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  • Back to Business Plans

    Over at Entrepreneur , Tim Berry says business plans are back. While planning may have fallen out of favor for some, Berry says his specialty (he's the business plans coach at Entrepreneur.com) is going to be the reason for many turnarounds this year. This is the year for getting key planning elements defined and understood, for regular plan review and course correction, and for more focus on the planning process. All of which means, in a nutshell, that more businesses will benefit from better planning processes. Ultimately, that means more businesses, more jobs and more success. Berry goes on to list three key factors behind his prediction: 1) The natural backlash of the 'don't plan' fad: "The more you see experts harping about the straw-man business plan that wasn't that useful, the more we're going to see people turning to real business planning because they need it." 2) Back to planning fundamentals: "...good planning increases your ability to manage change by providing you clear visibility of how everything links together." 3) New age of accountability: "You can't assume that showing up is enough anymore; things have to get done. And that means getting done remotely, or virtually, or wherever and whenever." Read the full article here .
  • Carnegie Mellon Team Takes Top Prize at Rice Business Plan Competition

    Credit card companies have come up with various new ways of fighting identity theft through new technolgies on the cards themselves. But these new ideas haven't stuck, mainly because they require merchants to change their equipment. A team of Carnegie Mellon students who developed a way of making a credit card magnetic stripe that could change its data from one card to another, allowing for greater security and added flexibility (theoretically, a person can carry several "cards" on just the one card). And for their novel idea, the team--now a company named Dynamics --was awarded the grand prize at the 2009 Rice Business Plan Competition . CNNMoney.com Small Business has a profile of Dynamics, and other winners at the competition, here . For more background on the competition, click here .
  • Young Entrepreneurs Battle for Funding at the Rice Business Plan Competition

    The Rice Business Plan Competition gets underway today, pitting dozens of teams of entrepreneurs from universities across the country against one another as they compete for $800,000 in prize money. CNNMoney.com profiles some of the teams in this year's competition here . You can check up on last year's winners here . We'd love to see your comments on what the judges should be looking for. How much should they weigh the current economic climate when considering the viability of each plan? Click on comments and weigh in.