ONIA runner-up joins Nebraska business plan competition

The team e-UREKA, 2nd runner-up winner in the Oriental Negros Innovation Awards 2005-2006 competition recently joined the New World Ventures business plan competition in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The competition was held April 6-8, 2006 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Lincoln and is one of the many events of its kind in the United States. Although admittedly their plan "i-Kard" needed more fine-tuning and further research, to e-UREKA Information & Advertising Officer Irene Rafil (the group’s lone representative to the competition), the experience was most rewarding, having been the only Asian team that made it to the finals. Her team was one of the over 60 applicants that qualified to submit the required executive summary of the plan, and out of the 60 moved up to the top 26 and eventually made it to the top 4 finalists in the graduate category. According to Ms. Rafil, the competitors, who mostly came from North America, were very professional, aggressive and experienced. Most of them were already “hands-on” in their businesses and their plans were either in the fields of agriculture or medicine, and, according to Ms. Rafil, iKard was the only entry that was into IT. During the Q&A portion, the judges told Irene that their plan “will not” work out in the U.S. but that it had a big market potential in the Asian region.

So what now for iKard? The group is set to go further into the business that they have started to establish. With their ONIA and Nebraska experience, they have realized that with determination, things are only starting for them. They also plan to join other forthcoming business plan competitions in Asia. Meantime they are in the process of establishing their presence in four big campuses in Dumaguete.