After coming in second in the undergraduate competition at this year’s Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup Collegiate Business Plan Competition held in Oklahoma City in April, a group of five OU students defeated five other teams from Oklahoma, Arkansas and Nevada to win the $30,000 prize at the Tri-State Competition in Las Vegas. The team, FieldFocus, which provides innovative software for the oil and gas drilling industry that includes asset and personnel tracking tools, plus job management and big tracking, won after delivering the best business plan pitch. Team members include three Price students, Susan Moring, Parker Dooly and Caroline Trump as well as OU students, Jeffrey Rhea and Mubeen Shakir. The team was led by faculty advisor Robert Free, a fellow with OU’s Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth and was assisted in the business plan course taught by Lowell Busenitz, Michael F. Price Chair in Entrepreneurship. “From a professor's standpoint, instead of telling students, ‘you need to do this or that,' the bar for what is right gets set by venture capitalists, angels and experienced entrepreneurs who sit as judges in business plan competitions like the Governor's Cup,” Busenitz said. “These judges evaluate business plans based on what they know works in the real world and the challenges that the presented concept is likely to encounter. It is not what the professor says but it is the reality of the external market as seen by these experienced judges that is the last word.”
Undergraduate Team Wins Tri-State Governor’s Cup Competition
