UNC NextRay team places second in Rice University business plan competition

J-school junior Allen Mask and a team of UNC business school MBA students won second place and more than $142,000 April 18 in the 2009 Rice University Business Plan Competition for their medical device company, NextRay, that was spun off from UNC medical school research and technology.

The competition is the largest graduate-level business plan competition in the world. The Rice grand prize went to Dynamics of Carnegie Mellon University for its next-generation interactive payment cards that use programmable magnetic strips.

NextRay, the faculty-created spinoff business the UNC team presented, provides medical imaging technology that produces more detailed images than current X-rays with less than one percent of the radiation dosage. UNC breast cancer researcher and vice dean of the UNC School of Medicine Etta Pisano developed the technology.

In addition to the $15,000 second place win overall, Mask and MBA students John Lerch, Justin Cross and Stephen Jarrett won the $100,000 Life Science Prize from Opportunity Houston and the Greater Houston Partnership Award in the competition. The team also took home the NASA Earth/Space Engineering Innovation Award for $20,000 and awards for the best business plan, best medical device and the best life science project.
NextRay is a participant in the Student Teams Achieving Results (STAR) program at Kenan-Flagler. The STAR program sends teams of top MBA candidates and undergraduate students to corporations and not-for-profits to help them build effective business strategies.

The $100,000 prize requires that the company relocate to Houston. Lerch noted that the team has received no further information about other requirements of that award and will be evaluating the opportunity as it learns more.

“Rice is the preeminent business plan competition globally, and the success of the team from UNC tangibly demonstrates the leadership among our faculty and students in entrepreneurship, and the university’s commitment under the CEI to bring together the resources to support our innovators on campus,” Ted Zoller, executive director of the business school’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. “We look forward to the future success stories that will result from the collaboration among all our professional schools and academic departments, and the extraordinary entrepreneurial leaders across this campus.”