A business idea to make special enriched rice for the developing world is the first-place winner in the first annual Business Idea Competition sponsored by the Big Red Venture Fund (BRVF) at Cornell.
First place, with its $10,000, prize went to Syed Rizvi, professor of food science at Cornell, K.V. Raman, professor of plant breeding, and K. Vijay Raghavan, the managing director of Sathguru Consultants in India; their business idea is called Cornell-India Novel Food Ventures Inc. Their goal is to make reprocessed, quicker-cooking rice that is nutritionally enhanced, affordable and accessible to countries around the world.
The BRVF is a Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, student-run venture capital fund that gives top Cornell MBA students the opportunity to serve as fund managers, making and managing investments in early stage business ideas. The fund is designed to help stimulate entrepreneurship among Cornell students, faculty and alumni. Competition winners not only win cash prizes but their business ideas get to be thoroughly evaluated by the BRVF for potential funding. They also get the opportunity to draw on the resources of the fund's incubator to help bring the businesses to life.
Second prize of $2,500 went to VaSecure, a plan to sell closure devices for surgical catheterizations, submitted by undergraduate student Daniel Kim, in operations research and industrial engineering, and his brother, Samuel Kim. The third place prize of $1,000 went to LaserCast, an idea to cast molten metals into a thin flat product; it was submitted by a team of Cornell engineers headed by Paul H. Steen, professor of chemical engineering. Goods+Goods, a catalog/Internet retailing business idea to offer high-quality, lifestyle products to disabled individuals, got honorable mention; it was submitted by Johnson School student Anthony Moon.
The Big Red Venture Fund was launched last year as a Park Leadership Fellows project by several students in the Johnson School.
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