stanford business plan competition

A new student’s guide to Stanford’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, part 2

This article is the second of two installments in a series on Stanford’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Read part 1 here .

Stanford’s vast entrepreneurial ecosystem, a network of courses, programs, accelerators and student groups, deliver hands-on entrepreneurial education and support the creation, growth and funding of startups and ventures — brand new companies or businesses.

As a guide for the uninitiated, The Stanford Daily interviewed Stanford undergraduate and graduate students who have experienced the most popular of these resources for their insight and perspective.

While this series of articles aims to present the most popular and well-known resources that Stanford offers, more exhaustive lists are maintained by the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network and Cardinal Ventures . Course offering lists include those maintained by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Graduate School of Business .

In addition to quarter-long courses, Stanford’s entrepreneurial ecosystem includes cohort-based, structured programs designed to significantly deepen students’ skills in entrepreneurship. Three leading programs are the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), Stanford Ignite and Design for Extreme Affordability . Each respectively come from one the three main entrepreneurially involved schools: management science (the Department of Management Science and Engineering), business (the Graduate School of Business) and design (the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, or “d.school”).

The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) is the entrepreneurship center at Stanford’s School of Engineering and is run by the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E). It encompasses courses, programs and speaker series, and runs four selective year-long fellowship programs : Mayfield Fellows, Threshold Venture Fellows, Accel Leadership and Peak Fellows — ranging from 12 to 24 student admits each. These programs seek to develop an entrepreneurial mindset in students within a tight-knit, motivated cohort. It also hosts a popular one-unit course that is also open to the public: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders’ Seminar (ETL). Its weekly line-up of speakers frequently includes C-level executives from Silicon Valley, startup founders, vice presidents of organizations and venture capitalists. Venture capitalists are investors in startups that provide funding after critically appraising them, which includes hearing the founders “pitch” their plans and ideas and interviewing them.

As a 2020 Threshold Venture Fellow (TVF), Mallika Khullar M.S. ’21 thoroughly enjoyed the program, from the people, discussions and doors it opened. The program is run by professor Tina Seelig and Threshold Ventures Partner Heidi Roizen. “People in the cohort are generally extremely driven and motivated; everybody comes with a rich background in something different and the cohort usually features a healthy mix of students from all over the world,” she wrote as part of an interview with The Stanford Daily. “So the discussions throughout the year are fueled with very diverse and usually informed opinions,” she added.

The fellows are connected to a strong mentorship network. “Everybody is paired up with an [ex-TVF] mentor [and] an industry mentor, like a [venture capitalist] or an entrepreneur, or somebody who is from a bigger organization. We [had] events where all of these people were present,” Khullar said. Her industry mentor was a board member at several startups in Silicon Valley, and whose advice she found “extremely valuable … detailed and concrete.”

The cohort of 12 met twice a week — once on Tuesdays at Selig or Roizen’s houses, involving brainstorming sessions and team building activities over meals, and once on Wednesdays after watching the ETL seminar to dig deep into their entrepreneurial themes. “We bonded a lot over poignant discussions; some of us opened up and were extremely vulnerable with each other. We are all still in touch and help each other out through times of need — till date!” she said. For her, one of the most valuable parts of the program is the network she now has, with industry experts, TVF alumni, mentors and classmates.

However, TVF, along with the three fellowship programs in STVP, is selective. The application process has two rounds: a written application and a group discussion, with the latter stage having about a 40% acceptance rate. “For the written application, since it’s an entrepreneurial leadership fellowship, it’s important to show them that you’ve got an entrepreneurial spirit and/or experience building your own impactful solutions to the world’s problems,” she said. “For the group discussion, Heidi and Tina are the very best. They’re great conversationalists and the group discussions are fun and open-ended. Just be yourself, be authentic, tell all the compelling stories you have and try and build a connection with the other people in your group discussion as well as with Heidi and Tina.”

Additionally, though the TVF program is focused on developing entrepreneurial leaders, the application doesn’t require having a startup idea in mind. Rather, “the application form is very heavily focused on you as a person, what kind of background you come from and what kind of stories you have to tell, so you don’t necessarily have to have an idea in mind, nor do you have to have startup experience as such,” she said. “You just need to know what it means to want to start something which might have impact.”

The Stanford Ignite Executive Education program is another cohort-based program, but with a focus on creating ventures and developing new products. Run by the Graduate School of Business (GSB), it takes place over eight weeks (part-time) or four weeks (full-time). Each cohort has 60 to 80 people, with half from the student body and half being working professionals. The program teaches participants how to formulate, develop and commercialize new ideas, touches on all areas of business operations and has an experiential learning component where teams collaborate on a venture project. As a course taught by the M.B.A. faculty, it is aimed at professionals with a bachelor’s degree and prior experience with advanced degrees preferred, or graduate students in non-business fields, rather than undergraduates without experience or business majors.

Ryanne Ramadan M.S. ’21, a member of the January 2020 cohort, who worked on an education-sector project to prepare students for careers of the future, described it as a “mini M.B.A. experience.” She pointed to the content, connections and experience as highlights. “We formed teams and worked on projects throughout the course of the eight weeks. As we’re learning these fundamentals, we had to build a pitch, and at the end of it, we got to pitch to venture capitalists and get feedback on our presentation,” she said. “So it’s kind of like you’re learning the books, but at the same time you’re applying the material.”

Each session covered a different aspect of entrepreneurship, as well as primers on core business school classes such as marketing, finance, accounting, strategy and operations. “All the class courses were taught by GSB faculty, and they were the best — they were super highly specialized in their field, and you could go up to them after and ask them questions,” she said of the teaching team. “They would lecture super interesting stuff and give you resources if you wanted to dive in more.” Ramadan said that they also did a lot of case studies — a popular business school teaching method which typically summarizes real business scenarios to illustrate the application of business theory and help students develop business acumen.

Participants can have a venture idea beforehand, but don’t have to. “On the first day, everybody pitches their idea, and people vote, and then based on that, you’re paired into groups, and either your idea is selected or it’s not,” Ramadan explained. “The project I worked on was totally from scratch. Another [participant] had a biotech company — she already had it running — but they helped her grow it and think outside the box and really develop a more solidified business plan over a period of time.”

A year on, her cohort, made up of masters, Ph.D. and postdoctoral participants as well as highly accomplished industry professionals, has a camaraderie that is still going strong. “All of us are still in the [same] group chat,” she said.

As with all other Executive Education programs from the GSB, Ignite continues to be offered during the pandemic with virtual instruction, but maintains its immersive and comprehensive nature, generous access to the teaching team and ability to facilitate strong connections through activities like team building and organized coffee chats.

The Design for Extreme Affordability program from the d.school, unlike other startup courses and entrepreneurial programs, partners with organizations based in developing countries for immediate impact, and may lead to student startup ventures. It is a two-quarter program (across winter and spring) where students learn to design products and services that will impact the lives of the world’s poorest citizens, working with international partnering organizations to implement their designs. The program admits 10 teams of four students each, and has a 40% acceptance rate. Partner organizations come from developing countries across the world, including Ghana, Tanzania, Costa Rica, the Philippines and Nepal. Over the spring break, two students from each team also travel to the project sites to meet with their partner organizations and conduct needfinding on the ground. Following the course, teams can continue at the Social Entrepreneurship Lab, a center associated with the program, which provides funding, space and mentorship over the summer, after which teams that continue typically become revenue-generating startups and apply for venture capital funding.

Aishwarya Venkatramani M.S. ’21 was part of the 2020 cohort and worked with a Ghana-based organization to design a healthcare wristband and app. The program was a “game changer” for her time at Stanford. “What I intended to do at Stanford and what I ended up doing changed because of Design for Extreme Affordability, in a good way,” she said. “I came in as a Ph.D. student wanting to do research [but] in the back of my mind I always wanted to do something [that could] be taken into a real-world setting.” During the course, she said, “you go out to the community that you’re designing for … I was particularly interested in taking healthcare ideas into a developing country, and it was a great opportunity for that.”

The beginning of the program starts with learning and applying the design thinking methodology while getting to know partner organizations and classmates. After the first two weeks, students list their preferences of what projects they want to work on, the team members they want to work with and whether they are interested in traveling to their partner sites abroad. The first quarter is more content-focused, while the second quarter sees teams more independently directing their activities as they continue to work with their partner organizations. For the most part, it’s also up to the teams to determine the pace of interactions with their organization. “We usually reach out to them after we realize we want to do interviews with people on the ground or doctors that we want to work with,” Venkatramani said. “They [the teaching team] also do a session in class on how to work with your partner [organization], how to work with them across time zones and what is a professional way of talking to them.”

The program, being selective, involves a written application followed by a group activity interview. For Venkatramani, in the group activity which spanned an evening, students were put in teams of four to five and provided a set of materials to build something the teaching team specified. According to the website, students are then selected based on “passion for the class, proclivity to make things and prior experience in addition to their discipline.”

Venkatramani says that this course is relevant for anyone interested in design and its real-world applications. “A lot of companies have come out of it, they’ve incorporated, [some] with a couple of hundred employees,” she adds. There is also a large community of designers, investors, legal counselors and industry experts to help with student ventures for program alumni. Other similar programs which can also lead to startups and institutional funding, albeit without partnerships with developing world organizations, include one- and two-quarter project course sequences from The Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign .

