The 13th annual Johns Hopkins University Business Plan Competition was held on Apr. 27 by the Center for Leadership Education, featuring various 15-minute pitches on individual teams’ business ventures.
The competition requires teams to build a successful business plan around an idea or cutting-edge technology. They must then develop their target market, identify potential competition for their idea, create a market entry strategy and present their final pitch to industry professionals and venture capitalists.
There are three different categories in which participants can enter: general business, life sciences and social enterprise. For the first place winner in each category there is a $6,000 prize, $4,000 for second, $2,000 for third and $250 for the runners-up. In total, the competition awards more than $36,000.
The competition featured 65 teams, which was more than ever before. Students were able to enter into the competition in teams or as individuals, but each team had to have at least one member who is a full or part-time student at Hopkins. The competition included students from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Carey Business School, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, School of Medicine and Whiting School of Engineering (WSE).
The winners from this year included two teams from the Whiting School of Engineering. In the General Business category, Meditel Health Solutions won, under the leadership of Benjamin George, a graduate student from Bloomberg and Jason Reminick. Meditel Health Solutions is the only telemedicine-based, health care service provider that links physicians and patients via webcam and simple web-based video conferencing to enable examination and assessment for Parkinson's disease.
In the Life Sciences category, Salveo Vascular won, under the leadership of Adam Clark, Shuja Dawood, Nathaniel Moller, Luis Soenksen and Jonathan Moller. This start-up medical device venture is dedicated to preventing infectious and functional complications in vascular access devices through the recognition of clinical needs and development of disruptive solutions. All members but Jonathan Moller are graduate students from WSE.
In the Social Enterprise category, John-William Sidhorn, Marton Varady and Shuja Dawood, all graduate students from WSE, won with Momo Scientific. This social venture medical device company seeks to reduce the global burden of cervical cancer, and collaborated with Jhpiego, to develop CryoPop, a low-cost cryosurgical medical device that ablates pre-cancerous lesions of the cervix.
The keynote speaker of the awards ceremony was Kevin Joseph, president and CEO of West Chester Hospital and senior vice president for UC Health in West Chester, Ohio. Joseph graduated from Hopkins in 1996 with degrees in biomedical engineering, psychology and materials science.
