Who How Why

Who Should Enter

This program is for Minnesota's entrepreneurs, inventors and small business people. It is for those individuals or early stage businesses that are pursuing their dreams and working on their breakthrough business idea.

Whether you are at the point of inception or already have created a company and are pursuing your breakthrough idea, this program is intended to provide support for you as an entrepreneur.

How to Enter

Entering the Minnesota Cup is easy:

STEP 1: Anytime after March 28th, click on "Enter the Competition" from the Minnesota Cup homepage to begin creating your 2011 MN Cup account.

STEP 2: Complete the contest entry form that includes a short executive summary (100 words or less) and four questions (400 words or less) that help us understand your idea and how you will make it a success. These four questions are :

- Description of Product and / or Service
- Market Size / Potential / Opportunity
- Sales and Marketing Plan
- Operating Plan

Note: If you are not yet ready to complete the form, you can come back later, login and complete your entry. Also, we encourage you to draft your responses off-line, in a word processor so you have access to spell checking, etc.

STEP 3: Continue to work on your entry. You can come back to the MN Cup site as many times as you like to edit and revise your entry through 11:59pm on May 20th.

When you return to the site in the future, the top right will say "Manage Your Entry". Click on that button to gain access to your submission.

Each time you make an edit and hit submit, our system will automatically update your record and send you a confirmation email with your changes.

If you have any questions or run into any issues in entering, please email support@breakthroughideas.org and we will provide assistance.

Why Enter?

Our hope is that in some fashion, we are able to assist each entrant on their journey as an entrepreneur.

For some, it will be a chance to critically think about how to articulate their business idea or how to answer the questions that investors most want to know about their idea.

For others who advance further into the competition, there may be opportunities to expand your networks by meeting leading investors, developing relationships in the business community, gaining valuable media exposure and even winning the top prizes of seed capital and professional advisory services from our partners.

Finally, we are hopeful that the tools that we are providing in the resource center will prove to be useful to you as an entrepreneur, regardless of where you finish in the competition.

For feedback from previous year's entrants, please see the testimonials page.