The Chinese University of Hong Kong Vice-Chancellor s Cup of Student Entrepreneurship 2015 The Center for Entrepreneurship (CfE) of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) invites all students attending CUHK to enter their start-up business plans in the Vice-Chancellor s Cup of Student Entrepreneurship (VCCE). The final presentations of VCCE will take place on Friday 27 th February, 2015. Teams will present their plans to panels of judges who will select as winners those planning to create the most value subject to feasibility. The judging panels will be made up of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and investors. Students and faculty of CUHK are welcome to attend the presentations. Presenters will meet privately with judging panels for feedback sessions. Winners of VCCE may represent CUHK to join local and international competitions and may apply to the CfE for travel subsidies to those competitions subject to fund availability. Prizes First prize is HK$8,000; second prize is HK$5,000 and third prize is HK$2,000 Team Composition & Eligibility This is a competition for graduate students & undergraduates, and at least one graduate student must be a member of the venture s startup management team. A team with a few undergraduates will be allowed to compete. Each entry shall be a team of from one to five CUHK students and shall be supervised by a CUHK faculty member. Value Creation and Feasibility Judges will select as winners teams that are expected to generate the greatest return on their investment. Determination of expected return requires assessing the chances of successful implementation as well as the generated value in the event of implementation. Teams that present plans that have little chance of being successfully implemented will not be selected as winners. Depending on the business model, return generated by plans could be captured in differing proportions by investors and other stakeholders.
Your Business Plan Your business plan should be addressed to an external prospective contributor of equity capital or other resources required for implementation. The plan should detail the value that your venture adds to purchasers of your product or service and the business model for capturing that value. You should explain the operational, personnel, marketing, sourcing and financing aspects of the venture, including the projected returns to the investors and other stakeholders, the risks in achieving those returns and the strategies for mitigating those risks. Your venture can be a concept, a start-up or an early-stage business. Eligible ventures can have already started operations but must not have generated substantial sales prior to September 2014. Competitors from previous VCCE competitions may re-enter their own updated plans from previous years as long as the re-entered updated plans did not win first, second or third prize. Plans from the CUHK Professor Charles K. Kao Student Creativity Awards (KSCA) that have not won VCCE competitions are eligible, whether or not they have won prizes at KSCA or elsewhere. Through the clear presentation of relevant market research, proofs of concept and/or prototype testing, you may demonstrate how your proposed venture s comparative advantages will generate value. You should consult and enlist the help of persons in the Hong Kong, the Chinese and the global business communities to improve the feasibility of your plan. The judges will treat the business plans as blueprints for new companies, so increased team diversity through inter-faculty membership and involvement of external parties may enhance prospects of winning. The attractiveness of your venture may be further increased by involving parties outside of CUHK s student body, but the students roles in the venture s conception, management, and ownership must be substantial. To be eligible for entry in VCCE, your team members must not simply be acting as consultants writing a business plan for a company with which you have little ongoing stake. In general, a member of the student team should be CEO, COO, or President of the venture, or members of the student team should occupy 50% or more of the functional area management positions that report directly to the CEO, COO, or President. Members of the student team should also own 50% or more of the equity allocated to the management team and key advisors. If students hold less than 50% of the equity allocated to the management team and key advisers, and/or less than 20% of total equity, students should show evidence that they were a major force in the venture s creation. VCCE is for new, independent ventures in the seed, start-up, or early growth stages. Generally excluded are the following: buy-outs, expansions of existing companies, real estate syndications, tax shelters, franchises, licensing agreements for distribution of existing products or services in a different geographical area, and spin-outs from existing corporations. Licensing new technologies from universities or research labs is encouraged. All ventures must be seeking outside equity capital.
