300px-BMC_Canada_RedWelcome to Canada’s Business Model Competition® 2016!

Join us on March 4th – 5th 2016 in Halifax Nova Scotia for the third edition of Canada’s Business Model Competition ®

The competition is hosted and organized by the Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship in collaboration with Dalhousie University’s Rowe School of Business. Canada’s Business Model Competition ® has been sanctioned as the national qualifier competition for the International Business Model Competition with the winner advancing to the International Business Model  Competition (other contenders may still apply through the general application found on the IBMC Apply page).

The winners of Canada’s Business Model Competition ® will share in $50,000 in cash and in-kind prizes generously provided by our partner Deloitte Canada

What is Canada’s Business Model Competition ®

Over 85 percent of new businesses fail within a few years, often because they try to plan their way to success. What’s worse, research suggests that writing a business plan has no correlation with success. It’s time to change. Canada’s Business Model Competition ® represents a radical departure from the past and the crest of a new paradigm in entrepreneurship.

The CBMC is not a business plan competition. Participants won’t be rewarded for doing lots of library research, drawing fancy graphs, or crafting the perfect sales pitch to venture capitalists. Instead the CBMC rewards students for 1) breaking down their idea into the key business model hypotheses, 2) getting outside the building and testing their assumptions with customers, 3) applying Customer Development / Lean Startup principles to make sure they nail the solution, and 4) learning to pivot (or change) until they have a customer-validated business model.

Ultimately we believe this will dramatically improve the new student’s chances of success. The CBMC is Canada’s official national qualifier competitions for the International Business Model Competition, the first international competition of its kind and is open to all students enrolled at an accredited four-year institution of higher education anywhere in the world.

How does a business model differ from a traditional Business plan?

Canada’s Business Model Competition ® is about recognizing that any new venture is just a guess at a problem /solution and the only valid way to test whether those guesses are right is to “get outside the building” and start working with customers. So what exactly is the difference between a business model and a business plan?