The Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan Competition has given students throughout Iowa the opportunity to work with Iowa entrepreneurs to develop business plans and to compete for three $5,000 prizes.

The winners of the regional competition for Iowa State were graduate students Luke Schlangen and Ashish Joshi with Windblade Solutions, senior William Lohry and graduate Sam Robinson with Structuralize, and junior Colin Hurd and senior Jonathan Schuhwerck with Track Till.

“This year was an especially competitive year for the Iowa State students and alumni who competed, and the judges at the regional competition had to make some tough decisions. They narrowed down a record pool of 28 groups to the three Iowa State regional winners,” said Judi Eyles, program coordinator at the ISU Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship.

The final winners of the Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan competition were Lohry and Robinson with Structuralize from Iowa State; Brian Hoyer and Tim Schulte with Recycle Rite Inc. from Northern Iowa; and Ross Johnson, Aidan Murphy and Anith Mathai with Mazira LLC from the University of Iowa.

“It was really exciting to be one of the final winners, and we plan to use the award money to start up our business Structuralize, which will be a contracting service that will provide the same quality animations as competing companies at a fraction of the price and with improved usability,” Lohry said.

The UNI and Iowa winners also are looking forward to starting up or expanding their businesses with the money they have won. “Recycle Rite Inc. is currently providing curbside recycling for more than 400 residential and commercial accounts, and we are expanding by adding services such as residential refuse handling and event refuse management,” Hoyer said.

The University of Iowa winners — Johnson, Murphy and Mathai — created a business plan for Mazira. “Mazira is a cloud-based Web service that can be used for storing massive amounts of data and documents,” Johnson said. “Mazira is unique because of its new search dimension that has an interactive time line that users can use to find information in an organized way.”

This year marked the 13th annual Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan Competition. “All of the prize money is donated by John Pappajohn, who believes that it is very important for students to get real-life entrepreneurial experiences,” Eyles said.

“The wide variety of business plans included everything from Three Fates Games, which is striving to make better board games, to Structuralize, which is a facial motion capture service, from competitors statewide who won at the regional competitions.”