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No Longer MOOT
UT's MOOT CORP Competition from Launch to Harvest
By Dan Schmisseur
If you’ve been in or around a graduate business school the past five years, or read a Business Week guide to MBA programs in that time, chances are good that you know how intercollegiate business plan competitions have changed entrepreneurship education in the best schools. In fact, there are more than fifty events hosted by universities around the world.
But did you know that it all started here?
It's true, and Dr. Gary Cadenhead wants you to know it. In his tenth year as director of the nearly 20-year-old MOOT CORP Program, Cadenhead has written a book about it.
No Longer MOOT: The Premier New Venture Competition From Idea to Global Impact chronicles the birth, growth and, well, global impact of a Texas MBA innovation. The launch of the first business plan competition; the first intercollegiate and international competition; and the first truly global competition, with teams representing universities from six continents competing in Austin—all were achieved by McCombs MBAs, faculty, and sponsors. It is a legacy of achievement to make all Longhorns proud, and preserving the legacy also serves a purpose in Cadenhead’s classroom.
“It is incredibly valuable to have that history and heritage, not just about the launch and growth of the competition, but about the MBAs who have competed in it,” says Cadenhead. “Some of the most exciting classes for current MBAs feature several of our graduates who tell their stories about launching new ventures straight out of the MBA program. It is very informative and inspirational, and the message hits home that they can do it, too.”
But No Longer MOOT isn’t merely a history book speckled with success stories. Drawing on insights and anecdotes from more than 50 alumni, faculty, and sponsors, Cadenhead explains the value proposition for the program’s constituents: MBA students, alumni with entrepreneurial interests, and business community sponsors.
The book is also a statement of qualifications, of sorts, for the McCombs entrepreneurship program. As Cadenhead notes, the story of the MOOT CORP Program closely parallels the lifecycle of a successful new venture: opportunity, launch, growth, harvest. Borrowing from this very model taught through the entrepreneurship program’s core curriculum, Cadenhead points to the MOOT CORP Program’s success as evidence that McCombs students and faculty know more than just how to theorize about launching a new venture—they know how to do it.
The Opportunity Phase
McCombs MBAs learn that before a successful entrepreneurial venture can launch, the idea must pass intense scrutiny. In 1983, two Texas MBAs birthed an idea for a real world educational experience to complement classroom theory. Borrowing from the Law School’s moot court concept, Steve Mailman and Barbara Oppenheimer Cohn pitched a plan for the first known business plan competition. Different from business case competitions, the teams would create venture proposals for concepts that, if viable, could actually evolve into real businesses. The MOOT CORP co-founders won grassroots support from peers and the invaluable support of a true entrepreneur in the faculty, Dr. Ken Knight, as they developed their plan and sought approval and funding to make it a reality.
As with most great innovations, the idea did not pass on its own merits. It took tremendous perseverance and skillful persuasion from the founding team before they were given the green light. The result, the 1984 Texas MOOT CORP Competition, became the prototype for future business plan competitions.
The Launch Phase
Though the MOOT CORP Program founders envisioned a national, intercollegiate business plan competition, they knew it first had to thrive in beta-testing as a UT-only competition. After Mailman and Oppenheimer Cohn graduated and Knight left the school for other opportunities, IC2 Fellow Dr. Ray Smilor became the program’s second director.
With a co-appointment as chair of the MBA school’s entrepreneurship program and as executive director of the IC2 Institute, Smilor had the resources and connections, as well as the vision and pure entrepreneurial drive, to elevate the MOOT CORP Competition to the national stage. First, he enlisted the enthusiastic support of Dr. George Kozmetsky at the IC2 Institute and financial backing from Michael Dell, Ronya Kozmetsky at the RGK Foundation, Joe Aragona at Austin Ventures, Ron Kessler at Locke Liddell & Sapp, and Ron Garrick at Ernst & Young. Smilor then called friends with faculty positions at Harvard, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan, and Wharton, inviting them to prepare and bring a team to compete in Austin, all expenses paid. They accepted, and when it was all over, the first national intercollegiate business plan competition drew rave reviews.
The following year, teams from Australia, France and the United Kingdom joined in, making the spring MOOT CORP Competition an international event for the first time.
