A team of students from the University of Dundee scooped a £5,000 prize at the Scottish Institute of Enterprise national business plan competition last night.
Four students from the University of Dundee and one from University of Aberdeen presented their plan for Intelliflame - a device to monitor fires of different substances for the offshore oil industry and were awarded the runner up prize to start up their business.
Peter Traill and Paul Casey, science and engineering students and Dominic DeFranco and Matthew Miskell, in the faculty of law and accountancy joined with Medhi Khoury from the University of Aberdeen at the early stages of the competition and started throwing ideas around for a business plan. The boys took advice from Research and Innovations Services at the University of Dundee. The University of Dundee students are all members of the young entrepreneurs society at the University of Dundee.
Sir Alan Langlands, Principal of the University of Dundee and chairman of the Scottish Institute of Enterprise gave the welcome at the ceremony at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh yesterday to an audience of students, business professionals, university representatives and business angels.
Carl Togneri, Director of SIE, announced the winner as Dynamic Innovations from Glasgow University. The team of four, whose business plan was developed to exploit their 'hearing test' device technology, were then presented with the top prize of £10,000 in start-up finance by Andrew Bissell, CEO of Voxar.
The other runners up were ReacTec, a three strong team from Edinburgh University whose idea is to develop an adaptive ski incorporating innovative materials that will offer skiers significant performance advantages over existing ski technology.
Connect Scotland, who managed the competition on SIE's behalf, will also offer the three winning teams the opportunity to present at their prestigious early stage investment conference, Springboard, in Dundee on June 17.
Commenting at the awards, Carl Togneri, Director of SIE said: "The success of our first national Business Plan Competition is testament to our belief that there are many nascent technology student entrepreneurs in Scottish universities with the talent and ambition to start-up and succeed in business. "High standards have already been set by this year's competition entrants, many of whom we expect to see running successful businesses in the near future. Our hope for next year is that more students rise to the challenge and continue the trend of successful technology start-ups emerging from the university base."
SIE's competition judging panel was made up of leading lights from the entrepreneurial and investment communities - Martin Ritchie, business angel and Chair; Nelson Gray, Director of Gap Fund Managers; Iain Macdonald, an investor and founder of ComputerGroup; Kevin Dorren, technology entrepreneur and founder of Orbital; Peter Hookham, private investor; and Brian Gray, ex Senior Vice President of Adobe Inc and technology business investor.
Note to Editors
Round 1Picture caption: Peter Traill, Paul Casey and Matthew Miskell, three members of the Intelliflame team.