Sustainable Vision Connect 2013 is a one-day preconference workshop for faculty building strong educational programs around technology invention and innovation for poverty alleviation and basic human needs.
The workshop will conclude Thursday evening with a dinner for attendees, featuring keynote speaker Ashifi Gogo, CEO of Sproxil and former NCIIA grant recipient. Sproxil was just named one of Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies 2013, coming in at #7 overall and #1 in the health care sector.
Separate registration is required. Register for both and receive a special discounted rate to Open 2013.
Attendees of the NCIIA annual conference are invited to a welcome reception on Thursday night. NCIIA staff and invited VIPs will be on hand to meet and greet, answer questions, make introductions and offer tips on getting the most from the conference.
Entrepreneurs drive our civilization’s growth and well-being with their innovation superpowers. We’ll kick-off these two action-packed days by activating the superpowers that reside in each of us, and which we work hard to develop in our students.
The Big Ideas@Berkeley contest provides funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students who have "big ideas." More than 220 student teams have received $1 million since 2006 to support their plans to improve society across multiple contest categories such as IT for Society and Global Poverty Alleviation. Over the past year, the Big Ideas contest has increasingly focused on providing resources to guide and incubate these student ideas. These have included information sessions, grant writing workshops, judging feedback, and connections to mentors and advisors, among others. The contest is in the midst of conducting a comprehensive survey of all past participants (~1,000 innovations involving 3,000 students) to help us understand the students' perspectives on innovation and the most important resources necessary to catalyze innovation.
Liberal arts colleges and other primarily undergraduate institutions are increasingly using campus venture competitions to stimulate student creativity and engagement with entrepreneurial ideas. Quite often, such competitions are spearheaded by a business, engineering, or entrepreneurship faculty group, but are intended to engage the entire campus. One challenge in the liberal learning environment is to encourage widespread participation from students in diverse majors outside of the traditional business disciplines in campus venture competitions. A second challenge is enlisting the support and involvement of faculty from non-business disciplines in this type of extracurricular activity. There are undoubtedly other challenges around administration, funding, and commercialization. This session presents and invites discussion about the aims and accomplishments of smaller college venture competitions, and lessons learned that might be applied more widely.
How can we prepare youth to engage with (their) communities, uncover innovations and fuse indigenous knowledge with modern science to create appropriate and sustainable value? Penn State embraces this challenge by hosting an annual global competition called "Milking the Rhino: Innovative Solutions Showcase." Students are invited to develop appropriate, innovative and sustainable solutions that empower indigenous communities to leverage wildlife and natural resources for self-determined development. The showcase encourages students from across the world to explore the ethical intricacies of globalization and loss of indigenous cultures, and the role technology plays in both fostering and preventing sustainable, self-determined development. This session discusses the rationale and mechanics of the showcase, the key ethical issues that the teams grappled with, the solutions they've developed, and assessment of the educational outcomes of the competition over the last three years.
The $100K ACC Clean Energy Challenge (www.accnrg.org) combined the competitive but friendly spirit of ACC conference rivalries with one of the most critical challenges facing our country and our planet, clean energy. Applying a sports theme to a business competition was a perfect way to show pride in individual ACC schools while still working together and leveraging the collective strengths of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and not just in sports. This presentation will discuss how using an intercollegiate sports theme increased participation, sponsorship, media interest, and overall excitement and quality in a clean energy entrepreneurship competition.
One of the challenges confronting colleges and universities that choose an entrepreneurial path is engaging students and faculty across the various academic disciplines. While disciplines like business and engineering may support clusters of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking, these concepts are often foreign to students and faculty in other disciplines and majors. If, however, we consider the root of successful innovation and entrepreneurship--the ability to identify, solve and implement customer-friendly solutions to complex problems--we can introduce entrepreneurial thinking and action to students and faculty who may never have self-identified as entrepreneurs. The DifferenceMaker program at UMass Lowell represents our effort to introduce innovation and entrepreneurial thinking to students and faculty across the campus and across all academic disciplines. This presentation will examine the impact of DifferenceMakers on our campus from the student, faculty and administrative perspectives.
Faculty at the University of Tulsa are blending the knowledge and passion of various academic disciplines in order to increase the quality and quantity of new and innovative ideas. In the fall of 2012, a pilot program called the Nova Fellowship was launched, bringing together students from each college on campus into a set of courses that: 1) gets them out of the classroom and into the local community, 2) teaches them the tools and process of innovation, and 3) requires students from different majors to work together to develop and implement innovative projects for a community organization. As evidenced by innovative leaders such as IDEO, students from the humanities and social sciences have much to contribute to the process of developing innovations.
We will discuss the evolution of governance and curriculum for the NUvention program, a series of interdisciplinary, experiential courses in entrepreneurship overseen by the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Northwestern University. The core framework of NUvention involves building courses around vertical industries, which include medical devices, web, energy, digital media, and social enterprise. Each course includes interdisciplinary teams of students from the engineering, law, arts and sciences, and business schools, among others. We began with one NUvention course in 2007 and have expanded to five courses in 2012, with two more offerings planned for 2013. Student demand for the courses is very high, which is a testament to what we have learned about delivering these courses over five years. We have also seen a number of student teams move forward with their businesses and raise significant funding post-course. Inc. Magazine ranked NUvention as one of the top 10 entrepreneurship classes.
Quinnipiac University is launching a new School of Engineering that looks to break the traditional silo structure of learning by integrating the entrepreneurship and engineering programs through a variety of methods. Students in each program are exposed to the other field in their first-year introductory courses to start them thinking about how they can grow their ideas into full businesses. Engineering and entrepreneurship students learn more about each other's disciplines as they progress through their majors through the insertion of entrepreneurship and engineering concepts into their courses, joint guest speakers, and other extracurricular formal and informal activities, culminating in an opportunity to engage in a joint capstone project. This capstone class allows business and engineering students to work together in interdisciplinary teams to prepare to launch a new business and includes credits for experiential learning over multiple semesters if they choose to actually launch.
