Can innovation and entrepreneurship be taught? And can they yield new and better ways to inform and engage local communities? This spring, teams of of Ohio University students are competing to develop innovative solutions to media challenges.

Now in its second year, the Scripps Innovation Challenge is offering a total of $25,000 in prize money. This includes a $5,000 diversity enhancement, awarded on top of other prize money to recognize the project that make the best effort to engage underserved or underrepresented communities or audiences.

Managed by the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University, this competition grew out of a $3 million endowment for media innovation from the Scripps Howard Foundation. It's open to OU students from any department (not just communication students).

In addition to prize money, all student competitors will benefit from exposure to media entrepreneurship and the startup culture of the Athens, Ohio region.

This year, media organizations and professionals have posed seven challenges for the competition. Each team chooses a challenge and devises a possible solution. Students have access to a coworking space, presentations by media and tech experts and entrepreneurs, mentoring, and other support. In some cases, students participate in the challenge as a class project; other teams are self-organized by students.

Right now, teams are registering for the competition and selecting challenges to solve. This year's challenges are:

1. Create a better way to inform central Ohio residents about closings, cancellations or postponements prompted by severe weather or other causes.
2. A news organization with close to 190,000 Twitter followers is looking for ways to monetize this loyal and growing audience.
3. Create a "loyalty program" game that increases your audience by rewarding those who participate in on-air or online activities.
4. Create a way to repurpose news content in a manner that appeals to millennials.
5. Create a way to verify the accuracy of user generated content, such as photos or video clips, submitted to news organizations by members of the public.
6. Create a nontraditional 4 pm newscast with a significant digital emphasis that allows viewers in a metro market to personalize and customize their news experience.
7. Create a solution, either face-to-face or through technology, to engage Southeastern Ohio residents throughout the news cycle.

Each team must produce a video and a short business model "canvas summary" of their idea, and they'll also develop plans and prototypes. The week of March 24, seven finalists will be selected. At the Apr. 21 Pitch Day event, the finalists will present their ideas to industry professionals. From there, the media outlets and professionals who suggested each challenge has the option of implementing the proposed solution; or the students can develop their ideas further on their own.

Michelle Ferrier (OU's Scripps Associate Dean for Innovation, Research/Creative Activity and Graduate Studies) emphasized the importance of the diversity enhancement prize. "$5,000 is a significant encouragement for all the teams to try to serve different audiences than they might have thought of before," she said.

Ferrier noted that innovation is spurring rapid change in the competition itself. For instance, the on-campus coworking space is new this year. It will be available to the students during the spring semester, and provide access to speakers and faculty mentors. "We did this to level the playing field more between teams that are self-organized, and those that are part of a class," she said. "It's also good for the students to have a place where they can have meetings, interact with other teams, and generally emulate the kind of culture that tends to evolve in startup communities."

All speaker presentations will be videoed, and those presentations will be posted online. The Pitch Day event will be live-streamed, Ferrier said.

The coworking space is part of a larger plan to develop entrepreneurial zones around the campus, where all students can drop by, meet with entrepreneurs, and get involved in entrepreneurial efforts.

Since mobile technology is a key focus of current media innovation, OU has developed a special two week "mobile entrepreneurship module" curriculum which is being deployed in several classes throughout OU. In part this is intended to encourage interest in entrepreneurship and the challenge; but it's also a way to bring faculty quickly up to speed with using and teaching mobile technology.

In the bigger picture, Ferrier observed that the mobile module is also an example of "hacking the curriculum." "Normally, it's hard to mount new courses and meet those standards," she said. "But smaller modules can be developed and deployed in a relatively agile and versatile way. This module isn't just being used in communication courses; it's also being used in business classes and other OU schools. Most schools don't offer innovation as a core class, so this module allows students to at least get some exposure to it."

In future years, Ferrier plans to spread the challenge and the mobile module to other colleges and universities in the region. She also would like to foster more involvement by community organizations, community members, and community foundations. "It can seem risky for community foundations to fund lone entrepreneurs with ideas for community engagement projects. But to support an entrepreneurship program run by a local university? That might be more comfortable for community foundations. We're definitely talking to them about this," she said.

Ferrier also hopes to further harmonize the schedule and deadlines of the challenge with those of local tech accelerator and incubator programs, so that students can easily continue to develop their ideas and skills with the support of successive programs.

"Ohio already has a lot of pieces of the entrepreneurial ecosystem already in place. We have a network of innovation centers around the state. And OU has a gaming and immersive design lab. I'm also trying to develop a media innovation center at the Scripps College. So part of what we're trying to do now is to build roads between these parts of the ecosystem, to ensure a steady flow of students, right from their first year at OU."