Did you “Elf Yourself” last holiday season? OfficeMax’s seasonal marketing campaign featured a viral Web component which allowed customers to superimpose an image of their own face on an animated dancing elf. According to Internet tracking service comScore, more than 17 million people visited the Elf Yourself Web site during the 2007 holiday season. But did all of those unique visitors translate into increased sales? The answer is not really: the company’s reported total sales in Q4 2007 were down 2.6%. The economy’s slide hasn’t helped either; in 2008, OfficeMax reported that its 2008 Q4 earnings were down more than 14%.

Ava Seave, an adjunct associate professor in Finance and Economics, recently blogged about the correlation between viral marketing success and sales totals. Seave suggests that marketers examine traditional metrics to gauge the success of their campaigns. She writes:

Viral marketing can decrease acquisition costs for new customers because your current customers essentially endorse your product when they send along a game or video they think is funny or interesting, and, of course, is associated with your product.

However, the acquisition cost calculation needs to be done over time, since a viral marketing campaign almost never leads to direct sales from that game or video viewing. The right goals for a viral campaign should be a lot more old school: Does this campaign generate leads and does it help with brand recognition?

Judging a viral campaign’s success for lead generation is straight forward — count the number of the leads that close and judge the quality — i.e. total revenue — of the new customers. To count, how many leads land on the registration form and actually fill in the information, and how many abandon? What percentage of leads make a transaction? What is the cost of the lead and the cost of the order?

Compare these statistics to all your other sources, naturally. Does this campaign help with brand recognition is a harder question to pull out a quantitative answer. You can point to the number of downloads or pass-alongs as new exposures to your brand, and we assume exposure will lead to recognition. You also could look at what terms are put into search engines that lead to your site and determine if this indicates the effectiveness of the campaign.

Photo credit: Judy Baxter

In addition to his long and impressive tenure with Columbia Business School, Professor Burton left a lasting impression in public life as well. In Washington DC, he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission as its chief accountant in 1972, then returned to New York City to become Abraham Beame’s deputy mayor for finance in 1976, a time when the city faced severe financial challenges.

The New York Times, in an obituary showcasing Professor Burton’s life, writes about his approach to accounting and financial regulation:

At the S.E.C., Mr. Burton stiffened the requirements for financial reporting by companies and lobbied accounting firms to take greater responsibility for the accuracy and clarity of the financial records under their review.

He argued that the accountant’s task should not be confined to auditing corporate books, but should include forecasts, judgments on the corporation’s financial controls and evaluations of management. And he argued that accounting firms were too secretive about their own finances.

“The mantra he was selling to Capitol Hill was, ‘An eighth grader has to understand this: Is the company healthy or isn’t it?’” said his daughter, now the general counsel for the Hearst Corporation, who was an eighth grader while her father was in Washington.

The key challenge that healthcare enterprise leaders face is determining how to drive innovation while addressing problems of affordability, inefficiency and gaps in quality. This task is now complicated by strong economic headwinds that limit the resources available to attack these problems. Industry executives are also dealing with new sets of competitive and regulatory pressures on their efforts to drive business growth.

At Columbia Business School’s 5th Annual Healthcare Conference held in New York City on November 21, over 500 students, alumni and other professionals heard more than 40 speakers and panelists discuss these issues.

The featured healthcare leaders said they are embracing change to develop creative solutions to the industry’s growing problems and to provide attractive investment opportunities on a global basis. A career strategies panel of executive and corporate recruiters also presented their views on the skills and talents necessary for healthcare professionals to succeed in this dynamic environment. This was followed by a concluding career fair and networking reception with the conference’s 17 corporate sponsors.

Ed Ludwig ’75, chairman and CEO of BD (Becton, Dickinson), gave the opening keynote address. Ludwig said that a successful global healthcare company must use technology, scale, global reach and operational excellence to offer value-added products. These products should reduce costs, enhance the quality of patient care and generate sustainable earnings growth.

Following his remarks, four concurrent panels took place in the morning session on the topics of pharma and biotech, medical devices, diagnostics and payor/provider issues.

