Microsoft's Imagine Cup saw Irish teams take top prizes and join other students with commercial potential in California, writes Karlin Lillington.

UP AGAINST gruelling international competition, an Irish student team took a top prize for the second year running in Microsoft's Imagine Cup held in Paris this month, when three students from Maynooth bagged second prize in the ebedded design category, and $10,000 for their kit to convert any diesel engine to run on vegetable oil.

Commendable, yes. But what - if any - practical use is an award from the world's largest third-level international technology competition? Does spending months preparing a project, then a week of going through manic presentations, coding, and judge interviews topped by hanging out with 400 other young eager students, really change the competitors, much less change the world?

Yes, say the students and the companies, professional researchers, venture capitalists, business executives and faculty mentors circulating around the venue at the annual event.

From Microsoft's immediate perspective, the contest offers the opportunity to recruit from some of the brightest and most inventive third-level students, who compete in a range of categories from software design to algorithms and web design to digital filmmaking, for big cash prizes.

"Microsoft sees this event as very important because it's mostly undergraduate students. That's the start of the pipeline that we recruit from," says Andrew Herbert, director of Microsoft's major research laboratory at Cambridge University. The students are nearly all computer science focused, and "there aren't enough students taking the subject in both the UK and US. Understanding the role that computers play in the annual themes for the Imagine Cup (this year's was technology's role in creating a sustainable environment), and trying to capture some of that scope, is really what the Imagine Cup is all about."

Antoine Petit, the director of INRIA, the French national technology research laboratory that employs 3,800 people, agrees. "Computer science is not present in French high schools. To get students to take it at university, we have to communicate to students that the subject is really important. The Imagine Cup is an opportunity to show students that they can do fantastic things in science."

From an Ireland Inc perspective, organisations like Enterprise Ireland support the competition because they see it as a spawning ground for technological inventiveness and young entrepreneurial spirit. But it is also more than just getting students to think about computing and science careers. A key part of the event is making what amounts to a commercial as well as societal argument for the project.

Ignacio Lopez, one of the judges in the competition's main event, the software design challenge, was previously a competitor on a winning Argentinian team that has gone on to form a business around its Imagine Cup project. He says the competition is a serious business - literally.

"It's tough. You have judges asking you business questions - what's the business model, how are you going to attract users? And the business part is only one of 10 criteria."

"When I ask them what is the commercial market for their project, most have a point of view," says Dan'l Lewin, a senior judge for the software design segment and vice-president, emerging business, Microsoft.

Lewin, a VC based in Silicon Valley for Microsoft, hosted and organised the coveted Innovation Accelerator award sponsored by Microsoft and BT, a business boot camp given to six teams in the software design competition with commercial potential at last year's Imagine Cup. One of the teams was from NUI Maynooth.

The passion and inventiveness of the students is what strikes him. "VCs are always looking for ideas that change the world focus," he says. "The root of the entrepreneurial spirit is in their enthusiasm and energy."

Has he seen projects this year in Paris that have commercial potential? "Yes." That's why once again, they will offer six teams the three-week Innovation Accelerator programme in California.

The attitude of the two Irish teams this year is the ultimate example of the value of the cup. Both the ParkIT team from Sligo Institute of Technology and Team AcidRain from NUI Maynooth say that almost from the day their teams formed, they were never just looking at their project as a submission - they were already thinking in terms of commercialisation.

Says Sunya Vanka of Microsoft, a judge in the interface design competition: "The perfect project is one that is about getting the business right, getting the technology right, and getting user needs right." In other words, like entrepreneurship in the real world.