We couldn’t think of a better way to start the week than by shining the spotlight on our colleague Anu Tewary, Sr. Data Scientist at LinkedIn, who started a non-profit after-school program in 2009 called the Technovation Challenge. The goal: to encourage girls in high-school to explore careers in technology and entrepreneurship.

Here’s Anu…

This year, LinkedIn is hosting the Technovation Challenge, a nine-week program in which high school girls and high-tech professional female mentors work in teams to design a mobile Android app prototype and write a business plan. The program, run by non-profit Iridescent, has expanded to five cities across the country (including Berkeley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and two programs in Mountain View), serving over 250 girls.

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The LinkedIn Mountain View program will culminate in “Pitch Night” at LinkedIn’s headquarters on Wednesday, April 27, when the girls will pitch their business plans to a panel of judges that includes LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner, Venture Capitalist, Katherine Barr, and Entrepreneur and Professor, Mendel Rosenblum.  The evening will also feature a keynote by Raissa Nebie, co-founder of SpoonDate.

Winners of each regional Pitch Night will come to the San Francisco Bay Area for a “National Pitch Night” on May 21, where they’ll compete to have their app professionally developed and distributed on the Google Android Marketplace.

I’m very excited that LinkedIn has sponsored this year’s Technovation Challenge. LinkedIn is an ideal platform for transforming the world by tapping the talent and creativity of the world’s professionals to solve big problems. I’ve already used LinkedIn to find mentors, speakers, judges, and volunteers for the program. As students who have gone through the program advance in their education and their careers, they will use LinkedIn to find internships, mentors, jobs, and, eventually, funding for their entrepreneurial ventures.

Yet another benefit with having LinkedIn host the program is that it’s made it easier for women mentors from LinkedIn to participate. This year, four LinkedIn employees, including Janet Ryu, Prachi Gupta, Lili Wu, and myself have been able to take advantage of the opportunity to mentor these incredibly talented girls from neighboring schools.

As software engineers, product managers and data scientists, it’s been personally rewarding for each of us to mentor these young girls and give them the skills and confidence they need to be successful in computer science and entrepreneurship. The girls are avid users of social media and technology, and they have a keen and sophisticated sense of what makes a technology product useful and “cool.” Watching them in action as they develop their ideas, it’s easy to see that with coaching and encouragement, they can become the next generation of product designers, technologists, and entrepreneurs.

Pitch Night is open to the public and free to attend. More details here.

comments

1. Noha El-Shishtawy April 25th, 2011

   I loved the idea so much and it is very important not to stop at producing but also to support new ideas and new generations’ thoughts and ideas. Great job

2. Lucia Giacomantonio April 25th, 2011

   I attended last year and it was amazing to see such a young group of girls pitching their own business ideas. Looking forward to this years event!

3. Dorai April 25th, 2011

   Would love to take this program to a couple of countries and many cities in India. How can we help?

   Dorai Thodla
   http://dorai.wordpress.com
   http://www.twitter.com/dorait

4. Nidhi Doshi April 25th, 2011

   Great stuff Anu!! Very excited to be a part of this.

5. Manoj April 26th, 2011

   Great Idea.