The Economist-Lumina Foundation Challenge Winner Announced Solution to Help Bridge the Gap Between the Workforce & Higher Education

NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Lumina Foundation, in partnership with The Economist Group and InnoCentive, announced the winner of its groundbreaking Challenge to crowd-source solutions to address the skills gap between higher education and the workforce. The Economist-Lumina Foundation Challenge aimed to discover a product or service that can facilitate better communication between employers and higher education in order to equip graduates with the necessary skills for today's workforce.

Diana Cobbe and her solution, OnCampus, were selected as the Challenge winner at this year's Economist Higher Education Forum, where she received a prize of $10,000. OnCampus is described as Candy Crush meets LinkedIn. It is a mobile app and gamified social learning platform that rewards students for building skills valued by employers. It tracks and validates skill development through college and generates an employability score for hiring managers. Employers are able to use this score to recruit apprentices, and students become better job candidates as they learn about companies and skills-in-demand through company menus. As companies update their menus to reflect their changing needs, and as students respond to those needs, companies are able to build their talent pipeline.

"We had a tough decision to make this year. The array and quality of entries helped us better understand perceptions of the skills gaps and provided us with a number of possible solutions," said Jamie Merisotis, Lumina's president and CEO. "It is imperative that higher education and employers do a better job in communicating with one another, and this year's Challenge winner is poised to make a positive impact on those efforts."

The Google+ Hangout entitled "Closing the Skills Gap -- A Conversation on the Roles of Business and Higher Education in Workforce Readiness," which will take place Thursday, October 9th at 1 p.m. EDT, will feature a discussion on the skills gap with some of the leading minds in education and business, including the Challenge winner.

Anyone can view the Google+ Hangout via The Economist Intelligence Unit's Google+ page and can join the conversation by tweeting questions @TheEIU for the Google+ Hangout panelists via #SkillsGapChallenge.

Google+ Hangout participants will include:

• Moderator, Riva Richmond, Senior Editor, The Economist Intelligence Unit
• Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO, Lumina Foundation
• Michael Stanton, Partner, Learn Capital
• Bhaskar Chakravorti, Senior Associate Dean of International Business and Finance of the Fletcher School, Tufts University
• Challenge winner Diana Cobbe, Founder, OnCampus

About Lumina
Lumina Foundation is an independent, private foundation committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025. Lumina's outcomes-based approach focuses on helping to design and build an accessible, responsive and accountable higher education system while fostering a national sense of urgency for action to achieve Goal 2025. For more information on Lumina, visit: www.luminafoundation.org.

About InnoCentive
InnoCentive is the global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems to the world's smartest people who compete to provide ideas and solutions to important business, social, policy, scientific and technical challenges. Our global network of millions of problem solvers, proven challenge methodology and cloud-based innovation management platform combine to help our clients transform their economics of innovation through rapid solution delivery and the development of sustainable open innovation programs.

About The Economist Group
The Economist Group is the leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs. We deliver our information through a range of formats, from newspapers and magazines to conferences and electronic services. What ties us together is the objectivity of our opinion, the originality of our insight and our advocacy of economic and political freedom around the world.

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SOURCE The Economist Group