Eric Elias, who graduated with a degree in finance in 2007, took part in the competition in his senior year, but ran into technical issues that kept his group from being successful. This year, he was a member of SoMoLend—a peer-to-peer lending website that was one of the three teams to win this year’s start-up competition sponsored by the University’s Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. The prize was a $50,000 investment from the center.

The site, which Elias’ team is pitching to different regional investors over coming weeks, aims to link lending institutions to local businesses.

“It’s kind of like micro-lending, but for communities,” explained Ken Harrington, director of the Skandalaris Center. “It allows people to potentially form those relationships in a local economy … it serves a function that we’ve lost with the institutionalization of banks.”

The win in this year’s competition allowed SoMoLend to hire Elias as a full-time team member, as its director of product management.

“It was a $50,000 award, and we basically turned over that award to make a hire,” said SoMoLend Founder and CEO Candace Klein. “So we now have a full time employee committed to improving our technology and maximizing our customer experience.”

This year was the first time that three different teams won the competition, with the Skandalaris Center awarding more than $150,000, about double the normal amount. Harrington said many students took part in the competition, including one student team that won a $5,000 cash prize.

“I suspect probably 50% [of the participants] were students,” he said. “A lot of the teams are supported by students.”

Although the business is based in Cincinnati, Elias said it will continue to have a hold in the St. Louis community.

“I think our product development is going to happen in Cincinnati but the company and the platform we’re building will continue expanding, including working with St. Louis area investors as well as lending institutions,” he said.

Elias’ involvement in the St. Louis entrepreneurial community has included lecturing at the Nexus Leadership Program and serving as a mentor at the recent StartUp Weekend St. Louis, where individuals and teams met downtown to develop novel web-based or mobile applications in groups.

Junior Stan Rosenthal, a member of the Washington University Technology Entrepreneurs (WUTE) who worked with Elias over the weekend to develop an application to contact Congress-people through Twitter, said Elias has come to speak with the group and is continuing to stay in contact.

“We had an event last week where we had three alumni fly in to talk about their start-up—Schoology—so Eric came to that,” Rosenthal said. “We’re planning on continuing on our StartUp Weekend project [and] he’ll definitely keep in the loop with WUTE events.”

The company beat out 15 other teams to win the first place prize of $20,000.

“[The competition] was for student entrepreneurs, and most of the semi-finalists ended up being MBA students. We were one of the few [part]undergrad teams in the competition,” said 2011 graduate Dave Spandorfer, co-founder of Janji.

The 2011 UCCS Sports/Outdoors Business Plan Competition had three criteria: a presentation, question and answer session and business plan. The rules required at least half of the principals to be currently enrolled in either college or graduate school.

“It was tough going into a competitive atmosphere with so many established teams that are older. The key is to remain confident throughout the presentation and answer the questions,” senior and Janji co-founder, Michael Burnstein, said. “The average teams [members] were around 28 years old.”

The competition is the first in the world to focus solely on Sports and Outdoors new venture concepts.

“The best part of the event was the feedback we got from judges and the validation of our idea. We know we have a really important cause and a great product. To hear so many people support Janji was really encouraging,” Spandorfer said.

Janji plans to help solve the water shortage and malnutrition crisis throughout the world by engaging runners in America to raise funds and awareness for these problems.

Two varieties of running shorts are available for sale on RunJanji.com. A portion of the proceeds from each purchase will benefit charities in either Kenya or Haiti.

“Run for Kenya” shorts purchases will help supply water to Kenyans via a partnership with Water.org. A portion of proceeds from “Run for Haiti” shorts purchases will go toward the Medika Mamba—a proven nutritional formula made by Meds and Foods for Kids and produced in Haiti.

Currently, only men’s shorts are listed for sale on the website.

The business, originally named Edele, won a $15,000 prize in the Skandalaris Center’s YouthBridge Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition last spring.

“We changed the name because no one could remember how to say it, and it was confusing with the singer Adele,” Spandorfer said. “The word Janji means ‘promise’ [in Malay].”

According to Burnstein, the prize money will help cover general startup costs such as inventory, website construction and graphic design.

Janji is led by current University students Burstein, junior David Hamm, sophomore Sarah Fisher and recent graduates Spandorfer and Kenny Fairleigh. All are currently or have previously been members of Washington University’s cross country team.

Spandorfer is thankful for the University’s support in helping Janji achieve success in the UCCS competition.

“There was no way we could have won without the support of the Skandalaris Center. Their entrepreneurship program and their continual support has been critical in taking Janji from an idea to something real,” he said.

The shorts will be released this February in St. Louis at Big River Running, and nationally this April.

The Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies reaches 709 undergraduate students and 220 graduate students. It hosts events such as the Olin Cup Competition and the YouthBridge Social Enterprise & Innovation Competition (SEIC), which invest thousands of dollars in startup and mission-based businesses every year.

According to Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center, the center is different from many programs across the nation, as it is not part of the University’s business school.

“We can pull students together from all areas of the University,” Harrington said. “That results in a lot of good ideas and learning.”

Harrington attributed the center’s recent ascent in rankings to its multidisciplinary focus. Only 35 percent of students participating in the Skandalaris Center’s programs are from the business school.

“We focus more on the spawning of ideas and providing the curriculum to develop their entrepreneurial skills,” Harrington said. “A lot of schools focus on the venture and business, but what we do is focus on the ideas and people. It is really surprising to see how many come from other schools.”

In addition to its events during the academic year, the Skandalaris Center funds summer internships at startup ventures for 25 students.

The center also holds “Coffee with the Experts” to allow current students to have one-on-one meetings with experts in the entrepreneurial field. Another program offered through the center is IdeaBounce, through which anyone can submit ideas for businesses or inventions and pitch them to a panel consisting of community partners, including venture capital firms, incubators and other local entrepreneurs, according to the Skandalaris Center’s website.

“We have really focused on entrepreneurship as something that relates to all the schools and all the disciplines,” Harrington said.

Harrington said he believes that the Skandalaris Center’s lack of affiliation with the business school, as well as its encouragement of students’ ideas and passions—rather than just the business aspect of entrepreneurship—has provided students with a forum to express what they want to see improved in the world.

Each school in the University serves as a base for a different type of entrepreneurship; most notably, the George Warren Brown School of Social Work specializes in social ventures, while the John M. Olin School of Business specializes in commercial ventures.

“It suits the University’s mission of putting the faculty and students first at Wash. U.,” Harrington said.

Courtesy of Dave Spandorfer

A student sports a pair of shorts sold by Edele, a student business that sells running shorts. The business won a $15,000 prize in a competition.

A new business run by current University students, Edele, will be selling running shorts and donating a portion of their proceeds to charity. The business won a $15,000 prize in the Skandalaris Center’s YouthBridge Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition (SEIC) to get the business started.

The team of undergraduates performed well in the competition, which is typically dominated by graduates and community members. Edele won two of the seven prizes awarded this year.

According to Edele CEO Dave Spandorfer, a senior, it is the most money an undergraduate team has ever made in the competition.

Now the team hopes to use that money to effect a real international change.

The business will sell athletic shorts for $40—the same price that Nike sells its running shorts for, and $6 more than comparable shorts cost without the Nike logo. But rather than collecting the extra $6 cost as profit, the company plans to donate the money to organizations combating malnutrition in developing countries.

When Spandorfer and his friends on the cross-country team noticed that athletes pay $6 more for Nike shorts than non-name-brand shorts of similar quality, they came up with their business idea—to sell similar shorts and give the extra $6 to charity.

“Nike puts their money into athlete’s sponsorship and expensive marketing; our goal is to create a product where that money goes toward fighting something fundamental,” Spandorfer said.

Spandorfer said that tutoring underprivileged students from other countries gave the group an idea of how to specifically direct the funds.

“I had tutored refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, and got to know these people and their back stories,” Spandorfer said. “You have this idea of wanting to do good, this idea of helping all these people; and you feel so lucky as a runner to have access to clean water, and plenty of food. Being able to give back was really important to us.”

Beyond the company’s product, group members are working to ensure that the factory producing the shorts in Vietnam is socially conscious with its workers’ conditions.

“I think that it’s really clever,” said Ken Harrington, managing director of the Skandalaris Center and one of the competition’s judges. “It combines design, athletics, social consciousness—and it’s integrating it into this new blending of for-profit and not-for-profit thinking.”

According to Spandorfer, 97 stores in 27 states agreed to sell Edele’s product—including every running store in St. Louis. He noted that potential customers have responded positively as well.

“We asked 249 runners between the ages of 17 and 75, and 92 percent said they would be willing to pay more or would consider to pay more for a socially conscious product,” Spandorfer said. “And just from the people that we’ve talked to—we’ve been flabbergasted by the sort of response rate we’ve gotten.”

Spandorfer hopes that over time the company will expand beyond running shorts and into other sorts of running apparel.

Edele intends to use the $15,000 in grants to begin selling the shorts by February 2012.

The committee (SSF) will fund student initiatives to make their sustainable ideas a reality. The committee will host IdeaBounce from 1:00 to 2:15 p.m. on Sunday in Umrath Hall, in cooperation with the Skandalaris Center and the McDonnell Academy Global Energy and Environment Partnership’s Global Energy Future summit.

The fund received $11,900 in Student Union money when the student body voted to approve a referendum in the spring.