One year on, Venkatramani is still in touch with their partner organization in Ghana. “We still talk to them once every other week, and exchange emails pretty often,” she said. “They are our customer, so they’re paying for what we’ve developed, and they’re funding us to travel to Ghana.”

Accelerators/hubs

Accelerators are fixed-term, cohort-based programs led by seasoned entrepreneurs that help startups establish a strong business foundation and fast-track their growth. Hubs loosely refer to networks of aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs and resources. Of these, the Stanford Venture Studio (SVS), StartX and Cardinal Ventures are the most widely utilized on campus.

Stanford Venture Studio , from the Graduate School of Business, is an entrepreneurship hub that supports students exploring venture ideas with an extensive network, discounts and free resources like for coding credits used for computer science projects, 24/7 access to coworking space and advice and mentoring from industry experts. They also have mixers to help people form founding teams. Admission is non-competitive — it is guaranteed for any Stanford-affiliated students that submit an application form.

For Chelikavada, the Stanford Venture Studio’s community through its email chain and office hours have been invaluable for making progress on his own venture. “People who are subscribed to [the email chain] are current students, alums, founders, investors, VCs,” he said. Any time someone posts in the group, everyone that’s subscribed to the group receives that message. “It’s very powerful,” he said. “When I posted about an idea that I was working on, I had a bunch of [venture capitalists] email me [back]. And they’re like, ‘Wait, this sounds interesting. Do you want to talk?’ I [also] had a YC [Y Combinator, an accelerator] interview, and I found people to mock interview [with] me through Venture Studios.”

Ramadan, who also signed up with the Stanford Venture Studio, agrees. “I think the biggest thing is that it connects you to a bunch of other entrepreneurs … [with the] email chain, if I have any questions, I literally just pop it in this chain and I get like four or five responses back and vice versa. People just kind of ask for help, and this extends beyond graduation,” she said.

The venture studio also offers frequent office hours with industry experts. “For example,” Chelikavada said, “there are people that have done it before, [such as] someone that started a massive company, and that they’re an expert in the [business-to-business] space.” He added, “they’re always helpful, not just to get advice on product or marketing, but also to build relationships with these people.” With very specialized experts, he would sign up for the office hours on the topics he needed help with. “I’d talk through any challenges that I’m facing and how I’m attempting to solve them and see if there’s a better way to solve them,” he said. “Also, if you [build a strong rapport] with them, it’s a good professional relationship to have — then you can go to them even outside of office hours,” he added.

Two other popular, albeit selective, forums to engage with the entrepreneurial crowd at Stanford are StartX and Cardinal Ventures . Both have accelerator programs that are equity-free, meaning that they do not take any shares of startup companies that they work with, an otherwise common practice for accelerators.

StartX is a non-profit Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurial network that is well-known for its Student in Residence (SIR) accelerator program, specifically for Stanford students, which includes a $9,000 scholarship and six months of support. More broadly, according to its website, its network encompasses “1200+ serial entrepreneurs, industry experts, tenured Stanford professors and 700+ well-funded growth stage startups,” to which access by application is open to Stanford-affiliated teams, including alumni and professors. Both of these programs are competitive, with an acceptance rate of around 8%.

Cardinal Ventures is an equity-free student-run accelerator for Stanford students. It runs a 10-week long program twice a year, in the fall and spring quarters, for 12 to 20 admitted teams who may be anywhere from the idea stage up to seriously seeking institutional funding. They provide an extensive entrepreneurship curriculum as well as a community of founders, mentors, angel investors and legal and financial expertise.

When Mackanic was launching Anthro Energy, he took part in StartX’s Student in Residence program in 2020, its full-time program in winter 2021 and also Cardinal Venture’s 2020 cohort. For him, the demo days, path to funding and mentorship in both programs were stand-out points. Demo days, or “demonstration days,” are common finales to accelerator programs, where the startups pitch their idea, progress and business plan to a room full of investors with the hopes of getting funding from them.

“Both have demo days that allowed us to connect with investors, which was crucial for fundraising,” he said. “My Cardinal Ventures mentor was actually one of the investors in my company, which is awesome, and my StartX mentor helped me get one of the big grants that I got.” Mackanic successfully raised a pre-seed round from these investors. “Pre-seed” and “seed” refer to the very first stages of funding in which investors provide funds to support the startup until it can generate profits on its own or is ready for further investments.

As for the experience, Mackanic notes that it’s more self-driven than a structured program. “Cardinal Ventures and StartX are a little bit more of taking it at your own speed and taking advantage of a pool of resources. So there’s not as many requirements or one-on-one meetings — it’s mostly about accessing a really powerful network and attending different seminars and workshops and things like that,” he said. “For all of these programs, you get out what you put in, which can be transformative for a company that puts in the effort.”

While both StartX and Cardinal Ventures have accelerator programs and strong founder communities, Cardinal Ventures is a community of student founders, while StartX skews slightly later stage, meaning that it accepts more mature, bigger startups than those just starting out. As a result, StartX has a significant intake of graduated founders, professors and professionals.

“Cardinal Ventures is more built for people who are excited about something but maybe not decided on it yet, and just helping them get further down that journey on deciding,” Cardinal Ventures co-founder Olivia Moore M.B.A. ’21 explained. “We thought there was a bit of a gap between all of the amazing classes that help you find a team and settle on an idea, and then actually having the conviction to drop out and raise money and forgo your summer internship at [any number of prestigious firms] to work on your company instead,” she said. “The goal is to provide an educational experience for student founders that would get them closer to going out to market if they actually wanted to go full steam ahead on the company,” she added.

In contrast, StartX is targeted to founders who have a clear goal. “For applying to StartX, I recommend having a compelling reason for why you are pursuing a startup and a clear vision for how you will build or already have a world class team,” Mackanic said. StartX companies also tend to raise funds anywhere from the seed stage to more mature stages commonly called series A or B rounds, while Cardinal Ventures companies mostly raise funds for pre-seed and seed rounds.

For Mackanic, both communities were helpful. “StartX is impressive because it has a network of full-time founders and people that are out of school, whereas for Cardinal Ventures, everyone in the cohort is currently in school,” he explained. “I really liked being able to interact with other kinds of students that were going through similar challenges and similar experiences as me, but then StartX with the more experienced network was also very valuable to help me solve pretty complex issues.”

As for what makes a successful team, Moore points to those that were really passionate, dedicated and excited about the problem space they were building in. “They all had a unique, elegant insight in how to make a compelling product there,” she said. Of Cardinal Ventures’ best alumni companies, she notes that “they started with a core vision or mission of the impact they wanted to see in the world. Maybe the specifics of how they went about building that changed even over the course of the program — but even now, three, four, five years later, the company is still working toward the same goal.”

Student groups

Stanford has over a dozen student groups for entrepreneurship, from broad-based groups such as BASES and ASES , to groups catering to many different causes (social, healthcare, space, venture capital), diversity groups (Latin American or women) and majors (computer science, business, law, energy) according to the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network website. The largest and oldest of which is BASES (Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students), which encompasses all causes, diversity groups and majors.

BASES has over 70 directors and over 5,000 general members on their weekly mailing list . While its leadership is only open to undergraduates, all events are open to the public, including graduate students who often participate in them. Events are hosted on average once or twice a week. According to co-president of BASES Renee Li B.S. ’21, three of their flagship programs are the Frosh Battalion, 100K Challenge and Startup Career Fair.

“The Frosh Battalion [is] aimed at giving freshmen the opportunity to learn about the entrepreneurial ecosystem at Stanford and beyond,” Li explained of the competitive program, which accepted 16 out of about 130 applicants this year. “Mostly we focus on the ecosystem in the Valley: during non-Covid times, we offer treks where we take the freshmen to visit startups and VCs around here and offer them the opportunity to learn about how investors make their decisions and how startups operate, with first-hand experience.”

The 100K challenge is a signature business plan pitch competition where teams with at least one Stanford affiliate can apply, across four categories: consumer, enterprise, health/medical and social impact, with a total prize pool of $100,000. The support that teams can expect comes directly from Silicon Valley. “We have a list of hundreds of VCs that have been very supportive of our Challenge competition over the past years, and we reach out to them every year for their expertise and during the judging process. And a lot of them have been nice enough to offer office hours and workshops for our competing teams as well,” Li said. The challenge has also proved popular with the graduate student body, so much so that part of the prize pool is set aside for the best performing undergraduate team.

Another key event is their startup career fair. “It usually attracts a lot of startups and also a lot of students looking for jobs. A lot of the freshmen told us that they found their first internship at the startup career fair,” Li said.

Li has had the unique perspective of being at all levels of the organization, from a Frosh Battalion member to vice president of the 100K challenge and currently co-president. She feels that it has been a valuable complement to the entrepreneurial classes she has taken at Stanford. “BASES offered me the opportunity to learn about the other sides of entrepreneurship. I could participate in Challenge and listen to the VCs judge the competition and see how they think; and during our treks [to Silicon Valley], I was able to visit some companies and VCs and really see their working experience first-hand.” She also enjoys the community – “it’s really cool to be surrounded by like-minded people in a way that’s not for a class specifically.”

