The Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO) at Tufts University has, for the last twenty years, been striving to improve education at all ages through the inclusion of engineering topics to the curriculum. By adding innovative, hands-on, project-based activities they have witnessed students becoming more connected to the material and, as a result, more inspired to learn. Leveraging LEGO products as one of the platforms for engaging students, the CEEO has made a name for itself through the development of new educational technologies, research into student and teacher practices, and in-classroom outreach efforts.
This talk and interactive icebreaker will highlight the efforts on which the CEEO has been focused and the positive outcomes and changes they have seen in the last decade. It will include a hands-on activity in which participant experience first-hand how activities structured in this way capture students' attention, challenge their thinking, and provide a platform for enabling multidisciplinary work in creative, out-of-the-box ways. Showcasing examples from first-grade through graduate school, across topics ranging from engineering, math, and science to literacy, psychology, and art, you'll be left wishing "Why wasn't this around when I was in school?"
The University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship (CITE) began with the mission of establishing intercollegiate technology entrerpreneurship as a cornerstone of engineering and business undergraduate education. A case study of the process creating this center is presented including the elements that have allowed for the acceleration of the program and the elements that have been barriers to overcome. In three years, the CITE has established an intercollegiate $100K New Technology Venture Competition, provided training to over 300 young technology entrepreneurs, hosted 44 New Technology Venture Pitches, created over a dozen new invention disclosures, and spun off multiple new companies and technology licenses. In addition, the implementation of programs in the center has been coupled with studies of the young technology entrepreneurs themselves to inform a more robust decision-making model for Accelerating Collegiate Entrepreneurship (the ACE model).
Unlike other countries, engineers have increased their relevance and market demand in recent decades in Chilean society. Engineering programs attract and enroll the best students from high schools and engineers rank in the top salary range.This success has its origins in different historical and contextual elements.In 1986, as a result of what ended up being an anticipation of current tendencies, within the industrial engineering program a new improvement process was initiated based on the incorporation of Biology of Cognition and Radical Constructivism proposals. This process, called the Learning to Start Starting by Learning (LSSL) Program, has resulted in the design and implementation of new courses, workshops, and other learning activities, all based on relating entrepreneurship skills development with the enhancement of learning capabilities.This paper is aimed at sharing the main elements and results of this innovative program in engineering education.
This paper presents the project-based innovation and entrepreneurship education activities of the Mercer Entrepreneurship Engineering Education Program (MEEEP), developed and implemented through Kern Family Foundation grants. How the Mercer University School of Engineering (MUSE) promotes an entrepreneurial mindset among engineering students is presented in terms of curriculum development, entrepreneurship club activities, recruiting and involving students and faculty, assessment of entrepreneurship courses, and the challenges encountered in implementing/sustaining the program. The course sequence integrates elements of entrepreneurship with engineering; develops an entrepreneurial mindset in engineering students; fosters innovation and creativity in engineering disciplines; and helps students to develop business plans for entrepreneurial design projects. The expansion of this program through the recently established Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) will support educational interdisciplinary curricula and co-curricular activities directly benefiting students and provide multi- and cross-disciplinary teaching, learning, and research opportunities on innovation and entrepreneurship to faculty and students.
Step onto Fantasy Island and help us define the future of entrepreneurship education with a highly interactive brainstorming and working session involving all participants. Facilitated by Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, this session will feature exercises you can try in your classes. Most of all, you’ll play a role in determining where we go from here in the field of entrepreneurship education. The outcomes of this session will provide fodder for Thursday afternoon's “Great Debate.”
At the University of Cincinnati, a unique collaboration in translational research and development has been formed. Students and faculty from the School of Design's Industrial Design Program and College of Nursing have come together to address and solve problems that nurses encounter on a daily basis.This presentation will outline the collaboration's inception and the school's plans to sustain the program. Also included will be examples of innovative product solutions and how the program is working with the university's Intellectual Properties Office to protect these ideas and ultimately see them to market.
We are currently piloting a Specialization in Global Health Design (GHD) at the University of Michigan. Building on the new Minor in Multidisciplinary Design infrastructure within the College of Engineering, the GHD Specialization provides interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate students with a month-long project scoping experience in Ghana followed by an intense two-semester design course. After the first semester, students return to Ghana to test, re-design, and implement their solutions. Through this process, students learn to: 1) design and prototype products that address a significant global health need; and 2) explore ways to sustainably implement them through social venture creation. As of August 2010, 38 students will have completed the project scoping experience at the Okomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana. Projects have included: a reconfigurable obstetrics bed, a portable gynecological examination table, a mortuary truck, a blood exchange transfusion device, and a threshold-based blood pressure device.
We will present on an NCIIA-supported course, "Technology Commercialization in Developing Countries," including updated outcomes, recommendations, lessons learned, and next steps.In the course, MBA and undergraduate engineering students work together to develop business plans for appropriate health technologies developed by undergraduates, including: (1) a diagnostic lab-in-a-backpack; (2) a suite of medical backpacks; (3) a dosing syringe for liquid medication; (4) micronutrient supplements; (5) warming crib and phototherapy lights; (6) an IV-drip monitor; (7) a continuous positive airway pressure machine; and (8) an improved dosing syringe, called the Accudose, to dispense liquid medication. Teams will work on new technologies in fall 2010. The interdisciplinary course helps MBA students understand the technical constraints and possibilities of the technologies, while engineering students learn how the commercialization process influences technology design. Students travel to Africa to gather data for their business plans. One team won the social ventures category of the Rice Business Plan competition.
