> I have often thought academics were in some kind of fantasy world.

I ran into the rift between academia and the real world a few weeks ago, and it changed my perception of both, specifically in regards to software engineering.

I feel like academia studies software engineering practices with the goal of wanting to increase the quality of the product. They come to conclusions about how great all the best practices are and teach their students that they should be using all of them.

However, when I started trying to build a product with those methods, I realized that academia has the luxury of ignoring time. In industry, time is the enemy. You have to beat the competition, release before the market opportunity disappears, and in the case of startups you have to find a product that people will pay money for before you run out of money. If you build a product that nobody wants, who cares what your test coverage is? When time is against you, all the best practices in the world probably slow you down too much, so you have to be more judicious in your application of them.

I don't want to knock academia too much. I think it's still very valuable, but I have to agree with edw519 that the real magic happens when theory meets practice.

I think software engineering is probably an area where academia's at the most disadvantage in studying it, because it's so applied and context-specific. A truly successful software-engineering researcher would have to be at least part anthropologist/sociologist, and spend a lot of time on field work. Sort of similar to academic study of the business/management field.

Areas where you can decouple at least some parts of the theory, and apply them later, have more luck, I think. For example, Knuth does perfectly fine inventing algorithms in academia, because it's a pretty academia-friendly sort of pursuit, and many of them later do make it into the real world, so it's not totally ivory-tower.

Even the things that academia studies that can't be entirely decoupled, such as TDD, I think can still be applied in practice. You just have to take your context into consideration when deciding if it's appropriate. What is your deadline? How skilled is your team? etc.

I know a lot of these competitions are centered around industries outside IT like Medical Devices, Pharma, Clean Tech, Aerospace, etc.These industries are hard to boot strap into or do "lean". These competitions serve as a bridge into these communities for smart technologists and entrepreneurs. MIT's 100K definitely fits this mold.

That's a good point. The winners of two business plan competitions I attended recently built physical devices. Their inventions would be a lot harder to boot strap, especially the ones that have to pass FDA approval, but that doesn't prevent them from pivoting. I think the point of Steve's distinction between business "plans" and business "models" is that plans are static and models are designed to let you pivot.

For example, one of the winners at a business competition at my school was a guy who invented a new type of RF amplifier. His plan is to get it into cell phones. But what if it turns out that his amplifier would be a better match for another market? He can pivot by changing his market instead of changing his product.

While you congratulate the author because you both believe that business plans aren't the best vehicle for starting a company, he's actually in favor of business plan competitions, not against them. The changes he advocates--such as building a prototype and getting user feedback--are criteria already part of most competitions, however.

College business plan competitions exist to bring awareness of entrepreneurship to an academic setting. A typical judge is either an angel investor, venture capitalist, or successful entrepreneur. Interaction with judges allows both serious and non-serious contestants to improve their idea from round to round, even competition to competition. Among other things, these judges take into account what kind of leg work the entrepreneurs have done to support their entry.

As far as theory versus practice, real-world judges run the show. They are the ones who give feedback and pick winners, not academics.

Since students typically attend college far away from where their chosen industry is based, business plan competitions enable them to pitch their ideas to adults with a lot more experience than they or their professors have.

A large body of entries come from full-time undergraduate students who gain valuable feedback about one or more ideas they've been thinking about for years. The other group of people these competitions attract are PhD students seeking help to convince the college to make their research available for commercial licensing, subsequently founding a startup that licenses this same research the founder created as a student.