Chloe Pae B.S. ’24 joined BASES in this year’s Frosh Battalion and is an incoming co-VP of Growth. She feels similarly about the community. “In my experience, the best resource available has been other club members,” she said. “I felt so fortunate to have upperclassmen that were willing to talk on the phone, truly whenever I needed, to share their wisdom and advice.” Only joining this year, Pae had a fully virtual experience but one in which she could still experience the strength of the organization. “My favorite experience was participating in the Frosh Battalion pitch competition, where I teamed up with three other Battalion members to design a product for the post-COVID world,” she said. “We got to pitch to venture capital sponsors and receive feedback. I don’t think a lot of frosh can say that they have had such a unique experience!”

As for what BASES will lead to, Pae notes that there are many opportunities to learn about the different parts of entrepreneurship. “BASES has exposed me to the world of entrepreneurship and the varying ways I can participate in it. I still have not decided where I fit best, whether that is in venture capital, startup accelerators or even starting my own company,” she said. “I am confident that further participation in BASES will allow me to explore these avenues, and more, and figure out if entrepreneurship is the right fit for me.”

Other entrepreneurship courses

Stanford’s Management Science and Engineering department, and other engineering departments to some degree, offer a host of entrepreneurship classes that complement the iterative Lean Launchpad-style startup courses. These cover many entrepreneurial topics, including a venture capitalist’s perspective on startups ( MS&E 275 ), entrepreneurial marketing (MS&E 271), entrepreneurial management and finance (MS&E 276) and product management (CEE 250).

“You literally have so many classes that are tailor made to sandbox your idea,” Khullar, who took many of these classes, said. Some, like MS&E 271 and CEE 250, include working in teams to build out a product from an early-stage idea, while others like MS&E 275 and MS&E 276 have less of a project focus but are also strong in bringing real-world perspectives from Silicon Valley venture capitalist practitioners.

“Not only are there a lot of different resources, but it’s a lot of resources that work great together because they cover completely different areas,” said Matthew Hernandez M.S. ’20, who also took most of the classes. “[MS&E] 275 was one of the classes I liked the most, but it was on the opposite side [to MS&E 271] – the venture capital side – but I do think it’s very valuable for entrepreneurship because it’s such a big part of the ecosystem. Knowing how both sides operate is very helpful,” he said, of the entrepreneur vs venture capital roles. He also enjoyed MS&E 276, adding, “that was also a completely separate aspect of entrepreneurship.”

Unlike the Lean Launchpad-style courses, a class like MS&E 271, which still has a team project component to develop an idea or product, the focus is not on rapid iteration or extensive customer discovery. “We did interview probably close to 10 different people over the course of the quarter, but they were more in-depth,” Hernandez said, in contrast to the 100+ required in the Lean Launchpad. MS&E 271 has a greater emphasis on working through content in a syllabus and supplementing it with the project, than Lean Launchpad, where greater focus is placed on the project and interviews.

Khullar also found that taking these courses was a great way to connect with professors. “They can help you connect to the right people to experiment with your startup idea,” she said. Many of these courses have a teaching team of adjunct professors or lecturers that come directly from the industry rather than academia, and so remain heavily connected. “I actually would suggest taking their class if you can,” she said. “Once you take the class, it’s easy to build relationships with them,” she added.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, these classes are also a great way to find co-founders, Khullar said. “Actually, finding co-founders is a very difficult thing otherwise, because it’s hard to find people who really align with your opinions,” she said. “When you have classes 60-people strong, it’s slightly easier to just have open-ended discussions and find people who share your vision.”

Most of these classes are selective by application. The MS&E ones also give preference to MS&E students, especially those in their final year, but all are open to students from any department. However, Hernandez says that the odds of getting in are better than they look. “A lot of people end up dropping or switching classes — so there’s usually more space than it sounds like. And if you don’t make it the first time, you can always try again another year,” he said.

Jonathan Ling is a graduate student in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. Contact him at grind ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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Stanford Law School 3Ls Win BASES Business Plan Competition for Legal Search Platform

• June 8, 2012
• Stanford Law School
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Stanford Law School third year students Daniel Lewis and Nik Reed won second place and a $10,000 prize in the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) business plan competition out of more than 150 original submissions. Their online legal search product uses visualization technology to serve up results that reveal the most important cases, the connections between cases, and the evolution of legal principles over time–offering a new dimension in legal search and legal informatics. They are continuing to develop their business and hope to be launching soon.

The Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) is at the heart of student entrepreneurship at Stanford and one of the largest and oldest student-run entrepreneurship organizations. Its mission is to promote entrepreneurship education at Stanford University and to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs.

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Rethinking Business Plan Competitions

Examining the pitfalls and potential of social business plan competitions, and how educators can redesign them for greater impact.

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By Michael Gordon & Daniela Papi-Thornton Nov. 30, 2016

On both sides of the pond, we have seen business plan competitions for social ventures send contestants out to sea without a compass.

While many of today’s university students crave lives of meaning and social impact , most will never start a business—social or otherwise. Social business plan competitions typically honor the first trend while overlooking the second. There is an opportunity to rethink these contests and use them to help students identify a range of ways to create social value, beyond just starting a business. Most importantly, these contests need to foster genuine understanding of problems before asking students to design solutions.

Many university social business plan competitions invite students to address a specific, pressing concern, typically in a short period, and almost always out of context. They typically require that entrants work toward a business model solution without requiring or rewarding a thorough understanding of the problem, including the landscape of current and past attempts at solutions.

What are the results?

• Students try to solve problems they don’t understood by proposing solutions that aren’t grounded in reality.
• Innovation is rewarded, even if neither contestants nor judges know what solutions have already been tried. Competition winners often feel validated even if their ideas are weakly developed or repeat the mistakes many others have already made.
• Winners are rewarded for their business plans—which tend to lock them into flawed solutions and lead to confirmation bias—rather than for thoroughly understanding a problem and receiving incentives for being flexible in seeking paths to solve it.
• A culture develops of “Best PowerPoint Wins,” ,reinforcing the common illusion that launching and running a successful social venture is much easier that it really is.
• Students who enter these contests often think they have produced grand solutions for social problems, leaving humbler, less entrepreneurial—but still quite socially minded—students without any funding and with few learning opportunities to find their own paths to impact.

We have both seen these mistakes play out. At the Center for Social Impact at the University of Michigan, we once asked students to look into improving the skills and professional outlook of young, low-income inner-city adults. One thing we got right was to create a tie-in between our competition and the actual activities of a well-run nonprofit. What we didn’t get right was expecting students to examine and tweak the nonprofit’s programming, financing, culture, and values, and then double its impact—all within a year. The competition was two weeks long, and the nonprofit was out of state. The students were, in effect, asked to pretend to be “experts” in a field they knew little about, had few hands-on resources to learn from, and were expected to do a year’s worth of work in a fortnight.

At Oxford, we’ve made similar mistakes. When students studying for Saïd Business School ’s one-year MBA competed for the Skoll Centre ’s social business funding, their intense schedule of study, in effect, guaranteed that many would apply with very rudimentary ideas and would not be ready for start-up funding even if they received it.

On many campuses, students are asked to form plans for new start-ups that address issues of noble concern about health, education, human rights—you name it. They are asked to address problems in faraway places, or involving communities with whom they have no familiarity. Organizers’ unrealistic expectations about what students can achieve translate into “exotic” societal challenges that students find attractive—but that have worrying traces of colonialist attitudes.

We believe there is another way.

Competitions can produce positive outcomes in different ways, and organizers should take the opportunity to carefully consider their goals in designing them. To help more students understand and take action to solve social and environmental problems, contests need to promote a full understanding of a problem and its context to ensure that students understand what is working, what isn’t, where gaps in impact lie, and how they might plug into existing efforts to solve these problems. This approach would help students acknowledge a range of possible interventions beyond starting a social business, such as expanding impact through government adoption or franchising a current solution. Opening up these contests so that contestants can consider extending or replicating an existing solution to a complex problem would invite students to step into a range of roles, not just the idealized start-up founder or heropreneur .

For a fewer number of students, competitions may be a step toward actually launching a venture. But even so, they must have a deep contextual understanding of the problem they want to solve before they are on solid footing to launch. Hence, contests that incentivize and reward an understanding of a problem will benefit all stakeholders, including both job seekers and future social venture founders.

Both of our institutions are shifting programs away from traditionally run competitions. We believe that our role is first to provide students with opportunities to understand social problems and deeply engage with them, and help them identify a variety of ways that they might add value. If they then decide that the problem requires a new venture to fill a gap in the landscape of current solutions, our next opportunity is to connect them to the tools and resources they need to test out their ideas.

To create this shift in approach, the Skoll Centre launched a competition called The Global Challenge , based on the Impact Gaps Canvas , which rewards students for understanding a problem. Students map the landscape of current solutions and then identify gaps where further social value can be added. The Global Challenge is now in its second year and is open to partner universities around the world, with more than 20 partner universities signed up for the 2017 competition. Over the last four years, Saïd Business School has also incorporated a required core course into the MBA and EMBA curriculum, Global Opportunities and Threats Oxford (GOTO) , designed to help students understand global challenges and bring the idea of “problem understanding” before “solution finding” to all students.

The University of Michigan, meanwhile, has incorporated the Impact Gaps Canvas and additional ecosystem mapping tools into several impact competitions. They have become mandatory first steps in two social impact competitions hosted by the Center for Social Impact at the Ross School of Business and third hosted by the School of Public Health.

