A Silicon Valley for Education
August 10, 2010 - In June, a group of nervous young entrepreneurs gathered on the Penn campus to present their innovative ideas to a panel of industry leaders and venture capitalists.
Finalists in a business plan competition, the group waited nervously for the judges’ verdict. At stake was a handsome purse that would help the winners launch their ventures.
If you guessed that this scene played out at Wharton, guess again.
The six finalist teams were participating in the first-ever competition for entrepreneurs in the field of education—conceived and organized by Penn’s Graduate School of Education.
The brainchild of Gregory Milken and GSE Vice Dean Doug Lynch, the Penn GSE-Milken Education Business Plan Competition is designed to stimulate innovation in education and to connect social entrepreneurs to venture capitalists and other funders. Milken is a senior vice president at Knowledge Universe Education and a trustee of the Milken Family Foundation, which provided funding for the Competition.
In its inaugural year, the Competition attracted 125 entrants including submissions from across the United States and from India, South Korea, and Taiwan. Applicants proposed innovative solutions to address academic challenges and industry inefficiencies in education, pre-kindergarten through adult.
In the first round of judging, 43 independent experts whittled the submissions down to the six finalists. In the finals round, competitors presented ideas ranging from downloadable mathematics applications, to software for streamlining the hiring process, programs teaching children to become entrepreneurs, and a mobile resource center that brings learning to underserved children.
First place honors – and a $25,000 purse – went to Shaun Sims and Andrew Mills for a software application that improves security in online education by analyzing student behavior in e-classrooms and identifying suspicious activity through keyboard usage and algorithms. The second-place prize of $15,000 was awarded to Jen Schnidman, who is developing web-based software that assists educators in tracking students’ academic growth.
For Doug Lynch, the Competition represents just the first step in creating a Silicon Valley for educators – an incubator for developing business ideas for education.
“Biotech and software entrepreneurs have a host of technical-assistance resources, but education has almost none,” says Penn GSE Vice Dean Doug Lynch. “Given the potential role entrepreneurs can play in addressing the myriad challenges in education, it is striking how little attention is paid to cultivating educational entrepreneurs.”
Penn GSE organized its first summit of education and business leaders last year to explore ways of fostering entrepreneurial innovation in the field. “A key theme that emerged,” Lynch says, “was that folks want a university like Penn to advocate on behalf of innovation, to serve as a safe place to convene, to conduct evaluations that are friendly to consumers, and to incubate the next generation of entrepreneurs.”
The Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition grew out of that meeting, and Lynch is hatching up a new plan: the Networking Ed entrepreneurs for Social Transformation (NEST) that will provide support for innovative business ideas in education.
To learn more about the Milken-Penn GSE Business Plan Competition, click here.