Hosted by

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 : Click on "Enter MN Cup" at the top right of this page to create your MN Cup account.

STEP 2 : Complete the contest entry form which includes a short summary (100 words or less) and 4 questions (500 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 midnight on May 23rd.

When you return to the site in the future, the top right will say "Manage Your Entry" and just click on that to get access to your submission.

Each time you make an edit and hit submit, we will update your record and email you a receipt 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, how to answer the questions that investors most want to know about their idea.

For others, that advance further into the competition, there may be the opportunity expand your network by meeting leading investors, develop relationships in the business community, get valuable media exposure and even win the top prizes of seed capital and professional advisory services.

Finally, we are hopeful that the tools that we are providing in the resource center and the short term access that is being provided by the James J. Hill Reference Library will prove to be useful to you as an entrepreneur, regardless of where you finish in the competition.

For feedback from some of last years entrants, please look at the testimonials page in this section of the site.