
This year, as part of Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, they have announced ‘Ingenuity Award’ and the intention behind the award is wonderful.
As we all know, it is important to enable creativity and ingenuity of our kids, this award embraces the openness and asks applicants:
- To choose the problem they would like to solve and why they would do so?
- Explain the primary target customer who will benefit from their solution
- The proposed solution- not necessarily a fool proof one – but how they envision a solution/future that might look like with their solution implemented.
This challenge is music to our ears! As it asks the kids to present a problem that they would like to solve….and we know they can go to pieneers.com/blog ! 🙂 Most importantly it enables them to think boldly without implementation constraints and this is first step in getting kids engaged in creative problem solving process.
Only Harvard students are eligible for this and I wish it is open to all! Perhaps some foundation will pick on this and launch a challenge for all the students across the globe. Will update this post once winners are announced. Fyi, application deadline is April 19, 2019. Good luck to all the Pieneers!
–UPDATE 5/25/2019–
Ingenuity awards were announced and the winners are:
- Grand Prize – Christina Chang, for envisioning the development of a sustainable chemical steel manufacturing process that would decrease global CO2 emissions.
- Runner Up 1 – Tauheedah Baker, for a tech-based approach to increasing the quantity, quality, and retention of teachers of color in under-served communities.
- Runner Up 2 – Nicole Ivey, for making day care centers hubs for everything working parents need.
Congratulations to all these winners. The above one-liners are from the announcement article and more details of these great ideas were not given out yet!
[Image Credit: Thanks to geralt via Pixabay]
I like your thought of a non-profit/foundation picking up and launching this is as an independent competition. That would be awesome and I can take part in it without being a student of a premier school! Thanks.
Thank you and I believe there are more like you out there. I will definitely write a post if I come across of such a competition.