In retrospect, Smilor developed far more than a flagship program within the Texas MBA curriculum. He impacted entrepreneurship education across the U.S. and internationally, as universities launched competitions—like the London School of Business’ European business plan competition—after competing in Austin.
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The Rapid Growth Phase
Cadenhead became the MOOT CORP Program’s third director in 1992 when Smilor joined the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurship as an executive. Over the next ten years, Cadenhead continuously reinvented the program while protecting the integrity of the core formula: a new venture competition where the judges select the winner as the business opportunity most worthy of an investment.
In a series of iterative innovations, Cadenhead embarked on an expansion strategy to maintain the preeminence of the Austin event as more and more universities launched competitions of their own. In 1993, Business Week recognized the spring event as “The Super Bowl of World Business-Plan Competitions,” and Cadenhead has ensured that it lives up to the billing, nurturing it into a premier event in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Today, the MOOT CORP Competition really is a global occasion, annually attracting 30 teams from nearly a dozen countries on six continents. Twelve other new venture competitions serve as qualifying rounds, sending their champions to compete in Austin. Nearly 50 business executives serve as judges in various rounds of the tournament format, beginning in the fall for McCombs MBAs with the Texas MOOT CORP Competition. The top four McCombs teams from the fall travel to competitions hosted by other universities, sustaining the school’s reputation as a leader in entrepreneurship education by consistently bringing home a lion’s share of awards and championships.
The Harvest Phase
Successful entrepreneurial ventures are created to produce extraordinary returns for founders, employees, and investors. For-profit ventures measure financial returns while non-profit ventures, like the MOOT CORP Program, measure the social or educational impact. With the advent of the MOOT CORP Pontoon Fund in 2001, the program is positioned for the first time to do both.
A former University of Texas at Austin student and a remarkably successful entrepreneur with Excel Communications and several other ventures, Stephen R. Smith is the angel investor behind the Pontoon Fund. With a $1 million commitment from Smith, the fund provides future winners of the Texas Competition and the Global Competition with a $100,000 convertible bridge loan. Winning ventures from the Texas launch pad now have more resources to build a case for a sizable venture capital investment.
Now the MOOT CORP Competitions boast the most lucrative prize of all university-based business plan competitions. Best of all, at a time when many business plan competitions have scaled back, the award is secure from the vagaries of the market economy. Someday, if just one of the Pontoon Fund recipients hits a home run IPO or achieves liquidity via an acquisition, both Smith and the MOOT CORP Program will share in the success, with an endowment for the program as the ultimate goal. Truly, the MOOT CORP Program is No Longer MOOT.
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A Valuable Experience for MBAs, Sponsors and the McCombs School of Business
In No Longer MOOT, Cadenhead gives the podium to dozens of alumni, sponsors, and McCombs faculty to describe the program’s accomplishments and continuing value from their own perspectives. Featured alumni are not just entrepreneurs who used their MOOT CORP projects as an exit strategy from the MBA program. They include alumni who launched careers with Fortune 500 companies and large non-profits, where their entrepreneurship education is applied in leading challenging corporate projects as intrapreneurs. Some have been extraordinarily successful, and some have experienced the pain of a failed venture. Through their stories, Cadenhead shows that the value of the MOOT CORP Program should not be measured by the number of ventures launched from it, but by the long-term careers of the people who experienced it.
Since the first Texas Competition in 1984, some of the program’s biggest fans have been the business executives serving active roles as sponsors and judges.
For many, the opportunity to help the next generation of aspiring entrepreneurs is reward enough. Most sponsors, however, also find strategic value in supporting an educational program that also delivers value to the business community. Venture capitalists, attorneys, accountants, and corporate executives find value in networking opportunities, scouting top MBA talent, keeping tabs on technology commercialization initiatives in major universities and, most importantly, experiencing entrepreneurship in one of its purest forms.
“With both the Texas Competition in the fall and the Global Competition in the spring, there are boundless opportunities to participate as a sponsor, a judge, or a mentor for a team of McCombs MBAs,” says Cadenhead. “We are very interested in partnering with Texas graduates who have entrepreneurial success stories that we have yet to hear about. We want them to speak to our MBA classes. We would like to focus on their successes and to help our students visualize their own future successes.”
For information on specific programs at the McCombs School, consult our contacts page. For media information, contact the Communications Director by phone at 512-471-3314 or by email at CommunicationsDirector@mccombs.utexas.edu.
