SIIA Innovation Incubator Awards Spotlight Ed Tech's Hottest Up-and-Comers
 Top, Derek Luebbe from simCEO accepts the award for Most Innovative from SIIA's Karen Billings. Below, Jim McClafferty accepts the award for Most Likely to Succeed on behalf of Brain Parade.
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Ed tech startup projects simCEO and See.Touch.Learn took home the top prizes in the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) bi-annual Innovation Incubator Program, which honors emerging companies and products that cater to the education market. The awards were announced at SIIA's Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco.
Online learning simulator simCEO snagged the program's coveted Most Innovative award for its entrepreneurship simulation that lets students create their own company and compete against classmates as they buy and sell shares from each other. See.Touch.Learn, a picture card iPad app from Brain Parade for special needs students that features crowdsourced content, won Most Likely to Succeed.
"Being voted the Most Likely to Succeed Ed Tech Product by our peers at the Ed Tech Industry Summit is an incredible compliment and will help to get See.Touch.Learn. into the hands of even more children," said Brain Parade President Jim McClafferty. "The award is a true validation of our product, our hard work over the past two years, and our plans for the future."
Winners were selected by 350 conference attendees after listening to quick pitches from 10 finalists, selected by SIIA on a broad range of criteria, including market need and level of originality. Additionally, research citing tool Citelighter was voted runner-up for Most Innovative, and annotation app scrible took runner-up for Most Likely to Succeed. Citelighter also earned the Educator’s Choice Award based on votes from educators across the country.
"This field of Innovation Incubator participants shows tremendous promise for shaping the future of technology in education," said Karen Billings, vice president for SIIA’s Education Division in a statement. "These companies are true leaders in developing the technology-rich teaching and learning solutions educators need and want."
Previous Innovation Incubator winners from last November include Clever and Mathalicious.
About the Author
Stephen Noonoo is an education technology journalist based in Los Angeles. He is on Twitter @stephenoonoo.