Winners of 2008 Harvard Business School Business Plan Contest Ring Opening Bell at New York Stock Exchange
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Listen to an interview with Hayat Sindi of Diagnostics-For-All 
The Diagnostics-For-All team,recent winners of both the HBS and MIT business plan contests,ring in today's trading at the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: NYSE Euronext BOSTON — Members of the start-up company Diagnostics-For-All were in New York City this morning to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange. The company, which recently won the social enterprise track of Harvard Business School's 12th annual Business Plan Contest, will provide health care agencies and commercial organizations with a new generation of point-of-care tools to address the diagnostic and clinical management needs of the global medical community. Diagnostics-For-All was also the winner of the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition this year. The seven-member team included HBS second-year students Jon Puz and Gilbert Tang; HBS first-year student Krishna Yeshwant; Harvard School of Public Health student Kyra Bobinet; Hayat Sindi, a Visiting Scholar in Professor George Whiteside's lab in Harvard University's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology; Roozbeh Ghaffari, a recent Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology graduate and currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Freeman Lab at the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics; and Carol Waghorne, a participant in Harvard Medical School's Scholar in Clinical Sciences Program and a Research Fellow in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. This year, Harvard University's Office of Technology Development (OTD) is providing a one-to-one "match" of the cash component of any prize for business plans that plan to commercialize Harvard University technologies. Based on technologies developed in Professor George Whiteside's lab in Harvard's Department of Chemistry, Diagnostics-For-All is one of two winners of the 2008 HBS Business Plan Contest which qualified for this match. The OTD match is one example of efforts to establish closer links between HBS and OTD in order to involve HBS students and faculty in the process of commercializing Harvard technologies and provide students with more entrepreneurial opportunities. Diagnostics-For-All is an example of startups based on Harvard innovations and part of a portfolio of 20 Harvard technology startups that OTD has helped catalyze in the past two years. The HBS Business Plan Contest is a student-run event. Cosponsored this year by the HBS Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise Clubs, it provides an integrative learning experience for participants, drawing on all facets of the Harvard MBA curriculum. It is one of several special programs funded by the Rock Center, which was created through the generosity of pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock (MBA '51). In 2003, Rock donated $25 million to Harvard Business School to support the entrepreneurship faculty and their research, fellowships for MBA and doctoral students, symposia and conferences, and new outreach efforts to extend the impact of the School's extensive work in this field. To further contribute to its research and course development efforts, Harvard Business School also established the California Research Center in Silicon Valley in 1997. Harvard Business School offered the country's first business school course in entrepreneurship in 1947. Today, members of the HBS Entrepreneurial Management Unit, which numbers more than 30 faculty, teach a required course to some 900 students in the first year of the MBA program as well as a broad selection of electives to second-year students. The United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship has recognized the Harvard Business School entrepreneurship program as the best in the country. |
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