The MIT IDEAS competition: promoting innovation for public service

The MIT IDEAS competition is a unique forum for student enterprise and innovation that encourages teams to devise creative methods to resolve community needs. The IDEAS competition provides a support network for students to develop their innovative ideas to solve a wide range of technical and social problems that face under-served communities and individuals, in both local and international contexts. By providing constructive criticism, mentors, and development grants to all viable projects, and hosting a poster session at the final awards ceremony, IDEAS helps every team to make significant progress with their project and to publicize their work. The IDEAS competition fills an important niche on the MIT campus by giving students the opportunity to be creative and to take active leadership roles in a nonacademic setting; exposing them to social, ethical, and political issues; and helping to prepare them to be community leaders on a global scale.