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The brightest and best of Oxford and Cambridge’s student entrepreneurs will gather in Oxford on 19 February to present their business ideas in the new Varsity Pitch entrepreneurship competition. So whether it was a Eureka! moment, scribbles on the back of an envelope or the result of long, hard planning, the competition may put budding entrepreneurs on the road to realising their dreams.

Each student will be invited to pitch their business idea in a 2 minute ‘elevator’ pitch to a formidable panel of judges - including Peter Jones from BBC’s Dragon’s Den, Martha Lane Fox, Co-Founder of Lastminute.com and Jim Lawn, Head of Microsoft Innovation Strategy in the UK.

All the finalists will be further under the spotlight as Peter Jones will be filming the event for his new ITV1 show ‘Tycoon’ - a nationwide search for people with killer ideas that he can help turn into profit-making companies (http://www.itv.com/tycoon).

Six student entrepreneurs have been selected to present their business ideas at the final from a host of entries to the earlier Oxford and Cambridge heats – Idea Idol at Oxford and Cambridge University Entrepreneurs £1k Business Ideas Competition at Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge have each put forward their strongest three entries to go head-to-head with their traditional rivals, before an audience of venture capitalists, business angels, local entrepreneurs, fellow students and representatives of the sponsoring organizations.

Rajeeb Dey, President of Oxford Entrepreneurs, Oxford University’s student society for entrepreneurs said “We are greatly looking forward to the competition and supporting entrepreneurship at both Universities in this way. It has been a difficult task to whittle all the Oxford business plans down to the three finalists and I was hugely impressed by the quality and diversity of the ideas we saw. Often great business ideas lie dormant; by providing a rewarding platform, we hope to germinate a company of real significance”.

Cambridge University Entrepreneurs President Rahul Vohra said “The Varsity Pitch is a great opportunity for both Oxford and Cambridge to showcase the best entrepreneurial ideas of their brightest students. Choosing the three Cambridge finalists has been an incredibly challenging task: we received 86 very high quality executive summaries from over 130 people. The Varsity Pitch will put all the finalists in the spotlight, which is precisely where teams of this calibre belong.”

The judges are:
* Peter Jones (Entrepreneur of Dragon’s Den fame)
* Martha Lane Fox, (Co-Founder of Lastminute.com)
* Michael Birch (Co-founder and CEO, Bebo.com)
* Ian Lobley (Senior Partner, 3i)
* Jim Lawn (Head of Microsoft Innovation Strategy in the UK)

Three prizes will be awarded, one each to the strongest Oxford and Cambridge entries and one to the overall winner with prize money totalling £10,000. The overall winner will also win a trip to Monaco where they have the chance to access further funding in a competition called The Next Generation Entrepreneurship Forum.

The Varsity Pitch competition is sponsored by NESTA, 3i, Microsoft, Saïd’s Science and Enterprise Centre, MindBench, and Equity Fingerprint and supported by Social Media Consensus and Purple Media.

You are invited to join us at the Final. For further information or to register to attend, please contact the Press Office below:

Clare Fisher, Public Relations Officer, Saïd Business School
Direct telephone: +44 (0) 1865 288851
Email: lare.fisher@sbs.ox.ac.uk

Josie Powell, Public Relations Coordinator
Direct telephone: +44 (0) 1865 288403
Email: josie.powell@sbs.ox.ac.uk

About Oxford Entrepreneurs
Oxford Entrepreneurs is Oxford University’s largest free student society and runs one of the largest networks of student entrepreneurs in the UK. Its mission is to encourage and support student entrepreneurship by providing inspiration, education, networking and the chance to learn by doing at the University of Oxford and beyond. For further information visit http://www.oxfordentrepreneurs.co.uk

About Cambridge University Entrepreneurs
Cambridge University Entrepreneurs organise the most successful student run business planning and creation competitions in Europe. Cambridge University Entrepreneurs has two goals:
* To educate staff and students about enterprise;
* To help staff and students create companies that shape the world.

Since 1999, CUE has had over 450 entries and has awarded over £280,000 in grants to 31 business ideas. These companies have raised more than £15m further funding and are currently valued at more than £30m. Our competitions help create global companies.

About Saïd Business School
Established in 1996 the Saïd Business School is a full service business school and one of Europe’s newest and fastest growing business schools. An integral part of Oxford University, the School embodies the academic rigour and forward thinking that has made Oxford a world leader in education. The School has an established reputation for research in a wide range of areas, including finance and accounting, organisational analysis, international management, strategy and operations management. The school is dedicated to developing a new generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs and conducting research not only into the nature of business, but the connections between business and the wider world. In the Financial Times ranking of MBA programmes (Jan 07), Saïd again improved its position and is ranked 19th in the world. This achievement follows the School’s success in HM Treasury’s 2005 ranking of the top 50 MBA programmes in the world, where it finished number one out of all the UK business schools. In the university league table published by The Guardian (May 2006), Saïd ranked first of all UK universities for undergraduate business. The University of Oxford also ranked top for business studies in The Times report published in June 2006. For more information, see http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk