HBS Business Plan Competition - back to basics?
I spend this past Saturday judging the 13th annual HBS business plan competition. I am not sure that I have judged every one of them, but it is pretty close. I always enjoy it. In part it is that I run into people I know but don’t often see. In part it is the plans. The competition seems to be an inexhaustible source of energy, creativity, ambition and insight into human behavior. Perhaps not surprisingly, this year the competition attracted a lot more entrants than in prior years. In addition, the plans I saw seemed both surprisingly doable and, in many cases, they were in fact well into the execution stage. More than that, however, this year’s plans reminded me of some of the things that make a good business, not necessarily a venture fundable technology business, but a good business: simplicity and an understanding of human behavior.
The more complex the business the less likely you are to succeed. In my group of judges there were some venture people, and entrepreneur and me. Although I don’t know how anyone ranked the plans we judged, based on the result, I have to believe that most (perhaps all) of us like a plan built around event planning (I won’t say more for confidentiality reasons). Similarly, based on discussions with other judges at lunch afterwards, simple easy to execute plans were winners in other sections. It was not that long ago that a lot of plans set out to be paradigm changing. I am going to take a guess and say that a higher percentage of this year’s plans will become real businesses than in prior years.
Plans that were grounded on some idea about how individual people behave seemed to have a high degree of appeal to contestants as they did to judges. In our group there were a couple of plans based on behavior, one of which was the event plan I referred to above. The plans that were based on changing technology and evolving markets etc. were bigger and more ambitious but (again based on my subjective and admittedly tiny sample) did not seem to move the judges as much.
This year a winning business plan was a business you can run and make money on and that people intuitively understand.
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