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Teams of student entrepreneurs will vie for $30,000 and entry to the international finals at Harvard University when Canada’s Business Model Competition (CBMC) is presented by Dalhousie’s Rowe School of Business on March 9. The Halifax University is the only site in Canada to select teams to compete at the International Business Model Competition to be held at Harvard May 3 and 4. The other preliminary competitions are being held in several locations across the U.S., on the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and in Lima, Peru.

Canada’s Business Model Competition will be held at the downtown Courtyard Marriott with a reception to follow in the courtyard of the Brewery Market. The prizes awarded will provide direct support to help move the top three business models from start-up to “stay-up”. First place will receive $10,000 in cash and $5,000 in consulting services from Deloitte. Second prize is $3,000 cash plus $7,000 in services and third is $2,000 cash plus $3,000 in services. The prizes have been named the Deloitte Smart Launch Award.

“Deloitte is proud to partner with Canada’s Business Model Competition as we present new ways of thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship. The Deloitte Smart Launch Award is one step in our journey to help clients with every size of business to transform ideas into successes, and create more value for their business and our community,” said Shannon MacDonald, Managing Partner, Atlantic, Deloitte.

Teams for the competition will be drawn primarily from Atlantic Canadian business schools but the event is open to students from any Canadian university. Teams interested in competing can apply at www.bmccanada.ca. In future years, business model competitions will be hosted in other major Canadian universities where the winning teams will qualify to compete in Canada’s Business Model Competition in Halifax at Dalhousie University’s Rowe School of Business.

“Canada’s Business Model Competition represents a radical departure from the reliance on business plans by entrepreneurs. The leading proponent of this approach, Steve Blank, points out that no business plan survives first contact with customers. Writing a business plan before doing customer discovery and validating your business model is a mistake,” said Mary Kilfoil of the Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship at the Rowe School of Business.

The competition recognizes that any new venture is just a “guess at a problem/solution fit” and the only valid way to test whether those guesses are right is to “get outside the building” and start talking to customers. Rather than focusing on developing a robust business plan, complete with financials and slick presentations, the business model competition focuses on identifying and precisely defining the assumptions of the new venture, testing those assumptions in the field, and then changing (pivoting) based on the lessons learned. Inspired by ideas from Customer Development (Steve Blank), Lean Startup (Eric Ries) and Nail It then Scale It (Nathan Furr), the difference between a business model and a business plan is a focus on inputs rather than outputs.

Brian Lowe, Entrepreneur in Residence at the Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship, sees Canada’s Business Model Competition as an import element of a larger strategy. “We are working with a range of partners to create a regional innovation ecosystem. The potential is here to drive regional prosperity by harnessing the entrepreneurial spirit of bright students to the commercialization of the research being done in our universities.”

The Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship is working on a number of initiatives aimed at building a regional innovation ecosystem. Last semester, under Mary Kilfoil’s leadership, it launched a new course called Starting Lean to introduce students with a business idea to the business model approach. The course uses the Lean LaunchPad model developed by a University of California, Berkeley, professor who says the goal is to teach students "the art, science and strategy of entrepreneurship that will forever change how they view early stage ventures." In the Dal course, students were divided into teams of 4 and attended their lectures online (hosted on the Udacity platform) prior to class, conducted market validation and then applied what they learned through weekly in-class presentations based on developing their business models canvas. Starting Lean is already paying off for many of the students. As of last month, two of the teams had been accepted into the 5-month Propel ICT Launch36 accelerator program, and three have received offers of development money and/or angel investmen

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Canada’s Business Model Competition

International Business Competition

Steve Blank and the Udacity course EP 245 “How to Build a Startup”

Information contact: Colin.craig@dal.ca