For Ambitious Students, Entrepreneurship Can Be a Big Win

This year, 40 teams from around the world competed for prizes totaling $135,000. The winner was NuMat Technologies, a company started by a team from Northwestern University, which produces high-performance materials for storing clean fuels.

While clean energy is a popular field for young entrepreneurs, health care-related businesses were the big winners at other business plan competitions. At the Harvard Business School's competition, the winner of the Business Venture Track prize (following a traditional business plan) was a company that plans to produce vaccines stored on thin strips of film, eliminating the need for refrigeration. The Social Venture Track winner (run on a social entrepreneurship model) created an Internet-based system that streamlines the process of transferring patients from a hospital to a specialized care facility.

Oklahoma State University's Riata Business Plan Competition gave top honors to a team specializing in gene therapy, while the Wharton Business Plan Competition at the University of Pennsylvania awarded a grand prize of $30,000 to RightCare Solutions, which makes software that helps nurses identify which patients are at highest risk for hospital readmissions.

Healthy living was also a winning theme at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, which recently instituted a Social Entrepreneurship Award for promising start-ups focused on social responsibility or environmental challenges. The inaugural $80,000 prize went to Fresh Takes Kitchen, a service that provides healthy meals and nutrition education to low-income families.

At MIT, not surprisingly, tech companies dominated the school's $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition. This year's winning business was CloudTop, a service that allows users to search for and move files between online services such as Google (GOOG) Documents and Facebook (FB). (And yes, they got a check for $100,000.)

Amid all the medical, tech and energy start-ups, it is possible for more off-the-beaten-path concepts to win funding. The winner of Columbia University's Outrageous Business Plan Competition was Cup and Compass, which plans to produce drink dispensers for fast-casual restaurants that offer healthier options, such as the Latin American drink horchata. (For purposes of the competition, Columbia defines "outrageous" as "ambitious in scope and scale" rather than out-there crazy). Other finalists produced organic cocktails, mobile toilets and a computer-based system for schools to track and analyze student behavior.

Graduating from a competitive university or business school is a great accomplishment. But leaving school with funding for the next step of your life is the ultimate graduation present.

This commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet guest contributor program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of TheStreet or its management.

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