The 6th annual Scripps Innovation Challenge Kickoff will be held at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31, in Schoonover Center Auditorium, room 145.
The Scripps Innovation Challenge, open to all Ohio University students, is designed for teams to work collaboratively across academic programs to develop and pitch innovative solutions to real-world “challenges” posed by media and communication organizations, with the winners selected by a panel of industry professionals.
The featured speaker will be alumnus Michael Clay Carey, MS ’12 and PHD ’14, author of “The News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia.”
Winners will be chosen when finalists present their ideas at a “Pitch Day” competition on April 9 at Ohio University’s Baker University Center.
Last year’s top prize of $7,000 went to Team Players, three students studying playwriting, who came up with an innovative way to use social media for a live-TV “pledge drive” in which participants would vote for cute animal videos, culminating in a five-animal showdown where celebrities would represent each animal and urge watchers to make donations to NRDC.
Green Mappers placed second, collecting a $2,500 cash prize. But officials at NRDC – in a separate judging competition – selected the Green Mappers entry as the best for the Natural Resources Defense Council challenge. That carried with it NRDC’s “incentive prize” of the all-expenses-paid trip to New York.
“The Scripps Innovation Challenge offers cash prizes to winners. But while the money is nice, we’ve found that students are just as interested in ‘incentive prizes’ in which they can present their innovative ideas to the top leaders in a sponsoring company or organization,” said Andy Alexander, director of the Scripps Innovation Challenge. “The Challenge’s extra value is that in presenting their ideas to sponsors, the students also get to network with top industry leaders.”
For more information, visit https://www.ohio.edu/scrippscollege/innovationchallenge/