Business Plan Contests- Hyped to glory or what?

It is surprising to hear people say that not many of the business plan contest winners have made it big or even got a large VC funding. Is it largely a PR exercise for the organizers or do they really mean business? But then isn’t it true that Travelguru was a Harvard Business School business plan product?
On the pessimist’s side, a first look at recent winners of B-Plan contests conducted in undergraduate schools in India gives the idea that winning B-plan contests these days has become more about great presentations and executive summaries and less about crazy, mind-blowing ideas. And this implies that B-Plans are written simply for winning and many winners could be cited acknowledging that they have no ambitions to startup with their ideas.
And what about the B-Plan contest itself?
Does it really help winners get good funding? And does it even get the right winners? The question about right judging might be more individual in nature, but the more important issue that needs to be addressed is whether the winners get what they deserve, are they just awarded money or are they hand held till they startup.
For example Conquest, the B-Plan competition of BITS provides incubation to winners till they are ready to expand alone. Since most ideas are born during picnics or cafeteria meetings, not many have the right picture of the startup scenario and so incubation becomes a necessary thing.
Coming to technology startups, participants look eagerly towards commercialization of their technology. Now consider a study conducted by Critical I ltd for BBSRC. They hold a business plan contest which specially invites biosciences related ideas. The study reveals an encouraging level of commercialization activity by past participants, with 65% of respondents having already actively commercialized their research outputs and a further 15% still actively attempting to do so.
But for the twist the report says that two-thirds of those who have commercialized their research feel that it was likely that they would have done so, regardless of the impetus provided by the Business Plan Competition (BPC). However, it is clear from qualitative research they conducted that all participants benefited significantly from the BPC, not least in motivating them to devote time and energy in making headway to their idea. One suspects that a number of respondents may, ex post facto, have over-estimated their own determination and under-estimated the impact of the BPC in that regard.
This brings us to an interesting point. Is it that BPCs aren’t given enough credit and publicity that they eventually end up looked at as unimportant stages in a startup’s life? Well a look at the winners of Conquest, the BPC of BITS, Pilani, before it went international, will prove that BPCs might just be angels in disguise. Conquest 2005, the second Conquest that was held, had the winners as Mobile Medics and runners up as Habits.in both of which were BITSian. If it hadn’t been for the furore created by Conquest an year before, these ideas might just not have been encouraged to enter the startup world. And now both of them have started up before going on a winning spree in BPCs across the globe.
The presence of hype around an event can be annoying at times, but it definitely gets people talking about it, often in awe. However, in undergraduate schools of technical nature, BPCs are often a trying experience to the purists around, those who can’t come to accept the fact that business and technology can, and in fact most often have to go hand-in-hand. In reality we are trying to get one step closer to building an industrially self-sustained India. It is definitely a better road to progress then letting other countries outsource their work to India just because of them getting cheap manpower.
BPCs might sound sophisticated, hyped-up events but the bottom line is that this new genre of a business challenge provokes people to think. It is like creating the product before the market exists. If there is so much prize luring students without any loss on their side in participating their will easily be a new creed of students dreaming of being the next Steve Jobs or Narayan Murthy! It might be that participants might just try out their hand at writing B-Plans for the sake of winning but the unexpected success might just make them give their idea a second thought.