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Business Competitions
The Lester Centers oversees two premier business
plan competitions, both established by Haas students
in the late 1990s.
The UC Berkeley
Business Plan Competition is the vehicle
that connects UC Berkeley’s best entrepreneurs and world
class research with the Bay Area’s business elite to
create viable businesses.
The mission of the Global Social
Venture Competition is to catalyze and promote the creation of financially self-sufficient
or profitable social ventures. The Competition is a partnership
between the Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business and Yale School of Management. The GSVC
community has expanded its global presence through several outreach partnerships in Asia and Europe.
In collaboration with Intel, the Lester Center hosts The Intel + Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. The Challenge is where the best engineers and scientists present how they plan to make the world a better place through their innovations and entrepreneurial skills. The Challenge partners with the best research institutions around the world and affiliates with regional business plan competitions to find the technologies and teams that can have the greatest impact. Since its inaugural year in 2005, teams have come from Brazil, China, Egypt, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Mexico, Russia, Singapore and the United States to compete.
Year after year, these competitions have helped to identify
and promote promising business ideas through the education
and exposure afforded by the competition’s events, mentors
and judges.
Another competition that pulls in a large number of Berkeley
MBA students each year is the Venture
Capital Investment Competition. The VCIC
tests entrants capacities to evaluate and "fund"
investment opportunites from a Venture Capitalists perspective.
For those with strong technology interests, The Center for
Entrepreneurship Technology (CET) runs the Technology
Breakthrough Competition. This competition
is a feeder into the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition.
External Competitions
Haas students have also participated in a number of business
plan competitions throughout the United States.
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