The Great Mind Challenge (TGMC) is an annual nationwide software development competition, created by the Academic Initiative of IBM. The competition currently takes place in India, Israel, China, Ireland and Switzerland; outside of India, the effort is known as the IBM Great Minds Program. History The Academic Initiative is an educational enterprise established by IBM that includes an online portal that provides access to software downloads, hardware, training, and course materials, most at no charge. Through the website, IBM provides resources for integration into college curricula to help teach students how to master open technologies. The Academic Initiative addresses the need for companies to collaborate with academia to develop IT talent and drive IT to smaller towns. The Academic Initiative programs include various student and university engagements designed to encourage innovation in the technology space at the university level and to enable students to become market-ready. The Great Mind Challenge (TMGC) was launched in 2004 by the Academic Initiative of IBM in India. TGMC's was created with a focus on the need to better educate millions of students for a more competitive information technology (IT) workforce by partnering with colleges and universities. Each year, the number of participants and participating colleges increases. TGMC is now one of the largest nationwide student competitions in India. The Great Minds Program started in Zurich in 2007 and since then has rolled out to include Haifa, Dublin and China. Concept The Great Mind Challenge is open exclusively to students across India, who in order to participate, have to form teams within their respective colleges. Colleges with registered teams eventually meet in competition for the winning project. Each team is constituted by one faculty member and a max of four students. The teams must develop innovative solutions using open standards-based IT tools, solely from IBM, in complex real-time situations. It is aimed mainly at students from Indian engineering colleges, who can develop solutions for real-time problems and scenarios with the use of IBМ software in the project being compulsory. TGMC is also utilized as a meeting ground for large IT corporations in search of young talent and students from smaller universities looking for recruitment opportunities. The IBM Research Labs in Haifa, Dublin, and Zurich host a similar competition for 3 to 6-month internships at IBM Research in the respective cities for students from central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It provides students