Administered by the NSF-funded National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter, directed by Stanford University and VentureWell), the University Innovation Fellows program empowers students to cultivate campus ecosystems supporting innovation, entrepreneurship, and community engagement. Fellows across the U.S. collaborate with faculty, staff, and university / industry leaders to create makerspaces / incubators, develop design thinking workshops, and provide unique, community-centered experiential learning opportunities for their peers to graduate with skills to compete in a 21st century economy. This student-led panel will expose UEDA stakeholders to unique ways Fellows are engaging with university-based economic development and how university leaders can sponsor Fellows on campus.
Katie Dzugan, University Innovation Fellow alumnus, Southern Illinois University and Epicenter UIF program
Rachel Ford, University Innovation Fellow, Georgia Tech
Shalin Jyotishi, University Innovation Fellow, University of Georgia
Brandon Nolte, University Innovation Fellow, Southern Illinois University
Bre Przestrzelski, University Innovation Fellow, Clemson University
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UEDA 2015 Annual Summit - 9/28 - Leveraging Student Ingenuity to Cultivate a Campus Culture of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Community Engagement
1. Leveraging Student Ingenuity to
Cultivate a Campus Culture of
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and
Community Engagement
Katie Dzugan, University Innovation Fellows
Shalin Jyotishi, University of Georgia
Brandon Nolte, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Rachel Ford, Georgia Tech
Bre Przestrzelski, Clemson University
10. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS 11
Collaborate Across
Institutions
Launch National
Initiatives
Activate Spaces Reimagine the Curriculum
Organize Campus & Regional Events
14. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS 15
Grand Challenge Scholars program,
National Academy of Engineering
Deshpande Symposium,
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
15. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS
Shalin Jyotishi
University Innovation Fellow
University of Georgia
Cultivating Student
Collaborators
Fo r U n ive r s ity - bas ed Ec onomic D evelopment
25. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS 26
Published in the Stanford
Social Innovation Review,
Wei-Skillern, Ehrlichman and
Sawyer write:
"In our research and
experience, the single most
important factor behind all
successful collaborations is
trust-based relationships
among participants.
Many collaborative efforts
ultimately fail to reach their
full potential because they
lack a strong relational
foundation."
26. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS
Student Entrepreneurs
Thr ough Student - led Ec onomic D evelopment
Brandon Nolte
University Innovation Fellow
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
42. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS
Design Thinking
A C ur r ic ulum - bas ed Appr oac h to Ec onomic
D evelopment
Rachel Ford
University Innovation Fellow
Georgia Tech
72. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS
Opportunities Assessment 10 mins
Introduction 5 mins
Stories of Change 15 mins
Q&A 10 mins
Main Activity 20 mins
Report Out/Final Comments 10 mins
Leveraging Student Ingenuity to
Cultivate a Campus Culture of
Innovation, Entrepreneurship and
Community Engagement
73. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS
5 Minute Challenge
Reflect on the projects you just heard about
from the Fellows and define the value of
students within economic development work
in small groups of 8 or less participants. We
will then call on a few volunteers to share.
74. UNIVERSITY INNOVATION FELLOWS
20 Minute Mission
Now is the time to ideate! How might
students enhance economic development in
or near your campus and community? How
will you take action when you return to your
campus?
Deliverable: After ideating in small groups,
decide on the top two examples to share with
the larger group and identify actionable steps
you can take upon returning to your campus.
Editor's Notes
We believe that higher education can and should contribute to students developing an entrepreneurial mindset and creative confidence to address big global challenge, whether they go to industry, academia or create their own ventures.
The slow pace of change within academia is a challenge, but students bring with them a sense of urgency and a healthy disregard for the impossible.
The University Innovation Fellows program responds to this challenge by empowering students to take ownership over their education and create opportunities for their peers to hone in on their entrepreneurial mindset.
We find that students are best engaged when they are the co-designers of their educational experience and not just the end product. By connecting the student experience to a community of professionals, like yourselves, and meaningful relationships, it will enhance their learning and college experience.
6. Through the Fellows program, we recruit, train and support teams of students and student leaders from schools across the country to become accelerators of change within academia.
7. These Fellows are a program of the Epicenter, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation, which is co-managed between Stanford University and VentureWell and funded by the National Science Foundation.
8. We currently have 300 UIFs representing 115 schools, from large research universities to our first community college this past cohort.
Over 6-weeks, candidates participate in a weekly online video-conference training, where they learn strategies for change, map their campus landscape, and strategically plan where they can make a difference at their school.
