March Madness continues. The “Sweet Sixteen” teams of student startups will compete in the annual Panasci Business Plan Competition hosted by the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship at the Whitman School of Management. The student teams will present their plans to business and civic leaders, alumni, entrepreneurs and investors, in hopes of winning up to $35,000 in prizes made possible by long-time Whitman supporter, the late Henry A. Panasci, founder of Fay’s Drugs.
The 2018 Sweet Sixteen semi-finalists will be working with Whitman School Management Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprise (EEE) faculty and mentors on refining their business plans leading up to the semi-finals on April 13 and finals on April 14 .
Whitman School of Management faculty and staff selected the semi-finalists which include:
- 410 Pictures
- Anything But Beer
- Blood, Sweat. & Beers Brewery
- ComEnergy
- Eco-Carriage
- Farm to Flame Energy
- FlyBoard
- Indūlo
- In-Spire
- Miruku
- Shielded
- StrikeLight
- StudBus
- Taste Buddy
- UT-Hydrate
- WAYV
Alternates are The Pair and PneuStrength.
The contestants are from across Syracuse University and SUNY College of Environmental and Forestry, and their ideas cross many disciplines. The winning teams submitted detailed business plans, which will be judged on creativity, feasibility, comprehensiveness and their oral pitches at the competition. The competition is a great opportunity to compete for seed funding and network with competition judges including high-level entrepreneurs and alumni. The competition rewards both the innovativeness of the idea and the quality of the plan, including innovative thinking regarding new markets, products and services, coupled with the ability to strategize on how to make it happen.
Past winners have gone on to win state and national awards.
Consistently ranked as one of the top entrepreneurship programs in the nation, the Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprises (EEE) department is one of the few in the nation with a formal academic department devoted to entrepreneurship. In collaboration with the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship, the EEE department combines a highly unique set of entrepreneurship courses with a number of extracurricular activities and experiential opportunities to give students a total entrepreneurship experience.
For more information about the Panasci Business Plan competition, contact the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship at the Whitman School of Management.
Photo caption: 2017 Panasci Business Plan Competition Winners