OUR YOUNG men, guided by their nearly-as-young tutor, made it to the finals of this year's software innovation competition, run internationally by Microsoft. Competing against much larger countries, some of them with much stronger information technology (IT) systems, these students of Northern Caribbean University (NCU) placed third in the Imagine Cup competition.

Jamaican young men often appear in the news for less laudable reasons. We congratulate Imran Allie, Ayson Baxter, Damion Mitchell and Conroy Smith, who have done themselves, their institution and their country proud.

Microsoft, itself built on innovations by young people in the IT sector, since 2002 has been running the Imagine Cup competition to encourage IT students to develop software solutions to social problems, solutions which can make the world a betterplace. This year's theme was 'Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all'. The NCU team did, and designed Computer-Aided Distance Instruction (CADI) software, which, among other things, can perform real time translations in the top 12 languages of the world. The sponsoring company for the competition, Microsoft, says the software is set to revolutionise distance learning globally.

Competing against some 100,000 students from over 100 countries, the Jamaican team won in the Latin American and Caribbean regional competition and went on to the world competition in Seoul, South Korea, to take third place in the world.

The software design team has joined the extraordinary outpouring of Jamaican creative talent on the world stage. If the talents of the Jamaican people can be harnessed to productive enterprise, our development to First World status is assured.

Driven by information and communication technologies, the world is becoming a knowledge society. And in the ICT sector itself, change is now being driven by software rather than hardware. That is, the development of programmes for providing operations solutions is now more important than improving the power and capacity of computers. The genius of Microsoft, which has made its founder, Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, was in providing operations software which made the computer easy to use by ordinary people, affordable, and personal.

Software design requires no significant capital outlay and the intellectual talent required knows no national, racial or class boundaries. These young people out of the depths of rural Jamaica, shining on the world stage in the Imagine Cup competition, provide an inkling of what Jamaica as a country could achieve in the exponentially growing ICT sector.

We must now clearly imagine that future and take the steps necessary to find and nurture the talents of young people like Allie, Baxter, Mitchell and Smith. Schools and colleges must encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovations must be appropriately protected as intellectual property and opportunities provided for their entrepreneurial development.

We now wait to see where CADI goes as an innovative business idea. With Microsoft support, we expect very far. On our own account as a country, we must aim to create and move many more innovative software solutions for in-country applications and for the world.