Missoula News

Starting a Business

Pharmacy Entrepreneurs Win Business School Contest

By Jonathan Weber , 5-11-07

With $50,000 in total prize money on the line, University of Montana business school students last night pitched their start-up ideas to a group of seasoned busines professionals - and the big winner was a plan to buy up and re-focus independent small-town pharmacies. Jason Glidden, David Jurenka and Joseph Adams developed the idea for “Hometown Pharmacy” on the theory that a lot of local pharmacists are ready to retire even as aging baby boomers move to rural areas and seek more medical and pharmaceutical services. They now have $10,000 to take the idea to the next level.

The other big winner of the night - and my personal favorite - was Genre and Mode, a company that aims to develop fashion-forward accessories for diabetics to tote their medicine and equipment. Sarah Greenfield, herself a juvenile diabetic, was awarded the special prize for exceptional passion and vision, and the company took the $5,000 second-place prize in the competition. rTribes, an idea that grew out of the UM backcountry ski club, took third place; the business aims to build a social network and group buying coop for high-end recreational gear and was in some ways the most sophisticated of all the plans, but also one of the most challenging as a business model.

In the “lifestyle” category, the winner was the crowd favorite: an organic grocery store in an historic building in Uptown Butte. Overall, the evening was an impressive display of youthful entrpreneurial energy: congrats to all the competitors, and to business school professor Jeff Shays, Frontier Angel Fund founder Liz Marchi, and the many alums and local businesses that have made the competition a major annual event and one of the more lucrative contests of its type in the country.

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