Georgia Tech & Partnerships

Georgia Tech is a proven industry partner for many stages of innovation. The Convergence Innovation Competition (CIC) is a Georgia Tech program that is practical and highly successful for companies seeking innovation results. The CIC is Georgia Tech’s annual student competition. The CIC's mission is to enable students to develop innovative applications and services that are commercially viable. Winning entries include a working end-to-end prototype with a strong emphasis on user experience and a business case for the application/service.

Value to CIC Sponsors

The CIC offers industry partners an unparalleled model to engage with innovative academia and to glimpse into the future of technology. Partners directly collaborate with interdisciplinary teams of Georgia Tech student entrepreneurs. The partnerships provide students with real life guidance, including exposure to technology and business constraints worth considering, the process of selecting products and platforms for testing and development, and the benefit of final feedback from industry partners during the judging stage.

By participating in this process, partners witness the creativity of the brightest Georgia Tech students and receive practical user feedback on product or platforms from student innovators. The Convergence Innovation Competition provides great value for industry sponsors including:

• The ability to define a category for the CIC that will at breadth investigate an area of interest to the sponsor
• A campus wide talent pool dedicated to innovate on sponsors’ technologies and research interests
• An opportunity to integrate the sponsors’ technology into the RNOC's platform and make it available to all research and academic units campus wide, as well as to other industry partners of IPaT/RNOC
• Access to students to observe and closely work with over an extended period and recruit from the best talent pool on campus
• Be a full industry partner with access to all IPaT/RNOC thought leadership, partnerships and initiatives such as the annual People and Technology Forum

Category sponsors can target results of the competition by defining aspects of a competition category such as the subject domain, objectives, business and technical constraints for developers, milestone reviews, prizes, judges, and judging criteria. Senior Graduate Research staff are assigned to encourage and support students’ use of the Category Sponsor’s products and pursuit of the sponsor’s defined interests. “At Large" or contributing sponsors’ products are also made part of the platform and are available for use by CIC teams.

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