Start-Ups, Shout Out!

IMD 2007 Start-up Competition: Best Year Ever

Out of well over 70 ventures, 22 start-up companies have been chosen to work with IMD's MBA and EMBA programs in 2007. These are the winners of the 9th annual IMD Start-Up Competition.

According to the organizers of the competition, Jim Pulcrano and Dr. Benoit Leleux, the overall quality of the start-ups who entered the competition was the best IMD has ever seen in the past nine years. Jim Pulcrano comments: “Every year we have had a couple of stars, but this year we had many great start-ups to choose from. We had to make some difficult choices.” Benoit Leleux commented, “It was a challenge to decide which companies have the highest potential for commercial success and provide the best learning opportunities for our students.”

The IMD Start-Up competition provides a unique opportunity for early-stage companies to benefit from the support and insights of a team of dedicated and experienced participants from two of IMD’s flagship programs, the MBA and the Executive MBA. The objectives of this unique collaboration between entrepreneurs and managers/participants are two-fold: Provide hands-on learning experience in entrepreneurship and new ventures for the IMD MBA and EMBA classes Provide input and support to early stage companies, to improve their chances of funding and success.

“Life in a private company is unstructured, and IMD helped us to become more structured in our way of thinking”, comments Anil Sethi, CEO of Flisom, a start-up that worked with a team of IMD EMBA participants in 2005.

Winners of the 2007 IMD start-up competition: http://www.imd.ch/news/IMD-start-up-competition.cfm