The ISU Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship hosted a business plan competition in which 16 teams and individuals from Iowa State submitted fully formulated business plans.

The 2011 Pappajohn New Venture Business Plan Competition was an event for individuals or teams of up to five people who either had an idea or recently started a new business. At least one student on a team had to be registered at Iowa State for the 2010-2011 school year.

There are five regions in the state that competed separately. The best regional finalists selected moved on to the final competition Friday where they presented their plans to John Pappajohn Matt Kinley and Brian Thompson, president and senior vice presidents, respectively, at Equity Dynamics.

Of the 16 teams that completed business plans in Iowa State’s region, three made it to the finals.

Nate Pettit, graduate student in business administration, created Linked4Golf, a company that would allow golf courses to join forces and work together, creating a sportsmanship that does not currently exist in the industry.

It would offer four services: a golf reciprocal program, purchasing power opportunity, a communication platform and compiled financial and statistical data. With these services, Linked4Golf would provide golf courses with benefits such as increased revenues, decreased expenses, increased membership, improved membership value and morale and improved annual budget and decision making.

Sam Robinson and Matt Plasek, seniors in aerospace engineering, came up with Pink Elephant Development, which would do for hardware add-ons what Apple did for smartphone software apps. Pink Elephant development would develop and release streamlined hardware add-on products making it easy for people to create their own hardware add-ons for smartphones.

Michael Koenig and Holden Nyhus, juniors in agricultural and life sciences education and Stuart McCulloh, sophomore in agricultural and life sciences education, developed Scout Pro, a software application that would assist a grower or crop scout in identifying weeds, insects and diseases on plants.

Users would take a picture of the plant on an iPad or other handheld device, and the application would alert them of any pests with full details courtesy of Iowa State.   

The top five teams in the ISU region won $100.

The top three teams in the finals Friday won $5,000 each. Scout Pro was one of these teams.

The other two teams to win the top prize were Responsible Transportation, from the University of Iowa region, and SEO Solutions, from the University of Northern Iowa region.

Greg Jass and Therese Kuster, students at Northern Iowa, developed SEO Solutions — an education-focused Internet marketing firm that would specialize in search engine optimization, Pay Per Click advertising, email marketing, social media management and web design with the goal of improving clients’ overall web presence.