We’re not a prescriptive program, which I think is the best part. Our training provides flexibility and enables the students to pick projects that align with their personal interests and dreams for their campus. You will learn more in depth about this through the Fellows that are joining us today.
As they share with you the projects that they are spearheading and supporting at their school, remember that are many other like-minded students out there too. Fellows have great impact at their schools and beyond by organizing I&E events, creating new spaces, helping faculty design new courses, collaborating across institutions, and launching national campaigns that address key issues, such as attrition in STEM education.
Throughout the process they both hone their entrep mindset and they go on a mission to expose their campus peers to learning opportunities to bring about the same.
After training finishes, Fellows are funded by their schools to attend our Annual Meetup in Silicon Valley, spending at Google Headquarters and Stanford’s d.school, where they expand on their learning of what it means to cultivate a creative culture.
They return to their home campus and work to replicate the ethos we cultivate in the fellows program, which is one of authentic connections developed between one another and of every student finding a greater purpose that ignites them into action.
14. By partnering with students, we can accomplish so much more. Fellows are especially adept at breaking down barriers and starting conversations, that In many instances, university employees are challenged by because of departmental silos or the institutional culture of academia.
15. As we continue here today, you’re going to hear in depth examples of how these 4 Fellows are engaging with their economic development offices to spur activity through students in their regions and beyond; joining the national conversation about engaging students in innovation, entrepreneurship and community development are extremely important.
Thank you. Let me start by giving some background on me and how I got interested in university economic engagement
Started out as a research assistant looking at university-industry interfaces at the trustee level
Inspired and intriquired, I intered in Washington with the CICEP at Association of Public & Land-grant Universities
After my internship, I got to lead a round-table at the APLU Annual Meeting focusing on student innovation cultures
There I met Christi Bell and others from UEDA’s leadership and decided to get involved with some UEDA committees. Some of us actually work with both APLU and UEDA.
1. I learned a lot through UEDA. All the while I was an intern in tech transfer and in economic development…but I wanted to do more to help my campus.
2. Luckily, I met a former UGA UI Fellow and got engaged with this program!
1. Greg Wilson, the previous fellow, and I put together an interdisciplinary team of 5 students from engineering, political science and biology and education. From the start our campus considered the fellowship in context of university-led economic development
1. First, we established a year long interdisciplinary student task force on economic development. I reported directly to my VP for Research and VP for Public Service who jointly preside over economic development at the University of Georgia. We also worked with deans and our tech transfer director and others.
We sent our council members to key economic development meetings to learn from the folks in the trenches.
We established the city of Athens’s first undergraduate internship program in economic development
We became the first students ever to talk to the state commissioner for economic development about university-led economic development and why it matters
We also became the first students to speak with our president about economic development – especially entrepreneurship – and it’s value for students and the university.
We sustained our efforts by infusing I&E goals into a new student government association cabinet-level position. One of our student council members become VP of the SGA.
Our fellow Greg Wilson organized a number of make a thons, a uniqure combination of businesses plan competitions and prototyping. Greg actually incorporated these events into his PhD dissertation
3. Our campus’s fellows also launched UGA’s first public makerspace to allow for interdisciplinary student-community innovation
1. Two of our fellows, Stan Greogry and Kevin Wu, launched a medical robotics lab in collaboration with their lab PI who’s an assistant professor
2. The goal of the lab is to enrich our biological and computer systems engineering program by allowing students to learn by doing. They collaborate with clinical and industry professionals in Athens and in Atlanta. They work on site in hospitals and on campus in labs.
Good afternoon, my name is Rachel Ford, and I am a senior biomedical engineering student from Georgia Tech, and today I am here to show you how undergraduate entrepreneurship has changed my life.
If you had asked me as a freshman, I would never have told you that I would go on to work for myself, that I didn’t have the confidence to start a business, and that I didn’t even know who to talk to on my campus about startups – until I became a University Innovation Fellow.
This picture is from when I first got to meet the other fellows, which being a national program, came from all over the United States.
We all are so different individually, but we believe in the same common goal: that we have the power to expand the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem at each of our respective schools.
And we each have made a lasting impact in our own way.
At first, I had to survey the existing landscape of what I&E activities existed on our campus.
These included undergraduate and graduate curriculum classes, workshops, clubs, and Institute organizations that all fit the I&E profile.
However, they were scattered – fragmented – and students had no clue what existed;
In other words, there was not common thread.
In deciding how we were going to unify Georgia Tech’s I&E endeavors, we sought to define the characteristics of what our students needed this entity to be.
First, we knew that it had to be inclusive, that it had to be open and accessible to all majors, backgrounds, and ideas.
Inclusive in the sense that it was an agnostic space, and inclusive in the sense that it was limitless.
