300 Groups From Around the World Competed and the Winner was SelectedWorld renowned business strategy consulting firm, McKinsey & Company held the Virtual Venture Competition, pitting groups from all over the globe against each other, to create businesses in the virtual world Second Life.
The goal - create a business plan, and implement it, using seed money provided by McKinsey.
Out of the thousands of entrants, three hundred groups were accepted and funded for the competition. From these three hundred, ten were selected for the "virtual semi-finals", conducted inside the Second Life environment.
From these ten, six were selected to compete in the real world finals, held in Kitzbühel, Austria. Some of the ideas included a three-dimensional dating service, an ecommerce feedback system, and a virtual corporate team building service.
The winner was a two member group, whose product was "FinderBot", a virtual sales assistant.
Prizes for the winners included an iPhone, career counseling and business training by McKinsey.
Leader from the winning team, Alan Ross, explained, "FinderBot gives virtual store owners a virtual sales assistant that they can train to help customers when they are away. We created a working prototype and a creative business plan that we presented to the panel of judges, including a partner at McKinsey. They were impressed enough to award us first prize, beating even some of the groups that made money already. FinderBot is a great product, since it creates ROI for our customers."
When asked what was next, Ross continued, "Well, it looks like we'll be doing business development with McKinsey so we can figure out how to monetize it. It's one of those super cool ideas that just needs some funding, but with McKinsey backing us, we could essentially become the Google of Second Life and other virtual worlds." Ross concluded, "The most amazing thing to me was the global nature of the competition. I was the only American there, which drove home the point that these were truly some of the smartest people from all over the globe."
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