Innovation and marketing once again join forces tonight in the finals of the Big Bang, UC Davis' annual ideas competition.
The business plan is the vital thing at the competition organized by the university's Graduate School of Management, as student teams vie for cash prizes, the valuable seed money that can turn ideas into businesses.
MBA students at the school form teams and spend several months creating a business plan.
On the line this year: $21,000 in prize money.
Medical innovations, video search software and fuel cell technologies made the list of five finalists this year dueling for first- and second-place honors. An audience vote determines the competition's People's Choice Award.
The finalist teams are:
• KardiGenics, a biotechnology company developing treatments for heart disease.
• Accelerated Medical Diagnostics, a firm that provides tests for predicting which cancer patients will respond to chemotherapy.
• Fliksense, a company that licenses software technology enabling online video providers to provide better search of video content.
• ECO Catalytics, which develops nearly platinum-free fuel cell catalyst materials.
• Zinapt, which developed a platform to inexpensively and accurately detect infectious diseases.
The Big Bang competition was launched 11 years ago to promote entrepreneurship. Previous winning ideas include a system to disinfect water with pulsing ultraviolet light, a proposal to use tobacco plants instead of chicken eggs to develop vaccines and a company that applied software technologies to medical devices.
Inserogen – the team that used tobacco plants to develop vaccines – captured last year's $15,000 grand prize. The team said its product, named SwiftVax, could use the so-called "biofactories" to produce vaccines in weeks instead of months at a fraction of the cost of conventional methods.
For more information, visit http://bigbang.gsm.ucdavis.edu/.
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