I-Start Makes Launching a Competition a Breeze

Student Ambassadors and University leaders take note, the Kauffman Foundation has made it a whole lot easier to get up and running with your own campus competition!

I-Start is an online tool that allows anyone to set up and manage a business plan, business model or design competition. The Kauffman Foundation acquired the platform in 2009 from then Harvard student and now Director, Katie Peterson. You can be up and running in under 40 minutes with a simple competition, says Peterson in a YouTube video that describes a range of flexibility. Program Managers are offered a site with their own brand and domain name. A well-designed graphical user interface allows managers to set entry criteria, types of responses accepted and required elements. Users invite their own judges and manage the review processes.

On the flip side, if you’re a student startup thinking about doing the competition circuit, i-Start makes it vastly easier to search and apply for the range of different competitions for which you may be eligible. To date, close to 9,500 companies have applied to over 200 competitions. To learn more, check out the organization’s video about i-Start…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-dIYXsHiVE&w=560&h=315]

~ Humera Fasihuddin, Manager of Student Programming, T: @ihumera