MBA students vie for best business plan.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: SMALL - Master of business administration degree

With $5,000 in prizes up for grabs, four teams of second-year MBA students squared off in mid-January to see who could write the best business plan and present it most convincingly, as if to a panel of venture capitalists.

In fact, the judges were venture capitalists.

Instructor Frank Moyes from the CU Leeds School of Business called the competition "as close to a real-world environment as you can get."

The real world? The one with a 7.2 percent unemployment rate and a net loss of 2.6 million jobs nationwide in 2008? Yikes.

Liz Lowry, one of the finalists in the Business Plan competition consisting of four CU students per team, says the subject of the hapless economy hasn't come up too much among her fellow students as they've been immersed in their projects, but she did say, "It's funny, one of my teammates, Paul Cavalieri, is like, 'We all had jobs before we came into this program, and I'm a little worried we all might not have jobs when we leave.'"

At least Lowry managed to laugh as she shared Cavalieri's quip.

Lowry, 28, was working for an environmental-conservation nonprofit in Denver before leaving to pursue her MBA. "Most of us left what we were doing for a reason, so I don't think anyone's going to feel like they really got stiffed on the deal," she says.

Indeed, it could be a more difficult job environment for Lowry and other second-year MBA students when they graduate in May than when they entered grad school roughly two years ago. By contrast, new MBA students might well be lured back to school by this recession.

"Historically, applications to business schools have been countercyclical, so when the economy goes bad, applications tend to go up," says Moyes, a longtime entrepreneur and startup investor who has taught at CU for 10 years.

Jobs may dwindle in recessions, but the flip side is that downturns tend to foster entrepreneurial ventures, which is what these four teams of MBA students got a taste of when they wrote business plans and presented them to a judging panel consisting of Chris Wand, managing director of The Foundry Group; Marc Silverman, managing partner of CoCap Group LLC; and Kirk Holland, general partner with Vista Ventures.

The $2,000 winners' prize went to Knova Learning, an education-management concept that opens and manages public schools to prepare...