2024 New Venture Competition: Uniting Cutting Edge Ideas, Innovative Ventures, and Talented Alumni and Students
Summary
The New Venture Competition provides a rigorous platform through which students develop their business ideas as a positive force for change, commented Elise Bates (MBA 2000), who recently joined the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship as its new director. Complex societal challenges require innovative approaches, collaboration across sectors, humility, and the determination of the next generation of leaders, Amelia Angella (MBA 2001), director of the Social Enterprise Initiative, remarked. The New Venture Competition is one of our flagship programs within the portfolio of offerings that support HBS students and alumni in the pursuit of their entrepreneurial journeys, added Senior Lecturer Julia Austin, one of the Rock Center faculty co-chairs. Encouraging participants during the ceremony, Professor Shikhar Ghosh, the other faculty co-chair of the Rock Center, said, The New Venture Competition provides structure, support, and scaffolding for our students and alumni as they face the inevitable uncertainty and adversity that is part and parcel within the startup journey, enabling them to tackle some of the most pressing issues and opportunities of our timefrom climate change to healthcare inequities to AI and other new technologies that simultaneously encompass unprecedented risks and opportunities. In-kind sponsors were: All Stage, Case Smart Impact Capital, Foley Hoag LLP Law Firm, Harvard Innovation Labs, HubSpot for Startups, MassChallenge, and Wix.