The judges for the GW Business Plan Competition semifinal round met on Monday to decide which teams are going to the finals on April 11.  It was great to see so many good ideas, and to be able to send the best ones through.  But in my opinion the feedback the teams got was just as important as learning which ones would be in the running for a cash prize.

I was struck by how much tougher we Social Entrepreneurship track judges seemed to be than the main track judges, and I mentioned that to the man next to me, who happened to a vice president for AARP, which sponsors an Older-Adult Focused Innovation prize.  “There’s an age difference,” he pointed out.  Which was true: the Social Entrepreneurship judges were generally younger.

How much age was a factor, and if so why, I’m not sure.  But we seemed to be more focused on the credibility of the financial projections and the evaluations of the competitive landscape than our colleagues, who were more likely to go with their guts or argue on behalf of a business plan because they liked the overall concept or thought that the teams had a lot of passion.  I appreciate passion too, but I thought that the best way to evaluate a team’s passion was to assess how much work it had put into a viable business strategy.  Maybe the older, more experienced judges simply had more faith in their ability to instinctively recognize important intangibles.

With that said, all the teams moving forward deserve to be there.  I’m looking forward to seeing the winners.  And for the rest, now they can beef up their plans and try again next year.