The Era of Young Innovators: Looking beyond universities to source talents

billylo writes: Tech heavy industries are constantly looking for new sources of innovations. But where are the best place to find them? Increasingly, businesses are looking beyond universities and source ideas from savvy high schoolers. Cases in point:

• High school programming team finished in the Top 5 of MasterCard's NXT API challenge (3rd one down the list) last weekend in Toronto
• Waterloo's Computing Contest high-school level winners [pdf] tackled complex problems like these [pdf].
• FIRST robotics competition (design, CAD, manufacturing and programming all done by high schoolers.

Do you have other good examples on how to encourage high schoolers to become young innovators? Do you have any other successful examples?