MPowered Entrepreneurship student leaders Rachel Barch and Ankit Mehta are hoping to generate business activity out of the third annual 1,000 Pitches competition at the University of Michigan.

Nathan Bomey | AnnArbor.com

The student group that organizes the business ideas competition, MPowered Entrepreneurship, wants to convert the energy into actual economic activity.

“We like to say we’re trying to ‘entrepreneurialize’ the campus,” MPowered President and U-M junior Ankit Mehta said. “We want 1,000 Pitches to be the start of a journey for those students who are aspiring to be an entrepreneur.”

The competition gives students the opportunity to film short video clips of themselves pitching an idea for a new business or product. Pitches will be accepted starting Friday and ending Nov. 19 with an awards ceremony planned for December.

In 2009, interest in the competition surged as MPowered took in 2,165 entries, doubling the output from the first competition in 2008.

MPowered this year plans to extend its existing student startup business consulting services to the best business ideas generated through 1,000 Pitches.

“We don’t know if the next Google or the next Microsoft will come out of one of these things,” Mehta said. But “we’re hopefully going to see a larger impact on the community through this initiative.”

That mission fits in with the vision of U-M President Mary Sue Coleman, who regularly cites the competition as an example of how students are showing the importance of embracing a new entrepreneurial mindset. Some 10 percent of U-M freshmen have already started a business by the time they reach college.

“A huge part of the competition is showing the talent that we have here at the University of Michigan, and I think that’s one of the reasons she likes promoting it so much,” MPowered 1,000 Pitches project manager and U-M sophomore Rachel Barch said of Coleman.

The 1,000 Pitches competition enters its third year as U-M's student entrepreneurial movement is drawing national attention. U-M Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke said this summer that the U.S. should consider replicating U-M's student-led business incubator TechArb throughout the country.

"Even though we have come a long way in a short period of time, I believe there are times when we underestimate our students' ability to be entrepreneurs," Coleman wrote last month in Forbes. "We're not always tuned in to their exuberance for innovation. But, like out students, we continue to learn and grow.

MPowered’s 1,000 Pitches competition leverages that startup exuberance.
The pitches are tailored for 10 categories, including environment, consumer products, health, mobile software application and a special category for businesses that could help revitalize Michigan’s economy. The winning idea in each category gets $1,000.

One of last year's category winners, Allen Kim, has since co-founded an Ann Arbor startup called Bebaroo.com, which is calling itself "Netflix for baby clothes" and has attracted national attention. His winning idea in the 1,000 Pitches competition, however, was for something else.

Contact AnnArbor.com's Nathan Bomey at (734) 623-2587 or nathanbomey@annarbor.com. You can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to AnnArbor.com's newsletters.