This workshop will use participant data to drive the exploration of key aspects of national living-learning entrepreneurship programs to include: (1) program purpose/goals, (2) physical space requirements, (3) programming, (4) recruitment and selection, and (5) operations management including staffing and financial structure. Participants are highly encouraged to submit a pre-workshop survey that encompasses the key topics of the workshop. Individuals without existing programs are encouraged to attend and complete the elements of the survey that address their motivations and perceived challenges of starting a program. The data will be collected and analyzed in collaboration with Epicenter. The survey results will be shared during the workshop and used to facilitate a highly interactive dialogue among the participants. Participants will explore the survey results using personal best practice anecdotes and conversations on the constraints, strategies, uses, and rationale of the data. Participants will take away concrete strategies, contacts, and context to drive their own entrepreneurship living-learning program planning to the next level.
NCIIA initiated the Sustainable Vision Teaching Lab (SVTL) in June 2011, with one of the key sessions led by James Barlow on course strategy mapping. The workshop goal: help faculty revise engineering design curriculum to show students how to design for people living on less than $4 per day (termed "the other 90%"). SVTL strategy mapping helps faculty lay out learning objectives for a new course, or refresh an existing course, with a focus on some aspect of design for the poor, especially in the developing world. This workshop covers SVTL strategy mapping in three sequential steps:
In this workshop, faculty will learn how to fully align learning objectives, activities, materials, and readings.
inXsol was awarded an NSF SBIR Grant (0945987) to research migration of established entrepreneur education (EE) tools (SuperCoach(R) Entrepreneurial Training) from an instructor-led to a blended learning environment. Specifically, a 30-Second Elevator Pitch exercise was converted to an online module that familiarized students with sample pitches, clarified the key components of an elevator pitch and allowed the students to video and share their own pitches through the module. The pitches were designed to be remotely assessed by a panel of industry and EE experts using a rubric specifically designed for this project. This presentation will identify why this exercise was selected, the key learning objects, user experience for the module, the assessment strategies embraced and the commercialization lessons learned.
This new design tool overcomes a common challenge both in academia and industry: the lack of deep understanding of functions required in a product. This is achieved by easing the process of abstract thinking by way of visual function mapping. Based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) work on functional basis, the authors propose the use of seven different pictorial representations of functions most frequently used to map a product's functions. The need for words to construct a function map is reduced (if not eliminated), and instead, the abstract thought of the desired action is induced by simplifying a desired task into one of the seven pictures. This tool benefits innovators and entrepreneurs two-fold: it facilitates the creation of novel solution ideas more liberally, and it serves as a valuable communication tool to present and explain new ideas to non-technical persons.
Students are frequently encouraged to "think." The current work addresses a single facet of how can we teach students to think critically. This work reflects on a three-year development effort to adapt Michaelson's Team-Based Learning (TBL) in the teaching of entrepreneurship that can improve student critical thinking skills (CTS). Unlike many curricular innovations, this does not require significant funding to implement and can improve faculty productivity. TBL teaching is not didactic, but dialectic (reasoning-oriented); among other benefits the small-group peer learning structure dramatically increased student participation in class discussions. Preliminary TBL pilot program data reveals improvement in student CTS while at the same time improving retention and restoring a "small-class" atmosphere to large-class settings. Although the pilot program required the development of unique case studies and test materials, it is believed that collaboration among NCIIA members can produce shared cases to reduce the implementation effort by other universities.
We will present cases of successful--and unsuccessful--projects, and summarize salient points from each case. Through audience participation, we will observe the diversity, or the consensus, of opinions of which education methods worked and which did not. After this session, attendees will have the more focused ability to potentially make changes to their programs, increasing the probability of success of student projects. Topics such as resource management, student abilities and talent, along with project management will be discussed.
Session I
Objective: to develop criteria for project selection.
Team-based design courses focused on products for people with disabilities have become relatively common, in part because of training grants such as the NSF Research to Aid Persons with Disabilities (RAPD, now GARDE) engineering design course grants. An output from these courses is an annual description of courses and projects. While this could be extremely helpful for instructors, it has yet to be complied into a best practices guide. To meet this need, we conducted a study to generate best practices for AT product development courses and how to use these courses to teach students the fundamentals of innovation. We accomplished this by combining information we found through a literature review with information we gained from an assessment of an ongoing course we run at the University of Pittsburgh.
Collaborative design between Engineering and Nursing is beginning to make a significant social impact. A number of student projects have had direct impact on a small number of disabled individuals. A slightly broader impact is evidenced by students expressing transformational awareness of how they can benefit from multi-disciplined projects. Broad impact is being made as the program draws public attention, including news articles and acknowledgment in a recent speech by First-Lady Michelle Obama. The authors contend that there is potential for very broad social impact by commercializing the designs, but the path to commercialization is challenging, especially for a primarily undergraduate program. The authors describe failures, lessons learned and plans for establishing a commercialization process within the undergraduate program. The commercialization process itself will require a collaborative effort to attract participants from any or all UDM colleges.
We will discuss the recently formed interdisciplinary collaboration between the Multi-Disciplinary Design program and the Bio-engineering program at the University of Utah. The goal of the partnership is to provide an opportunity for bioengineering and product design students to collaborate through a medical clinical immersion experience. This experience exposes the students to interdisciplinary collaboration, open-ended problem generation, and introductions to user centered design practices. This is accomplished via an intensive summer program in which bioengineering students and interdisciplinary design students at the University of Utah shadow University Hospital physicians in the clinic, identify needs and work together to propose solutions. This immersion experience greatly enhances the student's knowledge by providing a hands-on experience of the realities of clinical medicine. By combining teams of engineering and creative design students, the students develop a balanced perspective of user-centered design principles and engineering development requirements.
Traditional master's programs in bioengineering, biology, and related disciplines typically focus on scientific fundamentals and early-stage research, but generally lack training in key topic areas such as leadership, clinical exposure, intellectual property, and FDA regulations, which are necessary tools for bringing new medical innovations to the marketplace. This presentation will focus on the lessons learned during the development and early implementation of a unique master's program focused on translational medicine: the process of "translating" new medical innovations into novel clinical devices or therapies. Specifically, this presentation will address issues related to the specialized curriculum required for fostering medical innovation and entrepreneurship, including coursework that combines technical-, clinical-, and business-related classes with team-based projects focused specifically on biomedical translation. The presentation will also address the benefits and pitfalls of operating a multi-campus program, and the various issues involved in building a new program from the ground up.