The pharma and biotech panel discussed the trend among companies to narrow their therapeutic priorities, focus on biologics, pursue licensing and target acquisitions and seek enhanced productivity and cost savings. Numerous early-stage biotechnology companies are turning to larger pharma and biotechnology firms to survive as they are unable to secure capital from the public market. Global medical device companies are seeking to introduce innovative and cost-effective products in a challenging regulatory and pricing/reimbursement environment and pursuing acquisitions and new markets to meet growth objectives. The consensus of the payor/ provider panel was that any healthcare reform in 2009 would likely be incremental due largely to economic and political headwinds, and that a key focus would be on information technology and expanding access to those without insurance coverage.

Robert Essner, former Chairman and CEO of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and now executive-in-residence at Columbia Business School, provided the lunchtime keynote speech. He suggested that although the pharma industry faces significant challenges, the combination of new drugs, biologics and vaccines in key areas of unmet need (e.g. Alzheimer’s, cancer, congestive heart failure) and the massive influx of informed baby boomers, who are demanding health solutions, provides favorable long-term growth prospects for innovative global pharmaceutical companies.

Three afternoon panels covered M&A, life science investments and emerging markets. It is anticipated that healthcare M&A will remain active across all sectors and that consolidation among Big Pharma companies appears inevitable. Early-stage life science companies and investors face a capital squeeze, which is threatening the viability of existing companies with lower levels of funds available for new investment. Emerging markets are an increasing focus for global pharmaceutical and medical device companies that are seeking new markets for their products.

The final panel of the day focused on the changing talent acquisition and development strategies of major healthcare enterprises. Panelists commented that successful leaders will need to have global and cross-functional experiences; that employees should be open to lateral moves that broaden their skills and experiences; and that healthcare companies considering new hires are seeking a broader “toolkit” of skills that reach beyond the traditional focus on healthcare backgrounds.

For more information about the conference and sponsors visit www.cbshealthcareconference.com.

In a similar spirit, Capon’s Customer-Centric CEO Index (C4I) is a simple measure of your firm’s degree of customer orientation.

There is scarcely a senior executive today who doesn’t recognize the importance of customers to the firm’s financial health. Relationships with customers drive the firm’s top-line performance; hence the role of NPS in trying to understand the customer-firm relationship.

My concern is broader; I want to understand the degree to which the organization as a whole puts customers at the center of its activities and is committed to using its entire set of resources to deliver customer value. What could be a better basis for determining your firm’s degree of customer orientation than the behavior of your CEO?

So, the C4I is very simple: C4I = the percentage of time your CEO spends with customers. Consider some polar opposites: for example, C4I = 0 and C4I = 30.

We could label the C4I = 0 CEO as the bureaucratic manager, internally focused and presiding over the entire organizational apparatus. Far from being central to the CEO’s concerns, relationships with customers are something to be delegated to the marketing or sales departments. Organizational layers shield this CEO from the realities of the marketplace — from competitors, customers and customers’ customers. Lack of firsthand customer interaction means that the firm likely makes all critical customer-oriented decisions at lower organizational levels. Alternatively, if the CEO does make these decisions, they are based on information filtered through the organization.

By contrast, a C4I = 30 CEO is highly engaged with customers. In B2C, some CEOs spend time on customer-complaint phone lines; former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher was famous for interacting with passengers; and Terry Leahy, CEO of British retailing giant Tesco, and Mickey Drexler, CEO of J. Crew (formerly CEO of Gap), frequently walk around their stores talking with customers.

C4I = 30 CEOs recognize that the firm’s revenues are probably based on an 80:20 distribution — 80 percent of revenues generated by 20 percent of customers. In B2B, or in B2C where channel entities are increasingly important, powerful customers play an ever more critical role in deciding the firm’s future. C4I = 30 CEOs use direct customer input to help plot the firm’s strategy — recall Lou Gerstner’s early days at IBM as he met with customers in the process of developing the strategy that would turn IBM from a lumbering and declining giant into a preeminent industry player. And a few years ago, EMC’s CEO Joe Tucci changed his firm’s direction only after meeting with the CEOs and CFOs of customers’ customers.

Furthermore, as strategic/key/global account management practices become more widely entrenched, the potential roles for customer-driven CEOs become increasingly obvious. Hank Paulson was an obsessively customer-focused on-the-road CEO at Goldman Sachs, and Larry Ellison is Oracle’s point person at major customer General Electric. Other CEOs, like Sam Palmisano at IBM, are ready to directly engage with customers to close a deal or redirect a contract that was headed for a competitor.

The message should be clear. As IBM’s Thomas Watson Sr. famously said, “Nothing happens until a sale is made.” Even if you only half believe this statement, you must ask the question, “What is my CEO doing directly to help make this happen?”

