Do student competitions really make all that much difference for the students who compete in them? Beyond the kudos and the prizes, do they really matter? For six Irish students who have just returned from successfully competing in Microsoft's Imagine Cup technology competition, the answer seems to be a resounding yes, writes Karlin Lillington.

For them, the journey from their Irish universities was much longer than the physical travel from Ireland to Seoul, South Korea.

They all acknowledge that they left Ireland as course and study-focused students with vague hopes of good jobs in the technology industry. They returned saying the competition, the world's largest for third-level students, was a life-altering event in which they discovered they had the ability to lead, rather than follow.

"It was a completely life-changing event," says Cathal Coffey, the project leader for the team from NUI Maynooth.

"It was definitely one of the milestones of my life. It made me realise I do have something to offer and I should always be trying my best. It definitely whetted my appetite for entrepreneurialism."

The students - four from NUI Maynooth and two from the Dublin Institute of Technology - all had their own fears.

Some, like Coffey, were terrified of talking to an audience, others worried that gremlins would beset their program or that they wouldn't be able to solve a coding challenge.

In the end, their programs held together, their demonstrations worked.

They then went before successive panels of judges and they took home top prizes - a second place in web development for the DIT twosome and a coveted spot on Microsoft and BT's innovation accelerator programme to potentially commercialise their project for the Maynooth men.

DIT team member Mohammed Al-Tahs - who entered DIT at 14 and now, at 18, is about to start a year of postgraduate work at the London School of Economics - said for his team the competition was "amazing".

"What did we get from it? Confidence. Endurance, after 24 hours of coding. Coping with pressure. Technically, we learned a lot from DIT, but these are things you can't learn from college."

All six say they have changed their notions of what they want from their future jobs; several say they want to lead and manage and maybe run their own companies, something none had considered before arriving in Seoul.

Just to get to Seoul, both teams had been up against formidable competition. More than 100,000 students worldwide registered for the cup. DIT's Red Dawn team was one of only six finalists chosen to compete in a 24-hour programming marathon from a field of 400.

Maynooth's Team InGest, which was in the cup's centrepiece software application competition, won the Irish all-island competition and, in Seoul, ended up as one of six finalists from a field of 55.

Judges from the first rounds of the competition said afterwards that Maynooth had shown real innovation in its development of real time motion capture technology.

They were impressed with their 3D animated teacher in their sign language program and the fact that their overall solution would be low-cost and accessible to learners.

Those elements impressed a panel of business development experts from BT enough that they chose InGest and two other teams to go on to its two-week Innovation Acceleration programme, run with Microsoft.

The programme, which is now in its third year, helps to hone business skills and brings the most laudable projects towards possible commercialisation.

Microsoft academic manager Caroline Philips says the programme evolved because cup judges from BT felt many of the cup projects were commercially viable but that students themselves would not be likely to take them further. "A lot of them come in with great ideas but no knowledge of what to do next," she says.

Most students are technology-focused with little business perspective, notes BT judge Steve Konya, who also heads up the Innovation Accelerator for BT.

The Innovation Accelerator programme, which uses the resources of Microsoft's Innovation Centres for producing collaborative enterprise technologies, has slowly expanded from its first year of helping six teams to focus on building a business proposal around their project.

This year, a more ambitious programme, probably to be held at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, will run the chosen teams through everything from perfecting an "elevator pitch" to venture capitalists to honing the commercial potential of their applications.

The goal, says Philips, is to enable the students to take their projects out to seek funding and get their technology into the market, if they choose.

Even if they don't wish to work further on their winning applications, the business bootcamp should serve them well in their future careers. Several accelerator teams from the past have gone on to get significant funding for further developing their projects.

Microsoft Ireland is now considering establishing such a programme here, just for Irish students.

The Maynooth team will likely head out for the Redmond programme early in the new year.

Meanwhile, Coffey is still on an Imagine Cup high.

"I won't ever forget it," he says. "I'll be 80 years of age and sitting on my front porch telling my grandchildren how I was in Korea, and up on a stage in front of hundreds of people.

"I haven't stopped talking about it."