About

The MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition is designed to help you generate ideas and begin to build a team.

If you enter the MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition, no matter whether you win a prize or not, you may put yourself in a better position to enter the MIT $100K Business Plan Competition in the Spring because you will have looked at different issues involved in planning a business. Then you can either build on your MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition idea or discard it to work on a different project. Going through the different sections of your MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition entry may also help you identify areas in which you need the skills, perspectives and personalities of other people to fill different roles on your founding team.

The MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition is intended to encourage a broad range of MIT undergraduates, graduate students and outside Teams with at least one MIT student to flesh out their ideas in business terms and form teams that combine technology and business strengths. The MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition rewards all competitors with feedback from qualified judges and offers cash prizes to 8 exceptional entries.

Rules

Submission of Entries

Paper entries will not be permitted for the MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition. You may only use the web http://www.mitesc.com to submit your entry. Entries must be received on time and in the appropriate format . The decision of the Organizing Team regarding late or incorrect submission of entries is final.

Eligibility

All full-time and part-time MIT students at all levels of education and from any department, registered in the current semester of the Competition, are eligible to enter.  People that do not meet this requirement may join or form teams, provided that at least one of the principal contestants on the team is a current MIT student. Teams are encouraged to seek the involvement of MIT faculty, alumni, postdocs, researchers, staff, students from other schools, and people from outside the MIT community.

Entries must be the original work of entrants and may be entered by a single student or a multi-student team. The size of a team is not restricted, and neither is the number of entries submitted by a qualified team or individual. By submitting a business plan, you represent and warrant to the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition that you have all right, title and/or interest in the executive summary submitted and the information it contains is accurate and complete, and that by submitting the plan to the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition you are not and will not be violating any contract or any third party rights including any patent, copyright, trade secret, proprietary or confidential information, trademark, publicity or privacy right.

Teams that have already secured arrangements for capital from any source must disclose the amounts and sources clearly in their entries. Past entrants have generated capital while in the Competition in the form of sales revenues or contracts, research grants, and personal or family funds. Ventures that have received outside investment from venture capital firms, private investors, or industry sources may be considered ineligible to compete and should contact the Organizing Team through the Competition website at http://mit100k.org.

The Judging Panel of the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition reserves the right to disqualify any entry that in its judgment violates the letter or the spirit of the Competition guidelines, processes and rules of the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition, and its decisions are final and binding.

Confidentiality

Access to submitted business plans is only granted by MIT Entrepreneurship Competition to the members of its judging panel. The Lead Organizers, the IT team and the Judging team members are the only other individuals who may be provided with the submitted business plans by the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition. Reasonable steps are taken to limit access to the submitted executive summaries and business plans (collectively referred to as "plans").  The judges of the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition are venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and lawyers who are used to dealing with confidential material on a regular basis. If some part of your business plan is confidential, you will need to clearly mark that information as “CONFIDENTIAL,” and the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition will retain that legend in any copy of your plan it provides to the members of the judging panel. However, even if you mark your information as confidential, there will be no confidentiality obligation by any recipient of your plan for information which: (a) is publicly available prior to the time of its disclosure to the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition or becomes publicly available thereafter through no wrongful act of the recipient, or (b) was known to the recipient prior to the date of disclosure or becomes known to the recipient thereafter from a third party having an apparent bona fide right to disclose the information, or (c) is disclosed by recipient in accordance with your approval, or (d) is disclosed by you or any member of your team without restriction on further disclosure, or (e) is independently developed by a recipient; or (f) the recipient is obligated to disclose to comply with applicable laws or regulations, or with a court or administrative order.

Intellectual property

Before submitting your business plan or executive summary the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition urges you to confirm with appropriate advisors or legal counsel that any intellectual property described in your plan is protected; i.e., by appropriate intellectual property filings, notices, (patent, copyright, etc) by the owning institution and/or individuals. The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition also recommends that you determine in advance whether your plan describes a technology, invention, copyrightable work or other intellectual property owned by MIT in accordance with MIT Policy (see: http://web.mit.edu/policies/13.0.html ). The MIT Technology Licensing Office is available to answer
your questions.

If you are not sure about the legal status of your own or third party intellectual property or any other aspect of your plan, the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition urges you to seek independent legal counsel.

Competition Categories and Prizes

$1000 prizes will be awarded in the following categories:

• Energy
• Development
• IT / Web 2.0
• Aerospace
• Mobile
• Biotech/Life Sciences
• Consumer Products/Services
• Other

Eight $1000 prizes will be issued.   A $1000 check payable to either the principal contestant or to a tax ID in the name of the team will be issued. The principal contestant must have a valid social security number or valid tax ID number for tax reporting purposes.

Judging Criteria

A panel of judges from the MIT and Boston venture communities, including experienced entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, non-profit founders, legal professionals, and patent experts reads the entries. The following are some of the general criteria considered by the Competition judges in the MIT $100K Executive Summary Competition.   These criteria may also be used by industry, private investors, and venture capitalists in evaluating the attractiveness of new venture opportunities:

• High growth potential
• Defensibility from competitors
• Up-front capital investment
• Short time-to-market
• Market leadership potential
• Stage of idea development
• Quality and breadth of team
• Why is this business going to be around in 5 years?

Judging for the Development category will focus on the following criteria

• Estimated social impact
• Quality and breadth of team
• Uniqueness of plan
• Sustainability (financial and operational)

All entrants  will receive feedback from the judges, regardless of whether they win or not. The decisions of the Judging Panel of the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition on the semi-finalists, finalists, runners-up, winners and appropriate progress for installment payments, are final and binding on each participant.

Miscellaneous

You agree that you will not use the name of “Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” or any variation, adaptation, or abbreviation thereof, or of any of its trustees, officers, faculty, students, employees, or agents, or any trademark owned by IT in any advertising or publicity without the written permission of the Director of the MIT’s News Office.

MIT MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND CONCERNING THE MIT ENTREPRENEURSHIP COMPETITION, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. IN NO EVENT SHALL MIT, ITS TRUSTEES, DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, STUDENTS, THE MIT ENTREPRENEURSHIP COMPETITION JUDGES AND MENTORS, AND AFFILIATES BE LIABLE FOR ANY ADVICE, INFORMATION OR DECISIONS MADE FOR OR ON BEHALF OF THE MIT ENTREPRENEURSHIP COMPEITITON OR FOR INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING ECONOMIC DAMAGES OR INJURY TO PROPERTY AND LOST PROFITS, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER MIT SHALL BE ADVISED, SHALL HAVE OTHER REASON TO KNOW OR IN FACT SHALL KNOW OF THE POSSIBILITY OF THE FOREGOING.