Second, we knew that it had to be transformational.
This space or organization had to provoke a new way of thinking for its students, the faculty, the Institute, and for our region as a whole.
We had to approach this opportunity from a new angle.
Finally, we knew that this transformation had to be essential.
It had to be ingrained in every student’s education, not only because it teaches us to be better problem solvers, but mostly because every student on campus desired that kind of education.
We took a two-prong approach:
First, we created, then refined, our evidence-based entrepreneurship curriculum, which we call CREATE-X.
CREATE-X teaches customer discovery, prototyping, and business-scaling techniques to students within its pipeline.
It consists of three parts: Learn, Make, and Launch
Learn is where we teach Startup Lab, our introduction to customer discovery.
Make is where we teach students how to communicate use value into a product.
Launch is where we teach students how to make these ideas into viable businesses.
Second, we created the Design Bloc, and agnostic space focused on teaching interdisciplinary classes and workshops about design thinking.
At Georgia Tech, we are excellent problem solvers, but the Design Bloc equips us with the ability to be thoughtful problem framers – a step that was missing in every college, spanning the business school to the engineering school.
Within the Design Bloc, we focus on teaching five main tenets of design thinking, which can be applied to any major, from public policy, to architecture, to biomedical engineering.
These principles are empathy, contextual awareness, rapid iteration, creative craft, and entrepreneurial spirit.
Zooming out to a larger-scale view outside of the Institute, we aim to engage industry members in our region.
We look to leverage strategic relationships with these industries, especially since Atlanta houses some of the top Fortune 500 companies in the country.
These companies look to recruit our students for their design thinking skills. Integrated more and more in curriculum classes.
And these companies want us because, although we are now equipped with the tools to make our own companies, we are great at intrapreneurship within the company as well.
Here, my cofounders and I spoke about this very topic to the Georgia State Senate Committee on Science and Technology. They wanted to know how recent graduates, and graduates to come, can utilize entrepreneurship and design thinking skills to increase the economic development of our state.
We also went to speak to the University System of Georgia Board of Regents at their quarterly meetings about how to replicate what Georgia Tech is doing in the rest of the universities around the state.
Their Committee on Economic Development is especially interested on how to grow, foster, and retain this talent within the state of Georgia.
In June, Shalin and I had the honor of attending the United States Council on Competitiveness – Exploring Innovation Frontiers Initiative
Not only are we demonstrating the impact of entrepreneurial teaching on a state level, but also at a federal level. This type of engagement is especially important, as UIFs are an NSF-funded initiative aiming to make an impact on our campuses, and our country.
Regardless of how your students make an impact – encourage them to make an impact.
Everyone can contribute, especially if you give them the right tools in their toolbox.
At the end of the day, every student should be able to say this, that you want your team.
We hear the word development and we think buildings, growth, etc. We are at this conference to do more than build buildings, attain metrics, and determine standards. We are here to ignite change within development.
Many can see the problems and complain about them, but few are in the positions we sit in to actually make that change. You, out there, you are the ones who are given that power. What will you do to ignite that development? And WHO will you gain help from along the way?
Before you can ignite that change, you must see the ecosystem. Truly see it. And everyone in it. We are the only four students at this conference.
Over under water picture
And yet, students are technically the major stakeholder of the university. So then why is their voice underrepresented? What role can students play in igniting this development? We think a great deal.
Our JOB IS LEARNING.
BUT
We cannot do it alone. You have the power, the experience, while we have the energy, the youthfulness, the ideas that you wouldn’t dare let yourself think because they are so crazy.
Both of us seek change within ED- students want good jobs to be available, and you want to see your community ecosystem thriving, keeping in the community/ecosystem the students your universities have prepared. It seems that we have similar missions and desires.
The students (we) up here today have represented tangible examples of how their ED and student populations have come together to collaborate positively to inspire these changes in development.
We are doing similar things at Clemson- including the DEN (which is supported in part by OED, and brings together blah blah),
That collaboration extends beyond just that at Clemson. We also have state level support from the Innovation Office (Commerce) for K-12 design thinking programs such as the LemonADE Stand.
And if we are truly aiming to ignite this development, we must collaborate on the largest scale possible- global. To which we are doing through U.Lab (network of thousands, etc.) and a grand challenges minor (?).
In the aforementioned examples, none of the UIFs worked alone. And none of the UIFs worked in areas they were comfortable in. Getting out of your comfort zone is where the ignition of development lies. You must DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY. One cannot expect to do the same things and get different results.
When you see the word “development” – do not see it as you have before. See it differently… See it as the opportunity that you have been given to ignite it. And then go do it.