LEDE: This summer, teams of US college students will compete with counterparts in other countries at a Shark Tank-like business plan competition aimed at tackling the biggest issues of our time.
Randy Atkins: The competition focuses on 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering. The top eleven U-S teams recently had a playoff here in D-C to select five finalists. Yannis Yortsos, University of Southern Californias dean of engineering, is organizing the event.
Yannis Yortsos: Added value will come from activities like this: entrepreneurship, innovation, looking at important big problems, a lot of interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as service learning.
Randy Atkins: Andrea Belz, who teaches innovation skills at U-S-C, is helping prepare students from the U-S, Britain, and China for the competition.
Andrea Belz: It can help engineering students really connect the dots between the things that theyre learning in class and actually having impact in the real world.
