Thursday, February 17, 2011

Update on the Duke Start-Up Challenge: 110 Executive Summaries (plus 50 Alumni submissions)

Hi everyone,

The deadline for the Duke Start-Up Challenge: Executive Summary Competition closed last Thursday, February 10th. We had 110 different student teams enter, which we consider to be a pretty successful turnout.

Below are the statistics for the student competition are below:


Functional TrackSpring 2011Spring 2010
Energy & Environment1011
Health Care & Life Sciences1519
IT & Media3027
Products & Services3427
Social Enterprise2125
Total110109
Special Interest Tracks
Undergraduate Led (Special Int4341
Women Led (Special Interest Tr2729
Total7070
School (Team Lead)Spring 2011
Pratt46
Trinity29
Fuqua17
Law7
Graduate School4
Nicholas School2
Sanford2
Graduate School, Fuqua (PhD)1
Pratt and Trinity1
School of Medicine / DCI1
Sum110



In addition, we hosted our first annual "Alumni Track" (hosted by DukeGEN), inviting alumni startup teams to submit their entries for feedback (but not compete for the prize money). We had 50 entries (!) in our first year, and were pleased with that amount of participation.  More info here: http://www.dukegen.com/alumni-track

Other updates:
- Grand Prize money has been increased from $25,000 to $50,000 (thanks to Rich Lee, former CEO of Hosted Solutions)
- $10,000 Track prizes for Undergrad-led, Women-led, and Products & Services (misc) prizes.
- Our Finals judges will be:



- J.B. Pritzker '87 will be our keynote speaker at the Grand Finale on Friday April 8th

Thanks for your support.

Howie Rhee
Advisor to the Duke Start-Up Challenge