Possible in Italy

“Italians” (http://www.corriere.it/solferino/severgnini/) is a popular Italian blog, hosted by the Corriere della Sera website. The journalist Beppe Severgnini manages the page and hosts twelve letters a day from Italians observing the world, both from abroad and from within homeland borders. Beppe is currently spending a period at MIT as “writer in residence” (http://blog.corriere.it/embedded/), and wanted to learn more about the MIT $100K after hearing Francesco enthusiastically ranting about the Competition. On November 18^th Francesco’s message to Beppe has been published both as opening letter on the blog “Italians” and as main message in the readers’ letters section of the paper edition of the Corriere della Sera.

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Ciao Beppe,

First of all, thanks a lot for the 98^th Pizzata Italians MIT/Harvard, yesterday in Cambridge, MA. Beyond the pleasure of having so many Italians under the same roof, there’s also the selfish relief of having joined (and helped organizing!, with Edo, Marco and Mauro) one of the last pizzata, after hearing about dozens of them on “Italians”.

Yesterday we talked for 30 seconds about the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Here’s some more details.

The MIT$100K is the largest student run entrepreneurship competition in the world. Every year, since exactly 20 years ago, here’s what happens: hundreds of thousands of dollars in budget and prizes, provided by about twenty sponsoring companies, are managed by around fifty student organizers, for about a thousand teams, with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists recruited as judges, mentors, coaches, speakers. MIT doesn’t give us a single dime: we even pay rent on the small office we have at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center (by the way, you should come visit it, at the E-Center invention rhymes with commercialization).

My role at the $100K is judging, which means to write the rules and recruit rockstars from the ecosystem as judges. The roles of my fellows organizers include marketing, events, sponsorship, alumni relations, management of industry tracks.

The Competition lasts one whole year, and comprises three contests: the Elevator Pitch Contest in the fall, the Executive Summary Contest in the winter and the Business Plan Contest in the spring. Each contest is structured over six industry tracks: development, life sciences, mobile, products & services e web/IT. Teams don’t enter just for the hundred thousand dollars grand prize in the name: they enter for the network, the feedback, the visibility online (the whole Cambridge entrepreneurial blogosphere) and on paper (WSJ, among others). The organizers work on it (for free) because, for example, it’s awesome to watch last year winner, at the time a “lab mouse” with a few numbers in a laptop, gather millions worth of grants and funding, in less than a year. Among the Boston VCs, being a judge or a mentor for the $100K is stuff worth a line in their resume.

And it looks like the toy is working well. In the last 20 years, we estimate that the $100K has created more than 85 companies, among which the famous Akamai (web services colossus) and Harmonix (ever heard about Guitar Hero?). The publicly listed alumni companies are worth about 10 billion dollars (post-crisis…); the ones that didn’t go public have been bought out, generating about 2.7 billion dollars, or 147 million dollars a year, on average. Last but not least, we conservatively estimate that the Competition has created about 2,500 jobs in the US, from Cambridge to Palo Alto.

What do you think? Any way to start anything similar in Italy?