Dr. Sridhar Radhakrishnan was recently awarded with the Innovator of the Year award for his involvement with SoBA.
The Journal Record reported, “Oklahoma is poised to make a big leap forward in the software products industry, thanks to the University of Oklahoma’s Software Business Accelerator. Known as SoBA, the initiative provides a leg up for the university’s graduates, who emerge with real-world entrepreneurial experience that gives them a significant advantage when entering the job market.
Introduced in the fall of 2010, SoBA provides one-of-a-kind opportunities for students to create and design software applications that can be quickly turned into salable products, typically within a semester. Mentors from the university and private sectors work with the students, most of whom are enrolled in computer science degree programs. Others come from a cross-section of university disciplinessuch as business, engineering, graphic design, fine arts, and film and video.”
The SoBA program operates under the umbrella of the OU Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth (CCEW) and constitutes a partnership between CCEW, OU’s School of Computer Science and Information Technology. CCEW’s purpose is to give students the opportunity to take part in real-world entrepreneurial ventures and to accelerate the movement of new technologies into the marketplace, spurring wealth development in Oklahoma in the process, said Jeff Moore, CCEW’s executive director.
“SoBA is OU’s catalyst for the rapid creation and launch of software-based products and businesses in Oklahoma,” Moore said. “In addition, SoBA fulfills an important community outreach function, offering services and resources to existing Oklahoma companies and individuals to help develop their software ideas. This makes it unique in its breadth and level of engagement.”
The first of SoBA’s products is Crowdstory, a mobile social networking application for sharing location-based audio snippets. Crowdstory will launch nationally in March at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas – the premiere event for featuring innovative media applications.
There are a few programs across the country that have a similar concept as SoBA, but none of them leverage community assets as broadly as SoBA does, in that software entrepreneurs are paired with both the seed funding and expertise to propel their products into viable businesses, Moore said.
“The value at stake for Oklahoma’s economy is significant; in addition to the substantial commercial potential for any new software businesses, students receive an unparalleled opportunity to create their own job opportunities through the entrepreneurial process,” he said. “Ultimately, SoBA’s bottom line benefits Oklahoma, where new jobs will be created and the culture of value creation will be strengthened by our young talent. This will give top students compelling reasons to remain in the state, instead of heading to software centers such as Silicon Valley or Austin.”