As a starting point, I suggest you figure out your CEO’s C4I score. If it’s in the doldrums, you owe it to your firm and the shareholders to do what you can to inch it upward. CEOs, take note!

Professor Capon is author of Key Account Management and Planning, Managing Global Accounts, and The Marketing Mavens. His new textbook, Managing Marketing in the 21st Century, is a quarter the price of most competitive offerings; see www.mm21c.com.]]> Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:21:31 EST ]]> Leadership Marketing Organizations After two years and more than 400 posts, Public Offering is on hiatus. Since launching in 2008, faculty members, students and staff members have used this space to share thoughts about the School, analyze events affecting the business world, highlight student achievements and more. Though Public Offering is going on hiatus, the School’s goals for the blog — to share ideas, engage the community and provide a means for discussion across all areas of the School — live on. Please follow the School’s Facebook page or Twitter feed to stay in touch, and visit the homepage to see the latest faculty research highlighted in Columbia Ideas at Work.

In his address last night President Barack Obama tried to rally support for his health care reform agenda, and announced for the first time that he would consider raising taxes on families earning more than $1 million a year, which is a scaled-back version of an earlier proposal that would have imposed a surcharge on households earning $350,000 or more.

Rita McGrath, associate professor of management and author of Discovery-Driven Growth, worries that the cost of health care reform could still take an overwhelming toll on small businesses.

“I’m concerned with the plans for funding it,” says McGrath. “It seems disproportionately aimed at smaller businesses and small business owners.”

McGrath argues that the taxes hikes needed to underwrite the reform program will fundamentally alter the “structure of incentives” (a term borrowed from William J. Baumol’s “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive and Destructive”), for small business owners.

She points to several ways that could happen: high taxes will diminish the amount of working capital companies have available; the tax structure places artificial constraints for the number of employees (fewer than 25) for small businesses to remain in a lower tax bracket; and small business owners’ energy will be diverted from innovating products to innovating ways to not pay more taxes. Ultimately, she argues higher taxes will diminish a strong spirit of entrepreneurialism in the United States. She writes in her blog:

With the small business growth having led us out of most recessions in the past, get ready for this sector to add jobs far more slowly and with far greater caution than it had previously — a big blow to an economy that desperately needs a vibrant and growing small business sector.

At the macro level, the effects of higher individual taxes on rates of entrepreneurship are without an exception, negative. It is well accepted, and has been for decades, that the desire to have a vibrant entrepreneurial economy is at odds with the desire to operate a welfare state, due in large part to the way in which welfare states allocate resources. When the upside to undertaking the risks of entrepreneurship decrease, and the downside of not doing much at all are limited, it becomes hard to justify making the effort. If it is possible to live quite a comfortable life without too much bother, why take on the long hours, the worry and the headaches of small business ownership?

Photo: apoxapox / BY-NC

	View and post photos from commencement on the Columbia Business School Facebook page.

This is an excerpt from the speech Vikas Raj ’10 gave at the School’s Recognition Ceremony on May 16, 2010. The class of 2010 took part in the Columbia University Commencement on May 18, 2010.

When most of us got into business school early in 2008, our friends told us, “What great timing.” But it wasn’t long after we started school that we began to question that. In fact, it was only weeks into our first semester — on September 15, 2008 — that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection. The day before, Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America.

In the weeks that followed, we first-year students at Columbia Business School stood in the lobby of Uris Hall, watching two awkwardly placed TV screens for the latest news on what appeared to be the unfolding of the global economy.

We started business school when it was about as bad as it could get “out there.” But as Columbia’s most famous alumnus Warren Buffett, MS ’51, once said, “When life gives you limes, make margaritas.” Sorry, looks like that was Jimmy Buffett, but the point remains. Over the last two years, while the crisis continued “out there,” we were given the opportunity to learn from it in real time from our brilliant professors and from each other.

We learned to rely on each other and to make the best of this difficult environment. We leave Columbia today with the skills and the confidence to rebuild the business world.

At that first Sunday night dinner of Orientation, we tried to listen to then-GBA president Don Baxter ’09 tell us, “These are going to be the best two years of your lives.” What we were really doing was staring at each other. We knew already that these were the strange faces of the people who would define our Columbia experience. In the following week of Orientation, those strange faces became friends on whom we would learn to depend.

