Abstract:
Every year thousands of students and budding entrepreneurs participate in technical
business plan competitions in over 44 institutions in the US alone. The stakes are high:
over $4 million dollars of prize money and hundreds of millions of dollars of venture
capital are available. The evaluation process takes an average of 4 months to complete as
the technical innovation, business plan, and personal traits of the entrepreneur are put to
the test. How do each of these factors contribute to a winning proposal? Which is more
important? How does the entrepreneur’s personality contribute to the success or failure
of a proposal? My research investigates the importance of these three criteria (technical
value, business management plan, and personality) in the ranking of technical business
plans. Business plan evaluations were collected from five separate university
competitions. The statistical significance of incorporating the Jung’s Personality Trait as
a measure of entrepreneurial capability was estimated and is presented. The research
findings suggest that the technical innovation is most significantly related to the proposal
ranking followed by the management concept and personality type of the entrepreneur. A
multiple-linear regression model was developed to predict the rankings of business plan
competitions using personality type, business value and technical value as the
independent variables. The inclusion and exclusion criteria were specified in terms of a
threshold value of the F statistic. The criteria for removal was set at 0.1 and for entry was
set at 0.05. The coefficient of multiple correlation (adjusted R2) for the best predictive
model was 0.939 for a regression through the origin. The predictive model was used to
estimate the semifinalist rankings and to select finalists for a business plan competition
whose data was not used in the model development. Predicted rankings were highly
correlated with observed rankings (R2=0.88) and the model perfectly selected the top
four finalists from a group of seven semi-finalists.
