The GW New Venture Competition was created to give GW students, faculty, staff and alumni a real-world, experiential learning opportunity in entrepreneurship. It is also designed to foster an entrepreneurial climate at GW and allow Competition winners to actually launch and operate their ventures while maintaining complete control through the issuance of non-dilutive cash grants as prize money.

As the Competition continues into 2018, it retains its two overarching goals:

• To deliver an excellent, broad-based learning experience in innovation and creative problem solving for all GW students.
• To nurture sustainable, scalable and profitable ventures that create wealth and have social impact.

In 2017, the GW New Venture Competition awarded over $300,000 in cash prizes in-kind prizes and is the fifth largest collegiate entrepreneurship competition in the country.

Compeition Process Overview

Tracks:

Submissions to the 2018 GW New Venture Competition will compete in one of three tracks:

• New Ventures are standard commercial ventures, and most submissions will compete in this Track.
• Technology Ventures are those that have a new, proprietary technology, discovery or invention at its core.
• Social Ventures generally have a transformative solution to a pressing need or social problem.

The competition is conducted in four rounds:

Round 1 submission requires a Form Fill Description of the Venture, A concise (50-words or less) Description and a Video Presentation by 12:00 noon on January 31, 2018. Typically there are over 100 Round 1 submissions. 

Round 1 Judges will select 100 submissions for the second round, and these quarterfinalists will be announced on February 3, 2018.

Round 2 The quarter finalists submit a 5-page Feasibility Analysis, a Business Model Canvas and a Concise (20-word) Summary by February 28, 2018. Teams must also submit a revised video. Those submissions are scored by a panel of judges online, and 36 Round 2 winners (semifinalists) are announced by COB March 6, 2018. 

All semifinal teams are assigned a mentor.

Round 3 semifinalists compete in a pitch competition against the others in their Track on April 2 (New Ventures), April 3 (Technology Ventures) and April 4 (Social Ventures). The three winners in each track are announced on April 5, 2018. 

Finalists who move onto Round 4 presentations will present on April 19, 2018 to judges starting at 9:30am and to the public starting at 5:00pm at the Jack Morton Auditorium in the School of Media and Public Affairs.