Other universities are also making the shift. The University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP), for example, includes impact gaps mapping as part of its Impact Entrepreneurship Program, Compass , and social entrepreneurship courses at Brigham Young University (BYU) offer opportunities for students to “apprentice with a problem” rather than asking them to jump in and “solve it."

Inspired by the approach at BYU, the Skoll Centre launched its own Apprenticing with a Problem Funding competition, which gives students access to funds to go out into the world for three or more months and learn about a problem they care about, through research or an internship. By learning about and apprenticing with organizations already working to solve challenges, students can identify a range of ways they might add value. This opportunity also attracts a much wider range of students than simple business plan competitions. Laura Taylor, a 2016 competition winner, noted, “I would not have entered the competition if it were about starting a new venture, as that was not my goal. … I wanted to learn how I could best contribute to solutions that might not be obvious at first glance.”

The University of Michigan’s Center for Social Impact has created another way of apprenticing through its Academic Year Impact Corps. A student can take a year-long, for-credit course where she spends 6-8 hours per week with a local social enterprise. That organization views her as part of the team, includes her in strategic discussions, and provides ongoing mentorship from the organization’s executive director. The student also spends the year doing a meaningful project for the organization, getting coaching from the center’s faculty director and participating in a seminar involving all other students in the course in an attempt to provide a grounded perspective on the complexity of social change work.

To better support students who actually do want to launch a business, the Skoll Centre has opened up its social business plan competition to alumni. In this way, students can identify a challenge they want to work on, “apprentice” with that problem either through the Skoll Centre’s apprenticeship funding or by working in the sector, and—perhaps years later—enter the Skoll Centre’s competition to gain financial support for a business start-up.

Other universities considering how to design or reshape their business plan competitions should think about:

• Rewarding and supporting deep learning about, not just solving, social problems
• Providing flexible funding that does not lock students into enacting untested business proposals, but rather allows them to pursue multiple paths to impact
• Identifying credible judges and mentors who have a deep understanding of global challenges themselves
• Providing thoughtful and thorough feedback to students so that they learn from the experience, even if they do not secure funding through the competition.

It’s time we social business plan competition organizers start drinking our own medicine and focus on the theory of change behind our contests. If we want to create appropriate incentives for students to go out and solve global challenges, then we should design offerings that are best designed to do that—and that means rethinking the value of traditional business plan competitions.

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Technology Ventures

From Idea to Enterprise

Chapter 7: The Business Plan

How are ventures actually formed and what is the role of the business plan?

Entrepreneurs respond to attractive opportunities by forming new ventures. In this chapter, we consider the five-step process for establishing a new enterprise. One particularly noteworthy step in the process is the development of a story and business plan. The story is a compelling synopsis of why this venture is needed at this moment of time and how it can achieve success. We then detail the task of writing a business plan, which is a significant and challenging effort for entrepreneurs.

To see these talks in their entirety or to access related materials, go to Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner

Other Materials

Business Plans that Work - Timmons, Zacharakis, & Spinelli Plans That Work arms entrepreneurs and small business owners with an easy-to-follow template for writing persuasive business plans, along with proven models that can be used to analyze potential business opportunities from initial idea to viable venture. This value-packed book will show both entrepreneurs and current business owners how to:

• Determine what to include in each plan, why, and for whom
• Recognize and avoid common pitfalls in the process
• Use the renowned "Timmons Model" to analyze potential business opportunities

How to Write a Great Business Plan A great business plan is one that focuses on a series of questions which relate to the four critical factors critical to the success of every new venture: the people, the opportunity, the context, and the possibilities for both risk and reward. This is a condensed version of Sahlman's longer article in book 'The Entrepreneurial Venture'

Frank Moyes - Colorado Leeds School of Business Professor Frank Moyes has a number of useful business plans templates and references available on his web site. There also many complete business plans from a breadth of different industries that can be leveraged as additional examples or case readings.

Financial Modeling for Startup Companies

Peter Kent of Insight Business Tools provides a slide deck on how and why financial models can help entrepreneurs in the business planning process.

Introduction

Book Contents

• Table of Contents
• ...................................
• Part I: Venture Opportunity, Concept, and Strategy
• Ch 6: Risk and Return
• Ch 7: The Business Plan
• Ch 8: Types of Ventures
• Ch 9: Knowledge, Learning, and Design
• Ch 10: Legal Formation and Intellectual Property
• Part III: Detailed Functional Planning for the Venture
• Part IV: Financing and Building the Venture
• Chapter Video Clips

Additional Resources

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• Authors Blog
• Entrepreneurship Blogs
• Testimonials
• Schools Using this Textbook
• Entrepreneurship Corner

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Stanford Online

Business model innovation: turning disruption to competitive advantage.

From a global pandemic to rapid changes in technology, the last few years have seen plenty of market disruption. 

Even the most established companies have been forced to re-evaluate their business models. In the midst of an ever-shifting marketplace, many business professionals are looking for ways to keep their business models limber. In a recent webinar for Stanford Online , Professor Haim Mendelson of the Stanford Graduate School of Business shared the secret strategies used by successful companies to weather (and thrive) during disruptions.

Register to Watch On-Demand Webinar

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What is a disruption?

All markets experience some form of disruption when changes in technology, customer preferences, competition, or regulation necessitates a major business model change. The Covid-19 pandemic and the growing use of A.I. technology are two examples. If you imagine your business model as a house, a disruption is like an earthquake that requires you to rebuild part (or all) of your house. A strong business model is like a good insurance plan–even if the earthquake hits, you won’t be left unprotected.

Secrets of successful business models

Your business model is a high-level blueprint that describes the structure of your business. If crafted thoughtfully, a business model can provide built-in strategies for managing market disruption. The most successful business models share several key elements that work together to create a cohesive business plan: 

• A value creation model: Who are our customers? Whis is our product? How does it create differentiated value? What is the value chain? What is our go-to market strategy? 
• A profit model: What is our revenue model? Cost structure? What drives profitability? 
• A business logic model: What’s our goal? What is the logic of our business?

Turn tension into alignment 

Most businesses face a fundamental tension between value creation and profit. Some decisions that create more value may hurt profit and vice versa. For example, when Facebook introduced advertising as their main revenue model, the company’s need to satisfy their advertisers negatively impacted user experience. However, profitable companies can adapt their business models to address tension between value creation and profit. A subscription model such as the one used by Substack, where users are also paying subscribers, naturally aligns value creation and profit.

Business Model Archetypes

Strong business models consider the relationships between value creation, profit, and the driving logic of a business, and often fall into one of four categories. Depending on which “archetype” your business embodies, you’ll want a business model that specifically addresses the competitive advantages of your particular market niche.

• Customer Intimacy: Customer intimacy is all about delivering the best solutions to specific customers by tailoring products or services to satisfy unique or highly-targeted customer needs.
• Product/Service Leadership: This business model uses product or service innovation to create value for customers.
• Operational Excellence: This is the workhorse of business model archetypes. Businesses built around operational excellence deliver a standard product or service that meets customers' needs at a low cost or provides superior functional performance.
• Value Chain Coordination: The matchmakers of the business model world, these businesses create value by coordinating different elements of the value chain, such as sellers and potential buyers.

Surviving and Thriving Through Disruption

According to Mendelson, AirBnB’s resilient business model left them well-positioned to weather the disruptive event caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike a traditional hotel chain, AirBnB could offer alternative lodging spaces, away from city centers and packed buildings, without having to build new buildings. Post-pandemic, AirBnB is thriving by connecting people with surplus space to those who want to work from anywhere, a competitive advantage over hotel chains.

Companies such as Netflix, Facebook, and Be My Eyes offer compelling examples of business models flexible enough to innovate through technology-driven disruption. As technological innovations changed how we access and watch video content, Netflix successfully pivoted their business model from a subscription-based DVD provider to a digital streaming service with original content creation. In 2022, Netflix innovated their business model again, introducing advertisers into their profit model.

The growing use of artificial intelligence programs, such as large language models like Chat GPT, presents another possible technological disruption. Be My Eyes, a user network for the blind and visually impaired that connects people who need help to volunteers, recently rebranded themselves as Be My A.I. Their previous model relied on real life volunteer users to help, for example, a visually impaired person identify a blue shirt from a red one. Now, Be My A.I. relies largely on artificial intelligence to answer users’ questions, a total change in the business model that’s driven by a change in technology.

When Apple’s changes to their privacy policy prevented Facebook from automatically receiving user data from Facebook iPhone apps, the company adapted by developing its own A.I systems to gather data. Not only have they been able to respond to the change, but by the 3rd quarter of 2023, they’d actually increased their revenue by 23%. Facebook used technology to improve their business model and respond in a positive way to technological disruption.

Do these examples of business model innovation inspire you to learn more? Are you a business professional looking for innovative ways to meet evolving customer expectations and crowded market segments? Stanford Online’s Business Model Innovation course will teach you how to thoughtfully reexamine and redesign your business operations to deliver more value to customers while increasing profit or growth.

For all your professional development needs and lifelong learning goals, check out the exciting resources available through Stanford Online .

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Stanford University's Global Entrepreneurs Challenge and Accenture Announce Winners of the First Global Entrepreneur Challenge Competition

Accenture Awards $75,000 in Prizes

PALO ALTO, Calif. —June 26, 2000 — The Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES), Stanford’s premier student entrepreneurship group and Accenture, today announced winners of the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge. Joel Friedman, senior partner with Accenture Technology Ventures presented awards in four categories to the student entrepreneurs from around the world, capping a week of panel discussions and networking sessions facilitated by Silicon Valley business leaders.

