A team from the Mona School of Business (MSB) of the University of the West Indies (UWI) have emerged winners from a business plan competition for historically black US colleges and universities.

One of only 21 schools that participated in the Opportunity Funding Co-operation Innovation & Entrepreneurship (OFCIE) Competition and the only non-US based institution, the MSB team also walked away with the award for best presentation.

The 2011 team included Christene Gittens, Taja Simpson, Danielle Barnett and Rohan Hylton — all students of the institution’s part-time MBA programme.

MSB entries in the entrepreneurship competition, staged in Atlanta, are drawn from participants in the UWI’s internal competition on business plan development and presentation — the UWI Venture Competition (UWIVC).

UWIVC provides entrepreneurial opportunities and experiences to students and helps them to look at the big picture and apply all their conceptual and theoretical knowledge to a chosen project.

The winner of the UWIVC then travels to Atlanta for the US competition at OFCIE, who, if victorious, then continues on to the international competition Moot Corp, sponsored by the University of Texas, Austin.

“MSB first entered the OFCIE in the 2002/2003 competition, when it placed third — an accomplishment which they repeated in the following year. In the 2004/5 venture competition, they placed second, with a project on Ornamental Fish Farms,” said a release from MSB. “They again placed third in the 2005/6 competition. Last year, 2009/10, they returned to their winning ways, by taking the first place in presentation skills, and the third position for the business plan.”

OFCIE is a not-for-profit corporation created in 1970 to facilitate the ownership of for-profit businesses by minorities and other disadvantaged persons through the provision of investment capital. The team placing first wins a prize of US$15,000, with the objective being to win potential investors, who will help to make the project a reality.

The investment proposal for this year’s winning team was “The Jamaican Ginger Factory”, a project to revitalise the growth of Jamaican ginger, which has the reputation of being the world’s finest ginger.

UWIVC is a product of the Vincent HoSang Entrepreneurship Programme, funded by a Jamaican resident overseas, Vincent HoSang. Director of the Vincent HoSang Entrepreneurship programme is MSB’s Patricia Lothian and is co-ordinated by Chantelle Fuskin.