The College of Business Graduate Competition in New Venture Planning awarded first- and second-place honors last month to two sets of Iowa State masters of business administration students who created plans for fictional or start-up companies.

Remus Ilies and Rainer Mues, both graduate students in business administration, took home the $8,000 award for their presentation on the fictional Crypto Corporation, a company that manages Internet security.

The second-place honor of $4,000 was awarded to Surya Prakash Loonker, graduate student in business administration, and Jeffrey Etriger, senior in engineering operations, who created a business plan for Innovative Medical Devices, Inc. The real company is in the start-up phase and makes an automated medication dispensing unit and monitoring service.

Gary Koppenhaver, program leader and associate professor of finance, said the competition, which is in its second year, was created to help students experience the work that goes into building a business plan.

“The goal [was] to generate some entrepreneurial interest among students, particularly grad students,” Koppenhaver said.

The competition was open to all students, but one member of each team had to be enrolled in a graduate program in the College of Business.

Koppenhaver said participating students started proposals for the competition last spring, pulling ideas from real or made-up companies or a product from the ISU Research Foundation.

Of the 13 students in six groups that participated in this year’s competition, three entries were chosen by College of Business faculty members.

Koppenhaver said the judges ranked the presentations on the “professionality, thoroughness and viability” of the plan to simulate a real-life business proposal.

“The two plans that were winners were very well done, and I think the students learned a lot about what it takes to write a business plan,” Koppenhaver said. “It’s a good exercise.”

Loonker said the competition was hard work, as well as an important learning experience.

“[The competition] personally gave me a good experience in a real-life scenario,” Loonker said. “It’s not just an academic enrollment, but something that you can really use.”

Six area entrepreneurs served as judges for the competition.

Judges for the competition were Monica Dolezal, vice president of Norwest Bank in Ames; Kenneth Kirkland, director of the Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer and the ISU Research Foundation; David Maahs, executive director of the Ames Chamber of Commerce; John Parks, president of the ISU Research Park Corporation; Phanos Pitiris, president and CEO of Elli Corporation; and Howard Van Auken, ISU College of Business associate professor of management.