Written Applications, Summaries and Plans 1) Application Form & Summaries All applicants must complete the application form and submit with it a summary business plan, typed in English no longer than 1,000 words. Due 5:00pm Thursday 22 nd January 2015 You must submit one soft copy in PDF format (file size not more than 5MB) to entrepreneurship@cuhk.edu.hk 2) Final Written Plans The CfE will shortlist semi-finalists by selecting among the summaries. Semi-finalists will be announced on 13 th Friday February, 2015 Plans are to be typed in English and are limited to no more than 16 pages, not including the cover and table of contents pages. Page format is 1½ line spacing with 1 inch top, bottom, left and right margins, 12 point font. This line spacing and font requirement applies to the textual content of the document and not to titles and descriptions accompanying pictures, graphs, tables or worksheets. All pages must be numbered excluding the cover page. The 16 pages are limited to 10 pages of text and 6 pages of appendices. Due 5:00pm 13 th Friday February, 2015 You must submit one soft copy in PDF format (file size not more than 5MB) to entrepreneurship@cuhk.edu.hk & two hard copies to the CfE at Room 951, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Building at Chak Cheung Street, CUHK. The first page of your plan should be a summary that describes your business model, how it will generate value, how much financing or other resources you seek and what the investor will receive in return. Financial data should include a cash flow statement, income statement, and balance sheet. Include an explanation of the offering to investors indicating how much money is required, how it will be used, and the proposed structure of the deal, i.e., stock, debentures, etc. Oral Presentation The semi-finalist and finalist teams will present their business plans orally in English. You may use any audio and visual aids that you consider appropriate. All members of the CUHK community are invited to attend the oral presentations. Each team will have fifteen minutes to present formally its plan. Each presentation will be followed by a fifteen minute question-and-answer session with questions being asked by the panel of judges, who will have received copies of your written business plan prior to the presentation. Academic Honesty Your written plan is a prospectus to attract external equity financing. You must present clearly, completely and truthfully all material facts concerning the
proposed venture. While you are free to project the future in any way that is reasonable, you must not misrepresent current or historical facts. You must be academically honest. CUHK s standards of academic honesty are found on the website www.cuhk.edu.hk/policy/academichonesty/. We will screen plans for plagiarism. You may use any and all information including interviews, internet sources, books, industry periodicals, market reports, academic literature and start-up business plans written by others. But whenever you quote directly you must use quotation marks around your direct quote and insert a footnote and whenever you paraphrase another person s words, you must insert a footnote. These footnotes must contain full citations that will enable the reader to find the source, independently verify facts and determine the extent to which your ideas derive from the cited sources. Ownership of and Disclosure of Plans and Presentations Each participating team will continue to be the owner of its plan after entry in the VCCE. By entering, however, each team gives permission to CUHK to distribute the plan to judges and administrators and to use the plan for teaching purposes. The CfE will not ask its members, faculty and administrators of CUHK, judges, reviewers, or members of the audience to agree to or sign any non-disclosure statements for any participating team. The CfE may record VCCE presentations and those recordings will be the property of CUHK to be used at its sole discretion. Teams should consider information disclosed at the presentations to have entered the public domain. For More Information To find out more about VCCE, please contact Rosanna Lo at the CUHK Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 951, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Building at Chak Cheung Street, CUHK Phone : (852) 3943-7542 Fax : (852) 2994-4363 Email : entrepreneurship@cuhk.edu.hk Web : www.cuhk.edu.hk/centre/entrepreneurship/ We look forward to receiving your start-up business plans!!
The Vice-Chancellor s Cup of Student Entrepreneurship 2015 Application Form Please fill in this application form and return it with your 1,000 word summary one soft copy in PDF format (file size not more than 5MB) by 5PM Thursday 22 January 2015 to the CUHK Center for Entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship@cuhk.edu.hk ) Name of Project: Faculty Supervisor: Name: Department: Team members: (1) Name (Chi): Name (Eng): (2) Name (Chi): Name (Eng): (3) Name (Chi): Name (Eng): (4) Name (Chi): Name (Eng): (5) Name (Chi): Name (Eng):