Two Ball State University students will have 500 seconds to present a business plan in the back of the limousine today as it drives around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
If their presentation for the Nascent 500 Business Plan Challenge is successful, the students could win $10,000.
Senior entrepreneurship majors Emily Eoff and Matt Weyand will be presenting a business idea to a panel of judges who will then choose the winners. Eoff and Weyand wrote a 500-word abstract and a business plan that earned them $500 and a spot in the qualifying round.
Weyand said they will be proposing an idea for a business called Pedals, a pay-as-you-go bicycle rental company.
The objective will be to assist students who need transportation to class, he said. It will be $3 to use bicycles for the day and $400 for unlimited access for the semester, Weyand said.
The bicycles will be locked up around campus, and when students want to use one, they can text the serial number on the bicycle to Pedals to get it unlocked.
Pedals will track the bicycles with a global position system, and the codes for them will be changed every day, Weyand said.
Larry Cox, director of the Entrepreneurship Center, said the competition is geared toward undergraduate entrepreneurship majors who have a business idea, Cox said. In order for students to participate, they had to submit a written business plan limited to 25 pages that addressed aspects regarding their proposed business such as the number of employees, square footage of land, location and the market of the business, Cox said.
Ball State's one team will compete against 12 other teams, including students from Purdue, Michigan and Taylor universities, he said.
Four teams will advance to a final round, in which they will present their business plans again. The first place team will do a victory lap on the speedway and receive $10,000, second place will get $5,000, third place will get $2,500 and fourth place will get $1,000.
Karen Vaughn, coordinator of technology and public relations in Entrepreneurship Center, said the format was changed this year by moving the competition to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
"We changed it to create more buzz around it and to get more universities to register," Vaughn said.
Cox said although this is the ninth year for the national competition, it has never used a venue like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Vaughn said the event, which runs from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., is centered on education.
"We want to give students a venue to present their ideas and hopefully later they will launch," she said.
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