April 9, Saturday was one of the best days of my life. It was Imagine Cup 2011 Bangladesh Boot Camp post-Phase 1. I am obviously not a contestant, but I was honored to be invited to the event to engage in mindshare with the young innovators of Bangladesh, who are putting their best feet forward to the Imagine Cup 2011 finals to be held in New York.
I was present there for about six hours and was privileged to exchange ideas with the participating teams. I have tried my best to give them a third person view on their ideas and really wanted to make sure they had received it correctly. Because I needed to make sure the product that will showcase Bangladesh in the finals should be awesome! You know why? Because as a developing country, Bangladesh has the largest share of responsibility to show off what’s possible, not only because we have some of the brightest youngsters, but also the problems are within our very reach – they’re just around the corner.
If you are a contestant this time, aspire to be the next, or at least generally curious about the contest, keep an eye on this series.
The Next Leaders of the World
The theme of this year’s Imagine Cup is noble: Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems. To help the contestants realize what the toughest problems are, they set Millennium Development Goals as the baseline. Ten teams from all across Bangladesh came in under the same roof, some bailed out from exams, some were temporarily staying at friends house, some traveled overnight, willing to solve the world’s most difficult problems, are surely not another guy/girl you see next door. They are the innovators, they are the future leaders of Bangladesh, of the world. When I was entering into the room to meet such code-crazies, (ummmm-haaa) I could surely smell energy pumping out of the young hearts, who wanted to change the world. I call these hungry leaders: Noble Innovators.
Photo credit: Omi Azad
On a relevant note, from my experience after the event, I can tell Imagine Cup pushed software innovation ability of the contestants to the extreme. And who is the winner here? The most underprivileged community of the world. We should be thanking Microsoft for bringing this incredible opportunity to exercise healthy design innovation exclusively for mankind.
Although I did most of the talking, I learnt 5x from them of what I could deliver. It was such an honor to be among such passionate ones, and spending six hours thinking about how we could improve quality of life regardless of the color, sex, race, and religion of the world population. You do not get this opportunity too many times in your life. And I am just happy to be me. 
I’ll talk about the teams and their ideas in subsequent blog posts, but let me first share what message I wanted to convey to the youngsters.
What is Software Innovation?
Software is a product like no other in the industry. By setting up production facilities, machineries and equipments, hiring as-many-as-possible human resources, may guaranty in many cases that the products will be built and delivered on time. However, unlike those, software is not manufactured, rather it is engineered. Like all engineering disciplines, it has its drivers, manual and resources to learn from. Learning how to build software now a days has become incredibly easy. Oracle serves us big time – I call it BSc: Bing + StackOverflow + CodeProject. BSc answers it all!
The collection of articles, tutorials, screencasts on any topic are now abundant than any other time. If you want to learn ASP.NET, visit: http://asp.net/learn. It’s that easy! However, software innovation cannot be manufactured, engineered, or learnt from manual or experience for that matter. It is all about thinking different, simple in order to enrich peoples’ lives and making it a regular exercise.
Don’t Make Me Think
Consider me an idiot and build software for me. For example, think about a rickshaw-puller, who works and lives in a very remote location, whose educational profile is next to nothing. That’s him, who needs the solution for toughest problems most. You may have sophisticated workflows in your applications, your software may run well on iPhone or Windows Phone for that matter, but are you enabling that rickshaw-puller by that? Do not leave all the blame for current technology and age old barriers, ex. SMS push-pull service and lack of literacy. If need be, try invent alternatives. Software design is not all about how efficiently your code will run, rather how effectively it solves the actual problem.
Solve the Hardest Problems
Don’t skip a problem just because it appears to be the hardest problem ever. The Millennium goals require very serious innovation, and if those were easy, there wouldn’t be any competitions worldwide. The problems call for everybody’s effort. Since you are young and fresh brains, and already have shown promise by coming up with compelling ideas, you have no backdoor to go away from them. Think outside of the box, yet provide with simple and elegant solutions. For example, complex workflows deliver only complexity for a problem in disguise of the intention to provide a solution. If your audience profile is unreachable, because they live in remote area, lack language literacy and insufficient infrastructure, that’s not their fault. Reach the unreachable. You can do it only when you believe in yourself. Take help from corporate success stories and mix it up with your solution space. If Coke can make 1.2B servings daily which covers even the remotest locations in the planet, where there’s not even a radio, why cannot your idea travel that far? See, where not even radio waves could reach, Coke did!
Microsoft delivers world’s best software development products and tools. From desktop, to web, mobile and even cloud – you name a presence Microsoft is there well established with the same Visual Studio development experience. They realize such immense success comes with responsibilities. So, they arrange such competitions for *you* to innovate. The framework is there; the problems are well defined. The world just needs youngsters like yourselves to do the brainwork and innovate.
Unleash The Bruce Lee Within
There’s nothing more rewarding than being honest to yourself. Review nightly or at least weekly, what you have done, what you should have done, and what you should have done better. Maintain a healthy level of hunger. Over-hunger will make you unsocial and under-hunger will seduce you to failure. Regular review will help you understand your current position and you can only advance if you know where you stand. Let me quote Bruce Lee here:
One must constantly exceed his/her limit.
You and mankind both will receive its reward.
Continue Innovating Beyond The Contest
Work for the community. I know you will be completing your degrees soon, and you will be all busy with searching new jobs, pursuing next degrees, some of you even might give up the projects you are doing for the cup now after the contest, and remember after several years – oh, yeah we did this and that. I would suggest to continue working on the ideas that you have come up with. In addition, working for not-for-profit changes the way how you look at life and the world. It makes you even smarter, cooler, better person and gets you a wide open mind and a lion-heart. After years of practice, you would even achieve the power to distinguish people for profit and not-for-profit. You will see someone walking down the hallway and you could tell that’s a meanwalk.
No, seriously, engage into the community of all sorts. It could be for the underprivileged, not-so-underprivileged like the technology community, etc. Love sharing and let passion guide you. I personally spend 40% of my weekly time for the three different types of community beside my day-job. For technical community, I write blog posts, articles, produce video podcast episodes, write tons of open source code, because I know somewhere around the world, someone is consuming the contents that I produce, learning and enjoying the benefits.
That feeling, my dear, is so much more rewarding than the hard work, effort, time and energy I put in!