Venture mentoring is a vital practice to ensuring the commercial success of student-led start-ups, for-profit or non-profit alike. This fast-paced and interactive session will share tools, tips and techniques that new and established mentoring programs can implement immediately. Hear about the good, the bad and the ugly from eight mentoring program leaders in 'Ignite' presentation format (twenty slides auto-advancing every fifteen seconds, five minutes total). From tips on recruiting mentors, to useful tools and software systems, to best practices in ensuring a strong mentor-mentee relationship, this session will cover the gamut. RSVP to this session is encouraged by emailing humera@nciia.org.
There is often a higher workload for teachers using real projects to bring context to their teaching and traction to the work of their students. I will present about free, open source, web-based tools that teachers (or project supervisors) can use to help manage student projects. The focus will be on two tools in particular: Appropedia and OpenPario. In addition, a brief overview of other open web tools will be provided. This talk will help "advance the field of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship education" by providing information, examples and instructions on tools for project management and dissemination of future projects.
This paper will introduce process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) in entrepreneurship, and model a POGIL activity. POGIL has been developed and validated over the last fifteen years, primarily in chemistry education. In POGIL, teams of learners (typically 3-5) work on scripted inquiry activities and investigations designed to help them construct their own knowledge, often by modeling the original processes of discovery and research. Teams follow processes with specific roles, steps, and reports that encourage individual responsibility and meta-cognition, and should help prepare students for E-Teams. Multiple studies have examined the effectiveness of POGIL, and generally find that it significantly improves student performance, particularly for average and below-average students.
Traditional institutions, such as universities, face the challenge of utilizing modern collaborative media and social networking platforms to instill a greater sense of community within their vast community of entrepreneurial students and professionals. When used effectively, social media can stoke the flames of entrepreneurial interactivity outside of the university's classrooms and meeting centers and make resources available beyond the traditional walls of the institution. The Dexter F. Baker Institute for Entrepreneurship at Lehigh University has created iDex to crowd-source support for young entrepreneurs and to engage the greater Lehigh network to provide students with direct feedback and advice on their innovations and venture creation ideas. By taking the effort online, the institute demonstrates its initiative to maintain a standard for entrepreneurial education that reflects modern entrepreneurial thinking and activity.
Today, DiamondBack Automotive is a successful truck cover manufacturer in Phillipsburg, PA. In 2003, it was an idea two Penn State engineering students had for an assignment in one of PSU's engineering entrepreneurship classes.Key to the success of this venture was the close working relationship developed between the students and the entrepreneurship minor faculty. This paper chronicles that relationship, with special emphasis on how the program used innovative approaches to help the students "bootstrap" the company into existence and eventual success. The focus will be on problems encountered and solved in the areas of raising funds, development of an IP strategy and acquiring a patent, and the conflict between completing an academic career versus working on the start-up.
ASU is implementing an approach to innovation and entrepreneurship that integrates research, education, and venture acceleration into a modular process for commercializing faculty and student research and venture ideas. In an environment consisting of 60,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff, ASU's particular challenge is to scale this process while identifying the highest potential opportunities. This paper will describe the overall process, with a focus on the importance of mentoring in scaling student involvement in the process.
Boston University College of Engineering has been actively involved in developing an optional new concentration in Innovation and Entrepreneurial Studies for its undergraduate students. Multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate engineering students are participating in experiential design projects that combine technical engineering elements with strategic, sustaining, and socially relevant problem solving techniques.To more fully support these advanced teams, traditional faculty coaching is being supplemented by a new student mentoring program in cooperation with the KINDLE faculty mentoring program now offered by the BU Office of Technology Development. This program provides the organizational framework that allows alumni, community leaders, and corporate executive volunteers with specific and relevant content expertise to meet regularly with each student team.This paper will describe the elements of the program, give specific examples, and discuss the implications of this approach as a prototype for emerging innovation programs across the undergraduate campus at Boston University and beyond.
In addition to E-Team grants and other funding that NCIIA provides, there is a wide range of non-dilutive funding options available to seed-stage entrepreneurs. This panel will provide information on a range of potential sources of non-dilutive funding that faculty advisors, innovators and entrepreneurs should consider in funding their start-ups. In addition to grant funding, this panel will delve into case studies of startups that have used non-dilutive funding to advance their ventures and provide examples of government and non-governmental funding programs.
Gaining confidence in taking new technologies to market requires experience, not just discussing cases. But real ventures don't have the time to involve engineering and business students in their work, even though they need the experience, unless the venture is actually propelled forward in the process. Baylor's Technology Entrepreneurship course, built around Enable Venture's Supercoach® Entrepreneurial Training, delivers that value to sponsors. Firms bring venture/product concepts and leave with compelling, validated stories designed for the specific audiences needed to take them to the next step. Student collaborators finish with demonstrated readiness to repeat the process in multidisciplinary, cross-cultural settings. A sustainable, growing, experiential learning platform flows specifically from this mutual benefit. This paper addresses the design, challenges and insights learned in delivering this practicum course to over 250 students and dozens of partnering ventures over the past four years in the US and China.
