I would not recommend this. 200 hours writing a business plan that you could have spent building version one? This is the way startups would begin life in the Soviet Union, if it still existed.
Business plan contests are only good if (a) they take near zero time (i.e. you simply submit a business plan you've aready written) and (b) the judges are people you want to impress.
While that might be true I firmly believe that writing the plan helped us to have a much better focus for our application. Also, the 200 hours was for both writing the plan and building the prototype.
for bay area folk interested in seeing what a Bplan competition is all about, the final presentations for the UC Berkeley Bplan is Thursday, April 26th.
Lots of companies in Cambridge, UK, start up from business plan competitions. Sure, the really top entrepreneurs may turn there noses up at such competitions but the rest benefit so much and more people understand the start-up process.
Also the sponsors love it and provide food and wine for the networking events.
Then the Mums and Dads also read about start-ups in the news and people everywhere are more supportive of entrepreneurship
Business plan contests are only good if (a) they take near zero time (i.e. you simply submit a business plan you've aready written) and (b) the judges are people you want to impress.