First-time attendees of the NCIIA annual conference are invited to a welcome reception on Wednesday 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.
After a conference welcome and orientation from NCIIA Executive Director Phil Weilerstein, Epicenter Director Tina Seelig will introduce the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), an education, research and outreach hub for the creation and sharing of entrepreneurship and innovation resources among engineering schools in the United States. Find out how you can get involved in this exciting NSF-funded opportunity to transform undergraduate engineering education.
We tend to measure a conference not only by the quality of it's content, but also by the quality of the connections we make. During the opening session you will get the chance to rapidly meet a whole host of people and find out the exciting things going on in this emerging community. Through a fun and engaging interactive exercise you'll quickly identify people that are working on things relevant to you.
The emergence of digital media, including social media tools, collaborative technology and mobile technology, provide new opportunities and challenges for teaching, collaborating and promoting research. Although many people understand how to use digital media for personal use, effectively using it in the classroom or to support research requires different strategies. This session improves the digital literacy of attendees by training them to effectively use digital media in classrooms, collaborations and marketing efforts. Hands-on tutorials and interactive Q&A will ensure that attendees leave with a strong digital foundation and the resources to develop their use of digital media. Additionally, the online learning tool Sandbox will provide a valuable avenue for continued learning.
The objective of this presentation is to have a lively and creative discussion about entrepreneurship programs that connect students and faculty from different academic institutions. The session will begin with a description of the Entrepreneur Scholars (E-Scholars) program that was started at the University of Portland in 1998 and expanded to include the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University and St. Mary's University. Each year, students in the program at each institution come together for the E-Scholars Student Consortium and later in the year faculty meet for the E-Scholars Faculty Consortium. Students from any major on campus may apply for the program, which consists of three courses: Creating a World-Class Venture, Global Entrepreneurship and Entrepreneur Apprenticeship. Student learning goals for the program are to be able to identify and assess viable business opportunities and to design and implement viable business plans.
The Arizona State University College of Technology Innovation (CTI) is in the process of developing and implementing a uniquely transdisciplinary, collaborative and modular degree program in Technology Entrepreneurship and Management. The program will eventually offer undergraduate and graduate degree programs, as well as minors, concentrations and certificates from CTI alone or in partnership with a variety of colleges, such as the ASU Schools of Sustainability, Design, Engineering and Business. This paper discusses the benchmarks, pedagogical philosophy, curricula approaches and collaboration strategies utilized in developing the program. Lessons learned to date and future plans for full build-out of the program are discussed, along with implications for a supporting faculty research agenda.
Learning engineering design by experiencing it while a student--problem-based learning--is the most favored pedagogy for teaching design. And with good reason: engineering is doing and no amount of instruction can supplant the experiential knowledge gained during the process. Most BME programs satisfy ABET's design requirements by having a capstone design program in which seniors work in teams to solve an open-ended problem. Curricula and pedagogy vary from institution to institution. This session will focus on sharing best practices in undergraduate engineering design education. By doing so, we hope to disseminate pedagogy that seems to result in favorable outcomes.
The Epicenter is dedicated to creating a nation of entrepreneurial engineers with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to innovate and contribute to the prosperity of the US economy. How might we engage engineering faculty and students in embracing this vision and leading the effort across America to deliver these skills into undergraduate engineering education? Join Epicenter Associate Director Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and NCIIA’s James Barlow in a high-energy brainstorm to envision new and effective ways of sparking enthusiasm and engagement from faculty and students in this vital effort.
Medical Device Design is a major focus at the University of Cincinnati. Over the past three years, faculty from four colleges have collaborated to integrate the device design process and curriculum into graduate degree and fellowship opportunities. The process began with networking and gap analysis and has grown to support studios and other activities at which innovation routinely occurs. The open studio model promotes creative problem solving, encouraging more students, physicians and technologists to enter our network. The c2c:MD program allows teams to develop their ideas up to the level of functional feasibility, as well as to learn the requirements of clinical studies. This further enhances the student experience and provides meaningful opportunities for entrepreneurship. Students and faculty may also elect to earn an advanced degree with a heavy focus on medical device design. Although in its infancy, this collaborative already includes three hospitals, four colleges, and university regulatory and business offices.
