Friday, September 19, 2008

Microsoft, NCIIA help students move global ideas to entrepreneurship

By Rodney Brown

Microsoft Corp. has looked to Western Massachusetts to help local student innovators in the area in which students want more help: entrepreneurship.

Microsoft has committed $50,000 in funding to the National Collegiate Inventors & Innovators Alliance of Hadley, which will use the funds to, among other things, provide scholarships to participants in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup innovation competition so they can attend the NCIIA’s one-day Invention to Venture workshops.

The Imagine Cup is an international innovation competition launched six years ago by the Redmond, Wash.-based software titan that pits teams of student inventors from around the globe against each other to tackle challenges facing the world today. The contest goals are based on solving the eight issues identified in the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, such as combating AIDS and other diseases, encouraging environmental sustainability and moving toward gender equality, according to Gus Weber, university relations executive for the Greater Northeast for Microsoft, and the head of the Imagine Cup program in the United States.

“Students really want to apply technology in meaningful ways, and really in ways that affect more than just themselves,” Weber said at an event in Microsoft’s new Cambridge offices last week. “The Imagine Cup started as a technology competition, and we’ve always used the Millennium Goals as a context for students to compete in. In the U.S., we have taken that a step further to sort of help students apply this around social innovation and entrepreneurship.”

According to Weber, despite 17,000 students participating in the United States last year, only three teams took their ideas to the stage of launching a company. That fact prompted Microsoft to solicit the help of Bentley College, which surveyed student participants and found out that students simply didn’t know how to make real companies out of their ideas.

Enter the NCIIA.

The organization was founded in 1995 with backing by The Lemelson Foundation, the product of inventor Jerome Lemelson, whose name and funding are also behind the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. With a well-established history of working with schools such as Duke University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to turn university innovation into real-world operations, the NCIIA was a natural fit as a partner for the Imagine Cup.

“The collaboration that we are embarking on here involves tying in some of the resources we have developed for students in a self-serve online format, as well as an in-person intensive format, to learn about the process of taking an idea and turning it into a viable product or business,” said Phil Weilerstein, executive director of the NCIIA.

It was the NCIIA’s experience that drew Microsoft’s eye, according to Pamela Passman, deputy general counsel for Microsoft’s Global Corporate Affairs. The NCIIA offers both breadth and depth to the issues of student innovation and entrepreneurship, she said.

“That will help students make a connection between what they learn and the real-world application and problem solving,” said Passman.