NEWS

MBA teams to compete in one-of-a-kind,
reality-based venture event

CHAPEL HILL – Master of business administration students from eight top programs have won the chance to compete for national bragging rights and $30,000 in prize money at the 2004 Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) national championship.

The competition will be held April 15-17 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Created by UNC Kenan-Flagler, VCIC is the premier competition for MBAs interested in careers as entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Unlike business plan competitions, the VCIC requires MBAs to play the role of venture capitalists, assessing real companies in a high-stakes competitive environment. Students are challenged to use a range of functional skills and theories in ways that mirror the work of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the marketplace.

The competition recently received the United States Association of Small Business and Entrepreneurship’s Award for Outstanding/Innovative Entrepreneurship Pedagogy.

Finalist teams are from the universities of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Washington, Texas, Notre Dame and Chicago as well as Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Teams from 36 of the nation’s leading schools of business participated in qualifying rounds, which were hosted by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, Babson College, Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management, the University of Michigan Business School’s Samuel Zell and Robert H. Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies and Georgia Tech University’s DuPree College of Management.

"VCIC is an incredible opportunity for a student to enhance his or her classroom learning," said Reeves McGee, a competition judge and director of financial analysis at United Guaranty. "A key part of the students’ learning in the VCIC comes from the feedback session with judges after the competition is over and results have been decided."

While the competition creates a realistic, high-stakes environment, the event benefits those who don’t advance, too.

"The competition is fun and exciting, but the real value of VCIC is in the process of working with a team to actually perform due diligence under serious time pressure," said Patrick Vernon, VCIC’s national director and former UNC team member. "You have to work together and apply what you learned in the classroom to the realities of the capital formation process. That real-world orientation makes the experience more valuable than working out theoretical or historical scenarios in a classroom. And that’s a huge plus for MBAs pursuing careers as entrepreneurs or venture capitalists."

For information, visit www.vcic.unc.edu or contact Vernon at (919) 962-9257, pvernon@unc.edu.

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Contact:  Kim Spurr at (919) 962-8951