The University of Detroit Mercy Departments of Engineering and Nursing have collaborated to provide unique assistive devices to physically challenged individuals living in the Detroit metro area. A team of engineering and nursing students are paired with a physically challenged individual. The engineers design and build an assistive device identified by the client as being useful to improving the quality of their life. The nursing students evaluate the device and the client for any potential health-related issues. The interdisciplinary student team works together to provide a safe, useful and health-conscious device with the goal of improving quality of life. This paper will describe the multidisciplinary approach used to educate students while working toward meeting the needs of the physically disabled.
TIPeD, a program funded by NCIIA, serves as a model program to enhance assistive technology innovation through product development teams. The goals of TIPeD are to develop cross-disciplinary teams (engineering, business, law, rehab) to create products to improve the lives of people with disabilities, develop promising business plans, secure pilot funding to launch ventures, and improve the quality and increase the quantity of impactful technologies to support the social integration and independence of people with disabilities. The output of the projects are Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) proposals, which position teams to develop start-ups to commercialize the products. In the first year of the program, twelve students worked on four teams, resulting in four draft SBIR proposals. Student assessments reveal that the product development team mechanism is an effective way to teach students about the principles of participatory action design, technology transfer, and entrepreneurship.
Guateca, California Polytechnic State University and the community of San Pablo (SP), Tacana, Guatemala are collaborating in multidisciplinary classes culminating with a two-month Appropriate Technology summer school in SP, Guateca, for twenty Cal Poly students and twenty SP college students. Guateca aims to improve the quality of life for Guatemalans and North Americans by developing local sustainable businesses to strengthen the local and regional economies.
Guateca (1) Builds cross-cultural community with the needs and interests of both communities in mind, (2) Fosters technological and social development by encouraging curiosity and empowering innovation, (3) Addresses language, culture, energy, society, and innovation of sustainable enterprises, (4) Develops sustainable technologies to meet the needs of SP and generate income locally, (5) Provides a model that the industrialized world can strive toward.
We have been developing a cell phone-based approach to delivering improved health care to rural communities surrounding the town of Waslala in northern Nicaragua. Community health workers with limited health care education have been trained to take blood pressure and other vital sign measurements and text this data to a central computer located in the town. A professional health worker evaluates the data and suggests treatment options as necessary. A description of the healthcare issues being addressed, the technology being used, and implementation details to date will be presented.
IPRO 335 is a team of students designing an open-sourced, low-cost, replicable, DC-only, solar power solution to charging laptops for secondary schools in Haiti. The team is also developing a community development model to engage the community in the project, with lesson plans to teach the students and the community about the benefits of clean energy and how solar energy works. They are collaborating with the Ministry of Education in conjunction with students from the State University of Haiti to monitor the scaling of the project to all secondary schools in Haiti. This presentation will guide the audience through how to assess, design, and implement projects in the developing world. With firsthand experience using engineering as a tool for social impact, the presenters hope to share our lessons learned and best practices to help use what is taught in the classroom to solve real-world issues.
Dorothy Lemelson, president and board chair of The Lemelson Foundation, and Executive Director Carol Dahl will discuss the vision of the Foundation, the Foundation's unique approach to supporting inventors and invention-based enterprises to improve lives in the US and developing countries, and outline challenges and opportunities for the next generation of inventor-entrepreneurs.
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. The NA session at the 2011 NCIIA conference was popular and lively, and NA sessions have been popular at other education conferences for a decade. 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.
Nationally, there are a growing number of undergraduate students from the science and technology disciplines with great product ideas, but with an insufficient understanding of the go-to-market strategies that will enable them to commercialize their concepts. With grant support from NCIIA, a new course in "Marketing High-Technology Products and Innovations" is under development to help not only University of Maryland students navigate this challenge, but to create a replicable pedagogy for how to integrate experiential entrepreneurial learning into a technology marketing course. The goals of this initiative are to increase (1) the number E-Teams launching innovative technology-based ventures; (2) the development of students' skills to successfully commercialize innovations; and (3) student understanding of high-technology market research principles, affordable design, and technology innovation. This paper will detail the initial needs assessment and strategies, as well as interim progress in the development of the course and related transferable pedagogical materials and methods.
This presentation focuses on the Clarkson model for discovery-driven technology transfer of faculty and student innovations, developed at the Shipley Center for Innovation, and demonstrates the model through an award-winning student venture. Translation of university discoveries is critical for sustained economic development, but complex in practice. Clarkson's approach is based on the recognition that a "one size fits all" model of university technology transfer is unrealistic. To be successful, the model must consider such institutional characteristics as size, geographic location, academic profile, student composition, resources, etc. The presenters will discuss the salient features of the Clarkson model through a student-founded startup, Blue Sphere Industries, Ltd., based on the "Controlled Environment High Rise Farming" system, an environmentally sustainable and economically viable solution to agricultural produce growth.
The Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) is an interdisciplinary program in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois engaging a vast pool of faculty, students, and alumni to provide the education, experiences, and resources that students need to become innovative leaders and empower them to change the world around them. Created in 2000 to highlight the university's rich history and culture of innovation, the TEC inspires its engineering students to become the next generation of world-changing visionaries, leaders and entrepreneurs. In the area of entrepreneurship, the TEC has developed a roadmap for students to follow that greatly increases their chances for starting a successful enterprise. The goal of this talk is to explain and discuss the roadmap with other educators in the field of entrepreneurship and see how it compares to their experiences and their school programs.
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, including: grants for student teams and faculty (of up to $50,000) 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.
Join Epicenter Director Tina Seelig in prototyping a transformative un-conference experience. Bring your creativity and imagination to shape the Epicenter’s inaugural un-conference, taking place in September at Stanford University’s Sierra Camp, where entrepreneurship and engineering faculty will come together for spontaneous inspiration and interactions on how to create a nation of entrepreneurial engineers.
This paper describes the development of a new graduate-level course entitled Sustainable Technology Entrepreneurship for Scientists and Engineers (STESE), which was jointly developed and delivered by the Colleges of Engineering, Business and Agricultural Sciences at Colorado State University. The goals of the course were to instill an entrepreneurial mindset and global/sustainable perspective among engineering and science students and to provide technical expertise and rapid product realization resources to student teams within the Global Social Sustainable Enterprise (GSSE) program in the College of Business. The motivation for the first goal was to address a deficiency of adequate entrepreneurship training opportunities for graduate students within engineering and agricultural sciences at CSU. The motivation for the second goal was to address a critical shortage of engineering and agricultural science expertise within the GSSE teams engaged in sustainable enterprises in developing countries.
This paper uses a case study approach to illustrate an approach to sustainable community development in Base-of-the-Pyramid (BoP) contexts. Most innovation and entrepreneurship processes concentrate on the development of individual product and service solutions. Arizona State University's GlobalResolve programs in the College of Technology Innovation and its partners around the world have worked to integrate sustainability entrepreneurship with the practices of sustainability science and sustainable community development into one multi-layered sustainable development process. As one example, over the past 24 months, GlobalResolve has worked with Campus Toluca of the Tec de Monterrey system to assist the community of San Antonio Buena Vista in defining a sustainability strategy that can be implemented, at least partially, through the creation of an integrated value network of mutually supporting sustainability-oriented ventures. The theory and methodological approaches are briefly discussed, along with lessons learned to date in their practical application.
Innovation manifests itself in myriad forms in developing communities. A dialog on developmental entrepreneurship requires us to conceptualize and operationalize innovation as defined by the people. Using provisional narratives, the Global Jugaad Commons aims to understand how youth in developing communities across five countries perceive innovation, and illustrate how cultural mechanisms and communal context bias the unique circumstances that lead to innovative solutions for individual or community needs. This project aims to create a repository of innovation snapshots, which, along with the research findings, will inform and inspire innovation by cross-pollinating concepts across cultures. Our team has interviewed over 400 youths across rural and urban areas of Kenya, Tanzania, India and Nicaragua with 120 interviews planned for September 2012 in resource-constrained areas in the US. This interactive session will explore innovation and the way it is perceived and practiced in five distinct contexts.
Over the fifteen years of history of the NCIIA, entrepreneurship programs have been developed and implemented at many member institutions. Some of these are long standing programs, and have experienced the trials and tribulations of startup, implementation, and being sustained on their campuses. They have also graduated many students. Together, these factors make it valuable for the community to hear about and review these programs to glean both best practices as developed by these veterans as well as the program outcomes that have been achieved. The discussion will be motivational, especially to those starting out in the discipline, as well as providing a catalog of outcomes that can be utilized by faculty to promote their programs at their own institutions.
The paper describes a collaborative project undertaken by the director of the Metro State Center for Innovation (CFI) and the Industrial Design (ID) Chair to develop the assessment program for the center's curriculum. The ID program assessment process has been identified as exemplary at Metro State, and directed this work.