SSF aims to fund projects that increase environmental awareness and make the campus more environmentally friendly.

“We’re looking for all types of ideas to make campus more sustainable and to educate students about sustainable issues, so anything from art installations to starting green businesses on campus to energy saving measures,” said senior Alex Christensen, student fund manager.

Junior Ellie Cooper, another student fund manager, believes the fund will benefit everyone interested in sustainability, in addition to students who are not involved.

“The fund is also going to serve as a way to kind of aggregate desires from students and also the willingness of the administration and facilities and…we have on campus together so it’s a way to match people up who are all interested in the same thing,” Cooper said. “We want it to really reach people who don’t live and breathe sustainability that either makes them more aware of their habits or teaches them something new.”

Those in attendance at IdeaBounce will have a chance to pitch their ideas, including the potential costs and resources that they will need. The committee will then choose some projects they’ll ask to provide a full proposal.

The judges are Deb Howard, the interim dean of sustainability; Hannah Roth, one of the Sustainability Fund Committee members and professor in the architecture school; and Art Ackermann, the associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and management.

IdeaBounce will parallel the fund’s normal application round. Students who do not participate in the event will be able to present preliminary proposals to the committee by Oct. 8. SSF will then ask certain projects for more information and give final decisions to students by November.

The fund will handle more than approved projects. Groups will also receive a liaison from the committee to ensure that their project gets carried out and implemented.

SSF has already received several projects, including a compact fluorescent lamp exchange on campus and a bicycle-powered smoothie maker.

Each year, the Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition (SEIC) awards between $25,000 and $35,000 to winning business teams that present innovative business solutions to social problems.

Four years ago, YouthBridge, a 135-year-old foundation supporting youth-focused social ventures, partnered with the Skandalaris Center in the Olin Business School to found the SEIC and create the YouthBridge Award. YouthBridge committed half a million dollars over the course of five years to facilitate the creation of innovative business solutions that can benefit the St. Louis community.

“This is the first year YouthBridge became the name sponsor of the competition. They were the organization that, four years ago, got the SEIC up and running, and now they’re committed to help us continue that program,” said II Luscri, student services coordinator of the Skandalaris Center.

Other sponsors include the Incarnate Word Foundation, Deaconess Foundation and the Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis.

Although the business school offers many entrepreneurship courses that help students develop their business plans, the competition is not only for business students. In fact, unlike the Olin Cup Competition—which requires at least one member of the team to be a University alumnus or student—the SEIC is open to anyone.

“The SEIC allows people to not only have ideas but to have support and realize their ideas,” said sophomore Atima Lui, owner of the student-run business Salon 40.

The SEIC launched last week with a team formation workshop. Later events include workshops on executive summaries, elevator pitches and business plans. Three rounds of competition involve a panel of more than 30 judges, all experts in various fields and industries. The first-place team is awarded $50,000 and the second-place team $20,000. An individual student award of $5,000 is also given out each year.

As in previous years, the competition began on ideabounce.com, an online forum where students can post and discuss potential business ideas.

“We already have 15 people declaring interest in the competition,” Luscri said on Monday, only three days after the competition began. “We have more students and organizations involved than ever before.”

This May, Rupununi Learners, an organization dedicated to bringing modern libraries to Guyana, received $25,000 as one of the five winning projects of 2009.

“I had maybe some of the right instincts, but I didn’t have any of the skills,” said Alice Layton, a former social worker who founded Rupununi Learners. “[The SEIC exposed] me to a knowledge base that I didn’t have, connected me to people with skills that I didn’t have and helped me develop ideas into plans.”

Other teams are similarly appreciative of gains from the competition.

“SEIC [gave us] that framework for finding out that [The Exchange] was a good idea. We didn’t enter to win; we entered to find out if it was good idea or not,” said Melanie Scheetz, founder of The Exchange project. “There is no way we could have come up with our plan without SEIC.”

Despite its successes, the Skandalaris Center continues to look for ways to expand and improve the competition, Luscri said. The Investor Presentation and Team Formation workshops are new additions to the SEIC this year—a response to the participant feedback from previous years.

“It would be better to have the center establish topics and ask [experts] to speak specifically on one topic,” Layton said. “I wanted fewer topics and more focused topics.”

A suggestion by Scheetz is to have more student involvement on teams that are not coming from the University community.

“I absolutely would have loved student involvement to help write up the plans,” she said. “We have to recruit Wash. U. students versus having them available to us.”

With YouthBridge Community Foundation now a name sponsor of the SEIC, the initiative to better the St. Louis community has continued to grow and evolve.

“The vision that business skills can improve social organizations needs to be matched with the vision that social organizations can improve business,” Layton said. “It has to be a two-way street. The nonprofit world should be impacting the business community.”