All of us now know that Orientation isn’t just block-standing games and case studies that bring together a cluster. It is the realization, gradually crystallizing over the course of two weeks, that somehow Admissions did it right, that they put together a group of people who were so different but still tied together by a fundamental desire to do something better and more impactful with our lives.

So, as things continued to get worse “out there,” inside the gates of Columbia Business School we began to depend on each other and learn from each other. We depended on each other to get through core classes and electives as our professors taught us the art and science of marketing, strategy and finance; they taught us to negotiate above our BATNAs and really value companies.

We depended on each other to get through the most difficult recruiting environment in decades, guiding each other through countless mock interviews, recruiting events and résumé reviews, and we checked in on each other during summer internships. We learned from each other by learning about the amazing things we had done before school. We came here to study in the same halls as business pioneers like Warren Buffett MS ’51, Henry R. Kravis ’69 and Jerry Speyer ’64, and to study with world-class professors in this amazing city, in the heart of the global business world. Columbia truly is a global business school.

Raj will begin a career in M&A investment banking at Evercore Partners in New York this summer.

Photo credit: Columbia Business School

Between 2:30 and 3 p.m. on May 6, 2010, the Dow dropped 7 percent before partially restoring itself by the closing bell. In the days following that sudden market shock, regulators have investigated possible causes, looking at a single trade in the Standard & Poor’s e-mini futures contract and other causes for the brief panic. The plunge has telescoped focus on the role of “circuit breakers” and the way high-frequency traders function in response to irregular use of those safety mechanisms.

“I think that market-wide coordination of regulatory mechanisms such as circuit breakers is a very positive thing. The lack of such coordination seems to have had a significantly detrimental effect,” says Professor Ciamac Moallemi, who has studied behavior in financial markets. In his recent research, he created a quantitative model to value latency or the delay between decision and trade execution, finding that the higher frequency of trading, the more impact latency has on transaction costs. (Read more about this research in Ideas at Work.)

Moallemi said the events of May 6 raised a number of unanswered questions, including:

1. Did buy-side firms employing algorithmic trading strategies contribute to the crash? Many mutual funds, pension funds, etc., try to efficiently buy or sell large positions via computerized strategies that buy or sell at a predetermined rate over the course of the day despite market conditions. Such strategies often trade at a faster rate in periods of high volume. Did these strategies accelerate selling just as the market was crashing?
2. High-frequency liquidity providers implement computerized market-making strategies based on the statistical analysis of markets. In periods of market anomaly, where historical statistical relationships may not hold, these traders may withdraw from the market and hence remove liquidity at times when it is most needed. To what extent did high-frequency liquidity providers withdraw liquidity from the market immediately prior to the crash?
3. Given that there does not seem to be any trading “error” involved in the crash, is it a wise policy for the exchanges to cancel trades that occurred at anomalously low prices? This would seem to destroy any incentive for investors to provide liquidity by buying during a crash. What incentives can be created for liquidity provision in turbulent times?

“Equity markets have changed dramatically in recent years, with the proliferation of electronic trading and the decentralization of trading across many new venues,” Moallemi adds. “While these changes have offered investors many benefits, there may be unintended consequences such as the momentary breakdown that occurred on May 6. This event highlights exactly how little we know about the complex and highly interdependent systems that constitute the market.”

Image credit: Google Finance

“Asia is leading the way in the recovery of the world economy,” Professor Shang-Jin Wei said in his introduction of Jong-Wha Lee, chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. Lee spoke at the School on April 20, 2010, in an event sponsored by the Center on Japanese Economy and Business and the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business. Wei, director of the Chazen Institute, is coeditor of the recently published book, China’s Growing Role in World Trade (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Lee outlined several key messages in his presentation, saying that Asian recovery was taking “firm hold.” He predicted 1.7 percent growth in GDP for major industrial economies in 2010 and the number moving to 2.0 percent for 2011. In contrast, the figures for GDP growth in Asia are 7.5 percent in 2010 and 7.3 percent in 2011, he said. Drivers for Asia’s strong recovery included growth in private consumption and investment.

Lee also discussed inflation — on the rise but manageable — and the risks stemming from uncertain global recovery and volatile capital flows. He said Asian economies will gradually unwind stimulus support and shift to private demand in the future.

The oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has placed renewed focus on clean energy, writes adjunct professor Bruce Usher, a carbon finance leader and executive in residence at the School.