Accenture senior partners and former Stanford graduates, including Larry Leisure, managing partner of Accenture’s Global Dot-Com Launch Centres, directed three open forums on topics such as global Internet businesses and team building. As one of the lead sponsors, Accenture contributed $75,000 in prize money to the recipients in the following four award categories: Disruptive Technologies, Elegance of Business Strategy, Positive Social Impact and Global Market Potential.

"We are pleased to have been a part of the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge and are very proud of what all the students have accomplished. Rarely do you have this kind of talent from around the world under one roof -- this has truly been an exciting week" said Brian Johnson, a lead partner with Accenture’s Chicago Dot-Com Launch Centre. "The competition was fierce and everyone performed like world-class entrepreneurs."

The award for Disruptive Technologies, presented to the team with the most innovative product that defines a significant new market or transforms an existing one and the award for Elegance of Business Strategy, given to the team that has developed a compelling solution to a tangible market need were both presented to Homan Igehy and Farid Nemati of T-RAM with Stanford University. T- RAM is a revolutionary memory that can provide the high speed of SRAM at the high density of DRAM. Previously T- RAM had won the Stanford BASES $50,000 E-Challenge Business Plan Competition.

The award for Positive Social Impact, presented to the team that would positively affect the environment, promote peace, ameliorate poverty, or alleviate social injustice, was given to Latinarte.com of Argentina. Marina Kessler, Hernan Fligler and Georgette Montalvan accepted the award for Latinarte.com, an online community marketplace for Latin American art. Latinarte, awarded best Latin American start-up in last March’s Latin Venture 2000 in Miami, plans to compete next at NET2MIL, a nationwide competition for start-ups in Argentina.

EyeGen of MIT team won the Global Market Potential award presented to the team with a plan that is best suited to global markets. Zoran Zdravski and Kiril Alexandrov have developed a technology to make biomarkers a safer, more cost and time efficient alternative to radioactive or fluorescent probes. In May, EyeGen won the MIT $50,000 Entrepreneurship Competition.

"The global nature of the competition’s winners is really exciting" said Ted Acworth, chairman of the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge. "It verifies our beliefs that Silicon Valley is merely a state of mind, and that entrepreneurship can sprout in different regions all over the world. On behalf of the organizing team, congratulations to all of the winners."

About the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge

The Global Entrepreneurs Challenge was founded in 2000 at Stanford University to expand entrepreneurial horizons worldwide. Its mission is to provide a vehicle for winning student teams from the world’s top business plan competitions to congregate at Stanford and immerse themselves in a conference, focused on entrepreneurship, and competition that provides valuable insight from top entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and beyond. The business plan competition will pose an opportunity for the teams to win infrastructure products, working capital and consulting support to help turn their business plan into a real venture. For more information regarding the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge, please visit: www.echallenge.org .

About BASES

Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES) is the premier student run entrepreneurship organization at Stanford University. BASES was founded in 1996 with the premise of expanding the entrepreneurial infrastructure throughout Stanford. The organization has over 3,500 members that encompasses students from Stanford’s Engineering, Business, Law and Medical schools. BASES is responsible for some of the most popular and well-attended events held at Stanford, such as the Stanford E-Challenge, the Start Up Job Fair, and the weekly Industry Thought Leaders Seminar. And this year, BASES is launching the very first global business plan competition and conference—the Global Entrepreneurs Challenge. For more information about BASES and its events, please visit http://bases.stanford.edu .

Roxanne Taylor

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Robert Koturbash

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LONGEVITY DESIGN CHALLENGE

T he Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge offers over $20K in cash prizes and free entrepreneur mentorship in a competition open to all university students around the world who want to design products and services which optimize long life for us all. The 2024-2025 Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge invites student designers to create solutions that expand or rethink education and learning opportunities at any age.

The Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge is a global competition that encourages students to design products and services to improve well-being across the lifespan. In its twelfth year, the Challenge is focused on reimagining education and learning for longer lives.

LONGEVITY DESIGN CHALLENGE GOALS :

• Create well-designed, practical solutions that improve well-being across the lifespan
• Encourage a new generation of students to become knowledgeable about issues associated with long lives
• Provide promising designers with a path to drive change in the world

ABOUT THE 2024-25 DESIGN CHALLENGE THEME: Reimagining Education and Learning for Long Lives

To fully engage with our long lives, we must change our approach to learning and education. Rather than going to school for a fixed number of years when we’re young, the Stanford Center on Longevity’s New Map of Life envisions learning new knowledge and skills throughout our lives, regardless of age.

Recognizing the integral relationship between education, health, and longevity, the challenge emphasizes the importance of innovative approaches that promote cognitive, physical, and financial well-being across the lifespan. From incorporating movement into learning environments to ensuring that everyone has the skills they need for whatever changes come their way, including switching careers or dealing with new technology, there are many opportunities to broaden our understanding of learning and establish it as a lifelong pursuit.

Students are invited to create solutions that expand or rethink education and learning opportunities at any age, particularly those that close opportunity gaps and ensure equitable access to educational opportunities for all, regardless of socio-economic background or age.

Examples of longevity education and learning needs include (but are not limited to):

• Creating pathways for non-traditional education
• Supporting educational return at any stage of adulthood
• Providing support resources for continuing education
• Supporting career and life transitions through reskilling
• Fostering intergenerational education and learning
• Laying the foundation for lifelong success in early education
• Incorporating play and physical movement in learning
• Ensuring equitable access to educational opportunities
• Teaching skills for healthy longevity
• Designing physical environments conducive to learning for all ages
• Offering flexible and modular learning pathways
• Leveraging technology for lifelong learning
• Utilizing data and analytic techniques to improve learning
• Promoting mental and cognitive health through learning
• Integrating cultural and community-based learning

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

HOW TO PARTICIPATE Register to participate and submit your entry here: https://designchallengestanford.skild.com/

Register to Participate Register to participate here between September 9 – December 4, 2024. You may participate as an individual or as part of a team. Teams may have a maximum of 5 members. See the “Teams and eligibility” section of the FAQ below for more information about team rules. If you are registering as a team, the person who registers first will be designated the team leader. They can then add everyone else as team members.

Prepare your submission You can view all the materials you will need to prepare in this preview of the entry form. Please see the “Submissions” sections of the FAQ below for more information about the entry form. If you still have questions, please email [email protected] .

Submit your design Once you have prepared your materials, log in and complete the entry form. The form will be open from September 9 until 11:59 PM Pacific time on December 4, 2024.

After the December 4 deadline, the judges will evaluate all submitted designs according to the judging criteria (see the Details section below for more information).

Finalists Finalists will be announced on January 29, 2025. Finalists will be awarded $1,000 US and paired with an experienced mentor.

Finalists will compete in the final competition for $10,000 in April 2025. The finals are expected to be held in-person at Stanford University. Finalists are reimbursed (limited) travel costs. Each team will have 7 minutes to pitch their idea to the panel of judges. The judges will use the same criteria as for the initial submissions and will decide the top three winners on the same day as the pitches.

CHALLENGE TIMELINE The challenge is organized into two phases that are synchronized with the academic year.

Phase I:  September – December 2024 Phase I is the open call portion of the challenge. During this time, teams will learn about the topic and create their solution concept. The Challenge organizing team will be available during this time for questions. Solutions may be submitted at any time during this period, but no judging feedback will be available until January.

Judging Period: December 2024 – January 2025 During this period, our judging panel will select a small number of finalists. Finalists will be announced in late January.

Phase II: January 2025 – April 2025 During Phase II, finalists will be asked to further develop their idea and to prepare a presentation. Mentors from corporate partners and industry experts will be available during this period.

  KEY DATES

• Kick-off: Monday, September 9, 2024
• Phase I submissions due: Wednesday, December 4, 2024
• Finalists (5-8 teams) announced: Wednesday, January 29, 2025
• Finals: April 2025 (exact day TBA)

AWARDS Top winners receive cash prizes of $10,000 (1st place), $5,000 (2nd place), $2,000 (3rd place).

Finalists receive a $1,000 cash prize and mentorship from industry experts and researchers.

ELIGIBILITY The challenge is open to teams of 1-5 students enrolled during the 2022-2023 academic year, attending any accredited university or college globally.  Each team must have at least one full-time student and if the team is selected as a Finalist, only students may present.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Any intellectual property developed by a team during participation in the Design Challenge will remain the property of the individual design team, or the team members’ universities or employers, as applicable. The Stanford Center on Longevity and Challenge sponsors reserve the right to publicize designs following submission. Teams interested in intellectual property protection should take any steps necessary to protect patentable inventions, copyrighted work or other intellectual property prior to submission. Team involvement with any of the Challenge sponsors is strictly voluntary. Agreements between teams and sponsors are beyond the reach of Stanford Center on Longevity or Stanford University, and should be arranged separately between the teams and sponsors.

JUDGING CRITERIA The Challenge will be judged by experts in design and technology including carefully selected academics with expertise on the topic; executives from technology and consumer goods firms; venture capitalists; and senior representatives from related mission-driven organizations.

