Last week, students around the world began submitting entries to the 2010 Dell Social Innovation Competition, which offers a grand prize of $50,000 to the student team with the best entry.
Guidelines for entering the competition are broad, and students with innovative projects that would help society are encouraged to enter their ideas.
There are no qualifications for entry except that the team be made up of students in graduate or undergraduate university studies. A panel of judges, as well as voters on the competition’s Web site, will decide the winner in March.
The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs’ RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service has teamed up with Dell to host the fourth annual contest.
“We were interested in engaging the most number of students to use entrepreneurial skills to solve global problems,” said Heather Alden, senior program coordinator for the RGK Center.
Past winners have included a device that turns rice husks into energy, an online resource for disabled pedestrians and last year’s Gardens For Health, in which students from Yale and Brown work with a community in Rwanda to create more sustainable crops and infrastructure.
During its first two years, UT hosted the contest independently through private funding. In its first year, the competition was statewide and became national the second year.
However, in an effort to broaden the scale of the contest to an international level, the University partnered with Dell as a sponsor for last year’s competition, a relationship that will continue for the 2010 competition.
“We are a technology company, and innovation is very exciting to us,” said Teresa Miller, U.S. manager of Dell Giving, the company’s community outreach arm.
Last year, the competition had 527 entries, and about half were international, Alden said.
“We’re teaching students to identify when they’re having an idea that could actually change the world and giving them a tool box for implementing that idea,” Alden said.
Design graduate student Beth Ferguson plans to enter her “Gas Pump Solar Pumps” in this year’s competition. The design for electrical charging stations uses modified 1950s gas pumps. She hopes to use the award money to build more stations and add sophistication to the designs.
“It’s innovative because it’s solving a problem that there is no place for electric vehicles to charge on the UT campus or in downtown Austin or really anywhere in the world,”
Ferguson said. “The competition is an opportunity to get funding to make more of the solar charging stations.”
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