As universities seek to provide entrepreneurial experiences to their students, it is important to examine existing policies governing intellectual property developed on campus. Often, policies that served institutions well during a time when investment in student projects (in terms of materials and heavy equipment) was significant may discourage student innovation in the digital environment. Also, existing policies may only contemplate projects developed by students and faculty, creating potential obstacles to working with industry sponsors. As in any legal scenario, whether a policy is sufficient for the activities of a given institution may not be determined until an issue arises. This paper will review some of the major intellectual property issues faced by universities seeking to commercialize student projects, including managing IP ownership when industry sponsors or government funding are involved. It will conclude with common scenarios that arise in this context and ways to address them.
Innovation has become a "cool" word for business and enterprise in the last decade, with gurus around the world advocating innovation as a catalyst for change. But an idea requires both creative and critical thinking processes in order to become an innovation. Sathikh (2010) established the relationship between creativity and innovation and the need for capabilities beyond creativity. Sustaining innovation requires a concerted effort in human capital built around what Smith II (2009) calls "analytic" and "creative" types, managed very much like in a beehive.In this paper, the author outlines important elements for sustaining innovation such as team composition, skill and knowledge, motivation and inspiration, guide and leader, vision and focus, action and results, mapping them as a visual representation, building on his earlier visual model connecting creativity and innovation.
The teaching of entrepreneurship has become part of the fabric of many institutions of higher learning. Programs and courses focused on product innovation, human-centered design and technical entrepreneurship are offered at hundreds of campuses where multitudes of students are able to leverage these opportunities to start something new. The question is, how are we doing? In other words, what do we provide that works for student innovators and in which ways might we need to refocus our efforts? A panel of student innovators will discuss these questions and others questions of interest to the session participants and audience members. This session will be of interest to anyone who teaches, mentors, provides resources for and appreciates student innovation and entrepreneurship.
The Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship initiative at Penn State is engaged in several entrepreneurial ventures that integrate teaching, research and outreach to educate entrepreneurial global citizens and create sustainable value for developing communities. Engaging students in publishing the observations and results of these initiatives in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings is an explicit objective of the program. The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is responsible for overseeing all research efforts that involve human subjects. IRB approval and subsequent compliance is essential for appropriate conduct of research activities. This paper discusses the challenges faced and lessons learned while seeking approval and ensuring compliance from the IRB on five distinct projects undertaken concurrently in Kenya in the summer of 2010. Unexpected situations that arose while gathering data and how they were resolved is also discussed. This paper aims to share insights into planning and executing research components of international entrepreneurial ventures with similar programs.
Working with, designing for, and selling to communities whose average individual daily income is less than 25 cents a day presents a set of unique challenges. SociaLite is the story of a solar-powered community lighting system that started in a first-year, first-semester engineering design class and continues today in remote rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a story about design and entrepreneurship by undergraduate students within the context of anthropology, extreme engineering and limited resources--all outcomes constrained by adherence to a minimalist framework. It is a story about providing light to the extreme poor through an independent, self-sustaining venture set close to the point of end use. In conjunction with the Ministry of Energy, students and faculty at Wa Polytechnic in the Upper West Region of Ghana, engineering and training centers are being established for the sale, assembly, installation and maintenance of these lighting systems.
Trying to develop sustainable enterprises aimed at bottom of the pyramid consumers is a significant challenge, since assumptions made in the developed world do not always carry over in developing countries. This session will be focused on challenges faced, lessons learned, iterations on business model concepts, and more as students and faculty work toward the creation of sustainable enterprises in developing countries.
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 with each other. A great NA is easy to adopt and adapt, relevant in many settings, 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.
The US is in a period of economic recovery, and "innovation" is one of the most talked-about solutions. Universities are the country’s innovation engines, generating thousands of inventions and technologies each year. The often-missing piece is a pathway--including access to resources and funding--to commercialize these innovations and launch competitive companies.
In this address, Dr. Kristina Johnson, former undersecretary of Energy in the Obama Administration, will provide a wide-ranging perspective on how economic recovery is being shaped. She will examine the government’s emerging plans and initiatives around funding and promoting innovation, and the impact that these activities will have on research, innovation and entrepreneurship at universities. What are the key growth areas the government is targeting for increased funding and support? How are faculty and students contributing to this call for action? How might they get access to resources that will advance their research, innovation and venture development?
In this plenary panel, leaders of federal government programs charged with catalyzing and supporting innovation will discuss their approaches, objectives and the directions that they are taking in response to the increased emphasis on innovation as an economic strategy. Panelists will discuss their organizations' approaches to expanding the frequency and number of innovation outcomes emerging from federally funded research activities and discuss their strategies, plans and programs for expanding innovation.
For several years the author has been teaching courses that combine biomimetics and entrepreneurship to first year college students, juniors, seniors, and graduate students at a liberal arts university. The courses, taken by students from a variety of majors, form interdisciplinary E-Teams to explore innovation and new business development. Ideation is inspired by nature's solutions to problems, and many involve green technologies. The courses are beginning to bear fruit in the form of novel inventions and patents. The author believes that this approach could be useful for teaching science-based entrepreneurship in academic environments without strong engineering programs.
