Business plan competitions: The case of GSVC

Employment, entrepreneurship and development are issues of primary importance for the recovery and the advance of both the world and the Italian economy. The main objective of the following report is to investigate, understand and analyze which are the activities created to support young entrepreneurs, with a particular focus on the role played by the Business Plan Competitions and more specifically by the ‘Global Social Venture Competition’.
The first part defines the concept of entrepreneurship, startup and their relationship. It considers the variables influencing the creation of new innovative companies, such as those referred to Gartner’s framework, together with the different kinds of financial sources available for these small businesses and the dominant actors dealing with risk capital.
The second chapter gives an overview of the list of activities supporting newly-formed startups and analyzes in detail the characteristics of Business Plan competitions, as well as the benefits young entrepreneurs can receive from such initiatives.
In the third part the case study of “the Global Social Venture Competition” is proposed, in order to grasp, through the analysis of a real example, the strengths and weaknesses of an international university business plan competition taking place in Italy. Also, positive feedbacks about GSVC have been collected thanks to some interviews made to past winning teams and presented throughout this final chapter, as a further confirmation of the potential of the competition. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief description of other similar business plan competitions, which are held in Italy as well.