Holloway Competition Details

The UNH E-Center is the co-curricular heart of ideas, innovation, and entrepreneurship at the University of New Hampshire and is open to all students from any college or major. They offer 1:1 coaching and mentoring - everything from a quick question to on-going weekly sessions are available at no cost to you.  

ECenter executive director Joshua Cyr has been the faculty advisor for many winning Holloway teams.  Request a meeting for a one-on-one coaching session. 

Pre-competition information sessions are designed to help students recruit teammates who specialize in disciplines they may personally be lacking: a business student to help develop a business plan from a financial and marketing perspective, an engineering student to help conceptualize how a product should be designed, a computer science student to create a software prototype. Prospective ventures and services can span any number of fields of expertise! These already took place earlier in February.

1. Participants must provide honest and accurate information in registration, written materials, pitches, and all other aspects of the Competition.

2. Participants must treat staff, faculty, volunteers, judges, fellow competitors and all others involved with the Competition with respect and professionalism.

3. Participants commit to participating in all rounds of the Competition to which they have been invited. 

4. The judges’ decisions are final.   

5. Participants understand that the Competition is a public event and have adjusted their intellectual property approach accordingly. 

6. In-kind prizes will be awarded to finalists based on the discretion of the sponsor and/or the Competition Chair. Cash prizes are awarded according to the schedule on the Competition website. 

7. The Competition Chair can remove any team that violates these rules.

8. Prize money will be divided equally amongst all registered team members and paid directly to individual team members according to USNH rules for such payments.

Answer the following questions to the best of your ability. Entries are limited to two single-spaced pages with no smaller than 11-point font. You do not need to include copies of the questions in your entry, but please number your answers 1 through 10. Please also include the name of each team member and the name of your product/service/company.

1) Entrepreneurship is commonly thought of as an exercise in problem solving, so to start things off, tell us about the problem you are interested in solving.

2) Next, tell us about your solution. At this point, your solution can simply be an idea or vision for a product or service, it does NOT need to be a prototype, working app, etc. [Examples: Uber offered a new solution to the problem of taxis being hard to find]

3) Describe how your solution is better than current solutions?  Think about how your solution is more valuable from the perspective of potential customers than current solutions (this will form the core of your “customer value proposition”). [Hint: Common value propositions include being easier to use, less expensive, more reliable, safer, more accurate etc.]

4) Next, tell us about how your solution works and how you plan to protect it? Is it built on an underlying technology? Is it a different approach to offering a service? Is it a new kind of process? etc. Is there any intellectual propriety (Patents, Copyrights, Trademarks) associated with your solution? If not, how do you plan to protect it from competitors?

5) One option for entering the Holloway Competition is to present someone else’s idea. If you are presenting your own idea, please go to Question 6. If you are presenting someone else’s idea, please specify the owners and provide written permission to the Chair to present this idea at the Holloway Competition.

6) Now, tell us about the market for your solution. Who will be your first customers (i.e. early adopters) and how many are there? How about other groups of customers? Add these together to estimate the overall market size for your solution and share how this overall market changing (i.e. is it growing, etc.)

7) Describe your revenue model and pricing models. How did you decide on these? Offer as much detail and support as possible. [Hint: A revenue model shows how you will be paid for providing your solution. Common revenue models include subscription (e.g. Netflix), ad-supported (e.g. Google), “Freemium” (e.g. LinkedIn), and direct-sales (e.g. Tesla)]

8) Describe your sales and distribution plans. How will you reach your customers to let them know about your solution? If they decide to purchase your solution, how will you deliver it to them?

9) Tell us about your team. Cover your backgrounds, skills, connections to this problem/solution etc. Do you have any business, technical, or industry experts that have agreed to advise you in developing your venture?

10) Help us understand how you arrived at your answers to questions 1-9. Did you conduct interviews with customers, industry experts, key partners etc.? Did you administer any surveys?  Did you analyze reputable secondary data sources? Please offer as much detail as possible.

Success in the entrepreneurship depends, in part, on how effectively you communicate your elements of venture. Strong presentation skills make your “pitch” more effective and can gain support from key stakeholders. You job is to tell a story of your venture that connects emotionally, as well as rationally, and present it with energy and conviction. 

First round video submissions must adhere to a strict maximum length of 90 seconds. 

Your stand-alone, original video pitch should highlight the following: 

• The problem that your product or service is intended to address.

• Your proposed solution – that is, how your product or service addresses the market need.

• How it will attract customer and sales (your value proposition) and investors’ interests. 

Technical Specifications: 

• .mov or .mp4 file

• Resolution of 1920 x 1080 (HD)

• Codec: H.264 set to a minimum of "medium high" quality (Note: most programs ask you to specify quality on a range from Lowest to Highest - somewhere around medium high to high works well, or if it's a numerical scale, about three-quarters of the way up.)

• Challenge entrants in all tracks are encouraged to contact UNH’s Parker Media Lab with questions about video formatting. PML is located in the Dimond Library on UNH’s Durham Campus. You can contact them for advice by phone at (603) 862-1747 to speak with any of the staff team, or by email to reach PML’s manager michael.mcintire@unh.edu.