Participating Teams 2007

2007 Winners First Place is awarded to Pyglet Enterprises.   The Pyglet is a device which can copy music from a compact disc to a MP3 player (such as an iPod or Zune) without the need of a computer. [read more]

Each team that enters the competition must have at least one student member, and some teams consist entirely of students. For the first time this year, The University of Adelaide has opened the competition to include teams whose student member is at any tertiary institution in South Australia.

Each team must develop a Business Plan for a new, previously unfunded business concept. As you read through the brief descriptions of each team’s idea on the following pages, you will see the ingenuity, creativity and diversity of the entries.

No doubt some of the entrants were initially attracted by the $50,000 worth of cash and prizes on offer this year, but it soon became clear to them that the process is just as valuable as the prizes.

The echallenge offers competitors unprecedented access to top South Australian business acumen and expertise. A series of workshops, presented by specialists in the various fields, outlines the steps to building a successful business: from assessing your idea, through marketing, finance, intellectual property to writing the plan and delivering a presentation.

This year, 30 teams submitted a business concept proposal in the first round, which was reduced to 20 teams after the first stage of judging. The teams then had just over five weeks to prepare their business plan for submission on October 4th, followed by two weeks to prepare their presentation, before pitching to the semi-finals judges on October 17th. An anxious wait over the weekend followed before hearing at the BBQ, hosted by our sponsors Coopers, which teams had the edge to take them into the finals.

The finals judging took place on the morning of Thursday 1 November, with a second oral pitch. The judges were looking for the overall commercial viability of the business based on the quality of the opportunity, the market, competitive advantage and the team strengths and weaknesses.