In an op-ed in the New York Times (“Red China, Green China” May 6, 2010), Usher says that the United States lacks the political will to become a world leader in clean energy while China has been moving ahead with creating jobs and policies in the sector. Last year, China spent a total of $35 billion — double the amount of the United States — on projects related to renewable energy. In 2008, China held 84 percent of global market share for clean-development projects. Usher called for aggressive action by the United States to compete with China in the clean-tech race, outlining three actions to develop new technologies:

First, institute national feed-in tariffs or a renewable portfolio standard — two ways to require that utilities buy clean energy in a minimum amount or at a certain price. Such standards have been effectively put into practice in several states, most notably in Texas with wind power, but only a federal program will provide the scale necessary to compete with China, which has a national feed-in tariff program of its own.

Second, establish a price on carbon via either a tax or a cap-and-trade program to encourage low-carbon technologies. The Clean Development Mechanism placed a price on carbon in developing countries, initiating thousands of emissions-reduction projects in China. Putting a price on carbon in the United States would provide an incentive for domestic developers to build similar projects here.

Finally, get serious about supporting the research and development of carbon capture and storage, and maintain America’s lead in a field that offers enormous opportunity but is too large for any one company to finance. Coal is the No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions, and the first country to develop economically viable capture-and-storage technology will dictate the terms for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired utilities globally.

Choosing wisely for positive long-term outcomes — often at the expense of tempting short-term gains — is a hallmark of mature leadership. At the individual level, these types of decisions signal patience, vision and self control.

New research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (March 28, 2010) provides significant evidence as to where in the brain these cognitive processes are taking place: the lateral prefrontal cortex. That region of the brain — tap your forehead, it’s right under there — is considered to be the executive lobe and is associated with planning, complex decision making and moderating socially acceptable behavioral responses.

Bernd Figner, a research scientist at the Business School and the University’s Department of Psychology, working with Professor Eric Johnson and Professor Elke Weber, used a brain stimulation technique called rTMS to temporarily disrupt the function of the lateral prefrontal cortex in a group of volunteers. After the brain stimulation, the volunteers were asked to make choices between smaller, more immediate rewards or larger, future rewards.

“When we disrupted the function of the volunteers’ left lateral prefrontal cortex, we found they strongly preferred the smaller, more immediate rewards,” says Figner. The effect of increased impatience was specific in three ways: it only occurred after stimulation of the left, but not the right prefrtontal cortex; when the smaller reward was a tempting immediate reward; and when a choice, not just an evaluative judgment, had to be made.

The results add to the growing body of scientific literature on decision making, which has examined the behavioral, cognitive and neural mechanisms. A recent Ideas at Work article profiled related research by Weber, Johnson and other researchers, on the role of cognitive mechanisms in decision making. Specifically, they examined how people use memory and attention in delaying gratification or taking an immediate reward; they found “people muster the most evidence to support the first choice they consider, drowning out other options.”

The implication of the research findings is important for “choice architecture” or the way in which environments are structured to lead people through a decision-making process.

In Ideas, Weber says out that we live in an era that makes choice architecture easy to implement: “More and more decision making and communication occurs on the Web, where it is easier to structure a choice environment in a way that focuses people on one type of option or query over another,” she says. “So you can provide people first with information about the future when they make health or financial decisions, building decision environments that promote less impulsive choices and encourage more long-term choice.”

To combat falling membership and scattered leadership, the Girl Scouts launched a new strategy in 2005. Five years later, the plan to increase participation appears to be working — at least in New York City where the New York Times recently reported a boom in troops.

The case of the Girl Scouts provides key lessons for strategy, says management professor Willie Pietersen. His new book, Strategic Learning (Wiley, March 2010), examines how organizations can turn market insights into strategic actions. In it, he uses the example of the Girl Scouts, with whom he has worked as a strategic adviser since 2004.

“The Girl Scouts are a movement rather than a legally aligned organization. It’s similar to a franchise operation,” Pietersen says.

The movement’s new strategy entailed redefining its customers and its winning proposition clearly, restating its mission and setting new priorities. Additionally, each of the organization’s 312 independent councils was required to set its own priorities, based on local markets, in alignment with the movement’s.

“After a total strategy was defined as a central idea, a local strategy was created for each independent council,” he continues. “They aligned their own propositions and priorities as a direct translation of what the total organization was trying to do. That gave coherence.”

