Is organizing a thesis competition a good way to connect academia and business?
It would be very hard to judge these things due to a dearth of objective criteria. Also, getting a panel of widely knowledgeable, senior employees (whose time is short and expensive) to each read and judge at least several theses just isn't feasible - and that's assuming that the field is narrow enough that the judges have the expertise to understand every thesis.

Unless you have a vested and very specific interest in the thesis, there just isn't any point in reading it. A short presentation or abstract is really all that's necessary to get the gist of the research.

A much better solution would be a thesis presentation competition. My old university did a university-wide "thesis in three" competition every year. Entrants had three minutes to give a presentation on their research, in front of a general audience and a panel of judges from all disciplines (a more specialized competition could allocate more time).

This could have many advantages, including:


the panel will be able to view all of the presentations in less time than it takes to read just one thesis
it assesses a very valuable real-world skill: the ability to distil a complicated piece of work into a simple and exciting nutshell
you can see someone's enthusiasm for a topic
gathering for drinks and dinner after the presentations will be a fantastic networking opportunity. Job offers could be flying about all over the place.


In the age of the internet, it would be easy to ask participants to create a video presentation if they cannot attend the event (possibly even in the style of a YouTube educational video, with narrated drawings / animations). This way, no one needs to travel across the country or world.