 From Santa Clara, California, it's theCUBE, covering Technovation World Pitch Summit 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Now, here's Sonia Tagare. Hi, and welcome to theCUBE. I'm your host, Sonia Tagare, and we're here at the Oracle AgNES campus in Santa Clara, California, covering Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2019, a pitch competition in which girls from around the world develop mobile apps in order to create positive change in the world. With us today, we have a Technovation executive, Devin Dillon, who is the Senior Director of Partnerships at Technovation. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So, before we start, for people who don't know, can you tell us more about Technovation World Pitch? Sure, so Technovation World Pitch is sort of the culminating event of a program that we run for young girls around the world. So, we invite girls to solve problems in their community. This year, we had over 7,000 girls from 57 countries participating. So, lots of girls with lots of ideas, and then this world pitch is the culmination of that. So, it's a competition, and our winners from around the world are invited to come here and share their ideas. And a really exciting part is they get to meet all of their peers that are also working on solving problems and exploring technology. So, it's a really great week. That's awesome. And can you tell us more about how you got involved in Technovation and what your role is at the company? Sure. So, I got involved in Technovation about seven years ago. The program was small. It had just gone international. I think our first year, we had less than 10 countries that were participating. But I really liked the idea of putting education online accessible to anybody. Anyone can lead it in there and solve a problem in their community and learn a little bit as they were doing that. So, that's how I got involved. And then, the program has grown, and we now have this big celebration event. So, it looks different, but yeah, that's how I got involved. And can you tell me more about your role? Sure, yes. So, I lead the program. So, we have two programs at Technovation. We have Technovation Girls, which this World Summit is the celebrating event for. Then, we have Technovation Families, which is an educational program for a younger audience. It invites families to solve problems with AI. So, my role is really to make sure that our programs are awesome and helping people to learn. Our resources are good, and we're supporting our leaders around the world. So, our Technovation team never actually leads programs. We invite everyone from around the world to lead the programs. So, we do a lot of work to make sure that the quality is there and that the programs are having a great impact on the kids. Wow. And I recently heard that Iridescent became Technovation. So, can you tell us more about that change and why that decision was made? Yeah, I'm happy to. So, like I mentioned, we have two flagship programs. They previously had names that were pretty different, and our organization was called Iridescent. And Technovation was one of our, it was this program. It was like a program that had gotten a lot of global scale and participants. So much so that when we would say Iridescent, people wouldn't recognize us. So, we changed our overall organization name to Technovation, and this program is now called Technovation Girls. We challenge girls to solve a problem in their community using coding and create a mobile app and a business plan. And then our other program, Technovation Families challenges families to solve a problem using AI. And so, I heard the girls had an amazing week. What was the schedule like? Who did they get to meet? Sure. So, it's a busy week. We have flown in girls from all over to be able to see a little bit of the Bay Area, to be able to meet each other. So, we have lots of activities. We've had field trips to a lot of tech companies. So, we were able to visit Uber, we were able to visit Autodesk, Google Ventures, where the girls are able to see and hear from different mentors in the industry, meet people that are working on technology, ask them questions. And then the other component is we invite the girls to connect with each other. It's a powerful moment where we have a lot of girls representing different cultures and different ideas. So, we have fun things like dance parties and opportunities for them to get to know each other also. It sounds like a really fun bonding sleepover. Yeah, we try to create that atmosphere. Of course, girls can be shy and they're coming maybe further the first time to the United States. Many of them English is their third or their fourth language. So, it can be a little scary at first, but I think by today, they have been able to hopefully create some lasting friendships. That's amazing. Along with the friendships for the people who do win, what kind of prizes do they get? Yeah, so we are giving away this year over $50,000 worth of prizes. 30,000 of that is scholarships. So, the students can continue their education since they're young girls. They're able to sort of put that to their education how they would like. And then another option is that they can continue developing their idea. So, the girls have created a mobile app and a business plan, and so they're able to continue developing that if they would like to. And do they have mentors getting them through that? Yes, and the exciting thing is a lot of the mentors are here. So, the way that the competition works is that the girls are working on their idea for many months. They are creating an idea, they're coding, they're learning a lot of different things. They can be creating business plans, and the mentors are really there to support them to help them build a relationship with someone who's maybe in the tech industry, but also just someone to give encouragement and to help them work together on their problem. And have you seen an increase in participant in tech innovation over the years? Yes, so this year, like I mentioned, we had 7,000 participants, which is a large year for us. The past two years, we've had great growth because the program is online and it's freely accessible. We've really been able to see a lot of take up from different people around the world. What countries do you hope to reach to eventually? Yeah, good question. Well, we had submissions from 57 countries this year, so each year the submissions kind of change. So we're growing in a lot of really exciting places. I always love to see ideas from all different areas of the world. So tonight we have some great ideas represented from Nigeria and Cambodia and Bolivia and Canada, like really right there, like lots of corners of the world. So it's always exciting to see. And what criteria do finalists have to pass to make it to this stage? Yeah, good question. So they need to submit a lot of different things to be invited to the competition. So the girls really work on pitching their idea because we know that if you have an idea not just in technology, you need to be able to understand how to present it and develop a business plan and how you want others to understand what you're doing. They have created a mobile app, so they've coded something. They've probably learned technology or some technology skills. And then what are our other components? They develop their idea. So a large part of it is really thinking of an idea, making it better, developing an actual product. So wow. And how do you think Technovation is helping the overall girls in tech, women in tech community? Yeah, so we're hoping to get girls interested. So our girls are young, but we really hope to spark an interest and get them involved in a community. Hopefully this is a step on their path. Maybe they will keep taking classes that are technology related or maybe they'll make some friends that are into technology and form a community. Maybe they'll go to college for this. Maybe some of them will become computer scientists or engineers or someone in technology. So it's pretty open. We want to create problem solvers and problem solvers do a lot of different things in our world, including impact technology. And going off of that, are there any success stories that really stand out to you? Yeah, I'm trying to think of some girls from this year. I think what always stands out to me from the girls is that they aren't just building like a mobile app. A lot of them are collaborating with people in their community, with their governments, with different nonprofits. So one of the girls this year, she's working on opioid addiction and she's been collaborating with a lot of researchers in different universities. She's been thinking about how to create a prototype. Another girl this year is working on supporting farmers and invasive species. So she's been working with different invasive species groups to understand how this program is affecting people. So I think it's always really fun to see how the girls are not just thinking about themselves or collaborating just on their team. They're really thinking about their community and making an impact with different people in different groups. And how do you hope Technovation's gonna continue to improve and impact more girls? Well, I hope we continue to create girls that feel empowered to make the world better, which you know is idealistic, but I think that's the power of education, is that you help people to think about how to make the world better at the end of the day and I hope we're giving them those tools. Hope we continue giving them the tools to, you know, make their lives and their communities better. That's awesome and thank you so much for being here. Sure, thank you so much. This is Devon Dillon and I'm Sonia Tagare. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Stay tuned for more.