Undergraduate students are increasingly engaged in developing products and technologies that are commercially viable outside of the university through their involvement in courses and experiential programs focused on product design and/or entrepreneurship. Discussions at engineering and entrepreneurship conferences suggest that: 1) undergraduates are increasingly involved in activities that warrant interaction with university technology transfer offices, and 2) that many faculty members and program administrators do not feel prepared to counsel students in IP matters. The involvement of undergraduates in intellectual property protection leads to interesting questions related to how best to align student interests with institutional policies and practices since most are not employed by their universities in the way that faculty and many graduate students are. This presentation will summarize the results of two surveys, one conducted by the presenters and one by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), the intent of which was to: 1) understand the scope of involvement of undergraduates in intellectual property protection and technology transfer; 2) identify major challenges faced by university technology transfer professionals when dealing with undergraduate students; and 3) examine technology transfer professionals’ views on approaches and best practices. The presenters will discuss the results, future areas for research, and opportunities for collaboration between NCIIA and AUTM.
This workshop will seek to address the following questions: 1) What are the learning outcomes (goals, expectations, etc.) for those using creative learning spaces? 2) What are the experiences teachers and learners may have in these spaces (based on desired learning outcomes)? 3) What are the characteristics (affordances) of these spaces that enable such experiences, and 4) How will we know the effect of these spatial affordances on creativity and innovation? We will engage participants in designing their own learning spaces by 1) identifying learning outcomes, 2) exploring learning experiences, 3) creating their own designs, and 4) discussing the "how do you know" question and reporting out.
Students innovators are eager for entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) to be a part of their educational experience. The recently released infographic by YoungEntrepreneur.com articulates this well: early-adopter student innovators are taking a leadership role and would greatly benefit from access to national models, benchmarks, network, guidance, inspiration and other resources.
That’s why we are supporting a national movement led by students. The Student Ambassadors Program, a joint venture of NCIIA and Stanford, as part of the Epicenter, provides training and access to resources that help student leaders become evangelists to their peers and campus administration. Student Ambassadors are helping other students realize, in STEM and other disciplines, that engagement in innovation activity can lead to positive social and environmental change. Student Ambassadors are also liaising with campus officials on policy and institutional change, advocating for a more entrepreneurial climate for students. Empowering student leaders with training, a network of like-minded peers, a work plan and ongoing oversight gives Student Ambassadors the tools they need to lead an effective movement.
Tom Byers, moderator of the session, will set the stage and provide an overview of the Epicenter's efforts, followed by a spotlight on two specific campuses exemplifying the student-led movement, Penn State and Johns Hopkins. Three stakeholders--the Student Ambassadors, their Faculty Advisors and a Student-led Venture on that campus--will offer perspectives on the good, the bad and the ugly from their unique vantage points.
Students often have a concept of "sustainability" contrasting with its definition, believing that it is a moral or "green," but not necessarily a practical imperative. This course provides a foundation in the what and the why of sustainability and how it underpins economic robustness. Some still view environmental and social responsibilities in tension with economic success, impeding aggressive improvement. Examining the achievements and unintended consequences since the industrial revolution that created the need for complex regulations and protective technologies, the presenter will demonstrate from real world experience how successive use of those defined risks and their true costs (including often neglected externalities) as opportunities to address root-cause, geometrically reduces negative impacts, optimizes resource use and produces substantial economic gains. This course's strength is that it is grounded in real world outcomes, emphasizes critical thinking to derive true cost/benefit analysis, utilizes available tools and grounds the learning in the students' everyday lives.
Simple changes in water storage capacity (e.g., use of larger tanks, electrical pumps, and gravitational flow) were introduced to determine their impact on sustainable operations of WASH facilities in Kibera, Kenya. Water storage capacity was significantly increased with two goals in mind: adequate water supply during periods of water rationing and capability to sell "cleaner" water to residents. Water sold in portable devices is more convenient, economical, and safer for residents through water purification (Waterguard) at point of sale. Available clean water meets basic needs of residents, becoming a major marketing attraction to the facilities for water purchase and other services such as toilets and showers. Profits from these water sales support facility attendants' salaries, increasing the overall positive net margins of the community-run facilities. Hence, the three elements of sustainability (people, planet, and profit) are achieved.
This paper will report on collaborations between the OWOW (One World One Water) Center and the Industrial Design Department at Metro State College of Denver. OWOW helps students become urban water stewards through coursework, co-curricular events, and applied learning activities. As industrial design students attend learning sessions with Denver Water, Hach Industries, and OWOW director Tom Cech, they are uniquely equipped to invent concepts that conserve, or bring awareness to water conservation. The principles are internalized as students devise innovative, informed design solutions. Further collaborations occur with campus Center for Innovation (marketing) and the Communication Design Department (branding). The paper will advance design education by serving as an example of how water conservation may be taught and integrated into a curriculum and by providing case studies of completed student design projects.
The setting: a cluster of villages with a population of approximately one million in Cameroon. The perspective: that of a interventionist researcher serving as a change agent for over five years. Several organizational changes have been implemented and various innovations introduced, covering such pasturelands as needs assessment, business model development, assessment and impact analysis. The lessons learned have implications for invention, innovation, entrepreneurship at the level of both practice and education. Moreover, examining approaches to meeting institutional voids and capacity development are two key factors considered critical to success in the field. Overall, this exercise has been one of studying strategy in action and examining the pivoting of strategy to assure sustainability and impact.
A panel of some of our most successful student teams sharing their experiences and lessons learned.
Poster presentations on a range of topics--program models, spaces of invention, sustainability--and time to network.