Judging Criteria 

• 40% Impact – will the design improve long life outcomes?
• 30% Originality – has this idea been seen before? Is there something similar to it on the market?
• 20% Feasibility – will the design work? Can it be produced at scale?
• 10% Affordability – teams must identify their target population for the design. Would the cost of the design at scale make it a viable product for that population?

A separate score reflecting alignment of the design to the topic will be added as a weight to the overall score. For example, if a design were to score 90% on the judging criteria above but only 50% on alignment, the overall score would be 45% (.90 X .50).

SPONSORSHIP

LEVELS AND BENEFITS OF SPONSORSHIP

  PLATINUM SPONSOR ($50k +) • Receives all benefits as per Gold Sponsor (below) • Receives online and offline Platinum Sponsor recognition • Acts as a strategic partner in creating the structure of the challenge • Option for SCL presentation at Platinum Sponsor meeting or event

GOLD SPONSOR ($20k) • Receives all benefits as per Silver Sponsor (below) • Receives online and offline Gold Sponsor recognition • Has the opportunity to provide a judge for the competition • Is offered access to all designs submitted in December 2024 • Is offered a corporate presence at the Awards ceremony in April 2025

SILVER SPONSOR ($10k) • Receives online and offline Silver Sponsor recognition • Has the opportunity to provide tailored content to educate teams through the challenge website • Is offered the opportunity to mentor teams during the incubator period

For more information on sponsorship opportunities, please contact Marie Conley-Smith at [email protected] .

Teams and eligibility

Who is eligible to participate in the Longevity Design Challenge?

The Challenge is open to teams of 1-5 members and is primarily a competition for university students: at least one team member must be a student enrolled at an accredited university or college from anywhere in the world during the 2024-2025 school year. Students may be undergraduate or graduate (e.g., masters, PhD) students.

Can my team consist of students from multiple universities?

Yes! Teams may consist of students from multiple universities, from anywhere in the world.

Can non-university (e.g., high school) students participate?

Other (non-university) students may participate in the Design Challenge, but only as part of a team which contains at least one university (undergraduate or graduate) student.

Can a team have members who are not students?

Yes! A team may be a mix of students and non-students (of any age).

If a team is chosen for the finals, only team members who are students may participate in the final presentation.

Can I submit a design by myself?

Yes! You may participate as an individual.

Can I/my team submit more than one design?

Yes! You may be a member on multiple teams and/or submit multiple designs. In the submission portal you will need to submit each design under a different email address. We do, however, recommend spending more time on one design in order to make sure your submission is high quality, rather than submitting many designs.

Submissions

What kinds of materials do I need to submit to participate in the Longevity Design Challenge?

All materials are to be submitted through the submission platform: https://designchallengestanford.skild.com/ .

When is the last day to submit a design?

The submission deadline for the 2024-2025 Longevity Design Challenge is Wednesday, December 4, 2024. The submission portal will close at 11:59 pm (23:59) Pacific time on December 4.

What types of designs are accepted by the Longevity Design Challenge?

Many types of designs are accepted in the Longevity Design Challenge. It could be a program you implement in your community, an app or software, a product for people to use, or anything else that will help people live long and healthy lives under the current topic, “Reimagining Education and Learning For Long Lives.”

Do I have to produce/implement my design for the competition?

You do not need to have a product made for the December submission deadline. We are just looking for a thorough explanation (text, and pictures/video if applicable) of what your product will be. Then, if your idea is chosen as a finalist, that’s a great time to start developing it more fully.

If you are able to make a prototype before the December deadline and able to conduct some user testing , it can help to share your results in your submission. It can be really early stages user testing, like with family and friends (who hopefully fit into whichever demographics you are designing for). Or if you don’t have a product to test yet, you can also do user interviews to get feedback on your idea.

What are the judging criteria, and what do they mean?

Longevity Design Challenge submissions are scored on 5 criteria:

Impact : The primary question behind the “impact” criteria is “will the design improve long life outcomes?” Because this is a longevity design challenge, we want to know if the design will help people be healthier (physically, emotionally, socially, etc.) or more purposeful in a way that will help improve their lives.

Originality : Does your design represent an original idea? Has your idea been seen before? Is there something similar to it on the market? A new design will earn a higher score in this criterion.

Feasibility : Will your design work in the real world? Can the design be produced at scale (e.g., for most/all of the population it is meant to serve)? Your design may be a very interesting or compelling idea, but it needs to be feasible to bring it to life to get high marks in this criterion.

Affordability : Will your users be able to afford your design when it is produced at scale? This is why the judges want to know who your design is for: e.g., Is it for children? Older adults? People with low incomes? They will also want to know how much your design will cost its users when it is produced at scale.

Fit to theme : Is your design relevant to this year’s design theme, “Reimagining Education and Learning for Long Lives”? You can read more about this theme on our website.

What is expected in a submission video?

We recommend uploading a short (i.e., maximum 90 seconds) video that will help the judges understand your design. A video is not required for entry.

The entry form asks for “documentation that will help evaluate your proposal.” What type of documentation?

This field is meant for any materials you think might present your idea more clearly alongside your text answers in the following fields. For example, you might describe how your idea works in the text fields, but you think it would be helpful to include a visual or flow chart of it, so you could include PowerPoint or PDF slides that contain visual mock-ups of how your idea works. It is not required to include any extra materials.

Do I need to include citations in my design description?

This may not apply to everyone. If you would like to include citations, don’t worry too much about including a lot of citations (the judges just need enough information to understand your idea), but if you feel that there are sources that are important to include, please include some kind of citation along with the links so that we can see the title, publication year, and authors (in case the link doesn’t work for us). You may use any citation format.

Is there mentorship available during the submission process?

The Longevity Design Challenge team isn’t big enough to offer general mentoring in the first phase of the competition, but if you have a specific question about your project, you may email us at [email protected] and we will do our best to answer it or to try to help find a resource. This is also a great time to take advantage of your university’s resources. The 6-8 teams that are selected for the finals will each be paired with a mentor.

What are the cash prizes for this competition?

• Finalist teams (announced in January): $1000 US
• Grand prizes (determined at the final competition in April):
• 1 st place: $10000 US
• 2 nd place: $5000 US
• 3 rd place: $2000 US

How are the cash prizes paid out?

Each finalist team is asked to designate one team member to receive prize money and that person is responsible for disseminating it to the other team members. That person will be asked to provide bank information for a wire transfer, and a tax identification number (if applicable).

Is the prize money subject to US taxes?

Yes. Prize money received will be reported on tax form 1099.  Tax forms are distributed at the beginning of the following calendar year. (US taxes are filed before April 15 for the prior year.)

Follow on Twitter

Video recordings of the 2023 @LongevityCenter Design Challenge Finals are now available! 📽️Watch now: 🚶‍♀️Keynote address by Prof Steve Collins about designing exoskeletons to sustain mobility 📢Pitches by the outstanding finalist teams 🏆Awards 🎉And more! longevity.stanford.edu/design…

About a year ago from Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge's Twitter

The @LongevityCenter announces the 10th annual Design Challenge winners! 🏆🎉 Read more about the outstanding winning teams, their solutions for Optimizing Health Span, and the in-person finals experience 👇 longevity.stanford.edu/design…

🎉Congratulations to the WINNERS of the 2023 @LongevityCenter Design Challenge! 🥇1st: Variable Reactive Board, @PrattInstitute @nyuniversity 🥈2nd: Unpause Life, @nmims_india 🥉3rd: 2 Care, #TunghaiUniversity #NationalTaipeiUniversityofEducation #finalists ' class='rtw_url_link'>longevity.stanford.edu/design… pic.twitter.com/2KKPTxULMF

🎉5 days away! The 10th annual Longevity Design Challenge Finals are on Tuesday, April 25, 2023! Don't miss it! Register to attend in-person (the event is open to everyone): events.stanford.edu/event/lon… A recording will also be posted after the event. pic.twitter.com/2t2m1k16IG

#IntroducingTheFinalists 2023 Team Shakti from @ucdavis is changing cultural scripts about weakness and womanhood while addressing anemia during pregnancy. “Shakti” means “strength” or “power” in many Indian languages. 👉 longevity.stanford.edu/design… pic.twitter.com/rIEl0E0Fxa

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PREVIOUS WINNERS

2023-2024 | “Designing for Life Transitions”

The 2024 Longevity Design Challenge focused on making life transitions more positive and meaningful for people of all ages.

• First Place – “Asterisk” from University of Navarra, Spain
• Second Place – “Bala” from Delhi Technological University, India
• Third Place – “LifeQuest” from Northwestern University, USA

View the 2024 Finals See Winners Announcement

2022-2023 | “Optimizing Health Span: Living Well at Every Age”

The 2022 Longevity Design Challenge focused on the optimization of health span at any age.

• First Place – “Variable Reactive Board” from Pratt Institute & New York University, USA
• Second Place – “Unpause Life” from NMIMS School of Design, India
• Third Place – “2 Care” from Tunghai University, Ming Chi University of Technology, and National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan

View the 2023 Finals See winners announcement

2021-2022 | “Longevity-Ready Environments: Rethinking Physical Spaces for Century-Long Lives”

The 2022 Longevity Design Challenge focused on designing physical spaces that better support century-long lives.

• First Place – “Sarewa” from Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria
• Second Place –“Karpolax” from Makerere University, Uganda
• Third Place – “Spore” from North Carolina State University & Boston College, USA

View the 2021 Virtual Finals See Winners Announcement

2020-2021 | “After the Pandemic: Designing the Next Version of Our World”

The 2021 Longevity Design Challenge focused on ideas inspired by the cultural shift that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic that support long, healthy, and happy lives for everyone.

