Startups On Fire – The five winners of our STUDENT STARTUP COMPETITION

The five winners of our STUDENT STARTUP COMPETITION have fresh ideas–and the toughness and savvy to burn up the marketplace.

Protesting on college campuses is back. The object of this generation’s rebellion? Traditional jobs. In an era of widespread disenchantment with the often bureaucratic, scandal-ridden world of big corporations, more students believe that building a successful startup is the way to go. A recent poll of 1,155 teens by Junior Achievement Worldwide, a Colorado Springs outfit that teaches students about entrepreneurship, revealed that 69% want to start a business, an increase of five percentage points since last year. And the Harvard Business School just found that 67% of MBAs it surveyed had started a firm after competing in its business-plan competitions.

It’s not surprising, then, that our third annual business-plan contest, the FSB Student Showdown, was our most competitive yet. Eighty-two plans arrived from 66 schools, including Harvard and UCLA–up from 58 entries in 2004. To enter, teams had to have won a business-plan competition. (For more on the selection process, see the box "How We Chose the Winners.")

(FORTUNE Small Business)
By Elaine Pofeldt

Full Story: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2005/11/01/8360973/index.htm