For hundreds of years, entrepreneurs have started new ventures based on a carefully prepared written document known as the Business Plan. Essentially unchanged throughout that time, the traditional business plan includes sections on things like Organizational Background and Product Descriptions, as well as Operational, Marketing, Financing and Staffing Plans.

Business plans are most frequently written when a company realizes that it needs to raise money to finance its startup or expansion, whether such funding comes from banks, grants, angel investors or venture capitalists. Dozens of books on ‘business best practices’ remind entrepreneurs that the Business Plan should never be static, and should instead be the day-to-day guide book for company’s direction and operations. However, this advice is rarely heeded, and most business plans quickly become outmoded, gathering dust on a bookshelf as an out-of-date artifact.

This challenge is to design the next-generation business plan, taking full advantage of all of the information and active data resources available in the world of Web 2.0.  The idea is to describe exactly what such a ‘living’ business plan would look like, starting from all of the components of a traditional plan (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_of_a_business_plan for background) and enhancing it with interactive resources and live information relevant to a business and its markets. Some obvious components would be management biographies automatically supplemented with LinkedIn profiles, competitive market analyses drawing on graphs from Compete and/or Alexa, customer lists and pipelines taken in real time from Salesforce.com, interactive analytics from Google or Chartbeat, live financials from QuickBooks online, etc.

We are issuing this challenge because as the market leader in the early-stage financing industry, Angelsoft provides the tools that are used by over 17,000 accredited investors in 45 countries to process over 3,500 business plans each month, and we would like to do our bit to expand the horizons of both entrepreneurs and investors to take advantage of the extraordinary power of new technologies.

Earnings: $1000 will go to the winner; $500 to the runner-up; $250 to each of two third place winners; and $100 to any honorable mentions Angelsoft selects.

Intellectual Property: All winning submissions including honorable mentions become property of Angelsoft, LLC.

SOLUTION DEADLINE

November 30, 2009