Technology and convenience intersected at the fourth annual UT Dallas Business Idea Competition, offering some clues about the future direction of business innovation.

Sponsored by the Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IIE) at UT Dallas, the contest drew 116 entrants organized into 46 teams. They competed for $18,250 in cash prizes.

A roster of 39 judges with impressive credentials — including Philip Wheat, an information technology architect with Microsoft Corp., David Matthews and Joel Fontenot, principals of Trailblazer Capital, and Richardson Mayor Gary Slagel – rewarded the first-place winners of both the undergraduate and graduate competitions for ideas that used smart-phone technology to simplify consumers’ lives.

The School of Management hosted the Nov. 19 contest.

“At early stages of a startup, it’s important to really manage your money and funding, because oftentimes that’s the one limitation to getting it off the ground. We’ve made a commitment to moving the idea forward and exploring our opportunities.”

Corey Egan,
winning MBA team

UT Dallas Full-Time MBA students Corey Egan and Swapnil Bora  won the graduate division and the $4,000 first-place prize for the iLumi SmartBulb, an interactive LED indoor lighting system controlled wirelessly by a smart phone. Their polished presentation, which began with an audiovisual introduction and included background music, also netted them the Most Effective Presentation award. They plan to use their $500 prize from that to move their idea forward.

“We talked about it previously,” Egan said. “Any contribution that we obtained from the competition would go back into the company. At early stages of a startup, it’s important to really manage your money and funding, because oftentimes that’s the one limitation to getting it off the ground. We’ve made a commitment to moving the idea forward and exploring our opportunities.”

Many of the undergraduate presentations were nearly as polished as those in the graduate competition– with impressive ideas to match.

Laura Maczka, executive director at Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, was one of the judges. Her organization, which serves youths in low-income neighborhoods, holds a high-school entrepreneurship competition. She found it fascinating to see the difference between high school and college competitions.

“The sophistication level goes up,” Maczka said. “This idea of entrepreneurship as a viable way to make a living versus just graduating from a university and going to work for a major corporation, which isn’t really the world anymore ― I think it’s great that the university offers this and actually empowers these kids to start thinking, ‘Maybe this idea that I came up with is not going to work, but the next one might.’ ”

The best of the undergraduate ideas came from Team Rhone, whose members were David Evans, a junior computer science major, and Michael Ellsworth, a junior in aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University. Their winning idea, which they named Rhone, is a smart phone-based universal remote control that can operate devices such as TVs, Blu-Ray and DVD players, DVRs, and computers. Their winning entry netted them $4,000 in prize money.

Their idea uses wireless Bluetooth technology to send information from smart phones to a hardware device that then sends infrared signals to the entertainment devices. The app has a slew of features, including web-based backup, friend sync, re-arrangeable virtual control buttons and an interactive TV guide to change channels. It even has GPS sync, which allows users to move from room to room because it automatically recognizes the hardware devices in each room.

“The business idea competition is about ideas, not just business plans.  We focus on business concepts, probably more so than others. As a consequence, it allows the students and those involved to spend more time dealing with the key things up-front, the success factors that are there.”

Dan Bochsler,
 faculty member

“We had a good idea, we worked hard on it, and we had a lot of enthusiasm,” Ellsworth said. “We feel that we put a lot of effort into it.”

In addition to the prize money, the first-place winners in each division received one month’s free office space near downtown Dallas at CoHabitat, a shared workspace for developers, creatives and entrepreneurs.

All semi-finalists and finalists also qualified for Microsoft’s BizSpark program, where they will be able to connect with a global network of investors and network partners.

“The business idea competition is about ideas, not just business plans,” said Dan Bochsler, a School of Management faculty member who works with the IIE to develop cross-disciplinary academic studies and extend the reach of IIE in the community and region. “We focus on business concepts, probably more so than others. As a consequence, it allows the students and those involved to spend more time dealing with the key things up-front, the success factors that are there.”

A number of individual and corporate sponsors contributed prize money for the competition, including Jackie Kimzey, BKD LLP, Dynamex, SPlus Technologies, Trailblazer Capital, TransGlobal Technologies, Inc. and Wischmeyer Benefit Partners.