Course & Program

Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010 - $43,000

The InVenture Prize is an undergraduate invention competition at Georgia Tech that provides incentives, resources, and a structure for student innovation in a fun, high profile, televised event. The second year of the competition (2009-10) involved 300 student inventors, 60 faculty, 1,000 audience members, 50,000 television viewers, $30,000 in prizes, sixteen provisional patents and two utility patents filed, and national media coverage by CNN, NPR and others.

This grant will help transform the competition into a business-launching platform by incorporating a preparatory technology-focused curriculum, a series of high-profile competitive rounds, and follow-on support and mentorship. The top three objectives of the grant are to: increase by 50% from 2010 the number of interdisciplinary teams participating in the competition (as well as the number of teams comprising minorities, the number of teams tackling human needs/social entrepreneurship challenges, and the number of successful teams after the competition); build and strengthen infrastructure for the televised final round of the competition; and continue to use the competition to foster a culture of innovation at Georgia Tech.

University of California (UC), San Diego, 2010 - $28,600

Despite female entrepreneurs now making up nearly 50% of all entrepreneurs in the US, female founders are severely underrepresented in technology startups—in the first six months of 2010, 92% of technology startup founders were males. But at the same time, data shows that women-led high-tech startups generate higher revenues per dollar of invested capital and have lower failure rates than those led by men.

This grant supports development of a new program at UC San Diego, mystartupXX, (named for the female chromosome) that will target female students for invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship education. The program objectives are to: encourage and empower women to participate in the technology startup process; stimulate the formation of E-Teams led by female students; and provide high quality education and training on new venture creation and personal development for women entrepreneurs as leaders of high performance teams.

The teams will receive three months of intensive mentoring and one-on-one business coaching, participate in educational workshops and seminars, learn how to apply management principles to team building and effective leadership, evaluate technology strategies, perform market opportunity assessments, and create the value propositions, business models and financing strategies needed to launch a business. The program will culminate with a demonstration day, where teams will present their ideas to potential investors.

Brown University, 2010 - $26,500

This grant supports development of a three-part (spring-summer-fall) undergraduate experiential learning curriculum that is part of a larger initiative with corporate partners that comprehensively addresses developing world needs. In the spring, students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design will form into teams and learn ethnographic observation techniques that will develop their skill in uncovering needs and understanding situational constraints in developing regions. In the summer, they will take ten-week trips to the regions themselves, doing more observation and problem-finding. In the fall, they will create new solutions to problems they encountered. The PI is partnering with IBM to provide platform technologies and other resources that could be adapted to developing world needs.

The students will focus on four themes: healthcare in rural Africa; water in India; communication trends in developing countries; and commerce in informal settlements in Africa.

Clemson University, 2010 - $25,400

There is an existing multidisciplinary course at Clemson University in which students analyze energy and carbon dioxide emissions on global and local scales. Students evaluate both demand-side (more efficient buildings and transportation) and supply-side (solar and wind) strategies for reducing emissions. The course deliverable requires students, working in an E-Team format with faculty and industry professionals, to develop and evaluate innovations contributing to carbon neutrality for the Clemson campus.

This grant will enable Clemson to offer further support to teams at the end of the course each year. At the end of the course, E-Teams will be selected to receive prototyping and consulting support, allowing them to pilot-test their innovations and evaluate scalability through a network of over 675 colleges and universities committed to carbon neutrality. This program will also result in a guide for the other 675 institutions, shared on a central website, which will help produce similar courses and E-Teams nationwide.