The JHU Business Plan Competition allows young entrepreneurs the opportunity to develop a business plan around their novel idea or innovative technology. Student teams compete in three categories (General Enterprise & Technology, Medical Technology & Life Sciences, and Social Enterprise) for a total of $36,000 in prizes.
The 2021 competition will be completely virtual.
Want to learn more about our competitors’ innovative ventures? Though judge and competitor registration is closed, you can still register to observe pitches on competition day. Simply choose the “general admission” registration type when completing the registration form.
The 2021 JHU BPC Keynote Speaker
Dr. Maria Alexandra Artunduaga is a translational physician-scientist and CEO with expertise in bio-engineering, public health, and implementation science, and has led many NSF, NIH, and Gates-funded technology projects. She invented a novel acoustic-based technology for lung function monitoring that has the potential to predict when respiratory decline will occur days in advance. Her product’s first application is in COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), a condition that took her grandmother’s life. She is now working with a team of engineers, designers, and machine learning experts to bring her invention to market with her startup company Respira Labs, which has secured almost $1M in grants and angel investments, and which was accepted into Stanford’s StartX accelerator. The Silicon Valley Business Journal named Maria Silicon Valley’s 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year, as well as one of its “40 Under 40” honorees in 2019. She was chosen as one of “100 Rising Stars” that same year by The Business Journals’ Young Executives Influencers. Maria has published in The New England Journal of Medicine (first authorship) and Nature, and has received more than 40 prizes, scholarships, grants, and fellowships. She has an MD from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia), did postdoctoral work in molecular genetics at Harvard, trained in plastic surgery at the University of Chicago, earned her MPH at University of Washington, and an MTM at UCSF-University of California, Berkeley.