The MIT GSW is the world’s premier workshop dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship and building entrepreneurial ecosystems globally. Each year in a different location we bring together over 300 entrepreneurial leaders, executives, next generation entrepreneurs, professors, financiers, government agents and private supporters to build connections between cultures, regions and backgrounds.

Over three power-packed days we stimulate discussion, generate ideas and share best practices, while networking and socializing in some of the world’s most memorable and inspiring locations. Since 1998 we have organized 13 international workshops spanning 6 continents and welcomed participants from over 70 nations.

The Cyprus Entrepreneurship Competition, CyEC, is a Business Plan Competition, organized on an annual basis since 2003. CyEC aims to nurture entrepreneurial culture among young scientists in Cyprus and challenge them to transform their ideas into real business opportunities and to leading companies of tomorrow. Over 100 teams have taken part in the annual competitions completed thus far. In its seven year history, CyEC alumni have successfully launched start-up companies, some with significant investments and revenues.

The UNICA Entrepreneurship Competition for Students and Young Researchers aims at:

• Promoting a culture of entrepreneurship among the students and young researchers of UNICA member Universities.

• Becoming the vehicle for the young researchers to learn to compete
  and collaborate at European level, thus contributing to the creation of
  the European higher education and research area.

• Enhancing the culture of entrepreneurship which contributes to the
  abilities of UNICA Universities to innovate and link high quality
  research with the needs of contemporary society.

• Improving the confidence of the participants in their own entrepreneurial skills and capabilities.

This paper describes how entrepreneurial firms can use superior architectural knowledge to open up a technical system to gain strategic advantage. The strategy involves, first, identifying “bottlenecks” in the existing system, and then creating a new open architecture that isolates the bottlenecks in modules and allows others to connect to the system at key interfaces. An entrepreneurial firm with limited financial resources can then focus on supplying superior bottleneck modules, and while outsourcing and allowing complementors to supply non-bottleneck components. I show that a firm pursuing this strategy will have a higher return on invested capital (ROIC) than competitors with a less modular, closed architecture. Over time, the more open firm can drive the ROIC of competitors below their cost of capital, causing them to shrink and possibly exit the market. The strategy was used by Sun Microsystems in the 1980s and Dell Computer in the 1990s.