A team from the University of New Brunswick has found a solution to this problem, and their innovative idea won them top prize in the 2011 New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s (NBIF) Breakthru Business Plan Competition.

Scenesharp at the Breakthru competition

The team, composed of 4th year undergraduate business students Jordan DeWinter and Pablo Alvarez,won the competition’s grand prize, raising more than $145,000 for their company, Scene Sharp.

In addition to the $145,000, their video (click to watch) won the Viewer’s Choice Award, receiving almost 70% of all votes. This award, sponsored by CBC television, means they will be heading to Toronto for the set of CBC’s Dragon’s Den to pitch their idea. Watch for them on the show airing next fall.

DeWinter and Alvarez became part of this project through the International Business and Entrepreneurship Center’s (IBEC) Activator program, which matched them with Scene Sharp’s founder, Dr. Yun Zhang. Dr. Zhang is a UNB professor of geodesy and geomatic engineering, and has been with the university for over 11 years.

Dr. Zhang’s experience is extensive. He is the inventor and developer of 11 patented and commercially licensed technologies, which are being used by leading industry, government, academic and military organizations globally across the five continents, including NASA, US Department of Agriculture, Google Earth, Natural Resources Canada and Department of National Defence, Canada.

The lens and chip technology behind Scene Sharp is the latest innovation of Dr. Zhang and it has worldwide implications for a camera’s effectiveness.  It can detect the 3-D location of a moving object and provide an image that is three times sharper than anything currently on the market. A sharper image isn’t the only benefit, though. The chip technology also records only when motion is detected, meaning a lot less storage space is wasted on uneventful video.

Alvarez certainly got it right when he commented, “this award is an amazing thing not only for us, but for New Brunswick as well”. The continued success of UNB students and faculty as well as organizations such as NBIF can only make the province’s future brighter.

Most people don’t realize it, but New Brunswick has come a long way in raising the level of innovation and the calibre of small businesses. In fact, the NBIF Breakthru competition is the richest entrepreneurship competition in Canada.

The competition fosters entrepreneurial efforts not only in New Brunswick, but throughout Canada as well. Year after year there is stiff competition vying for the $285,000 cash and in-kind professional services that are available to be won.

Thanks to this competition a UNB team has received funding to give their company a head start, and potentially make New Brunswick and the world a safer place.

UNB BBA students, Robert Keleher and Simon Pearn took home the top prize for their business plan, ARC Technology.

ARC Technology is a company in the process of patenting a piece of paving equipment capable of combining the three pieces of equipment currently being used for asphalt resurfacing, into a single 40 foot long Asphalt Resurfacer.  Simon comments, “The physical size of the Asphalt Resurfacer will allow us to dominate the Urban (City Streets) Market.”

The CIBC Business Plan Competition is organized through the Faculty’s International Business and Entrepreneurship Centre (IBEC). This year ten teams from across Atlantic Canada competed for prizes. The winners were as follows:

Graduate Track

1st Prize                $5,000   ARC Technology (UNB)

2nd Prize               $2,500   Cuts4Cancer (Dalhousie University)

3rd Prize                $1,000   GenLink (UNB)

Undergraduate Track

1st Prize             $5,000   Educard (Crandall University)

2nd Prize               $2,500   Kipedal (UNB)

3rd Prize                $1,000   E-ceipts (UNB)

A professor of entrepreneurship with research and teaching interests in small business, family enterprise and business ethics, Dr. Litz facilitated two research sessions for UNB students and faculty. The first session was entitled “Kitty Hawk in the Classroom” and focused on entrepreneurship.

In his second session, “Two Sides of a One-Sided Phenomenon: Conceptualizing the Family Business and Business Family as a Mobius Strip”, Dr. Litz discussed the his paper of the same title (published in Family Business Review, September 2008) in which he compares the family business and the business family to a one-sided strip known as the “Mobius strip.”

Dr. Litz received his PhD in strategic planning and policy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, and focuses his research on small incumbent strategy, family enterprise, and business ethics. The recipient of several awards at the university and faculty level, Dr. Litz teaches courses in new, small and family business. His work has been published in several leading entrepreneurial and family firm research journals including Theory & Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Small Business Management and Family Business Review.

IBEC concluded National Small Business Week with a panel discussion centred on family business. The four panellists were Dr. Litz; Terry Malley, president of his own family business, Malley Industries Ltd.; Doug Motty, Executive Director of Enterprise Fredericton; and Michelle Audas, Senior Business Advisor with CIBC Small Business. The panel addressed the concerns and questions members of the audience had about starting new businesses, obtaining financing for new businesses or new projects, and succession planning. The audience was made of students and faculty members from UNB, and small business owners in the Fredericton area.

For almost 30 years, the Business Development Bank of Canada has organized Small Business Week, which encourages everyone to pay tribute to our Canadian entrepreneurs. The theme of this year’s Small Business Week was a world without boundaries, open to new markets.

“The theme recognizes the efforts and contributions of Canadian entrepreneurs to the national economy and acknowledges the importance of financial and consulting support for innovative and promising ideas,” said the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Gallibois, Murray, and Corey represented UNB as VerifyRX and defeated 11 other teams en route to capturing the top spot in the competition. Originally 90 schools attempted to qualify for the national competition in Vancouver.

For their victories in the regional and national competitions the team received $23,000 in prize money.

Chairman of the Department of Finance of San Diego State’s College of Business Administration, Varaiya has won numerous awards for his research into corporate finance and was at UNB to present a lecture entitled ‘Teaching Entrepreneurial Finance.’

Focusing on such topics as Credit Unions, Venture Capitalists, and Evolution of Startups, Varayia spoke for over two hours on the various areas of entrepreneurial finance. This included the information that out of 1000 new companies, only seven to twenty will go on to become a long-term public corporation.

Varaiya was also a guest speaker in two of the Faculty’s classes, including a fourth-year Competitive Strategy class. He presented his Strategic Value Based Management Framework, which tries to capture the major decisions and aspects that are relevant to managers engaged in strategic decision making. Other strategic management tools, such as Strategy Maps, also try to do this, but Varaiya’s framework has a much stronger integration with the financial components of strategy.

The course’s professor, Dr. Martin Wielemaker, stated that “Varaiya’s framework enabled the students to easily interrelate all the important aspects of the Capstone business simulation that they had competed in over the past months.”