We will present cases of successful--and unsuccessful--projects, and summarize salient points from each case. Through audience participation, we will observe the diversity, or the consensus, of opinions of which education methods worked and which did not. After this session, attendees will have the more focused ability to potentially make changes to their programs, increasing the probability of success of student projects. Topics such as resource management, student abilities and talent, along with project management will be discussed.
Session II
Objective: To develop a set of criteria for judging the success of an individual project in addition to measure of success for the entire term.
NCIIA meetings are a great place to learn about assignments and activities that work for other people and could be adapted to other situations. However, many such nifty assignments (NAs) aren't presented at conferences or in formal publications. Thus, this panel session is an opportunity to share NAs. The NA sessions at NCIIA's 2011 and 2012 annual conferences were popular and lively, and the activities are listed at http://pui-eship.org. A great NA is easy to adopt and adapt, broadly relevant, thought-provoking, and fun for students and teachers. For each NA, there will be a brief (~5 min) presentation and a few minutes for questions. Each NA will be summarized in a simple template and the collected templates will be available as handouts or downloads. If time permits, we will welcome spur-of-the-moment NAs from anyone attending the session and general discussion.
Most academic institutions now offer at least some courses in entrepreneurship and related topics. In these programs students typically learn how to generate creative ideas, develop business plans, protect their intellectual property, and pitch to potential investors for financing. Decision making and the decision making process are areas that unfortunately get little attention, but in reality entrepreneurs spend much of their time making decisions. Utilizing a variety of techniques, the author has developed course components devoted to decision making. These include simulations, team challenges and a pedagogical approach that approximates the decision making process and its challenges.
An increasing number of programs are being developed to promote entrepreneurship skills among undergraduates. Often emphasis is placed on the necessary content, and course sequences are constructed to ensure that content is covered across the curriculum. But research on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education, as well as education in general, demonstrates that how teaching and learning occurs is as important as what is learned. In this paper, we offer such attention by exploring the integration of a dominant framework for business model development (Lean Launchpad) with frameworks for learning that emphasize the situated, social construction of knowledge; the role of mentors; and the need to work across disciplinary boundaries. By marrying business model development with intentional pedagogies grounded in Bruners spiral curriculum, Collins et al.s framework for cognitive apprenticeship, and McNair et al.s approach to interdisciplinarity in product development, we seek to enhance the development of technical innovation leaders.
Most successful student projects require students to discover insights into a problem that allow them to propose innovative solutions that solve real problems for potential customers. A student team designing a piece of sports equipment for a local manufacturer was not able to identify and articulate an important insight into the design problem until the very end of the project. Earlier knowledge of the insight would have changed the direction of the design project and the nature of the solution the students proposed. The important insight involved how customers evaluated the product and made their buying decision. This paper analyzes the current methods and design process used in the course to determine how the insight was overlooked. Finally, a design methodology named job mapping is proposed to give future student teams a better chance to discover insights sooner.
The development of any innovation easily becomes a long and arduous process. The advancement of that innovation into a usable product starts another journey entirely. In this case, at Tufts University's Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO), we developed PaperBots to address a perceived, cost-driven opening in that educational technology marketplace. This innovative product is an inexpensive means to present engineering education and design-based lessons in a classroom, and the development of it provided an effective lesson to the graduate students involved in innovation and entrepreneurship within a very specialized and unique market. We convened a multidisciplinary team and made use of feedback from a wide range of sources to develop a product, business model as well as distribution methods that address the issues discovered upon examining that field and overcoming its difficulties, preparing the product for eventual entry into the market.
This interactive session will connect research and evaluation findings to educational practice through small-group design activities. Presenters will open the session with an overview of Epicenter research and evaluation projects to date, and introduce four papers that address different components of entrepreneurship education. Attendees will break into groups to review these papers, and then engage in a design exercise to link findings from each paper to entrepreneurship course development for engineering undergraduates. The session will close with short “pitches” for team-designed entrepreneurship courses.
Although many great thinkers and problem solvers have recognized the importance of problem definition, most engineering students and practicing engineers are accustomed to being handed a problem statement and seldom take time to analyze it to make sure they are working on the right one. Misdirected problem statements can limit the design space or impose false constraints on the solutions considered. Based largely on materials in Gerard Voland's 2004 book, Engineering by Design, the facilitators will pose a hypothetical problem statement to the group and then have the participants systematically explore and refine that problem statement using the following five techniques: Present State, Future State, Why, Why Diagram, Statement, Restatement, Checklisting/Trigger Words, and Situation Analysis. We believe that more entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs will be successful if they apply these techniques to help ensure they are solving the right problem.
Conference attendees will head to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History to watch a small handful of brief, dynamic presentations on "spaces of invention." These will be explorations of the spaces in which we educate young innovators every day--the physical spaces where invention and innovation happen. These spaces have an undeniable impact on pedagogy, curriculum and most importantly on outcomes for students.
After the Spaces of Invention talks, conference attendees will be welcomed into the Open Minds exhibition at the Smithsonian. Open Minds is the acclaimed annual exhibition of cutting-edge innovations from NCIIA's best student teams. Ten to fifteen teams are selected each year to participate in this high-profile event, which involves this private evening exhibition for NCIIA conference attendees as well as an exhibition open to the general public and a video competition.
Bruce Kisliuk, Deputy Commissioner for Patent Administration at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, will focus on recent changes in the laws and process and how the USPTO can help educate and inform university inventors.
Traditional business plans increasingly are viewed as anachronisms in today's entrepreneurial environment, spurring UVA's Darden School of Business to launch a bold experiment to re-envision the school's traditional business plan competitions. Rooted in scholarship of Darden's Batten Institute that concentrates on principles of design thinking and effectuation, Darden has added a new event to its calendar, a De-risking Challenge, while evolving its "plan" competition and adding a design-based methodology into its "concept" competition. This panel explores the thinking behind that innovation and practical issues involved in implementing new, non-traditional competitions. Philippe Sommer will be joined by Craig Forest from Georgia Tech and Elana Fine from the University of Maryland, each of whom will discuss their school’s approach to business plan competitions, including the implications for business education of this new mode of competitive expression.
