A team of three chemical engineering graduate students — Warren Hogarth, James Nehlsen and Swaroop Chatterjee — won the seventh annual Business Plan Contest for their proposal of a new fuel cell design for laptop computers.
During the Feb. 26 competition, sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Club, students presented their business plans to a panel of judges made up of venture capitalist entrepreneurs.
The top three finalists were awarded a total of $10,000 in prize money.
Entries have traditionally featured technology-based products, ranging from medical devices to software technology, contest director Matt Weiss '07 said.
But "there was a wide array of teams this year," he said, citing the second runner-up consumer retail team as an example.
"The contest gets students who are going to be entrepreneurs more experience," Weiss said. "[The contest] provides the incentive and funding . . . to hopefully implement a plan during or after college."
The winners were announced after a six-hour judging process involving speeches, sessions with the venture capitalist judges and individual presentations.
The winning design applies newly developed surface-functionalized mesoporous ceramic membrane technology to the concept of laptop batteries. The fuel cell can then be instantly recharged by a chemical cartridge in place of plugging it into an electrical source, such as a wall socket.
By marketing such technology, Hogarth said, the team hopes to "allow more freedom with . . . mobile devices" and to help laptop users "become unwired from the wall, being able to run all day from their laptops."
The product design is based on chemical engineering technology that Hogarth developed at Princeton and in his native Australia.
Hogarth, a visiting student on exchange, said "The idea was based on some of my research . . . It had a nice commercial potential so [our goal] was to find out what we would have to do to the technology to bring it to market."
The team plans to make their winning business plan a reality by developing a prototype for a marketable product to be ready as soon as mid-2006.
The plan is "really viable," Weiss said. "It just sounded really convincing, [as did] the team's ability to implement the plan successfully," he said.
If Hogarth, Nehlsen and Chatterjee succeed in marketing their product, they will not be the first winners of the Business Plan Contest to do so.
Past Business Plan winner Tom Szaky '05 went on to found the successful company TerraCycle, while Erik Limpaecher '01, Darren Hammel '01, Mark Holveck '01 and John Lerch '01 created Princeton Power Systems.
The Business Plan Contest run annually by the eClub. To compete, students first write a business plan and then present their plan to a panel of venture capitalists, usually alumni.
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