Innovation First- What gives?

[Tom Bottiglieri]

I've seen alot of talk about how much the kit costs "in the real world" compared to how much FIRST teams pay. I advise you to take this with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that liquid assets (cash) are not always equal to real assets (the business as a whole).

The world revolves around incentives. If there was no incentive for someone to do something, they simply wouldn't do it. Our official suppliers were given the incentive from FIRST to trade some cash now for a huge pool of graduating engineers in the near future. Money is relatively easy to come by; there will always be people to sell products to. The real value is in the people who make the products. A quality team of motivated engineers are worth their weight in gold to big technology companies. If given the choice between a little bit of cash now or an abundance of quality prospective employees later, I'm will to bet almost every company you asked would take the latter.

Also, how cares how much IFI gets from their contract with FIRST? Leave the conspiracy theories to the guys outside the fence at Area 51. The bottom line is while registration costs roughly the same every year, the quality of the kit and the event becomes progressively better. No matter how much cash IFI gets (or loses) from supporting FIRST, every student is still given the same great experience. $6,000 for an entire team (which may I remind you IS NOT just made up students. Parents and mentors love this stuff, too!) is CHEAP for what we're getting. You can't this kind of deal anywhere else.