Smith Students Prepare for 7th Annual China Business Plan Competition

The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business is gearing up to host the seventh annual China Business Plan Competition in Beijing on Jan. 5, 2012. Teams of up to four Smith MBA students will compete against their counterparts in China for $10,000 in cash prizes for the best business plan pitch.

The competition is co-hosted by Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management and will take place on its campus. More than 20 MBA students from the Smith School will participate in the competition and weeklong student trip to the Chinese capital, including for the first time, six Executive MBA students. The group also will be joined by another Smith School MBA global studies trip, led by Gurdip Bakshi, Dean’s Professor of Finance. Chinese teams from the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE), Smith’s partner in delivering an EMBA degree in China to launch in spring 2012, will participate in the competition as well as Tianjin University and Zhejiang University.

The China Business Plan Competition is the culmination of a three-credit course on global entrepreneurship and business plans, led by J. Robert Baum, associate professor entrepreneurship and Asher Epstein, managing director of the Dingman Center. The course fulfills a portion of the new Smith Experience requirement, aimed at providing MBA students hands-on learning experiences. Guanghua students take a similar course leading up to the competition, co-developed by the Smith School with some sessions taught by Dingman Center experts.

Last January, Veggie Cool, a team from the Smith School of Business, won the competition’s top prize of $3,000, plus the People’s Choice Award of $1,000, with a plan for cold storage and transportation of produce.

The China Business Plan Competition is one of the highlights of global entrepreneurship programs at the Smith School. The Dingman Center also leads a Global Technology Entrepreneurship Fellowship to Israel each summer where Smith students work on technology transfer projects with students at the Technion — Israeli Institute of Technology.

Also new this year, two MBA students from the Technion will travel to China and participate in the business plan competition and weeklong trip. The Smith School also hosted a group of MBAs from Guanghua in August to take part in the Dingman Center’s weeklong Jumpstart entrepreneurship program to build new businesses.