The Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge has flourished for 30 years thanks to its late donor.
- By
- June 01, 2026
- Entrepreneurship
A Legacy of Supporting Innovation
Since the New Venture Challenge (NVC) began in 1996, Edward “Ed” Kaplan, MBA ’71, has funded the prize. But it took more than a decade for the accelerator program to be named in his honor.
Ed, who passed away last July at 82, first donated $25,000 for the winning startup team. He continued those donations as the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago began overseeing the NVC in 1998, soon doubling the gift to $50,000 a year.
The Polsky Center’s first executive director, Ellen Rudnick, MBA ’73, built a collaborative relationship with Ed, who’d become a close advisor to the center. Eventually she brought up the possibility of an endowment, so the program could grow under guaranteed funding. But Ed saw annual gifts as a better way to ensure the university stayed dedicated to the program.
“After about 10 years or so, I said, ‘Ed, what more do we have to do to prove that we’re going to institutionalize this?’” Ellen recalls. Interest in the NVC had grown so large, with offshoot tracks also being established, that if Ed didn’t endow it, another donor might soon.
He was finally convinced of the university’s commitment. Ed endowed the competition in 2012, and ever since, it has borne his name as the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge.
As the competition celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, it’s indeed become an institution of Booth, the university, and the entrepreneurial community at large, recognized as one of the top accelerator programs in the nation. This year, the NVC will likely award more than $2 million in prize money. More than 600 startups have graduated from the competition—including instantly recognizable names such as Grubhub, Braintree/Venmo, and Simple Mills. Out of the NVC’s success, the university developed tracks catering to executive MBA ventures, undergraduate ventures, and ventures focused on social impact.
Ellen credits the NVC—and Ed’s gift—with expanding the Polsky Center’s impact and establishing Booth’s reputation as a hub for entrepreneurship. “If you compare the NVC to a startup, Ed provided the seed capital,” she says. “Everything that we’ve been able to add since then would not have happened had we not had that seed capital.”
Bridging Entrepreneurship and Education
Ed was 26 and still working on his MBA when he cofounded Data Specialties Inc. in 1969. The company built high-speed electromechanical products like paper tape punchers, growing from freelance design work Ed had been doing on the side of his day job as a mechanical engineer. But by the 1980s, Ed and his cofounder, Gerhard Cless, saw that they’d taken over too much of the market to continue growing. In 1986, they rebranded as Zebra Technologies Corporation, with a new focus on improving existing technologies in the barcode industry. The shift was so successful that Zebra went public in 1991.
In 1996, Ed was given Booth’s first Distinguished Entrepreneurial Alumni Award. At the time, he told GSB Chicago Magazine (now Chicago Booth Magazine) that “heart and smarts” are the keys to entrepreneurship. “You have to have heart—an emotional investment in the business, an absolute will to succeed so you aren’t going to give up until you have achieved the success you’re after,” he said. “You also have to be smart; you need to know when to walk away from something.”
When Ed’s younger son, Alan, started a real estate development company, Ed provided more than just entrepreneurship advice. Despite never working in real estate himself, Ed helped Alan learn the details of the industry. “I was like, ‘How do you know all this?’” Alan says. “He was, fundamentally, a teacher.” That support set Alan up to successfully lead his company, Repak, for more than 15 years.
With his passions for entrepreneurship and education, Ed became the perfect resource for Steven Kaplan (no relation), the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, as he started developing Booth’s entrepreneurship curriculum in the 1990s. Ed gave Steven, also the Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director of the Polsky Center, early advice and connected him with other experts in the field.
“He was always supportive and helpful to the school and me,” says Steven, who created the NVC and first convinced Ed to fund the competition’s prize. “But he also pushed to make sure we were moving forward.”
“He loved the entrepreneurial spirit. That was just part of his DNA.”
— Alan Kaplan
Once the Polsky Center was established, Ed began advising the school on entrepreneurship in a more formal capacity as a founding member of the Polsky Council. He served on the council, alongside other leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and private equity investors, for more than two decades. He was also a member of Booth’s advisory board, the Council on Chicago Booth, from 1995 to 2019.
He loved to attend final NVC presentations with his family each year, often meeting with the students during the day and following how their businesses fared after the competition. “His seat will be empty this year, but the rest of our family will be there to support the students,” Alan says. “The NVC means a lot to all of us.”
Ed’s support for innovation went beyond Booth. In 2016, he gave a gift to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, to establish the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship. He served as vice chairman of IIT’s board of trustees and was additionally a trustee of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.
“He loved the entrepreneurial spirit,” Alan says. “That was just part of his DNA.”
Outside of business, Ed also had a deep appreciation for the arts. He and his wife, Carol, collected blown-glass pieces and regularly traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach, a top contemporary art fair. He avidly listened to jazz music and often attended concerts at Ravinia Festival in Highland Park—something he and Ellen first bonded over. He was also a dedicated fan of Chicago sports, especially the Cubs and Bulls.
Today, though, when Ellen remembers Ed, it’s not his interests, his career, or even the NVC that come to mind first. “He had the best smile,” she says. “He could be very intense. But then you’d say something funny and he would just break out in laughter.”
In honor of Ed Kaplan and the 30th anniversary of the NVC, the Kaplan family has given a new multi-million-dollar gift to benefit entrepreneurship programs at the Polsky Center. The gift will support the NVC and the Build and Launch summer accelerators, and includes $250,000 for the 2026 NVC prize pool.
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