Wharton Business Plan Competition Winners Ring the NASDAQ Closing Bell

Lumina Diagnostics, winner of the 2009 Wharton Business Plan Competition, visited the New York City NASDAQ MarketSite accompanied by the Wharton School. In celebration, representatives of Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs and Lumina Diagnostics rang the NASDAQ closing bell. Find out more here.

Winning Innovation

Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, Operations and Information Management professors at The Wharton School, are co-authors of new book Innovation Tournaments, a "great read for anyone who is looking to develop a process to manage innovation... filled with real-world case studies and examples of approaches that will be beneficial to any practitioners who have the task of driving successful innovation..." Find out more here.

What Elon Musk Thinks

Paypal founder and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk speaks about electric cars, hybrids, the Tesla and the mysterious ways of Detroit in the first of a two-part Knowledge@Wharton and Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs podcast series "Great Companies Are Built on Great Products". Listen to the podcast here.

Wharton Business Plan Competition Winners Announced

Student team NIR Diagnostics, whose patented “InfraVue” device detects wound healing problems faster and more accurately than current approaches, won the $20,000 Michelson Grand Prize of the 2009 Wharton Business Plan Competition at this year’s Venture Finals, the culminating event of the year-long Competition, which attracted nearly three hundred venture capitalists, business leaders, faculty and students. Read more here.

"Get It Started!" Gets You Started

"Get It Started!" is the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs' newsletter of entrepreneurial highlights and insights. Every month the newsletter is updated with new articles, video clips from experts discussing pertinent issues, and interviews with successful entrepreneurs.

This month's stories include "Reaching Beyond the Case Study," a look into the experiences gained by student consultants at the Wharton Small Business Center, and a video interview with Wharton MBA alumna Anne-Marie Corner, founder of Biosyn. Check out the newsletter and subscribe here.

StealthRowing: Company to Watch

StealthRowing, a VIP company that designs and makes specialized training equipment that allows rowers to get the effect of rowing on the water while training indoors, took the top prize last Friday at PennVention, the University of Pennsylvania annual inventors competition, winning $5,000. Read more here.

WEP Co-Director Talks Risk

A YouTube posted video of WEP co-director Prof. Raffi Amit highlights his lecture on risks facing start-up companies during the economic crisis. He argues that, in addition to affecting funding for new ventures, the credit crisis is removing lifelines for established startups in this segment of his lecture for Wharton's new course, "The Economic & Financial Crisis: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Options." Watch it here.

Inside Knowledge

Wharton Professor MacMillan: "Cutting Prices Across The Board...Will Destroy Your Profit Streams"

The newsletter Wharton@Work has just come out with an interview with Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs co-director, Professor Ian MacMillan, on how to grow during a downturn. "Mac" says, "Some customers will enter into your market and others will leave...[Resegment] proactively instead of cutting prices across the board, which will destroy your profit streams." Visit Wharton Executive Education to read the entire article: "Focus on: Finding Strategic Sweet Spots in a Sour Economy".

Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference 2009

Buy your tickets now for WEC taking place February 13th at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia. The conference will feature the first ever WEC 25 startup expo, as well as keynotes by Donny Deutsch from CNBC's "The Big Idea" and Julian Brodsky, co-founder of Comcast. Find out more here.

Venture Initiation Program Companies Announced

The suspense is over! Wharton's new roster of Venture Initiation Program companies have been announced and you can check them out here. If you are a student at Penn and have an idea for starting your own business, don’t wait until you graduate to get it going. Leverage the Penn community and apply to VIP. The next round of applications are due in April. Maybe you could end up like this guy, who started his business in VIP back in 2003.