With a goal of helping young entrepreneurs avoid failure, Canada’s Business Model Competition will take place this Friday and Saturday at Dalhousie University.

Now in its fourth year, CBMC judges student teams from across the country based on their use of the lean canvas, which emphasizes speaking directly with potential customers and users of their business idea. Teams don’t receive points for library research or fancy graphs, but by showing how their business idea could legitimately find a place in its market.

Eighty-three per cent of businesses fail within their first year, said CBMC organizer Mary Kilfoil. By sticking with the business model canvas, she hopes the 52 businesses competing at this year’s CBMC won’t become part of that statistic.

“Teams that have gone through this process and have learned the skills of customer discovery are much more likely to launch businesses,” said Kilfoil, who heads Dal’s Starting Lean program, which teaches students to use the lean canvas.

The participants not only have the chance to become first-, second- or third-place winners and receive a shared $50,000 in cash and in-kind services from Deloitte, but also to network and receive mentorship throughout the weekend.

The overall winner of CBMC will go on to the International Business Model Competition, which will be held in April at the Microsoft Campus in California.

Read About Last Year's CBMC Winner, HeadsUp

The judges, who include representatives from the Business Development Bank of Canada, the University of North Carolina and The Next 36, among others, give feedback to the teams to help them develop further. Teams also receive mentoring from local entrepreneurs on Friday night to prepare them even more for their Saturday presentations.

“There are dinners, networking sessions, and everyone gets to meet one another, which adds real value to the nature and friendliness of the event,” Kilfoil said.

In conjunction with CMBC, the inaugural Canada’s Pitch Competition will also take place Friday and Saturday. (You can register to pitch or watch the event here.) Pitch 101, which teaches new entrepreneurs how to create one-minute pitches, is hosting the pitch competition to celebrate the university participants who completed the Pitch 101 program.

The reason for putting both competitions on at the same time is to show the Pitch 101 participants, who are in the ideation stage, what can happen once one works more on an idea and further develops a pitch.

The pitching competition participants can also participate in the networking events and dinners so that they can expand their networks and further their business ideas.

Kilfoil describes it as “a competition where there is tremendous learning—with, of course, an after party after the final pitches.”

The CBMC organizers, Kilfoil, Ed Leach and Akram Al-otumi, all work at the Norman Newman Centre for Entrepreneurship at Dalhousie.

Al-otumi is a graduate student himself, but also owns two businesses and is Manager of Programs and Projects at the Newman Centre.

Leach is the director at the Norman Newman Centre and oversees all the activities related to entrepreneurship both academically and extra-curricular.

Disclaimer: The author of this article also did paid work for Canada's Pitch Competition.