Team SYTECH from Romania (center) took first place in the Software Design competition at this year's Microsoft Imagine Cup in Cairo this week. Coming in second was Vital Lab, from Russia (left), while Virtual Dreams from Brazil (right) earned third.
By Mike Drummond
Joe Wilson makes a convincing case he has the best job in the world.
He is senior director of Academic Initiatives at Microsoft and the man behind the Imagine Cup, a competition he launched seven years ago to inspire students to create breakthroughs in technology, advance their careers and start companies.
Joe Wilson
“The most incredible thing about being involved with this program is I get to hang out with these passionate, talented kids from all over the world,” he told Inventors Digest before overseeing the July international finals in Cairo this year.
The Imagine Cup 2010 Finals will take place in Poland, a country with a track record of producing highly skilled IT students as well as successful Imagine Cup entrants. Visit www.imaginecup.com.
The Imagine Cup is a global high school and college student technology competition focused on finding solutions to real-world issues. The competition encourages the world’s most talented software designers, programmers, game developers, photographers and filmmakers to tackle the toughest problems facing the world today.
“Innovation on our planet is not happening in board rooms,” Joe says. “It’s happening in dorm rooms. Ninety percent of major technology innovations are started by those under 25.”
Finals competitions take place in a different country each year, places like Paris, Seoul, Delhi, Sao Paulo and Barcelona.
It makes sense the Imagine Cup has an international flavor. Joe says a group of students from Asia initially approached Microsoft with the idea.
“They said, ‘We want to do a competition on your stuff. Would that be OK?’ We were smart enough to say ‘yes,'” Joe says.
At first the company helped set up competitions in rooms around the country. In this case, the software giant treaded cautiously.
“Sometimes,” Joe says, “you can rip the soul out of something if you place corporate marketing in there.”
Although Imagine Cup was growing incrementally year-to-year, it took off in 2006 when Wilson’s team decided to focus the competitions on solving some of the world’s toughest technological, social and environmental problems. “That,” says Joe, “opened the clouds.”
More than 300,000 students from more than 100 countries competed this year. “It’s a lovely monster,” Joe says of Imagine Cup.
Imagine Cup isn’t mere science-fair stuff. A team from Greece built a wrist apparatus that converts sign language to speech. They got a “huge” grant, ending up earning doctorates and built a company around their technology, Joe says.
Another team from Russia, OmniMusic, solved the latency problem with Internet video streaming. The team won the competition’s software design prize in 2005. Teammates Stanislav Vonog, Nikolay Surin, Alexander Popov and Ruslan Gilfanov were musicians from different parts of that country and wanted to rehearse remotely in real time.
They marketed themselves to the music industry. Turns out the Internet phone or VOIP carriers were the most interested in their technology.
The success of the student teams and of the Imagine Cup program has rubbed off on Joe. Yes, the planet has a long list of economic, environmental, social and political problems. But Joe’s upbeat.
“The future is in great hands,” he says. “When you witness what these young people are doing, it’s like seeing dawn sneak over the edge of another planet.”
