Starting on Dec. 10, iPhone and iPod Touch application designers will have a chance to compete for up to $2,500 in prize money in the 2010 Innovation Challenge.
Professor of business information systems Rodney Pearson said the competition will be open to any Mississippi State University student, faculty or staff member.
“They develop an application, submit it to the App Store and those applications will then compete in three different categories: most downloads, most dollar sales or the most innovative application,” he said. “There are going to be three prizes for downloads, three prizes for sales and one prize for innovation, so there are seven prizes total.”
He said the competition will be held until April 18.
“That’s because the App Store gives financial results, and their week runs Monday through Sunday,” Pearson said. “We’re going to end it on the end of an App Store week.”
Students taking the Field Study in Entrepreneurship class divide into groups and work on an application which could be submitted to the competition.
Marketing professor Melissa Moore said the students in the class do not have to submit their applications to the competition.
“They could choose to be finished completely, so that contest or competition, the Innovation Challenge, is separate from the course,” she said. “They are obviously well integrated but you could choose not to take the class but still enter the challenge or vice versa.”
However, she said students who take the class will not have to pay the $99 fee to be a programmer on the Apple Web site.
“That is actually covered,” Moore said. “It’s one of the perks that goes along with the course that comes out of the Entrepreneurship Center.”
Graduate student Allison Flaherty is a student in the class whose group is entering their application in the most downloads category.
“There’s a monetary reward at the end … but for us, it’s just kind of the challenge,” she said. “We’ve developed this app. Let’s see if we can promote it better than anybody else can.”
Gary Butler, assistant vice president for research and technology development, said the College of Business has been in the process of building the MSU Entrepreneurship Center for several months.
“As part of that activity, we’ve been working closely with the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, which is part of the Sloan School of Management at MIT,” he said. “The function of the Entrepreneurship Center includes supporting business plan competitions.”
He said MIT has been involved in supporting campus-wide business plan competitions.
“As part of our new Entrepreneurship Center, we wanted to kick off a new, initially what we called a business plan competition similar to some of the programs that they are conducting there,” Butler said. “Rodney Pearson had been teaching a class in iPhone apps. development and so we thought … that it would be great to use the Apple iPhone apps. software as a way of supporting the framework for a new business plan competition.”
Gerald Nelson,Thad Cochran Endowment for Entrepreneurship director, said there are probably less than 20 universities nationwide who are holding Apple apps. competitions.
“There is actually an Apple apps. competition at MIT right now and at Stanford, so we’re actually in a very elite group,” he said. “It’s just really cutting edge. We feel honoured to be in that first group.”
Butler said he is not sure at this point whether or not the competition will be held in the following years.
“We want to see how well the competition goes this year, perhaps how many people are involved, how much enthusiasm and support is demonstrated for this program,” he said. “We want to make sure that it’s something that supports student-led entrepreneurship through the Entrepreneurship Center so if it achieves those goals, I would say we would seriously consider doing this in subsequent years.”