Silicon Valley Launches New Innovation Zone

“In our schools you wouldn’t know if this was Silicon Valley or the Midwest or Mississippi because we haven’t been able to harness the innovation in our backyard,” says Muhammed Chaudhry, CEO of Silicon Valley Education Foundation (SVEF). “We want to change this. We want to create an ecosystem where innovation is in the DNA of our schools.”

To begin creating this ecosystem, SVEF, in partnership with NewSchools Venture Fund, is launching The Learning Innovation Hub (iHub) with $100,000 support from the Gates Foundation. Much like innovation efforts in New York, the iHub hopes to bring together entrepreneurs and educators, facilitate short-term efficacy studies, and help train educators to evaluate which products work for them. The program kicked off Feb 3 with ten companies competing for four spots in the iHub’s first project: a four-month efficacy study in which eight teacher fellows will pilot middle-school math products. (The teachers will each be paid $1,750 for working closely with entrepreneurs to help iterate the product.) At the end of the four months, the iHub will measure and compare student achievement data and share the result in July 2014.