Everyone can think of at least one game that has captured their interest and drawn their attention for extended periods of time. Whether it is board games, card games, sports or digital games, this medium has the ability to engage individuals. The question remains, though, whether games can be used to teach skills such as those related to innovation and entrepreneurship. This workshop will give you the chance to experience a few games first hand that can be incorporated into your classes to help teach students concepts related to innovation and entrepreneurship. Come to learn and play!
This presentation introduces a virtual computer lab, called Virtual Incubator at Penn State Berks (VIB), to facilitate E-Teams in getting their information technology (IT) ideas off the ground. The VIB is conceptualized as a virtual environment that provides E-Teams with high-end IT resources, which are difficult for students to acquire normally, as well as technical and business support through partnerships with academic and industry experts. The first part of the presentation focuses on the technical aspects of the VIB, including how to create such a system and its current capabilities. The second part introduces an experiential learning model for encouraging student-led IT innovations in a virtual environment. One of the objectives of this learning model is to integrate entrepreneurship concepts into technology courses at Penn State Berks. Finally, the presentation will conclude with the demonstration of current projects.
Operation Mousetrap is a technology entrepreneurship program designed to increase the business acumen and entrepreneurship skills of inventors and innovators and to support university technology commercialization in a rural setting. Each intensive, twelve-week program is limited to eight participants from the university community and uses various activities to strengthen the participants' business knowledge. Over three years, it has evolved into a successful program that integrates faculty and student innovation with entrepreneurship education and has resulted in start-ups, venture capital investment, and job creation. In addition, students in the College of Business are integrated into the program by providing market research, entrepreneur assessments, speaker and program evaluations, and business coaching. The program is replicable and can be implemented in both rural and urban settings with an emphasis on lessons learned from four cohorts of participants.
In 2012, Lehigh University launched a brand-new master's degree in technical entrepreneurship. The cross disciplinary approach opened the door to graduate school education in technical entrepreneurship for students from all academic backgrounds, creating a melting pot of experience, skills and aspirations in the classroom. In this discussion, participants will hear from three groups: students from the first cohort, a faculty member responsible for developing and implementing the curriculum, and the visionary who championed the program and brought it to fruition. Lessons learned from these three perspectives will provide insight to others developing and enhancing their own entrepreneurship courses.
In recent years, opportunities for young engineers to develop global health technologies have benefited from burgeoning developing markets, an influx of investments, and the potential for humanitarian impact. However, a consensus has yet to be reached for best-practices in this unique market. Specifically, the early stages of needs-assessment and product requirements can be a challenge for student design teams. Due to the complexity of sociocultural considerations, contextual inquiry can be difficult. Additional challenges are associated with prescribing quantitative metrics for verification, validation, and subsequent efficacy evaluation of a device. We propose quantitative metrics for filtering needs, developing a set of design best practices, and evaluating the success of devices in low resource settings. Quantitative validation will provide a basis for the optimal allocation of resources, development of best practices, and meaningful design iterations for devices serving under-resourced healthcare systems.
As more students enroll in online courses and more institutions venture into the burgeoning field of online education it has become clear that online learning is not an educational fad but instead holds great promise for the future and democratization of education, offering untapped potential for transnational projects, innovation, and collaboration. By leveraging existing technologies and an interdisciplinary faculty, students have the capability to cross disciplines, geographic borders, cultural perspectives, and time zones. This model of engagement has great potential to expand students' professional networks and design perspectives through transnational discourse, collaboration, and leadership. But can product design be taught online? Are students able to produce functioning prototypes? Will their products make it to market? This paper will examine these questions and share the lessons learned from developing and implementing a newly launched MA with an emphasis in sustainable product design that is taught completely online.
MIT is well known for its culture of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Increasingly, MIT students are applying those traits to addressing challenges in the developing world. The presenters run co-curricular programs that feed this culture of innovation for development without being tied to specific departments or philosophies of development. We will present models of tried and tested approaches to engaging students across disciplines. We will focus on inexpensive methods for promoting the culture of innovation for development outside of the classroom, and for moving projects from the classroom into the field.
Social enterprises are more likely to be sustainable and successful when venture teams engage in the design of appropriate technologies, develop business plans, and implement solutions with an integrated approach, rather than in a linear, piecemeal fashion. Through our academic ventures over the past decade, we have come to realize that a collaborative and integrated "triple helix" approach of system design, business planning, and implementation strategy development is essential. In terms of venture success, the process of executing the business strategy is as important as the product itself. This integrated design process encompasses conceptualization, validation, design, field-testing, implementation, and evaluation in an iterative process. Through the discussion of several case studies, this paper explores the tenets of implementation strategy development that will inform the conceptualization of a triple helix design process for sustainable and scalable technology ventures, specifically for base of the pyramid contexts.
The authors have developed an approach to idea evaluation based on the Innovator's Scorecard, presented in Thomas McKnight's 2004 book entitled "Will it Fly?" This approach can be used to either select the most promising of several ideas or to identify weaknesses of a current idea to enable those weaknesses to be addressed/strengthened. The scorecard includes elements across four categories: Market Demand, Resources and Strategy, Return on Investment, and Showstoppers and Intangibles. Participants are encouraged to bring an idea to evaluate to the workshop. During this workshop, groups of 3 to 5 will select one group member's idea and develop and deliver increasingly refined pitches as various elements of the scorecard are covered. Feedback on the pitches will be sought from the facilitators and from the other participants. The initial and final pitches will be recorded, and, time permitting, we will watch these videos at the end of the workshop.
With millions of views and downloads from around the world, eCorner has been a premier resource for students and entrepreneurship educators since it was created by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program in 2001. This platform shares teachable moments from key players in the U.S. entrepreneurial ecosystem. Building on that experience, we asked ourselves: What’s next? And, beyond eCorner, how can a nation of expert entrepreneurship educators use and create online resources to improve the opportunities of the students at their schools and beyond? Join us in discussing the promises of teaching entrepreneurship online. This will be an interactive session in which working prototypes will be shared and discussed. Come prepared to work with colleagues and bring examples, ideas and questions.
