UO teams plan for business, for real.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Graduate business students at the University of Oregon are taking some classes in the school of hard knocks and coming out of the experience seeing gold, not stars.

They're breaking out of the classroom and into boardrooms through a program at the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship that already has taken two up-and-coming UO business teams from Manitoba to Bangkok. In business plan competitions that have the same kind of white-knuckle, cold-sweat pressure as Wall Street commerce, the two teams have racked up a series of impressive top finishes that soon could put the students in the driver's seat of their own businesses.

Randy Swangard, director of the entrepreneurship program, said the business plan competitions aren't just an exercise. Students come up with real products, write real plans to produce and sell them and pitch to real investors.

"These are very nonacademic," he said. "These are very real."

Business plan competitions have become a big thing at universities around the world. They've already spawned a small crop of successful start-up firms that are now putting products on the shelves, and UO students are hoping to join them.

Thanks to a partnership with Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, UO business students accepted into the summer Technology Entrepreneur Fellows Program work directly with researchers on ways to turn the latest discoveries into marketable products. That's how the two teams that have been barnstorming this year's business plan competitions got their start.

One has formed CleanSmart Inc., a business that would use a new process to remove a once-popular wood preservative, chromated copper arsenate, from waste wood, allowing it to be recycled into new products. The other, Perpetua, has a license for a new technology that generates small amounts of electricity from naturally occurring differences in temperature, creating an extremely long-lasting power source and eliminating the need for batteries in small devices such as remote sensors.

The CleanSmart team recently won a $15,000 first-place award at a competition in San Diego; the Perpetua team recently earned $5,000 and second place at an international competition at a university in Bangkok. The teams also have won competitions at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cincinnati, and Perpetua is competing in this week's New Venture Championship put on by the UO in Portland, which carries a $25,000 top prize.

The wins already have qualified the teams for the biggest competition of the year, the MOOT CORP Competition at the University of Texas. Top prize there is worth up to $150,000.

David Grove, a member of the three-person CleanSmart team, said the thing that makes the competitions so real-world is that they have to pitch their business plans to panels made up of real investors and venture capitalists. And they don't treat the students any different than anyone else looking for a backer.

"I'm a big believer in learning by doing," Grove said. "You can learn some of this stuff in the classroom, but you can learn worlds more from this (competitions) than anything in the classroom."

What they learn most is how to work together under pressure. The investors pepper them with questions that force them to think on their feet.

Will Glasson of the CleanSmart team said the competitions are intense. On the way to winning the recent Venture Challenge meet in San Diego, Glasson said team members took to looking at one another and asking, "Is that sweat or blood running down your back?"

All of the team members are in the MBA program; many have undergraduate degrees in an engineering discipline and one, Glasson, also is enrolled in the UO School of Law.

"They're in the same league as an elite athlete," Swangard said. "They're working on a lot of other things and they still manage to excel at this."

Swangard said both of the business plans are potential winners in the start-up world as well. And it's not unheard of for an investor or business executive who just blistered a team's plan in competition to approach a member in the hall, slip him or her a business card and say the magic words: "Let's talk."

Right now, neither team is irrevocably committed to going forward with their business. They're still refining the business plans and testing the waters with investors. After all, they're not in this just to say they started a business.

"All of us are budding entrepreneurs," said Perpetua's Jon Hofmeister. "I'm confident we can get funding. But a venture is a venture. I want to be sure I'm in a successful venture."