Using the model from a creative field for the development of the CFI assessment program honors the creative nature of entrepreneurship. This linkage directed the identification of clearly articulated student learning outcomes tied to assessment instruments, striving for an objective assessment of a creative endeavor. A curriculum map linking courses with learning outcomes and identifying a level at which those outcomes are addressed was developed and explained. The process for curricular and instructional changes reflecting assessment findings for the CFI is also discussed.
Successful innovators use a range of knowledge and skills that include developing creative concepts, prototyping new products, and several effective commercialization strategies. Colleges and universities frequently offer innovation courses, but few models exist for assessing whether or not students have mastered the complex skills that lie at the heart of successful innovation. Traditional tests are best suited to measure whether or not students have mastered a limited amount of discrete factual and procedural knowledge, which is necessary but not sufficient to be a successful innovator. This research investigates how to better assess whether or not students have understood and can apply key innovation concepts and skills. It uses course plans, student performance, and student feedback from a course on innovation management to determine successful methods for measuring what matters in innovation instruction. In doing so, it suggests how we might effectively measure what matters in an innovation course.
This presentation summarizes research on why entrepreneurship is important for economic development and provides insight into how additional entrepreneurial activity might be stimulated in a particular region. It is based on a year-long study of the entrepreneurship ecosystem in the Portland metro area. Findings emphasize the need for educating entrepreneurs and investors in order to close the perception gap that exists between them and drive economic activity. Entrepreneurs see lack of capital as a major barrier, while investors see a lack of investment-quality deals. The Index of Entrepreneurship Indicators is a tool that allows for assessment and tracking of the vibrancy of a region's entrepreneurship environment.
Connecting 350 US engineering schools to share entrepreneurship learning materials and methods is no small task, so we need to hear from you on how to build the most effective knowledge community. Should the Epicenter offerings focus on distributing audio and video resources? Full learning modules and lesson plans? Experiential entrepreneurship exercises? Take part in a group discussion with Epicenter Chief Information Architect Forrest Glick and members of the Epicenter curation board to discuss what web-based resources you think matter most and which tools and features will effectively help educators contribute to the Epicenter community.
Major universities have big budgets, big energy bills, and large carbon and waste footprints. They also waste a major resource: large numbers of students with great entrepreneurial, technological, and innovative potential who care deeply about environmental issues. We are attempting to develop a replicable "Sustainable University" program that will develop and explore businesses and business models that could motivate, empower, and incentivize potential innovators and entrepreneurs to identify and develop money-saving opportunities on their own campuses, and then to commercialize and disseminate their solutions to other higher education campuses.
In the fifteen years that Lehigh University has been supporting student inventors and innovators, only a small percentage of them have been women. In fact, more often than not our Eureka! Innovation Competition has received no proposals from women. During academic year 2010-11, Lehigh's Baker Institute hosted themed monthly events that were regularly attended by ~50 students, but in April featured "Women Who Innovate" and played to a packed house of nearly all women; also our entrepreneurship and product development courses have female enrollment proportionate to our student body. Why are we having trouble converting women interested in learning about innovation to women who innovate? This interactive panel discussion will feature students and faculty from colleges and universities that participate in NCIIA with both successful engagement of women as well as those experiencing a lack of female participants in innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities.
NCIIA is launching a new greentech initiative focused on clean energy and sustainable materials companies. The initiative will augment E-Team grant funding in these sectors and provide specialized E-Team support. If you are a faculty member who works with teams in these sectors, please contact Joseph Steig.
Eben Bayer, co-founder of NCIIA E-Team and successful green materials company Ecovative Design will give a brief overview of his involvement with NCIIA, where Ecovative is today and where they plan to go in the future. Ecovative uses mushrooms and mycelium to grow environmentally friendly alternatives to plastics, including packaging materials.
Why should every innovator look to the natural world for design inspiration? Because the more our designs function like well-adapted components of healthy ecosystems, the more sustainable they will be. This interactive workshop is intended to introduce instructors to a wide variety of tools and concepts that can be incorporated into existing course content, whether the course is in engineering, biology, business, or industrial design, and used to encourage students to truly innovate and evaluate the sustainability of their designs early in the design process. Tools and techniques will be introduced that work in traditional classrooms and for online courses. Participants will be encouraged to share their own creative successes in bringing biological knowledge to the classroom. They will gain access to a growing body of biomimicry curricula and techniques and a network of instructors at the forefront of introducing this exciting new paradigm to students.
The presentation provides a case study of the academic year 2010-11 launch of the new Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program (EIP) at the University of Maryland. Modeled on the university's award-winning Hinman CEOs Program for upper-classmen, the new two-year EIP living-learning program for Honors College freshmen and sophomores combines challenging academics, experiential learning, and a community-living environment to help foster students' entrepreneurial skills in opportunity discovery, creativity, innovation and business creation. The presentation looks back on the first year of the program and provides an interim review of the program's progress, an assessment of initial results, and discussion of lessons learned.
A course called Product Development and Innovation was developed in 2008 under a grant from the NCIIA, and first taught in fall 2009 and again in fall 2010. The course is a three-credit, semester-long, and open to all College of Business and College of Engineering undergraduate seniors. Students are organized into interdisciplinary E-Teams. The E-Teams develop product concepts, prototype their products, and develop marketing plans to sell their new product designs. Throughout the semester, the E-Teams have several design review meetings with the faculty team serving as a pseudo-management team.
In the distressed rural economy of southern Illinois, Southern Illinois University Carbondale has aggressively expanded its entrepreneurial training focus to launching new ventures, ranging from small microenterprises to high-tech, knowledge-based companies. The training scope also serves a diverse audience, including academically talented fourth and fifth grade students, high school students, undergrad and graduate students, university faculty, low-to-moderate income individuals, and regional aspiring entrepreneurs. The customized training approach has been multi-faceted, incorporating experiential learning techniques, multiple Kauffman curricula, individual consultative and coaching services and wrap-around resources such as the SIUC Small Business Development Center. The ultimate goal is to illustrate how a training model and curriculum can be modified for a diverse group of partipants to complete a training/coaching mix.
Georgia Tech has historically not adequately recognized the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship to its undergraduates. The InVenture Prize television show and competition was initiated to help remedy this problem by introducing a dramatically new approach to creating and establishing a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among undergraduate students.
In 2011-2012, 477 undergraduate students are competing for six finalist slots and the opportunity to face a panel of four judges on stage in front of a live, 1,000-person audience and 50,000 people watching state-wide on live television. Inventors compete after months of coaching and elimination rounds for cash prizes, provisional patents and utility patents. A partnership between Georgia Tech and Georgia Public Broadcasting has enabled the competition to be professionally produced and televised. An “invention studio” facility enables the students to fabricate working invention prototypes. Current efforts are focused on organizing this large competition with an eye towards national expansion.
With the growing number of university-based entrepreneurship programs, there has been a concomitant increase in student-based competitions around entrepreneurship. However, the take-home prizes for the top winners in a business idea competition, which is often cash, is only a fraction of the take-away value afforded to all of the entrants. For institutions basing these competitions on the educational process, and not just the outcome, student entrepreneurs at all stages of their learning and experience-building can benefit from participation. Over the past three years, the University of Pittsburgh's Big Idea Competition has grown in breadth and depth for undergraduate and graduate students. The lessons learned, via successes and failures, as the competition has evolved will be shared. Entrepreneurial educators, either looking to launch a new competition or evolve an existing one, will be provided specific tools for implementation at their institutions.
Universities initiated new business plan competitions (BPC) during the last decade at a 22% annual growth rate. Despite increasing popularity, even avid proponents of BPCs question their efficacy. There is sparse documentation of BPC's usefulness in "sorting out" and elevating innovative growth-oriented business models that drive economic development. We compare competitions hosted by nationally top-ranked programs in entrepreneurship (Princeton Review/Entrepreneur.com), engineering (ABET), top-rated and second-tier general business programs (AACSB). Findings suggest that institutions with top-ranked entrepreneurship programs were less likely than top-ranked engineering programs to reward entries from high-value ventures such as energy, IT, and medical products or solutions. The study has implications for universities considering a single-institution-based BPC. It stimulates discussion among program administrators who address the mix of competitors, the way competitors are attracted, and how to enhance the quality of entrants into appropriate BPCs.
Join the Epicenter team in exploring how the Epicenter can help faculty and engineering students to become leaders within their respective communities. Plus, using ideas generated in earlier sessions, work with the Epicenter team in leveraging faculty and student engagement to build leadership commitments in adopting entrepreneurship and innovation education throughout engineering courses and curriculum.
The World Health Organization estimates that international donors fund nearly 80% of health care equipment in developing countries. Almost 70% of the donations are not in use because of lack of maintenance or spare parts, or because local personnel do not know how to use it, representing a tragic waste of scarce resources. This disconnect arises because of the substantial differences in resources, infrastructure, social and behavioral norms, and the healthcare environment. The typical biomedical engineer in the U.S. is unlikely to be familiar with the unique challenges of designing devices for resource-constrained environments. We have developed a structured methodology that takes into consideration pertinent anthropometric, contextual, social and economic considerations in the design of biomedical devices. This systematic approach involves a series of questions and real-world examples to aid in design exploration and ensure that every decision made in the design process can be defended by a well-informed rationale.
This interdisciplinary project explored the medical patient experience through a multi-perspective lens. It journeyed through the issues and complexity involved in providing an exceptional patient experience within a health care setting. During this hands-on research workshop, students engaged in lectures, activities and exercises. This was accomplished within a "design thinking" framework. The approach focused on generating innovation through observation, reflection, creativity, integration and implementation. This helped the students, who had no design background, to see design as a positive force in society and a catalyst for change. It helped bridge between the rational, quantitative and emotional, qualitative so that students could develop well-grounded and holistic responses to vexing healthcare issues that were patient-centered.
Most capstone senior biomedical design courses challenge student teams to conceive, evaluate, develop, prototype and test a biomedical device. These organizational skills are expected to follow from theoretical principles taught in the classroom, whereas it is more often the case that these skills are lacking due to the absence of a clear model from which to guide the student to a successfully developed product. We propose that the GATE method of product development, adapted from many industry standard practices, can be applied to semester-long student design projects to enable a more clearly organized and successful student design experience. Small teams present regularly to faculty mentors and industry representatives to insure timely development with professional supervision. This timeline-driven method promotes the development, management and presentation of incremental tasks that lead to a successful product development experience.
Today, more and more students on college campuses are interested in learning about entrepreneurship, but it's unclear how faculty and administrators should respond. Many universities have tried to meet the demand by launching speaker series, academic programs, co-curricular activities, and student business accelerators. Successful initiatives are often talked about, while failures are swept under the rug. This panel will feature 3-4 faculty members from universities around the country that have started entrepreneurship programs for students discussing lessons learned from their not-so-successful initiatives. The panel will cover important topics such as interdisciplinary collaboration, influencing administration, and supporting student ventures. The panel will also specifically discuss how geographic location/economic environment affects overall strategy and implementation.
This panel discussion will cover various strategies for early-stage funding of technology start-ups, especially avenues other than traditional capital markets (e.g., angels, venture capital). An overview will be given of federal government programs available to innovators, with a focus on the Small Business Innovation Research program at NSF. We’ll also hear from the co-founders of two early-stage companies (one of them a former NCIIA E-Team) who have used a variety of funding sources to grow their businesses. Finally, a veteran entrepreneur and investor will give his insights on how to approach early-stage funding decisions. The discussion will focus on strategies and lessons learned related to the panelists' experiences with government grants, venture capitalists, angel investors, incubators, business plan competitions, and the like.
How do entrepreneurship and innovation skills develop over time? How does access to entrepreneurship and innovation programs affect career and academic choices of faculty and students? Join Epicenter Prinicipal Investigator Sheri Sheppard and NCIIA’s Research and Evaluation Manager Angela Shartrand for a preview of the big research questions the Epicenter will tackle over the next five years. Take part in a dialogue on how the Epicenter can create an innovative approach to these research and assessment challenges.
The University of Tulsa, a small liberal arts school, looked to IDEO and Google as models for its development of a hands-on experience for students and a physical space. "Studio Blue" functions as the home for an extra-curricular "agency" where a team of students works on select projects for area companies, non-profits, and campus departments. Examples of projects including new product ideation, research, and promotions will be presented at this session and attendees will be able to participate in examples of interactive exercises used in Studio Blue. Benefits of this type of experience for students include learning an interdisciplinary approach to problem identification, the ideation process, project implementation, and teamwork.