This paper focuses on the study of a fascinating organism called the limpet, a dome-style, shelled organism that lives in intertidal zones. Limpets can withstand the varying amounts of pressure from crashing waves during high tide to those at low tide, when limpets must trap water in their shells to avoid being dried out. They're able to hold onto rough, uneven rocks, making it almost impossible to remove them with one's bare hands, and while biologists have studied limpets, no one has discovered exactly how they hold on to rocks with such clamping force. In this paper, the clamping mechanism of limpets will be explored and measured, and potential applications of limpet-inspired, environmentally friendly product designs will be presented. These include the development of temporary attachments on multiple terrains, underwater robotic technology, and caps for underwater oil and gas spills.
The non-human world provides us with a limitless--and largely untapped--reservoir for inspiration. To help access these valuable lessons from nature, companies are turning to a methodology known as biomimicry. According to estimates from Bharat Bhushan, director of Ohio State University's Nanoprobe Laboratory for Bio and Nanotechnology & Biomimetics, between 2005 and 2008 alone, the top 100 biomimetic products netted $1.5 billion in profits. To capitalize on biomimicry's promise, universities must train future practitioners in this valuable new methodology. At Arizona State University, InnovationSpace is integrating biomimicry as the primary methodology for furthering sustainable innovation in new product development. At the same time, we are engaging partners across campus to develop additional curricula in biomimicry as well as to stimulate interest in using biomimicry in fundamental and applied biomimicry-based research.This paper describes our efforts to pioneer biomimicry's groundbreaking approach to sustainability in a major university.
The academic year 2010-2011 saw the launch of NCIIA's Student Ambassador program. Fourteen students were competitively selected out of sixty applicants, representing a wide variety of campuses from large and small to private and public--from campuses with thriving entrepreneurial activity to no activity at all.
If you're looking to strengthen the entrepreneurial ecosystem on your campus, attend this session to learn how you can better engage students to further your program goals and to see if an NCIIA Student Ambassador makes sense for your campus. Attnedees will learn how four NCIIA Student Ambassadors catalyzed greater awareness and entrepreneurial activity on their campuses.
For more on the NCIIA Student Ambassadors, visit http://nciia.org/studentambassadors.
This paper demonstrates how the involvement of entrepreneurial alumni can foster an awareness and understanding of the entrepreneurial mindset. Although Lawrence Tech has had a long and rich history of alumni involvement in student learning, the participation of entrepreneurial alumni has been limited. A relatively new organization of entrepreneurial alumni at Lawrence Tech is now engaging the student population with has an interest in learning more about their companies. This paper focuses on the process of planning, launching, operating and growing an alumni entrepreneurial organization. Few universities have effectively engaged entrepreneurial alumni as a key resource in creating an awareness and understanding of the entrepreneurial mindset. Lawrence Tech has recently embarked on this journey by taking a major step in the launching of The Legends of Lawrence Tech. This paper will provide a guide to creating an entrepreneurial alumni organization.
Established in 1985, Mtech's entrepreneurship programs at the University of Maryland (UMD) have grown into a dozen innovative programs in entrepreneurship education, venture creation, and industry partnerships, earning national awards and feature stories on CNN. These programs form an "innovation ecosystem": a continuum of support for entrepreneurial endeavors that weaves together technology, business, and innovation. This continuum is a system in which people, ideas, concepts and IP are transformed into seasoned entrepreneurs and sustainable companies. These programs have contributed $22 billion to the Maryland economy and helped create billion dollar industries like satellite broadband and infant respiratory medications. Key leaders from UMD's ecosystem will address issues such as vision/mission, talent/resources, measuring success, and politics in university innovation ecosystems and why all universities must nurture these ecosystems in order to help keep this country competitive.
In the field of technology entrepreneurship education, there is a presumption that students and alumni will launch technology-based ventures. This paper is based on a survey of living alumni of a technological university that delved into their start-up experiences, intellectual property creation, and many other variables. Analysis of the data, which are being collected at present, should result in a test of the presumption (hypothesis), and yield rich insights into the ways that technological entrepreneurship programs can target their activities.
Great minds don’t always think alike. This lively panel will discuss, argue and enlighten with opposing perspectives on where entrepreneurship education should go in the future. Moderator Tom Byers, Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, will use ideas generated “on Fantasy Island” during Thursday morning's session, along with audience questions, to elicit opinions from the panel.
This panel will discuss specific failures that faculty have encountered while working in sustainability, social entrepreneurship and humanitarian engineering programs abroad. This is partly a follow-up to the NCIIA 2010 conference talk titled "Preparing Students to Travel Overseas: Experiences from MIT's D-Lab". A discussion started during the talk about how rarely, and with good reasons, people discuss their failures. This talk will help "advance the field of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship education" by giving real world examples of failures and lessons that can be learned for future projects. We hope that, by exposing past errors, participants can move on to new ones and continue to become more effective.
There are many ways in which humans know things, but generally in higher education we confine ourselves to "propositional knowledge": things that can be stated in sentences (propositions). We focus on transmitting to our students the facts embodied in these propositions, and we test them on their propositional knowledge. Yet successful professional practice requires far more than propositional knowledge. Professionals draw on tacit knowledge, knowledge-in-action, and pre-conscious knowing--often collectively characterized and maligned as "intuition."We will explore and elicit other ways of knowing in the classroom through a series of guided exercises with Legos. With quick 5-7 minute building challenges, every participant will be able to explore their own challenges in teaching innovation, and develop a brief classroom exercise that addresses a teaching challenge with which they are wrestling. Non-teachers are also welcome and encouraged!
Featuring twenty posters covering a wide range of topics, an open bar and time to network.
