Top Business Plan Competitions in India - A Quick Overview

The first step to run a great business is to have an idea that has a great business plan in place. In a

way to provide the right platform and support for students with great ideas, the top engineering and

business schools in the country have their own business plan competitions where eminent panel of

judges judge these plans and the winners get to mentorship and other support apart from the prize in

these competitions. There are hundreds of bPlan competitions across the globe but only a handful take these business plans beyond the plan stage. Here’s a quick look at some of the top business plan competitions in the country:

Eureka! – Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay:

The Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Bombay, acts as a place for all those who want to the unbeaten paths and

believe in leaving trails. The Cell aims at manifesting the latent Entrepreneurial spirit of young students.

Eureka! is the International Business plan competition organized by IIT Bombay offering a total

prize money of INR 2.4 million apart from the legal and financial consultancy services, mentoring

and a platform to solve queries for the winners enabling them to actually startup at the end of the

competition.

Empresario - Entrepreneurship cell, IIT Kharagpur:

Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Kharagpur is a non-profit student body organization that is also among one of

the active E-cells in premiere colleges in the country. This E-cell, like other E-cells encourages start-ups

by providing them with required mentoring & support at different levels of incubation. E-cell has two

flagship events every year – EAD (Entrepreneurship Awareness Drive) and the Global Entrepreneurship

Summit (GES). Empresario is its business plan competition that invites entries for three different

categories comprising namely Clean Tech Challenge, Eclairez(social intiatives) and Negocio(for web and mobile application based ideas).

Vishishth - Entrepreneurship Cell, IIT Delhi:

IIT Delhi is one more of the IIT campuses with an active E-Cell promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship

among students. Like many other E-Cells, E-Cell IIT Delhi also has its flagship business plan competition

– Vishishth. The competition takes the competing teams right from the initial idea formulation stage,

business planning stage to the stage of investment providing them with resources to support them.

Conquest - Entrepreneurship Cell, BITS Pilani:

BITS Pilani is another premiere college in the country that boasts of an active entrepreneurship cell

that encouraging students to startup with their ideas. In a way to encourage this, the E-Cell conducts

Conquest, BITS Pilani's annual start-up challenge and entrepreneurship event that invites start-up ideas

and connects them to investors who are willing to pay up to Rs. 40 million as investment for the winning

teams.

Eximius – Entrepreneurship and Innovation Cell, IIM Bangalore:

Among the top management schools in the country, IIM Bangalore boosts of one of the most active

entrepreneurship cell. Eximius is their annual festival that covers various facets of entrepreneurship

while Next Big Idea is their business plan competition that aims to create a community of students who

become job providers rather than job seekers in India. The winners take home up to INR 1.5lakhs as cash prize.

Make your plans, win some cash, and then startup!