• First Place – “Foris Labs” from Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Nigeria
• Second Place – “PhoneBook” from the Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA
• Third Place – “Wulu” from Harvard Kennedy School, USA (team located in India)

2019-2020 | “Reducing the Inequity Gap: Designing for Affordability”

The 2020 Longevity Design Challenge focused on significantly reducing the cost of innovations that help people at all ages increase their odds of a long and healthy life.

• First Place – “Shishu, Sui aur Dhaaga” from the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bengaluru, India
• Second Place – “School in the Sky” from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA
• Third Place – “The First Desk” from the Beijing Institute of Technology in Beijing, China

2018-2019 | “Contributing at Every Age: Designing for Intergenerational Impact”

We invited teams to submit proposals for designs that promote and facilitate intergenerational interaction.

• First Place – “Family Room” by Anand Upender, Daniel Chan, Mina Bhatt, Nadine Levine, Stanford University
• First Place – “So You Think You Know Your Grandma” by Ismail Azam, Inaara Charolia, Rani Cochran, Ashna Mangla, Lillian Tran UC Berkeley
• Second Place – “Pillow Fight!” by Hung-Yu Chen, Chor-Kheng Lim, Ching-Chia Renn, YuanZe University, Taipei

2017-2018 | “Promoting Lifelong Habits through Design”

We invited teams to submit proposals for designs to create and support healthy habits –including financial, physical, and social behaviors—which are shown to improve quality of life.

• First Place – “ Ride Rite ” by Eric Bottelsen, Eric Lord, Maya Pines, and Drew Sigler from Virginia Tech
• Second Place – “ Gesturecise ” by Nakul Kasture, Nikhil Kumar, Akshat Mandloi, and Purvish Shah from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
• Third Place – “ Grow and Gather ” by Seira Yasumatsu of San Francisco State University.

2016-2017 | “Aging in Place”

The challenge invited submissions to address the factors that allow individuals and families to remain in their homes throughout the lifespan and into old age.

• First Place – “ TAME ” by  Hooriya Anam, Awais Shafique, and Arsalan Javed  from the  National University of Sciences and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan
• Second Place – “ Rendever ” by Charles Lin and Kyle Rand at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Third Place – “ UPPO ” by Lane Hering, Emma Lee, Charlene Lertlumprasert, Genesis Solano, and Gerrold Walker from Virginia Tech

2015-2016 | “Using Happiness to Optimize Longevity”

The challenge invited submissions to address three tracks: Mind, Mobility, and Financial Security, reflective of the Center on Longevity’s mission to enable people to reach old age Mentally Sharp, Physically Fit, and Financially Secure.

“Delight the Mind” (Mind Challenge)

• First Place – “ Memoir Monopoly ” from Cho Szu-Yang and Cheng Ya-Fang of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
• Second Place – “ Bath Chair ” from National Yunlin University of Science (Taiwan)
• Third Place – “ Echo ” from National University of Singapore

“Discover the Motion”  (Mobility Challenge)

• First Place – “ City Cart ” from Brandon Lopez and Eric Renard of San Francisco State University
• Second Place – “ Yedi70 ” from Koc University at Istanbul
• Third Place – “ POTALK ” from National Chiao-Tung University (Taiwan)

Note: Insufficient entries were received to select finalists and make awards in the financial track.

2014-2015 | “Enabling Personal Mobility Across the Life Span”

The 2014-2015 Challenge invited designer to create solutions for empowering mobility among older adults at a personal level by: (1) reducing sedentary lifestyles, (2) encouraging and enabling physical movement and exercise, and (3) reducing barriers and increasing facilitators to mobility in the home and community.

• First Place – Nicholas Steigmann and Maiya Jensen from the California College of the Arts and their project “ SPAN ”
• Second Place – “ HandleBar ” from the University of California, Berkeley
• Third Place – “ Luna Lights ” from Northwestern University
• Stanford Longevity Technology Prize – “ Flipod ” from National University of Singapore

2013-2014 | “Maximizing Independence for those with Cognitive Impairment”

This 2013-2014 challenge focused on designing new solutions to keep individuals with cognitive impairment independent for as long as possible. The challenge asked designer to identify issues around quality of life, personal independence, and helping people experience the best parts of life for as long as possible.

• First Place – “EatWell” by Sha Yao from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco
• Second Place – “Taste+” from the KEIO-NUS CUTE center at the National University of Singapore
• Third Place – “Memory Maps” from the Copenhagen Institute of Design

Read more about the winners >

The 20 latest Blog Posts

• Smultronställe
• Comments Test Page
• Jolly Jolie
• Intelligent Health Promotion Service System
• Stanford Center on Longevity Announces Finalists for 8th Annual Design Challenge

Available Pages

• #417 (no title)
• 2018-2019 DESIGN CHALLENGE FINALS
• 2021 Finalists
• 2022 Finalists
• 2024 Design Challenge Finals
• 2024 Finals Event Additional Details
• Amy Yotopoulos
• Chris Tarchala
• Christopher Tarchala
• Design Challenge Retrospective
• Draft Judges
• Duane Detwiler
• Elizabeth Gephardt
• Elizabeth Halifax
• Finals Event 2024
• Hannah Heejong Lim
• Login Designer
• Longevity-Ready Environments: Rethinking Physical Spaces for Century-Long Lives
• Mekhala Raghavan
• NoelLeon Gauthier
• Promoting Lifelong Healthy Habits through Design
• Staci Alexander
• Stacy Canan
• Stanford Center on Longevity Announces “After the Pandemic: Designing the Next Version of Our World” Design Challenge Winners
• Stanford Center on Longevity Announces 10th Annual Design Challenge Winners
• Stanford Center on Longevity Announces 2024 “Designing for Life Transitions” Winners
• Stanford Center on Longevity Announces Eight Finalist Teams for 11th Annual Global Design Challenge
• Stanford Center on Longevity Announces Finalists for 10th Annual Design Challenge
• Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge Finals 2023
• Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge Finals 2024
• Stephanie Smith
• Thomas Flores
• Welcome Finalists
• Welcome Judges
• Winners Announced: Stanford Center on Longevity Design Challenge “Longevity-Ready Environments: Rethinking Physical Spaces for Century-Long Lives”

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Visit us at our new home! eCorner is now part of the website for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP). Access the latest eCorner content at stvp.stanford.edu/ecorner . Soon, this site along all all existing links and bookmarks will redirect there. Sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop!

Ideas and Inspiration from STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center

Chapter 6: The Business Story and Plan

Entrepreneurs respond to attractive opportunities by forming new firms. In this chapter, we consider the five-step process for establishing a new enterprise. One particularly noteworthy step in the process is the development of a story and a business plan, including a compelling business model. The story is a compelling synopsis of why this venture is needed at this moment in time and how it can achieve success. We then detail the task of writing a business plan, which is an effort to better prepare the venture for testing its assumptions and hypotheses. An example of a well-prepared business model is provided in appendix A. Visit the textbook website for additional sample business plans, models and slide (or pitch) decks.

1. “Purpose of a Business Plan” with Tom Byers, Stanford University

2. “Work Backwards From the Customer” with Diego Piacentini, Amazon

3. “Have a Sense of Urgency” with Mike Maples, Floodgate

Continue to Chapter 7

Tom Byers , Stanford University

Tom Byers is a Professor in the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University and a faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP).

Andrew Nelson , University of Oregon

Andrew Nelson is Associate Vice President for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Oregon.

Richard Dorf , University of California, Davis

Richard C. Dorf is a Professor Emeritus of Management and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Davis.

Getting to Product-Market Fit [Entire Talk]

Video clips.

What Product-Market Fit Feels Like

Conducting valuable research, refining price point and messaging, going narrow, using your mission to find your customer, challenges and joys of hardware.

Mental Health Tech, Mentally Healthy Startups [Entire Talk]

Gaining Startup Skills and Mentors

Founder-market fit, scale the bright spots, mission-driven hiring, mental-health practices for founders, ai and mental health startups.

Exploration in Sports Technology [Entire Talk]

The Privilege to Take a Risk

Product innovation first, finding your first customers, go global from the get-go, maintaining values as you grow, ingraining sustainability.

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Business Plan Competitions: 6 Tricks to Help Your Students Win

May 3, 2016 //  by  Rhonda Abrams

With so many business plan competitions to choose from, and an increasing amount of prize money to help launch new companies, it’s worthwhile to think about how to encourage your entrepreneurship students to enter these competitions, and how you can coach them through the process.

Of course, to increase their odds of winning, students must start with the basics: meet the stated criteria; align the business plan with the goals of the competition; polish the written business plan; and practice, practice, practice their pitch.

Here are six strategies for winning business plan competitions:

• Understand the focus. An MIT business plan contest will have a different emphasis than one that helps small businesses launch.
• Put together a cross-functional team. Find team members with complementary backgrounds and skills. Judges often want to know you have the depth of expertise needed.
• Talk to past entrants or winners. If the competition shares examples of previous years’ winning plans, look at them.
• Research judges. What areas of interest and expertise do they have? If they’re investors themselves, what types of businesses do they invest in?
• For university competitions, call on alumni members for advice or information. This could be the perfect opportunity to get a meeting with a potential funder (or employer).
• Be real. Judges are often more impressed by a down-to-earth concept that has a good chance of succeeding in the real world, rather than a groundbreaking one.

