From pilot project to springboard to success: Munich Business Plan Competition celebrates 25th anniversary

For 25 years, the Munich Business Plan Competition has enabled (prospective) founders to use expert feedback to put their business model on a solid footing and prepare their market entry. 

In the fall of 1996, the “Munich Business Plan Competition” was launched on the initiative of the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs as one of the first business plan competitions in Germany. The aim was to encourage young people to set up their own businesses and to support them in realizing their business ideas. The successful business plan competitions in the USA, which were aimed at university students, served as a model. In Munich, too, the universities with their considerable innovation potential were a key driver of the beginning of the project. 

Since then, the Munich Business Plan Competition has developed further: Meanwhile, entrepreneurs with innovative ideas in all company phases and of any sector benefit from a very broad range of support, e.g. a special training program, top-class network events and above all an investor network. In a unique setup with both business angels and institutional investors, start-ups are given access to optimal financing. 

With technology topics in mutual focus, Bayern Kapital has been a strong partner of the Munich Business Plan Competition from the very beginning. Many former participants in the competition have thus been able to benefit from rounds of financing. That includes successful companies such as Pieris or Voxeljet, from which the latter belongs to those start-ups that continue the competition’s success story on the stock exchange floors.