Judging

  • Each round of the Business Model Competition is generally judged using the following questions:
    • Did the team use the Business Model Canvas or similar tool to identify and track hypotheses?
    • Did the team clearly state their hypotheses (assumptions)?
    • Did the team identify the most crucial hypotheses to test first (the ones that will kill their business)?
    • Did the team design and conduct low cost, rapid, but reliable tests of these hypotheses?
    • Number of tests: should be adjusted for industry, product type (web vs physical product), and business type (B2B vs B2C).
    • Quality of tests: interviews are high quality, surveys and focus groups are much lower quality (you don’t know which questions to ask) unless interviews have been conducted first.
    • Did the team clearly state their insights and learning, how those validated or invalidated a hypothesis and if that informed any pivots (changes)?
    • If changes were made, was the pivot the team made supported by evidence or did they fail to pivot when the evidence clearly stated it?
    • If appropriate, has the team developed a prototype or minimum viable product (MVP)? Does the team understand the hypotheses they are testing with a prototype or MVP? Is the prototype or MVP appropriate to answer those assumptions? (We want to reward prototypes over full products unless the product is the result of many prototypes tested with customers. In other words, we want to reward testing hypotheses before building and building from prototypes up to products. We do not want to reward just building products too early based on untested hypotheses).
    • Is the team solving a significant problem (defined in terms of money or impact)?
    • Does the team have significant evidence that the solution is validated (i.e., letters of intent, purchase contracts, sales, partners, etc.)?