In order to further streamline the Girl Scouts’ efforts, the number of councils was reduced from 312 to 109. “This was done to improve the implementation effectiveness of the strategy that had already been defined,” Pietersen says. The Girl Scouts made other tactical changes, including shifting the emphasis away from earning merit badges to learning about topics, like health and wellness or financial literacy, and using online tools to foster engagement. A key point in the strategic learning sequence is that structure should always follow strategy, Pietersen says.

Pietersen cautions that independent subsidiaries cannot automatically align with the central mission but should instead develop their own priorities. “They have to do their own situation analysis and learn about their own local markets,” he says. “They can translate that information into an aligned winning proposition.”

Willie Pietersen is teaching the Columbia Business School Executive Education program “Creating and Executing Breakthrough Strategy,” taking place May 16–21, 2010.

Peter Peterson, cofounder and chairman emeritus of the Blackstone Group and former CEO of Lehman Brothers, spoke with students on January 21 as part of the Silfen Leadership Series. He served as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Richard Nixon from 1972 to 1973. The event was co-sponsored by the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics.

Peterson is a vocal advocate of deficit reduction and founded the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to promote non-partisan education and research for economic issues. In his presentation at Columbia Business School, he elaborated on his views of the long-term fiscal challenges ahead for the United States, which he said included entitlement spending, current accounts and savings deficits, and healthcare costs.

“We need to get rid of the notion that we will grow out of these problems,” he warned. “If we don’t demonstrate to foreign lenders that we’re going to take significant action [on our debt], they will be forced to raise interest rates.” Peterson also strongly advocated for education and the mobilization of younger generations to play a bigger role in economic decision making.

Peterson answered questions from the audience, including one on the future of private equity. “They desperately need for credit to open up,” Peterson said. “Otherwise it’s not much of a leverage business.”

Photo courtesy of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation

Professor Bruce Greenwald and top value investors took part in a panel discussion at Columbia Business School on April 16, 2010. The program was hosted and televised by Bloomberg (watch video online).

In the discussion, Greenwald said the financial crisis validated the principles of sound value investing. “Thank God for the last year. … Value investors stayed the course,” he said. “We did not have a Great Depression, which I don’t think was ever the cards.” Greenwald went on to elaborate about the fundamentals of value investing, saying:

You are always buying future returns when you are buying a stock. The question is how you measure them. When you see a return today that you think you want to buy, the fundamental question is how long is going to last? You can see the birds in the bush, but the question is how many are going to die before you get to eat them? … Value investors have always focused on the permanence of the return. To Ben Graham that was asset production. For a business to be viable, if it needed assets, it had to earn a return on those assets or nobody was going to invest. … That’s why [Graham] focused on assets. But what Buffett taught people is that beyond assets, earnings are sustainable if you have barriers to competition.

	Judges and prize winners from the 2010 A. Lorne Weil Outrageous Business Plan Competition.

Nick Friend ’11 and his mates, Chris Beardsley and Russell Greenberg, had a dilemma: How to create the perfect, portable cocktail for tailgating? After tinkering with a design (they share a background in architecture and design at Yale), they came up with the Sidecar. It is a liquid-filled disposable sleeve (with room for advertising) that fits over a soda can. Every sip from the enhanced can produces the perfect blend of can and sleeve contents. Think a portable Jack-and-Coke in less than three seconds. Their idea came in first place — with an award of $7,000 — at the Entrepreneurship Program’s A. Lorne Weil Outrageous Business Plan Competition, which took place on April 16, 2010.

More than a dozen teams of first- and second-year students and their business partners participated in the competition. The second-place cash prize of $4,500 went to Ben Appenzeller ’10 and his plan for a virtual gift card distributor called Gift Helix. Julia Levy ’11 received $1,500 for her third-place winning plan to create a private-public partnership with New York City to encourage people to drink more tap water and reduce the consumption of plastic water bottles.

Honorable mentions went to Jeremy Miller ’10 and his plan for FSA-Store.com, an online commerce site offering products eligible under Flexible Spending Account programs, and Srikanth Nimmagadda ’11 for a mobile app called Cougar Hunter, a GPS-based application to help interested men and women find each other on-the-go.

The competition included an elevator pitch segment, in which students were asked to give their best short-form pitch. Watch select segments from other participants in the competition: