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About the Competition

About the Competition Image

The MRS Entrepreneurship Challenge is designed to be an educational program.

It has three goals:

  • To foster entrepreneurship within the MRS membership by providing hands-on opportunities for MRS scientists and engineers to learn about the business formation and venture capital fund-raising processes.
  • To create networking and collaboration opportunities between MRS members and business school students.
  • To create a generation of materials researchers with the vision, tools, and personal connections needed to shorten the time to market for major materials innovations.

Additionally, the competition is designed to provide early feedback for considering more extensive and well established business plan competitions. It is therefore the beginning, not the end, of a potential entrepreneurial career path for materials researchers.

We invite you to download this printable poster to display or share with interested individuals to help promote the MRS Entrepreneurship Challenge

Entry Expectations

This competition is virtual and international. While face-to-face meetings will not be discouraged, the program will be structured such that all interactions among team members, and between team members and judges, can occur over the Internet. The total time commitment expected from participants will be limited, encouraging the widest possible participation. While teams may devote as much time and energy to the competition as they like, it should be possible to prepare a respectable entry with as little as 40 man-hours of work, spread over a team that might comprise 2 to 6 people.

Entries are narrated PowerPoint presentations no more than 12 minutes in length and are to be mailed to MRS on CD-ROM. The entries must be postmarked no later than January 22, 2008. We invite you to view specific information on how to prepare a narrated PowerPoint presentation, guidelines for the presentation’s format and content, and mailing instructions. The CD-ROM presentation will then be posted to a password-protected “Judges Area". To understand how your entry will be judged, see "How Your Entry Will Be Judged (list of criteria)".

Eligibility

Each team must include at least one person who is a member in good standing of MRS, and one member who is enrolled in a business school as of December 15, 2007. There is no restriction on where additional team members can come from (remember, the whole point is collaboration). Teams should feel free to solicit additional help and input from outside advisors and mentors. Prospective entrants may use the Form Your Team page to identify potential teammates, but they are also welcome to independently form a team of their own. All teams were required to register by 12 p.m. (ET) Friday, December 21, 2007.

Established companies are invited to participate provided that the aggregate total amount of money that has come into the company (investment + revenue) is less than $1M. Please note that the requirements of having both an MRS member and a business school student on the team still apply.

Previous participants and teams are eligible to enter provided the ideas or materials technologies pitched in their entry presentations have not be used in a prior MRS Entrepreneurship Challenge.

Prizes

Grand Prize: $3000

Finalist Prize: Meeting registration and travel funding of up to $3500 per finalist team to present their entries to the MRS membership at the 2008 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, CA. At least two members of each team (one materials researcher, one business school student) should plan to be present at this event.

Benefits for all Participants: This competition provides substantial networking benefits to all participants. Each contestant’s resume and team presentation will be made available to our panel of venture capitalist judges and corporate business sponsors. The mentor program also provides an opportunity for participants to network with seasoned professionals. Finally, face-to-face networking opportunities will be available for participants at the information session for team members, sponsors, mentors and competition creators at the 2007 MRS Fall Meeting.



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