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ICE Contestant Community

Welcome to the ICE Contestant Community!  Here you can find out:

We want this to be a great resource for you and the community, so contact us or start a new thread if you have suggestions, questions, critiques – anything that you think would help support the efforts of entrepreneurs in the Clean Energy Cluster. 

Registration closes at 5PM on March 12 (extended deadline) – get your entry in early!

Get the Edge with Investors by Learning to Pitch -
No Business Plan Required, Mentors Provided

Get Your Idea Funded!

Are you an engineer with a great technology for changing the rules of the energy game? Or a marketing expert with a novel business concept for providing lower energy costs to consumers or commercial customers? Or do you 'just' have a lot of enthusiasm for working in a startup company with the potential to make a difference in our energy security and climate change problems?

We've had winners in each of those categories in the first two years of the $125K Ignite Clean Energy Business Presentation Competition. A few examples:

  • Solasta has a state-of-the-art nanomaterials technology that may revolutionize the efficiency - and economics - of solar cells;
  • PowerHouse Enterprises leverages the cost savings of modular building to bring to market cost-competitive, high efficiency homes that are beautiful and have solar cells;
  • Feed Resource Recovery is the brainchild of a Babson business school student who is using existing technology to process food waste into fuel and fertilizer;

Get a Team!

If you have an idea and a team, we'll supply you with at least one mentor. If you have an idea but need expertise in business or technology, we'll help you find teammates. If all you have is enthusiasm for working on a team doing clean energy business development - or you just want to get more experience at being an entrepreneur - we'll help you find a team.

We work to keep the Competition as accessible as possible to interested entrepreneurs: there are no fees and, unlike most competitions for entrepreneurs, no business plan is required, just a 3 - 5 page executive summary and a ten minute investor pitch. In fact, we encourage you to enter ICE07 even if there are other competitions you'd like to enter. The executive summary and probably the pitch will be required by any other competition, so why not get expert coaching and a mentor in the process?

Our goal is to help build the clean energy cluster in the Northeast by providing entrepreneurs with the tools and contacts to take their companies to the next level. Clusters are composed of companies at all levels, from the most cutting edge, high risk/high reward tech-based startup to the companies that offer supplies and services to the major corporations in the sector. While the high risk/high reward companies get the most attention, they are just one important component of the cluster. Thus, ICE is open to all compelling business ideas, from those based on the hottest technology to those that use old technology in a new way.

Why a Business Presentation Competition?

Investors are pitched tens to hundreds of business pitches every year, each one guaranteed to be a successful investment. How can you make your business stand out from the rest? Having a killer technology is great but investors invest in the team as much as in the technology. The way to give your company its best shot at being funded is to be able to pitch it quickly - ten minutes max - in a way that is compelling to the investor. A common complaint of VCs and business analysts is that CEO presentations are disorganized, self-serving, jargon-filled, or irrelevant. The Ignite Clean Energy program aims to give clean energy entrepreneurs a competitive edge in the funding race by training contestants in the best practices for creating money-winning presentations.

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