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Sunday Oct 06, 2024
Friday, 28 June 2013 05:35 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Allison Areias-Vogel, Counsellor Economic & Commercial Affairs of the US Embassy for Sri Lanka and Maldives who was the Chief guest the recently concluded Motorola Solutions /SLASSCOM sponsored Inter University Innovations Championship 2013 launch said that innovation is key to economic and social development.“Unless you’re Bill Lear, most of us are exposed to innovative ideas in school. But today, we are realising that innovation moves so fast that we cannot educate tomorrow’s workers for specific jobs today. Those jobs may disappear as technology evolves. Instead, we need to educate people to be more innovative and creative. We must develop the basic skills to adapt to and adopt new technology, as well as bring it to market.
“Innovation relies on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math skills (STEM). In the United States, STEM job creation over the next 10 years will outpace non-STEM jobs, growing 17% as compared to 9.8% for non-STEM positions. Jobs in computer systems design and related services – a field dependent on high-level math and problem-solving skills – are projected to grow 45% between 2008 and 2018. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, people in STEM fields also earn 26% more on average and are less likely to experience job loss. This is even more true for women. Women who work in STEM jobs earn 33% more than their counterparts in non-STEM fields”.
Vogel added that innovation is also revolutionising access to education and entrepreneurial endeavours. Online resources, like the Khan Academy, lets any child with an internet connection – anywhere in the world – access a library of over 3,000 videos covering everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and allows them to practice hundreds of skills. 
Websites like Kickstarter.com and crowdfunder.com help artists, creators and inventors fund their projects via collaborative funding on the web. That leads to further innovative projects being developed that may never have received traditional funding. One example: Kickstarter helped fund the design of an engineering toy for girls called ‘goldiblox,’ which is now commercially available and helps girls develop critical STEM skills.
If this virtuous cycle of education and innovation is important for the United States, it’s even more critical for small countries like Sri Lanka. A strong focus on STEM skills can help propel Sri Lanka into the forefront of technology clusters. The Sri Lankan Ministry of Higher Education is also aiming to make Sri Lanka a higher education hub; enhancing STEM subjects would give Sri Lanka a competitive edge in a very tight regional education market. But it all starts with a strong educational platform. Events like this one that Motorola Solutions is sponsoring will help inspire students and bring together that magic mixture of creative minds, mentors, financial backers, and government policy makers.
She concluded that she is proud that an American company, under the able leadership of Tennakoon, is at the forefront of these efforts in Sri Lanka. She congratulated the organisers on the launch of what she hoped no doubt will be another great competition, and wished good luck to all the competitors. She added that they were all already winners, just by being here, and that the staff at the US Embassy were looking forward to following the progress of the contestants as they helped fulfil Sri Lanka’s tremendous economic and human potential.
About the competition
The Motorola Solutions/SLASSCOM Inter University Competition is entirely funded by the Motorola Solutions Foundation. The Motorola Solutions Foundation, the independent philanthropic arm of Motorola Solutions, provides strategic grants, fosters innovation and engages stakeholders to make the communities where Motorola Solutions operates safer and better educated. The Foundation focuses its efforts on supporting science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, public safety, disaster relief and preparedness, and employee involvement. Commenting on the competition Anuradha Tennakoon, Motorola Solutions Director/Country Manager for Sri Lanka, said: “During the last three years this competition has been focusing on Enterprise Mobility Solutions, which is a very focused area. Since there have been many solutions put forward by past students the new students may run short of ideas. Therefore, we re-structured and re-named the competition to ‘Innovations Championship’ and today we are introducing the students to a basket of goodies. Using some of those goodies they have the choice to develop different software based solutions or applications as in the previous years, or prototype new mobile devices not necessarily in enterprise sphere it can be in any field, or develop an educational application or even a game, in short ,the sky is the limit.”
Joining the launch as the Guest of Honour, Dr. Kumara Hirimburegama, Vice Chancellor University of Colombo, said: “I am very happy that we are with the industry and it is a very good sign. We have to produce more and more entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people who could not enter Universities and we have to create jobs for them. Initially be a job seeker, gain experience and then become a job giver. This is an era of open economy. Without the industry we cannot survive or create jobs. Education is another industry. We should promote collaboration between education industry and other industries. Our job is to produce human capital to the industry. As a university community we should let others understand that there is a big value in human capital that we produce. At universities we have to create competitive graduates and post graduates.”
He concluded by thanking SLASSCOM and Motorola for their initiative and added: “IT is the future. Future managers will be IT professionals as the world is changing. Management has become a scientific subject. Sri Lanka has the potential to be the hub of Asia.”
