In an effort to inject some competition for small businesses with innovative ideas in the defense and security arena, a small group of London Business School students put together a contest last year that awards a healthy chunk of cold hard cash to entrepreneurs with bright ideas.

Called the Global Security Challenge, this year judges will focus on “technology products that can be used to prevent, defend against, cope with or recover from terrorist incidents, other criminal acts, natural disasters, including identifying or locating perpetrators of these acts…Examples of our areas of interest are biometrics, detection sensors, network security, data storage, biotechnologies, and search software.”

In order to qualify, the company or entrepreneur can have zero income but no greater than $5 million USD in annual revenues. The competition is open to worldwide idea meisters and the winner could garner $500,000 to get their security innovation started.

The first round of entries closes on June 30. So if you have that new “ACME robo retna scanner terrorist ID detection array” that’s just been sitting in the garage waiting for some cash injection to get it off the ground, this may be your chance.

-- Christian