forum, said about 70 people have signed up on the competition’s Web site, i3.fas.harvard.edu, expressing interest in the challenge. Half of those who signed up are already working on a startup.

The Entrepreneurship Forum teamed up with Harvard Student Agencies and the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH) to establish the challenge. Segal said it is the College’s first large-scale business and innovation competition.

Segal said that I^3 places Harvard on par with other renowned business plan competitions including MIT’s 100K Entrepreneurship Competition and the Harvard Business School’s Business Plan Contest.

What distinguishes I^3, Segal said, is its undergraduate and multi-track focus. Students from a variety of concentrations and interests are encouraged to compete for cash grants worth up to $10,000 by submitting business plan proposals in one of four tracks: For-Profit Startups, Campus Service Ventures, Social Entrepreneurship, and Creative Enterprises.

The purpose of the multi-track nature of the program is to allow for the expression of different modes of innovation, organizers said.

“We are hoping for a broad spectrum of interests to apply,” Segal said. “Not all entrepreneurs are simply looking to start multimillion-dollar businesses, and the purpose of I^3 is to encourage innovation across every discipline.”

Daniel “Zak” Tanjeloff ’08, the winner of last year’s Entrepreneurship Forum business competition, said he was excited to see entrepreneurship be emphasized as a bigger part of campus life.

“The competition allows entrepreneurs to coalesce, and it gives teams something to work toward,” Tanjeloff said.

According to Segal, the purpose of I^3 is to encourage the people who have outstanding ideas but who have never had the resources to pursue them.

The main sponsors of the competition are the McKinley Family, the Heller Family Foundation, TECH, Highland Capital Partners, and the Idea Translation Lab at Harvard.

I^3 plans to hold its launch party Saturday at the Queen’s Head Pub. To emphasize the multitrack and innovative nature of the challenge, the event will feature trivia, Lego-building, and “crazy idea” generation competitions.