Precision Agriculture Wins MIT Sloan $US100k Contest: MBA News

The winning business plan - the work not of MBA students but of master’s and PhD students in the areas of aeronautical engineering and health sciences – centered on using drones (unmanned aircraft) to pinpoint  crop damage and thereby allow for a more targeted application of pesticides  - something that RaptorMaps hopes can not only reduce environmental damage, but also increase crop yields. According to the team, insects, disease and weeds destroy a third of all crops planted worldwide.

Drones, this time of the underwater variety, were also the basis of another finalist’s plan in the MIT Sloan contest. Microswarms’ football-sized detector robots are intended for use in collaborative missions at the depths of the Earth’s oceans – a place about which less is known than the surface of the moon, according to the team’s business plan presentation. Microswarms’ entry also revolved around the work of MIT engineering students, but MIT Sloan was not without representation in last night’s final.

Visiting scholar Mohit Kansa, attached both to the business school and the Tata Center for Technology and Design, formed part of the two-man team behind CurrencyDoc, which features a multicurrency debit card that can be used with mobile app technology. A trio of MBA students from the class of 2016 was also shortlisted for InvoPlace – an online platform designed to allow small and medium-sized enterprises in need of finance to connect with investors in search of attractive returns, with a focus on the Latin American market.

Indeed, as a Boston Globe report pointed out, it is not necessarily the winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition that go on to the most high-profile successes in startups borne of their original business plan entry. Harmonix, the video game development company that went on to make the popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles and to be acquired by MTV Networks for US$175 million, is one noteworthy example.

There was an MIT Sloan MBA winner in a separate competition earlier in the week. Class of 2015 student, Alexandra Wright, was a member of the Optibit team that took home both of the top prizes (amounting to US$275k) in the MIT Clean Energy Prize (CEP) competition for its vision of making data centers more energy efficient. The clean energy prize is open to all students attending US institutions but also enjoys links to the university’s US$100k competition for eligible MIT teams.

Now in its 25th year, MIT’s US$100k competition began life at the turn of the nineties as the ‘MIT $10K’ after being founded by entrepreneurial clubs at MIT Sloan and continues to be led by a mixture of MBA students and other master’s candidates at the school.