Many entrepreneurship courses do an excellent job of teaching students the mechanics of creating their own businesses and provide them with the basics to get started. Where courses fall short is in encouraging students to be innovative. The Integrated Science, Business and Technology department at La Salle University created an entrepreneurship course entitled Entrepreneurship and High Technology Business. The goal of this course is to assist students in creating technology-intensive businesses. Students select their own ideas; all concepts must involve making something new or significantly modifying something that currently exists. Technology must be included in the product idea, manufacturing, and/or sales and marketing. The strength of this course is that students do become innovative and inventive; some very creative ideas have been conceived. The weakness is that, sometimes, the students do not have the expertise to make their idea a reality.
The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Northwestern University has developed curriculum, under the title of NUvention, that has actively recruited and leveraged alumni to enhance the learning of students in the classroom. We will discuss how this model has worked and why it has been so successful, ranked one of the top 10 entrepreneurship classes by Inc. Magazine. The NUvention model involves a class chair and advisory board made up of alumni of the university who are successful entrepreneurs and investors. The students, faculty and university all benefit from alumni participation. Alumni have the opportunity to network with other alumni with mutual interests. This model creates opportunities for networking, mentorship and experiential learning, and lets alumni directly experience the results of giving back to the university. Student demand for the NUvention courses greatly exceeds available seats. Alumni requests to join each class advisory board also exceed available slots.
Lawrence Technological University, Baylor University, and Ohio Northern University are members of the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN). KEEN schools are focused on instilling the entrepreneurial mindset in their undergraduate engineering students. While schools have taken a variety of approaches, these three schools (among others) have focused on faculty development efforts. These schools presented at NCIIA previously on their initial efforts at faculty development. At this presentation, representatives from each school will discuss progress on moving beyond the impact of faculty "champions." While all three schools have taken different approaches, techniques will be discussed that have been used to encourage faculty to incorporate aspects of the entrepreneurial mindset in existing engineering courses. Assessment and tracking of progress will be presented as an integral piece of the faculty development. Faculty development efforts have influenced other network schools through translational opportunities and outreach. This collaborative effort has broadened the impact.
Entrepreneurship education logically teaches engineering students to be entrepreneurs, yet most will work for corporations with cultures, processes and organizations that are far different than those of small entrepreneurial organizations. If we are to prepare innovative engineers for the corporate world we must understand innovation and intrapreneurship in the corporate context. Four universities partnered on such a study as a step toward developing curriculum that prepares undergraduate engineers to be more effective innovators in corporations. They were joined by over a dozen companies, including BASF, Comcast, DuPont, Ford, IBM and Lockheed Martin; and the US Air Force. The team conducted in-depth visits focused on five areas: leadership, process, organization, culture and workspace. Through this process the team defined best practices and key inhibitor/enablers of innovation and intrapreneurship, and recommended competencies for future engineering innovators.
There are increasing calls for changes in engineering education to better prepare graduates to be innovative and creative. Yet, research on how the creative process can be implemented in engineering courses is scarce. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the current state of research on creativity in engineering education. The paper reviews articles from the last five years and discusses how creativity is conceptualized in engineering education research. A content analysis was conducted of engineering journal articles whose title includes the word "creative" or "creativity." Targeted journals included national and international journals in engineering education. Results suggest that, while most researchers have adopted definitions relating to unique, novel, and problem-solving, some research perpetuates myths and negative connotations of creativity. Also discussed in the paper is the need for engineering education researchers to identify how the creative process can be integrated throughout the engineering curriculum.
This research displays the utility of innovation commercialization projects as part of graduate coursework. Commercialization of university innovation is frequently assisted by technology licensing or transfer offices (TLOs and TTOs). This paper suggests that some TLO and TTO responsibilities can be successfully shifted to graduate coursework to the benefit of all parties. TLOs and TTOs often work on long lists of candidate innovations developed by faculty, yet students of innovation and commercialization often have a dearth of such raw material. Although some courses focus on product design and development and result in innovations, other courses require those innovations as a starting point so that students can learn and practice commercialization strategies. A review of pilot innovation courses suggest that student access to "menus" of recently patented or patent-pending university technologies can lead to improved student learning, reduced costs, and faster commercialization.
Since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, many higher education institutions instituted intellectual property policies, claiming rights to faculty, staff, student, and researcher intellectual property. Faculty and students can rely on the institution to research, file, and protect patents. Conversely, some have questioned the validity of such policies and the impact IP policies have on IP generation. While analysis of IP policies greatly varies, the current policies and shifts have remained undocumented and largely unanalyzed. This paper discusses current IP policies of 1) the top 25 entrepreneur schools according to Entrepreneur magazine; and 2) member schools of NCIIA. A simple document content analysis of IP policies of these institutions should reveal the attitude of the academe regarding IP and university proprietorship.
There is as yet no consensus on how to teach entrepreneurship, or even on the appropriate goals of entrepreneurship education. This paper examines a new paradigm in entrepreneurship scholarship that also has implications for entrepreneurship education. The foundation of this new scholarship is the concept of "effectuation." Effectuation holds that expert entrepreneurs tend to launch their activities based on the means they control, rather than on the goals they set. Stemming from this research is the notion that something like an "entrepreneurial method" underlies entrepreneurial activity. This method is akin to the better-known scientific method. The latter has been explicated over centuries, while the entrepreneurial method is a new paradigm. This paper provides some background on the entrepreneurial method and its implications for entrepreneurship education.
Through the past few years, we have seen the growth and birth of many university programs supporting the scale-up of technologies and social ventures with the ultimate goal of poverty reduction. Among several opportunities at MIT, the IDEAS Global Challenge has been running for twelve years through the Public Service Center and D-Lab recently launched the Scale-Ups Program. Olin College runs the Affordable Design & Entrepreneurship program. Colorado State University has five years of history running the Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Enterprise. Leaders of each these programs will share what they see as the key support mechanisms for early-stage innovations and lessons learned from their respective experiences. This panel will discuss how these support mechanisms help innovations as they are piloted and introduced to developing markets.
