51ĀŅĀ×

The  will be held at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31, in Schoonover Center Auditorium, room 145.

The Scripps Innovation Challenge, open to all 51ĀŅĀ× students, is designed for teams to work collaboratively across academic programs to develop and pitch innovative solutions to real-world ā€œchallengesā€ 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 ā€™12 and PHD ā€™14, author of ā€œThe News Untold: Community Journalism and the Failure to Confront Poverty in Appalachia.ā€

Winners will be chosen when finalists present their ideas at a ā€œPitch Dayā€ competition on April 9 at 51ĀŅĀ×ā€™s Baker University Center.

Last yearā€™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 ā€œpledge driveā€ 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 ā€“ in a separate judging competition ā€“ selected the Green Mappers entry as the best for the Natural Resources Defense Council challenge. That carried with it NRDCā€™s ā€œincentive prizeā€ of the all-expenses-paid trip to New York.

ā€œThe Scripps Innovation Challenge offers cash prizes to winners. But while the money is nice, weā€™ve found that students are just as interested in ā€˜incentive prizesā€™ in which they can present their innovative ideas to the top leaders in a sponsoring company or organization,ā€ said Andy Alexander, director of the Scripps Innovation Challenge. ā€œThe Challengeā€™s extra value is that in presenting their ideas to sponsors, the students also get to network with top industry leaders.ā€

For more information, visit /scrippscollege/innovationchallenge/