11/21/2024
The Silicon Valley Venture Challenge: Another Successful Year
The Kelley School’s top ranked online MBA Program (Kelley Direct) features a unique challenge course for those interested in entrepreneurship and innovation. The Silicon Venture Challenge course (also referred to as ‘The Ultimate Spine Sweat Experience’) was designed by Dr. Donald F. Kuratko (aka Dr. K), with the goal of bringing students beyond the textbook and into a highly competitive, innovative, and entrepreneurial setting for a true test of their entrepreneurial abilities. After working throughout the fall semester, students are expected to conduct market, customer, and business model research, build a solid business plan, and create a formal pitch deck for a business concept that they believe they could pursue and launch as an entrepreneurial startup. The final challenge for the course is to travel to Silicon Valley and pitch the business plan in front of a panel of Venture Capitalists, Angel Investors, who are members of the Johnson Center’s West Coast Advisory Board. The pitches take place at Plug and Play, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful accelerators with over 60 locations worldwide, 90,000 startups in 25 industries, and over 550 partner organizations. The Kelley School of Business is one of those partners and has been for over 15 years.
Each pitch meeting lasts 60 minutes in length and students are expected to cover their entire business plan in 15 minutes to enable 45 minutes of questions from the judges which puts students in the “hot seat.” Final grades for the entire course are delivered by the professional panel based on that presentation with the written business plan. While it is truly a ‘Spine Sweat’ experience, the goal of The Silicon Valley Venture Challenge is to challenge MBA students beyond their comfort zone and discover their own abilities to perform under extreme pressure. This year 11 students accepted the challenge and were successful in passing the course.
This year a special award was created, thanks to the generosity of alum Michele Honomichl, for the “Outstanding Business Plan.” The honoree was Dr. Michelle Braun, PhD with her plan on combatting the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. The new venture, High-Octane Brain Fitness, is a science-backed cognitive fitness and brain health coaching program based on Dr. Michelle Braun’s bestselling book, High-Octane Brain: 5 Science-Based Steps to Sharpen Your Memory and Reduce Your Risk of Alzheimer’s. The judges were unanimous in their decision to award Michelle this honor. Comments included:
• Founder is an expert in this field, and this brings the business plan a high degree of comfort.
• Clear commitment to the business
• Well researched customer data.
• Believable real large market, real pain point
• Good research
• She is amazing and compelling.
• Very deep domain knowledge in mental health.
Photo 1: The successful graduates (left to right): Back row: Chris Hernandez, Qaisar Imran, Jonathan Nokes, Bob Swart, Ryan Breton, Miteshwar Patel, and David Ehmann. Front row: Dr. K, Trisha Davis, Dr. Michelle Braun, Briana Baldovin, and Maribel Cassens.
Photo 2: Dr. K with award winner, Dr. Michelle Braun.