Scott Case will discuss the Startup America Partnership, an alliance of the country’s most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other private sector leaders working to increase the prevalence and success of high-growth enterprises in the U.S. The Partnership was created as an independent, private-sector response to President Obama’s Startup America initiative, a White House campaign to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship throughout the nation. AOL co-founder Steve Case chairs the partnership and the Kauffman and Case Foundations are founding partners, providing initial funding and strategic guidance. NCIIA is a founding delivery partner of Startup America.
Through the stories of actual students and faculty, learn how to fully leverage NCIIA grants and resources for success. This session will provide an update on current and future NCIIA programs and participants will be able to query NCIIA staff on programs, including: grants for student teams and faculty (in the $20,000-$50,000 range) to support technology innovation, entrepreneurship and social impact; student venture competitions; venture development workshops; NCIIA mentoring services for qualified student teams; and Venture Well advisory services for venture development and raising investment.
The latest generation of innovative technologies (ubiquitous computing, tangible interaction and Internet-based systems) blur the boundaries between objects and services. Purdue University's interaction design program is its latest addition to the industrial design area. The goal is to arm students with knowledge and tools to prepare for the integration of physical and digital interaction. This paper focuses on introducing several educational approaches to integrating user experience research into the context of industrial design. These approaches lead to new interaction design courses. We discuss the experience gained from teaching and the potential for improvement. Different from traditional human-computer interaction courses in computer science, we weave real-world projects into the courses, study related cognitive and social systems to inform knowledge, employ research methodologies to evaluate and improve the design, and adopt innovative technologies to better accommodate human experience.
Leonardo da Vinci was a man of numerous exceptional talents. Beyond his individual genius, he had an understanding of the design process that allowed him to become one the world's most influential designers. Leonardo's contributions to design methodology are vast and deserve to be scrutinized and understood by educators. Research-based design, biomimicry, phenomenon-oriented discovery, content-rich drawing and the visual journal, and specialist versus generalist as designer are all fascinating areas for design educators to comprehend more fully and incorporate into design pedagogy. This paper articulates the lessons we can learn from Leonardo's process and how they can be translated into the university design studio to become powerful teaching tools. The hope is that these tools will expose our students to design concepts they can take with them for the rest of their careers.
Design Squad, PBS' ground-breaking engineering reality show, teaches kids about teamwork, the design process, and creativity--skills that all future innovators need. Originally designed for middle school students, Design Squad has made its way to the college engineering classroom. Meet with your colleagues and learn how they are using Design Squad to help undergraduate engineering students work better in collaborative group project settings, and to increase retention. Purdue University professor Senay Purzer will discuss her use of Design Squad episodes to build students' team problem-solving and design skills, and Elon University professor Sirena Hargrove-Leak will explain how students; outreach to local elementary school students using Design Squad's hands-on engineering activities has addressed issues relating to retention in her freshman engineering course and increased the elementary students' awareness of engineering.
According to Newton's First Law, objects at rest tend to stay at rest, while objects in motion tend to stay in motion (unless acted upon by an unbalanced force). As instructors, we must apply that unbalanced force to ensure that students do not fall prey to the planning inertia that plagues so many start-ups. The prevalence of business plan competitions and courses requiring a formal plan obscures a potentially troubling fact: researchers do not agree on the relationship between a completed business plan and new venture success. Some believe that a plan takes time away from more valuable activities; others argue that a plan helps facilitate resource acquisition and management, making goals more achievable. We believe that planning is useful primarily as a tool to create momentum for the new venture. We thus propose an interactive panel discussion in which we address start-up planning as an exercise in momentum generation.
Ventures in developing communities often fail because of the disconnect between the designer, the implementer and the end-user. Finding the optimum distribution of time, money and sweat equity to be shared by the communities and partnering organizations is essential to achieving sustainability. This paper discusses the "E-spot" model, which seeks to identify the right players within the venture, define their individual roles, and define what form of equity they might offer towards fulfilling the overarching objectives of the venture, while meeting their own objectives. This exploratory research effort is an attempt to develop the model, and a design space exploration tool based on the model, that enables stakeholders to allocate resources, split equities among them, successfully place technologies on the ground, and optimize opportunities to sustain their projects socially, economically and environmentally. This paper will discuss the model and simulation results for application of the model to infrastructure-based social ventures.
What's the difference between a "conventional" business and a "social" business, in terms of mission and in terms of practice? As public and not-for-profit sector individuals have gained interest over the past decade in starting companies to accomplish their goals, dissonance has mounted over what exactly differentiates a "social" venture from any other. But fewer hard distinctions exist than we might expect. In this new all-hands-on-deck approach to problem solving, hard rules are less important than general recognition of the relationship between social utility and profit, and where it comes from.
In the summer of 2010, Rochester Institute of Technology initiated a campus-wide undergraduate summer research program coordinated by the new Center for Student Innovation. Students worked with faculty mentors on projects that covered the sciences, social sciences, information sciences, engineering and more. The diverse pool of students included those from the National Technical Institute of the Deaf and the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP). At the conclusion of the program, all teams presented results at the RIT Undergraduate Research and Innovation Symposium along with peers from LSAMP programs at Syracuse, Cornell, Clarkson and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In our presentation, student representatives from three of the projects (a novel ergonomic wheelchair, educational game development tools for One Laptop Per Child computers, and a social network system that lets alternative energy consumers share their energy and carbon reductions with the public) will share their results and impressions of this program.
Much of entrepreneurship education focuses on the execution of an idea, yet many academic experiences equip students with very few, if any, concept generation techniques beyond classic brainstorming. Much of the corporate focus on innovation and intrapreneurship relates to business processes and metrics placed on corporate performance with regard to new products. The presenters believe that more intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs would succeed if they followed a structured ideation process. Thus, the presenters have been incorporating a number of systematic innovation techniques into the courses they teach in product development, innovation and creativity, and capstone design. These tools include anthropological research, painstorming, bisociation, the Kano model, axiomatic design, the trimming technique, parameter analysis, nonlinear design, DeBono's Six Hats technique, biomimicry, TRIZ, lateral benchmarking, and the Blue Ocean Strategy.This workshop will briefly introduce innovation techniques and invite participants to try several of them during the workshop.
Changes in the economy and workforce needs have led many engineering schools to consider offering entrepreneurship education to their students. This study explored engineering student levels of interest in entrepreneurship, their perceptions of its impact on self-efficacy, and characteristics of students who participate. Survey data were collected from 343 senior-level students at three institutions with entrepreneurship programs. Less than one third of those surveyed felt that entrepreneurship was being addressed within their engineering programs and most were interested in learning more about it. Students who took one or more entrepreneurship courses had significantly higher entrepreneurial self-efficacy on a number of measures. Students with international backgrounds, parent entrepreneurs, or who were within certain engineering majors, participated at higher rates. The results of this study provide valuable baseline data that can be useful for program development and evaluation.
This paper reports on a scorecard that can be used to assess the vibrancy of entrepreneurship ecosystems in US cities. It is based on a six-month study of entrepreneurship in Portland, Oregon with in-depth benchmarks against six comparable cites and quantitative comparison to the complete list of 51 metro areas of one million or more in population. The study identifies key indicators of a healthy environment for innovation and entrepreneurship and provides policy recommendations for improving each indicator.
Planning learning spaces that spark creativity and support innovation begins with asking the right questions. What is the physical form of learning that captures the imagination of future innovators as engaged learners? In a world that is changing exponentially, how do we shape, maintain and renew learning spaces that connect campus-based learning experiences to real-world opportunities? What evidence is there that learning spaces produce a higher level of learning? Participants in this engaging workshop will share and critique best practices and lessons learned in planning learning spaces that support campuses as laboratories for learning, creativity and innovation. Campuses are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge in a shared physical setting, enabling students to create, be productive and increase prosperity. Finding new ways to communicate, research, learn, and teach in a physical setting remains a priority in creating a sustainable future.
Effectively accelerating the transition of university research into successful companies—going from workbench to marketplace—is a core challenge of today’s engineering schools. A new approach to this challenge comes from UCLA, where the Samueli Foundation has funded the establishment of the Institute for Technology Advancement (ITA), an off-site, independent 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to the commercialization of high-value, innovative UCLA technology.
ITA’s operational model has three key components. First, it operates as a business-development organization that works closely with faculty and students to interface with government and other funding agencies, leveraging UCLA technology and innovations to shape and capture major new research programs. Second, ITA works to identify and transition new technology to start-ups, providing funding and facilities to enable faculty and student entrepreneurs to establish successful companies. Third, ITA facilitates applied research and development programs at UCLA for industry and government agencies.
The integration of these three objectives in an off-site institute enables UCLA to obtain funding and programs that would otherwise not be available, leverage university research to fuel start-up companies, and work closely with other organizations to perform applied research and development.
Each presenter will provide his perspective on how ITA was formed, the intent and purpose behind its formation, an overview of how it operates, and a look at its potential for replication elsewhere.
What are the unique challenges and opportunities facing entrepreneurship education in various countries? Travel around the world without leaving the room as we explore regional differences with representatives from Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the US. This session will encourage audience participation and include issues raised in the REE USA sessions on Thursday and Friday. We will all compare notes and glean new ideas while examining the different factors that impact our students based on where in the world they are educated.
How can entrepreneurship educators use social media tools to enrich learning? This student-led workshop will attempt to address this question with a round-up of how popular social media tools like Delicious, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are being used in innovative ways by entrepreneurship educators across the world. The workshop is intended to help instructors and course designers identify social networking resources and other emerging technologies that will enhance the delivery of instruction while meeting the needs of today's student’s learning styles. Participants will be encouraged and expected to share their ideas and related pedagogical innovations during the second half of the session.
Recognizing excellence and innovation in higher education.
The "lean start-up" model has inspired considerable passion in technology entrepreneurship, especially software entrepreneurs. Recent writings and presentations by Steve Blank, Eric Ries and others make a powerful case for an implicit theory of entrepreneurship whose key principles are applicable for any entrepreneur. The lean model posits that a start-up is simply the vehicle for figuring out a sustainable, repeatable, scalable business model: test each critical assumption in your business model; "pivot" (learn and adapt) quickly; iterate. However, the lean? model and its potential often remains misunderstood. (For example, "lean" is often interpreted as cheap, when it is really about being nimble.) We will show how the key principles of the lean start-up model can be used effectively in accelerating not just the scalability of a new venture but also its sustainability.
This presentation will discuss issues in, barriers to, and examples of developing a comprehensive multi-level pipeline of support for student entrepreneurs through all phases of business development. The programs at Lehigh University demonstrate how student startups can benefit from close collaboration among academic entrepreneurial innovation programs and early phase private and public funding sources, as well as with community, regional, state and federal business assistance and economic development organizations. The presentation will also outline how Lehigh has substantially leveraged the resources of the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance and its nationwide collaborative support network.
Effectuation, the concept that entrepreneurs are people who "do," not "plan to do," is essential to the study and teaching of entrepreneurship at UVA's Darden School of Business. Built around scholarship of Darden's Batten Institute, which studies how to apply effectuation in the real world, Darden examines case studies of business formation success in its course work and encourages actual business formation through its Incubator program. That thinking and scholarship is embodied in Darden's "No-Business Plan" approach to a business launch, teaching the importance of first testing a business concept against potential customers and markets to refine the viability of a product or service, demonstrate the potential for revenue-generating demand and bringing the key stakeholders "under the tent." In this "No-Business Plan" method, writing a business plan comes last, as a tool to assist in raising capital--not determining the viability of a business.
One of the keys to developing a successful, entrepreneurially minded engineer and engineering program is faculty acceptance of this subject and its integration into the engineering curriculum. Only then will students be exposed to these topics in a methodical, sequential nature, and only then will students see the importance of the topics in their future employment. Most faculty, however, have not had exposure to entrepreneurship in their educational or professional backgrounds--especially true of academics who have never worked in industry.This panel will include four presentations from schools that are part of the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN), documenting how they have prepared their faculty to integrate the characteristics of an entrepreneurially minded engineer into their engineering courses.
This workshop summarizes an approach for teaching creative, inventive and innovative thinking to students from different disciplines, based on cumulative experience by the author at Florida Atlantic University, University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University. The workshop describes teaching approaches that provide a broad perspective of innovation as applied to engineering, science, technology, and business. It details how to introduce students to new and powerful tools to boost their creative and innovative thinking skills, and how to explore win-win approaches to discover, define and solve problems. The workshop specifies ways that allow participants to re-discover their personal thinking preferences, identify and eliminate mental blocks, and enhance their communication and teaming skills. The delivery of the material uses team-based and hands-on projects and activities that stimulate innovation.
Students in a capstone design course designed, built, tested, and deployed a biochar reactor. Biochar is the material remaining after biomass is heated in a controlled environment without oxygen; a process known as pyrolysis. Biochar can be used as a soil amendment with the added benefit of carbon sequestration. Furthermore, excess process heat generated in the pyrolysis process can be harvested for other uses. The biochar reactor designed and built by the students in this project was deployed at a local hydroponic greenhouse. The reactor consists of a chamber within a chamber; the outer chamber holds the fuel to drive the pyrolysis process while the inner chamber holds the biochar feedstock. Several trials were run to demonstrate that biochar was being produced and to estimate the amount of process heat available to heat hydroponic pond water.
Breadfruit is an abundant but underutilized carbohydrate fruit that can be shredded, dried and ground into gluten-free flour. For many island nations, locally produced flour could replace imported cereals. Several organizations have collaborated with customer focus groups in Haiti to develop recipes and to design manual processing equipment. This paper describes the evolution of the shredder and insights gained in the challenging Haitian marketplace. Technological entrepreneurship requires that a need be met at a profit with a technology that works well in the customer's environment. One key element in the development of the process has been an understanding of the scale at which a new type of harvesting technique is practical and profitable. Originally designed for village-level female cooperatives using a holistic participatory framework, the manual shredder design evolved to serve a larger organizational structure.
Indigenous knowledge revolves around ways of knowing, seeing, and thinking that are passed down orally from generation to generation, and which reflect thousands of years of experimentation and innovation in all aspects of life. Indigenous knowledge has value for the culture in which it develops and also for scientists and entrepreneurs seeking solutions to community problems. Considering indigenous knowledge is essential when conceptualizing, validating, and implementing entrepreneurial ventures in developing communities. Penn State is producing a series of ten five-minute video clips capturing compelling stories about the importance of indigenous knowledge systems in developing and implementing strategies to address global challenges and foster development. The video stories discuss how indigenous knowledge helped solve a significant problem as well as the processes used to uncover indigenous knowledge, validate it, and apply/integrate it into community development projects in various parts of the world.
Open Minds (formerly known as March Madness for the Mind) is the acclaimed annual exhibition of cutting-edge innovation from NCIIA's best student teams. The exhibition is an opportunity for student teams to demonstrate their products and receive local and national media coverage. Ten to fifteen teams are selected to participate in this high-profile event, which involves an evening exhibition for NCIIA conference attendees as well as an exhibition open to the general public and an exciting video competition.
Open Minds 2011 will be held in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of American History on March 25-26, 2011.
In this address, Dr. Saras Sarasvathy will describe her research on effectuation, a rigorous framework for understanding the creation and growth of new organizations and markets. The research program based on effectuation involves over a dozen scholars from around the world whose published and working papers can be found at www.effectuation.org.
In the Japanese art of "chindogu," people create something new, not obvious, and purposely not useful. But what is not useful to a majority of people can seem eminently useful to some. Exploring the art of chindogu provides a new pathway to come up with creative solutions in product development. Participants will use chindogu to create potentially patentable ideas (useful, in this case, but equally new and not obvious) in a relaxed, fun environment. After all, humor has been revealed as the most prized quality among successful inventors.