Excerpted from Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies  by Rhonda Abrams

Beyond the popular business plan competitions run by universities like MIT and Stanford, this short list features some of the top global ones, and their deadlines. Most are open to students and aspiring founders with prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars.

• CodeLaunch  – Entry Deadline: 6/1/2016
• Gitex – Entry Deadline: 6/1/2016
• Mentor Capital Network – Entry Deadline: 8/3/2016
• Startup Open  – Entry Deadline: 9/14/2016
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Veliky Novgorod Region: Why you need to see the jewel in Russia’s ‘Silver Necklace’

Valday Iversky Monastery

For those of you making the trip to Veliky Novgorod Region, here is a list of unmissable activities and places of interest to really get you acquainted with the area and its history.

1.    Learn the history of the Russian state in Veliky Novgorod

Of course, this city is unmissable; being the historical center of Russian statehood with the most ancient cathedral in the country, Sophia Cathedral, erected more than one thousand years ago, is a place of power for the whole of Russia. The city was the first-ever Russian settlement straddling both sides of a river (Volkhov), with the imposing Kremlin on one side, and medieval churches and buildings in the historic market district on the other.

Veliky Novgorod Kremlin

You can spice up the historical tour with various custom ones available, including the ancient cemetery at night or an alco-tour of the city (where you get to try local food and drink). For more information on the city excursions, you can go here .

2.  Explore traditional folk craft at the workshop in Kresttsy settlement

Krestetsky stitching is a traditional Russian pattern - a folk craft that was born and developed in this area since the 1860-s. In Soviet times a small factory producing original unique linen products was built here. During Perestroika it was nearly closed due to the catastrophic economic crisis in the country. The risk for the Krestetsky stitch being completely forgotten was quite real. It is now a private factory and shop with guided tours.

NOVGOROD REGION, RUSSIA - JANUARY 24, 2019: Linen products of the Kresttsy Stitch clothing factory reviving and implementing the Kresttsy stitchery, a traditional local embroidery technique dating from the 1860s, in the village of Kresttsy, Novgorod Region

The pattern is very beautiful and difficult to master, so the possibility to observe the birth of a masterpiece is quite unique. Head over to the factory website for more details.

3.  Meet the old believers in the village of Lyakova

Russia’s so-called ‘old believers’ did not accept the reformation of Orthodox Christianity in Russia in the 17th century, choosing instead to keep the old traditions in church services and rites, in defiance of the state’s persecution, lasting centuries. Old believers are divided into two groups, those who accept the church hierarchy and those who do not accept priests at all, pray in their own houses, and are governed by the community leaders. At this time there are about one million old believers scattered around the country with no official statistics to confirm that figure.    

The old believers of Lyakova village will gladly welcome you in the old traditional peasant’s house, explaining how it was organized, and how life, in general, looked in the distant peasant past.  This immersion is accompanied by a traditional dinner with borsch, salo (pork scratchings) and tea brewed in a traditional samovar. Book your ticket here .

4.  Take the eco-trail at the Valdai national park 

This national park is one of the largest specially protected natural areas in the European part of Russia. Russian president Vladimir Putin has one of his ‘datchas’ here. The territory of the park that covers an area of 159 thousand hectares includes several lakes (Borovno, Valdai, Velje, Seliger) as well as rare animals and plants.

Many nature lovers come here to hike, swim in the lakes and camp. This year the big eco-trail was opened. If you enjoy hiking, you can walk all 59 kilometers in five days, starting from the town of Valdai and covering around 12 kilometers a day. On the way, you will have all the facilities needed for camping and spending time in nature, from toilets to camping equipment and various amenities. Visit the park’s website for more info.

5.   Visit the Valday Iversky Monastery

Located on an island 10 kilometers from the town of Valday, this monastery appears to be floating on the lake, when you look at it from a distance.

This is a male Orthodox monastery established in 1653. It was one of the three monasteries founded by the Patriarch Nikon (his reformation of the Orthodox Church in Russia and its unification with the Greek Orthodox church caused the split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ believers). The icon of the Mother of God – Iverskaya – is the treasure of the monastery and the reason for the active pilgrimage to this place.

6. Ring the bells at the Valday Museum of Bells

The region of Novgorod was the center of Russian statehood under the rule of the Rurikovich dynasty. After the collapse of Kievan Rus’, the region was an autonomous Russian state with a republican form of government, the symbol of which was a big Bell that every citizen could ring in order to gather the townspeople for a vote or resolve a community issue. So it is not by accident that the first-ever Museum of Bells in Russia was opened here.

Valday Museum of Bells

If you manage to get Nadezhda Yakovleva for a guide, you are guaranteed a one-person performance along with your historical facts, it’s fascinating and great fun as well.

 7.   Immerse yourself in 10th-century life at the settlement in Lyubytino village

This village of ancient Slavs has been restored in order to give tourists the impression of life centuries ago. Different types of Russian wooden cottages (izba) are represented here, as well as utility buildings and the ancient burial mounds, used by Slavs for burial rites.

Lyubytino is an urban locality (a work settlement) and the administrative center of Lyubytinsky District of Novgorod Oblast, Russia, located on the Msta River. Municipally, it serves as the administrative center of Lyubytinskoye Urban Settlement

For those seeking total immersion, there is the possibility of getting dressed in the traditional clothing of the time and have a photo session.

 8.   Visit the museum of local lore in the town of Borovichi

This is one of the oldest museums in the region, established in 1918, and located in a 19th century stone house with a mezzanine. It is devoted to the history of the region from the Stone Age to the Revolution of 1917.

By the end of the 19th century, Borovichi became an industrial city that attained fame in Europe due to the first international agricultural handicraft and industrial exhibition held here, which was established under the auspices of the Prince of Oldenburg, who underlined the importance of this region between the two Russian capitals. France then presented half of the items at the exhibition.

The region is also known for a unique material produced here: Franco-Russian pyro-granite plants of Prince Golitsyn were located in Borovichi, and the recipe for producing it remains secret to this day. This material got a large silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1889.

We highly recommend that you take a guide here, as there are many activities including role play and various fun games, as well as just beautiful stories told during it. Find out more here .

If you need some guidance in the area, feel free to address the Rus Novgorodskaya touristic center.

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Novgorod for Day Trip From Cruise Ship in St. Petersburg - Veliky Novgorod Forum

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Novgorod for Day Trip From Cruise Ship in St. Petersburg

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Our original plan for this cruise was to use the "Moscow option" and spend our second day not in St. Petersburg, but in Moscow. However, the second day is a Thursday - when the Kremlin is closed. The second day is the only day that the long trip to Moscow is possible. But there is no point in going all the way to Moscow without seeing the Kremlin! Major disappointment!

Plan B - Instead of Moscow, our guide suggested that we might want to go to Veliky Novgorod on our second day,Thursday. I haven't found too much about it other than that it's one of the oldest cities in Russia and it has lots of churches. One church is okay, but we're not really interested in visiting lots of them, and if we make the long trek to Novgorod, it has to be for much more than a church. What else is there to see and do in Novgorod? Is it worth the 2.5 - 3 hour drive each way in the car between St. Petersburg and Novgorod? Or are we better off staying in St. Petersburg and seeing again what we did last time? I loved St. Petersburg, so revisiting sights wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. However, if there is somewhere outside of St. Petersburg that is incredible, fabulous, amazing - then, I'd like to go there, too. Does Novgorod fit that description? Alternatively, if it doesn't, can you suggest a place outside of St. Petersburg that does? Preferably a place that is closer to St. Petersburg? Or even a place within St. Petersburg that is off-the-beaten-path that we might not have seen last time we were there?

Thanks for your help!

3 replies to this topic

Who is your guide? We'd like to hire her, too :)

It is a pretty long way and bumpy road to Novgorod The Great if nothing hasnt changed recently, which Im sure hasnt. And yes you are right -it is all about churches and religious heritage, its an ancient Russian city - there are houndreds of churches and monasteries. One of the attraction of Novgorod which is different is The open-air architectural-ethnographic museum "Vitoslavlitsy", which provides a whole complex of genuine folk wooden architecture, including ancient churches of the 16th — 18th centuries, peasant houses of the 19th — early 20th centuries, exhibitions of folk art and everyday life items of Novgorod peasants of the same period. But again if you are not much into OMG another church.

Yes, Novgorod is famous first of all thanks churches, cathedrals and monasteries, but these churches are different from St. Petersburg churches. First of all they are much older. Novgorod was a very important center in the past, for several years it was even our official capital but now it’s a real province with very slow and calm provincial life. Some information about Novgorod and tourists cites their you can find here http://www.bestguides-spb.com/tour-novgorod.html I love Novgorod and tour to Novgorod could be very interesting. Please notice that guides from St. Petersburg are not allowed to provide tours of Novgorod churches/museums. If you are only two it could work but with a bigger group I’m afraid it could be problems.

Despite my very special feelings about Novgorod (I really love it!) I would suggest you to visit Moscow even on Thursday. Moscow has so much beside of Kremlin which you will see from outside: the Red Square, St Basil Cathedra, the unique metro!, Arbat street, Tretyakov gallery, Novodevichy monastery and so on…

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