Innovation and Our Future

It was an exciting day today.  In addition to the first night of class for an MBA course I'm teaching, I served as a judge at the Minnesota Academy of Science's 2012 Science and Engineering Fair.  Earlier this year I purchased a Lego Mindstorm robot as an award for the science fair.  This award was the Creative Computing award going to the high school student with a science fair project exhibiting the most creative use of computers.

This year I viewed many amazing projects and found it difficult to pick just one.  In the end however, I did pick a winner.  The winning project was a fantastic application of information technology to another scientific field.  The technology itself was not innovative but the integration of a set of technologies to solve a real problem was wonderful.

It was fantastic to see an example of innovation through integration and application.  In this project, the student scientist solved a real-world problem with existing information technologies.  I can't wait until next year to see more examples of these young people driving innovation.  Given the number of sophisticated and practical projects I saw today, I can say that our future is very promising.