Winner of the Dell Social Innovation Competition will get $50K.

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COMPETITIONS: Students around the world seek money to make a better world

Winner of the Dell Social Innovation Competition will get $50K.

 

Dell Inc. is renewing its bet that an online competition — along with

the promise of cold, hard cash — can stimulate college students

worldwide to come up with creative solutions for social problems.

 

In its third year, the Dell Social Innovation Competition is

co-sponsored with the University of Texas RGK Center for Philanthropy

and Community Service . The entrants to the competition must submit

their entries to an online community that gets to vote on its

preference for the $50,000 grand prize winner. The final selection is

made by Dell-selected judges.

 

Last year's winning entrant was Husk Power Systems, a project created

by two students at the University of Virginia to bring electrical

power to rural India by using rice husks as an environmentally

sensitive fuel source.

 

This is the first year that the competition is being opened to

undergraduate and graduate students worldwide and the first year that

all entries will become part of a collaborative online community

supported by Dell. The competition's coordinator, Heather Alden at

UT's LBJ School for Public Affairs , said this year's competition

should eclipse the 1,500 entries that were judged in the first two

years. The competition was limited to Texas students in the first year

and then to U.S. college students last year.

 

Teams selected as semifinalists by judges and the community will be

asked to write a business plan and submit a three-minute video. Three

finalists will be invited to Austin on May 7, when the grand prize

winner will be announced at UT's AT & T Executive Education and

Conference Center.

 

" The young minds in our colleges and universities are bursting with

ideas for making the world a better place, (but) they often just lack

resources to make them a reality, " said Gil Casellas, Dell's vice

president for corporate responsibility. " The Dell Social Innovation

Competition will harness those ideas, feed them with the energy of the

online community, and then empower them with the funds to make them a

reality. "

 

Submissions will be judged on overall concept; demonstration of the

opportunity; assessed social impact; financial viability and

sustainability; demonstrated leadership ability; management team;

performance benchmarks; assessed risk and contingency plans.

 

The contest Web site is a variation of Dell's IdeaStorm, which was

created by Dell two years ago to let the company's customers and

others share ideas about Dell and its potential products.

 

" It is going to be a totally different competition this year, " said

Alden. " It will have more competition, and a whole level of

interaction that wasn't there before. Dell has created a fabulous

site. They refined it in a way that works perfectly for our

competition. "