This workshop will introduce participants to process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) in entrepreneurship, and model a POGIL activity. In POGIL, teams of 3-5 learners work on scripted inquiry activities and investigations designed to help them construct their own knowledge, often by modeling the original processes of discovery. Teams follow processes with specific roles, steps, and reports that encourage individual responsibility and meta-cognition. POGIL has been developed and validated over the last fifteen years; multiple studies have generally found that POGIL significantly improves student performance. Thus, POGIL provides valuable opportunities to help prepare students for E-Teams by learning both content and process skills.
Sessions at the 2012 NCIIA meeting highlighted that women participate in entrepreneurship at lower rates than men, women faculty are significantly less likely to patent a technology, and female students have lower entrepreneurial self-efficacy than males. We've seen the data, so what should we do about it? The purpose of this workshop is to generate practical solutions as to what we--faculty members, program administrators, students, entrepreneurs, and organizations like the NCIIA--can do to begin to impact these trends. We will explore the nature of academic programs, the characteristics of environments that support women entrepreneurs, how mentors can be integrated into meaningful ways, and the type of research that can help us understand these trends and solutions. Finally, we'll ask if the NCIIA put policies or practices in place that emphasize balanced teams, in terms of discipline, culture and gender, and what this would look like.
A talk from innovation expert and creative strategist Robert Tercek.
Assessing student progress toward developing an entrepreneurial mindset is challenging for most programs. This assessment challenge is multi-dimensional. Assessing the effectiveness of individual activities to determine their value for cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset defines one dimension. Program assessment, or assessing the effectiveness of the combination of various activities that take place on a single campus that are intended to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset, is a second dimension. The third dimension is assessing the effectiveness of the efforts by a network of schools, such as the Kern Foundation's KEEN schools, to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset. A rubric-based approach to assessing efforts at these three levels has been developed. The approach has been deployed on a limited basis at seven KEEN network schools. Data from this initial test will be reported. Lessons learned about assessing the entrepreneurial mindset at the activity, program, and network level will be shared.
The University of Arizona's McGuire Center has designed a major assessment program: a ten-category approach measuring the impact on students' perceptions, awareness, and appreciation of entrepreneurship and innovation. The assessment program reaches beyond specific course design to consider the combined cultural impact of a four-year college experience specifically at the University of Arizona. Micro-level data is gathered at the freshman level and compared with exiting senior semester data on a per-student basis. These questions cover perceptions, expectations, and personal interest in entrepreneurship and innovation and are measured for statistically significant changes. Additional metrics include: increase in faculty engaging in entrepreneurship (teaching and research); increase in composite scores of applicants to the e-ship major; and the number of students citing entrepreneurship as a highlight in college education. This is capped by an assessment of marketing and communications impact.
A major point of emphasis in the School of Business and Engineering's Entrepreneurship program is to support entrepreneurship throughout the university. Building on a successful partnership with the School of Communications to offer a course in media-based entrepreneurship, the launching of four new programs in engineering provides a unique opportunity to conduct a series of longitudinal studies on the impact of entrepreneurship educational efforts. The planned research examines cognitive (e.g., entrepreneurial intentions), behavioral (e.g., attitude toward risk taking) and outcome measures (e.g., number of launched businesses) of these distinct types of students and tracks their progress though their studies. Specific focus will be placed on the differences between the entrepreneurship and engineering majors at the start, during and completion of their degree programs. Research questions include: are there differences in entrepreneurship orientation between engineers and business students? What is the impact of specific entrepreneurship activities on this orientation?
Learn how to fully leverage NCIIA grants, training and other resources for success on your campus and beyond. This session will provide an update on current and future NCIIA programs, including funding and training for student teams as well as support for faculty educators to create or expand courses and extra-curricular programs. We'll discuss how NCIIA supports technology invention, innovation, entrepreneurship and helps produce social impact. We'll give you an overview of the competitions we run, the NCIIA ambassador program, and talk about our venture development services for later stage student teams.
Introducing cultural change via a new entrepreneurship program takes time, a collaborative effort, and resources. Developing the mechanisms for such change requires a balance of new courses, experience-based learning opportunities, and integration of the "student supply chain." The development of new programs, one at a private liberal arts institution and one at a large state-related research university, are evaluated via case studies. The common thread of "what worked," as well as challenges and failures, are identified. Thematic "lessons learned" are highlighted that can be extrapolated to other institutions of any size undertaking new initiatives.
"Agriculture, what an exciting place for entrepreneurship," is the droll response we often hear from colleagues in other disciplines. We think so; however the challenge remains to encourage agriculture students to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. We are also called to encourage students to be innovative and apply the lenses of technology and market need to solve agriculture's most pressing problems. Many of these problems have sustainability at their core. In this presentation we will discuss a series of themes that structure student engagement with entrepreneurship and offer a framework that discusses the challenges and effectuation levers educators have for creating tomorrow's agripreneurs. In addition, we will share student vignettes that highlight student learning, challenges and successes and the agriculture-based ventures they seek to create.
The development of an entrepreneurial environment in rural southeastern North Carolina by the University of North Carolina at Pembroke through the Thomas Family Center for Entrepreneurship and the UNCP Biotechnology Center is taking place through 1) education, 2) consulting, and 3) research. A variety of programs at the Thomas Family Center focus on providing students with entrepreneurial education. The center also works with community colleges and high schools, provides free consulting for local businesses, and conducts two yearly summits for UNCP and community college students and local citizens. The Biotechnology Center provides a research environment to benefit the region. Current work is focused on agricultural biotechnology.
We will provide an in-depth overview of a student business incubator, which serves as a model for academic institutions interested in expanding experiential learning opportunities. Combining traditional incubator resources with focused one-on-one mentoring, business plan development and support in an academic environment, the program is a natural extension of an academic entrepreneurship program. Program elements will be detailed. Best practices, what works/what doesn't and national trends will be covered as well. A student participant of the program will share his/her experiences.
