C2V Teams Invited To National, International Competitions
A pair of UIC teams from the 2006 Concept2Venture business plan competition will compete against top university teams from around the world in a number of upcoming national and international events.
Those teams, Optimal Vision and Flow Diagnostics, have received invitations to present their plans at the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition March 22-24.
Optimal Vision, a new venture advancing the use of an innovative, non-surgical vision correction technology for age-associated farsightedness, was founded by Liautaud Graduate School of Business MBA students and graduates Shrijay Vijayan, Kristin Ware and Kelly Liebl. Fellow MBA students Karen Tovey and Anad Santhosh founded Flow Diagnostics, a company that introduces a system for detecting and characterizing vascular narrowing through acoustic and geometric imaging of veins and arteries. Both companies are based on technologies developed and licensed by UIC.
Following the Rice competition, Optimal Vision will present at the University of San Francisco 2007 International Business Plan Competition March 28-31.The team recently placed third overall in the Spirit of Enterprise business plan competition hosted by the University of Cincinnati, and won second place in the Fast Pitch competition at the University of Chicago's Gleacher Center.
Over the past year, two other teams from the UIC entrepreneurial studies program, SanoGene Therapeutics and OrthoAccel, have garnered significant winnings and national attention for their plans. OrthoAccel was recently purchased by a Texas entrepreneur who expects to take its product, a disruptive orthodontic device that cuts the treatment time for braces in half, to market by 2009. SanoGene Therapeutics Inc. has accumulated nearly $150,000 in prize winnings and is currently negotiating for a multimillion-dollar investment in their biotechnology startup advancing a revolutionary new therapy for brain cancer treatment.
Notes Rod Shrader, professor of entrepreneurship, "There is a lot of buzz about UIC¹s successes in the field of entrepreneurship. Clearly a pattern is forming and people are noticing."