At institutions of higher-education, our responsibility is to provide methods to achieve innovative and appropriately designed man-made solutions. It is paramount to the young designers and engineers of the future that we impart the methods and experiences in a setting that allows grand, but realistic, ideas to evolve. Specific environments, elements, actors, and ingredients all play a part in forecasting the next paradigm shift in new product solutions. The following case study uses three different collaborative industry projects and product categories: a material supplier, an automotive company, and a toy company. A blend of mega trends research, traditional literature reviews, behavioral research methods, and qualitative action research methods provide a basis for informed design decisions to attain appropriate innovative results in an academic setting. This paper will provide a tested methodology for forecasting and delivering conceptual design solutions to a range of problem sets.
In 2008, Northeastern's School of Technological Entrepreneurship received a grant to design and develop a multidisciplinary new product development course for technology entrepreneurship. In this session, we will review how the class was created, implemented, and received by students, faculty, administration, and industry. The transformational class expanded on traditional content by 1) developing baseline content of general product development practices that are common to all development projects, 2) developing tailored course content for specific technologies (such as biotechnology and software), and 3) initiating a funded multidisciplinary experiential project during the course, resulting in industry-quality prototypes.The course was developed and run in conjunction with the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The combination of engineering, industrial design, and entrepreneurship has been extremely successful from a pedagogical and student project perspective. From our session, it our hope that this model can be recreated nationwide.
This panel discussion will present new assessment models, methods and techniques being developed and put into practice by the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN). KEEN is a network of twenty private universities committed to developing a new class of entrepreneurial engineers that can impact industry faster and help preserve the American way. KEEN strives to instill an entrepreneurial mindset to create intrepreneurial engineers around seven outcomes: 1) Effectively collaborating in a team setting, 2) Applying critical and creative thinking to ambiguous problems, 3) Constructing and effectively communicating a customer-appropriate value proposition, 4) Persisting and learning from failure, 5) Effectively managing projects through appropriate commercialization or final delivery process, 6) Demonstrating voluntary social responsibility and 7) Relating personal liberties and free enterprise to entrepreneurship. Examples of the KEEN assessment model will be presented along with a series of complementary methods being developed by KEEN schools.
The co-founder of Designmatters, along with two lead Art Center faculty from the college's industrial design field that have led international projects for the program with engagement of NGOs, will discuss lessons learned, challenges and opportunities for pedagogical and social innovation outcomes that design research insights and practices bring to the field of international development and social entrepreneurship. Particular emphasis will be placed on the advantages of engaging the design education field to cross-pollinate and educate students as "change agents."
Developing appropriate learning architectures that enable learners to enhance their invention, innovation, and entrepreneurial efforts is a vital issue. Educators today must be willing to innovate to meet the needs of these learners. This workshop will introduce an innovative learning platform that can be applied to professional education and leadership development. Participants will learn to: 1) establish clear learning outcomes that link knowledge, skills, and attributes to leadership action, 2) develop a flexible and responsive program structure, 3) acknowledge support and resources required for innovative teaching and learning, 4) design appropriate assessment at individual, team, and program levels, and 5) identify current technologies that support the design and delivery of these innovative learning approaches. Participants will gain insights and practical techniques to envision, enable, and energize a genuine re-creation of their learning platforms. The interactive format of this session will allow for dialogue and discussion regarding the most relevant elements.
This interactive workshop examines information visualization as an innovative pedagogical tool in entrepreneurship education. The workshop demonstrates how data-rich visualizations of entrepreneurship phenomena can enable student understanding of foundational entrepreneurship content, including processes of creative destruction, innovation-based competition and industry evolution. The growing field of information visualization, an offshoot of scientific visualization, examines how data-rich representations of complex phenomena can drive new insights and hypotheses. In the words of Ben Schneiderman, "Information visualization gives you answers to questions you didn't know you had." In a highly visual presentation, workshop participants will be engaged to discuss, explore and critique a visual approach to teaching entrepreneurship. The workshop advances the field of entrepreneurship education by considering the needs of visual learners and the untapped potential of new media in entrepreneurship education.
Based on experiences in the building of prominent entrepreneurship programs at a number of universities, this session will focus on the implementation of a novel model of campus-wide entrepreneurship program development that combines both centralized and decentralized elements, and provides a platform for dynamic innovation. Attention will be devoted to describing a unique architecture and approach to infrastructure development. Further, the session will explore the the design of both graduate and undergraduate curricula that reflects the distinct needs and requirements of faculty and students in all colleges and schools on the campus. The integration of an effective model for interdisciplinary technology commericialization will be introducted. In addition, high impact methods of entrepreneurial community engagement that reflect a university-wide focus will be examined. Time will also be allocated to examining methods for supporting interdisciplinary research on entrepreneurship.
This highly interactive workshop will focus on introducing participants to the existing research and teaching materials on effectuation. Effectuation consists of a set of heuristics and tactics used by expert entrepreneurs culled from a cognitive science-based study of founders of companies in a wide variety of industries. The ventures these entrepreneurs had founded ranged in size from $200 million to $6.5 billion. The principles of effectuation constitute an inversion of ideas commonly assumed to be at the core of entrepreneurship. The research that led to the development of effectual logic involves over a dozen scholars from around the world and about a decade of data gathering using several different methods. Currently about a hundred educators around the world are teaching effectuation and also developing teaching materials, many of which are now available through the textbook Effectual Entrepreneurship as well as through www.effectuation.org.