A wide range of innovative and affordable technologies have emerged to facilitate the creation, expansion and streamlining of Food Value Chains (FVCs) in developing countries. These technologies target various value chain activities, including agricultural production, processing, storage, marketing, distribution and consumption. Low-cost greenhouses, solar food dryers, threshers, grinders, storage and packaging equipment are just a few technologies that have the potential to improve the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers and agricultural workers while making FVCs more efficient and bolstering food security. To successfully disseminate these technologies, entrepreneurs need to develop sound business strategies to get their products to market as well as business models that potential customers can adopt to sustain and profit from the technology. This paper presents a typology of systemic multi-stakeholder business models to assist technology entrepreneurs in commercializing and integrating their agricultural technologies into FVCs.
Intensive hygiene training, with and without theory-based hygiene messaging, was provided to Community Health Workers (CHW) in an urban slum in Nairobi through train-the-trainer programs. CHWs then performed house-to-house training, including tests of water quality. Making hand washing stations and liquid soap from raw chemicals helped residents see how easily hygiene practices could be performed at home. In addition, hygiene message reminders were posted at water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities. After training, increased usage of these facilities was evident, along with increased purchases of hygiene-related products. Also, a number of women became entrepreneurs themselves, selling liquid soap door-to-door. Lastly, health records and health surveys further confirmed the positive benefits of our hygiene campaigns in this urban slum and the importance of these activities in creating behavior change with positive health outcomes.
The paper will present lessons learned from an initiative between the University of Hartford, University of Rhode Island, and Kenya Agriculture and Research Institute to increase production of amaranth grain in rural Kenya. In 2012 we will develop and implement the infrastructure for long-term use of two new innovations, a thresher and seeder, by farming collectives at three pilot sites. A business planning tool, the E-Spot canvas (Mehta & Mehta, 2011) will be used to facilitate consensus among stakeholders at each of the pilot sites on individual roles, project activities, and the time, money, and labor necessary for economical sustainability and group use of the thresher and seeder. Each pilot site will be a unique test case. Variation in revenue models between sites will be related to differences in resources, motivations, and practices of partnering groups.
Stanford-India Biodesign (SIB) represents a unique collaboration between Stanford University, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. Begun in 2007, the program is supported by the Department of Biotechnology (Government of India) and seeks to train and develop leaders in medical technology innovation within India. Housed jointly at Stanford and AIIMS (Delhi), SIB has several offerings: 1) year-long fellowships in which interdisciplinary teams spend six months at Stanford learning the Biodesign process followed by six months in Delhi, where they experience extensive clinical immersion in urban and rural settings; 2) internships which last 3-6 months and utilize a concentrated SIB curriculum; and 3) an annual Indian MedTech Summit that brings together leaders from academia, government and the medical industry. We will discuss the successes and challenges we have faced as well as future plans for this first-of-its-kind program.
"Crowdfunding" is a route to serious funding for early stage ideas, and has grown dramatically in the past few years via foundational efforts from websites like Kickstarter. Crowdfunding is administered from a web page that allows people to make small ($5-$500) dollar funding commitments (usually in exchange for a token of recognition or an early version of a product) to individual innovators, many of whom have raised significant sums of money on these platforms. At Penn State University, we have created a pre-crowdfunding program called The Sparkplug@PSU that helps students mount a credible crowdfunding drive. Students apply for a $500 Sparkplug grant and can use these funds toward creating a web presence, shooting a quality video, or refinement of a prototype. The Sparkplug@PSU has funded several student groups so far and the educational value of their efforts, results and lessons learned will be discussed.
This presentation will introduce the benefits and methodologies of an entrepreneurially friendly approach to roadmap planning for nascent ventures that results in stronger R&D proposals and increased success attracting needed funds. The authors will describe their training, which helps ventures develop the initial skills to apply roadmap planning to focus, plan, communicate and position their innovations and inventions in proposals, business plans and presentations. They will be able to describe in their work plans how their innovation advances the state of the art, and how to position their Innovation in Context of the state of the art, increasing probability of awards. They will be able to articulate their sustainable competitive advantage of products and their business model, increasing the probability of raising funds. They will be able to describe their compelling value propositions that offer increased sales to customers. Other benefits include tools for structuring strategic alliances, skills essential for technology businesses to grow.
Entrepreneurship education has experienced rapid growth over the past two decades. During that time more than 1,000 business schools have begun to deliver some entrepreneurship courses to undergraduate and graduate students alike. Despite this proliferation of entrepreneurship education, little consensus has emerged on how best to teach this subject. Yet, there is one pedagogical element of entrepreneurship education: the entrepreneur guest speaker. Guest speakers provide students and faculty alike with a real world perspective on the lessons taught and learned in the classroom. This paper is centered on a new DVD series titled "The Startup Experience" and how it can be used to supplement entrepreneurship education. Each DVD is a one-hour, in-depth interview with a successful entrepreneur in a specific industry. Entrepreneurship educators can use these DVDs as virtual guest speakers. We will introduce participants to this new tool and how to use it effectively to advance entrepreneurship education.
The creation of innovative ideas, concepts, and products has increasingly become a team effort. Therefore, college and university curricula need to provide students with the skills and tools necessary to manage the overwhelming flow of external and internal information as well as the high level of uncertainty inherent in any entrepreneurial activity. For example, the construction and revision of business model canvases provides students with an opportunity to translate business plans into business processes, enhance visual thinking and perform a reality check. In addition, weekly status reports encourage students to synthesize new information and revise previously developed hypotheses. Therefore, this paper will focus on examining students' use of thinking and management tools such as thinkfuse (www.thinkfuse.com) and lean launch lab (www.leanlaunchlab.com) in a entrepreneurship and innovation course directed toward the sustainable energy space.
All conference attendees are invited to watch brief, dynamic presentations on program models and their impact on the experiential learning process as well as the innovation and entrepreneurship outcomes of students.
Saturday evening's program will be dedicated to the theme of sustainability and include a speech by renowned climate change journalist Mark Hertsgaard as well as the announcement of the inaugural NCIIA Sustainable Practice Impact Award. This award will recognize companies or individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievement in developing clean technologies, implementing sustainable practices in their businesses or providing exceptional educational opportunities to university students. The award reflects The Lemelson Foundation and NCIIA's strong commitment to supporting technological innovation that improves the world.