The move toward green entrepreneurship education is cause for celebration by both environmentalists and entrepreneurship advocates. However, the actual manifestation of environmental entrepreneurship education at a liberal arts college encounters several pitfalls that environmental studies and entrepreneurship educators would benefit from discussing. Based on several years of offering environmental entrepreneurship courses at a small, midwestern liberal arts school, our goal is to offer a number of cautionary tales and identify possible solutions. We break down the pitfalls of environmental entrepreneurship education into two categories: those that overlap with the pitfalls of teaching entrepreneurship in general in a liberal arts context, including an antipathy toward business and a lack of real-world know-how on the part of students; and those unique to green entrepreneurship, notably a shallow understanding of sustainability. We illustrate each pitfall with case studies from our courses and offer pathways toward pragmatic teaching solutions.
All Muhlenberg College students take a first-year seminar (FYS) to develop critical thinking, research, and writing skills. In 2010, Muhlenberg received NSF grant DUE-0965834 for Scholarships in Math & Science (SIMS), a project to improve recruitment and retention. The SIMS students' FYS is inspired by cornerstone courses at other institutions, and is organized around multidisciplinary design projects, including musical percussion instruments and a stage-gate series of new product development proposals. The course also includes a variety of active, guided-inquiry, and team-based learning activities focused on creativity, design processes, prototyping, and entrepreneurship. We describe: relevant background; the FYS structure and activities; outcomes and implications; changes from 2010 to 2011; and directions for future work.
Around the globe, women participate in entrepreneurship at lower rates than men. A consistent finding in entrepreneurship education research is that even contemporary female students report lower entrepreneurial self-efficacy than their male counterparts. This presentation summarizes the results of three entrepreneurship education research and assessment projects that highlight gender differences. The sources are: 1) data collected via entry and exit surveys administered as part of an undergraduate entrepreneurship program, 2) data collected from a study examining the impact of entrepreneurship education on engineering students, and 3) research related to stereotypes of entrepreneurs held by millennials. The presentation will discuss briefly the literature related to women and entrepreneurship. The purpose of the presentation is to stimulate discussion about factors that limit women's participation in entrepreneurship and to explore interventions that can or should take place at universities to improve entrepreneurial self-efficacy.
In urban settlements, lack of financial resources can impact good hygiene practices, such as the inability to purchase bar soap or use pay-for-toilet facilities. As part of the presenters' efforts to create sustainable water and sanitation facilities, women were given the opportunity to participate in two health-related enterprises by selling homemade liquid soap and water purification. A simplified business micro-finance model was used in which a small interest amount was added to the actual cost of supplies, with periodic loan repayments to community-based organizations. It was expected that these enterprises would not only create new revenue streams for these women, but also reinforce the hygiene messaging and training and result in greater usage of water and sanitation facilities and better health for their families. Financial and usage data as well as survey responses were used to assess the impact of these enterprises on family health and facility operations.
Crossing the Rubicon: Entrepreneurial education at the lean crossroads
Over the past fifty years, the science- and technology-based startup has emerged as a critical model for commercializing new ideas. But great technologies don’t automatically attract users and thrive. While business schools have for decades taught aspiring leaders how to execute known business models for large companies, startups search for and discover business models for sometimes undiscovered, emerging markets. Instead of a “b-school” approach, Steve Blank maintains that now is the time for the rise of the “e-school”: teaching a 'lean" approach to venture creation. Successful serial entrepreneur and Professor Steve Blank will delve into the Lean LaunchPad method and its implications for technology entrepreneurship education in the US.
See Steve's blog post, "Search versus Execute" for an in-depth explanation of his thoughts on startups.
The Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell integrates a range of experiential activities into undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship courses in an effort to anchor entrepreneurship theory in practice. In partnership with the university's Intellectual Property Office and the campus' medical device incubator (M2D2), entrepreneurship students work alongside campus researchers and technology entrepreneurs to assess emerging venture opportunities and to assist in developing the ventures. We have found that experiential learning serves as a particularly effective vehicle for practicing and transferring entrepreneurial skills, since it allows students to practice skills in real-world settings. This presentation will discuss the pedagogical issues addressed through the various experiential activities outlined above. Sample activities and assessment techniques will be shared, along with the learning objectives associated with each activity. Two student panelists will be invited to share their perspectives on the value and challenge of these types of experiential learning activities.
Engineers typically do not get formal training in biomimicry and it is not reasonable to expect that experience will eventually result in DaVinci-like knowledge of nature. A standardized approach to finding nature-based solutions may bridge the gap and encourage adoption in academic curricula.
Function-mapping offers an intuitive method to connect engineering needs to potential biological (and traditional) solutions. A standard methodology for defining engineering functions can be used to describe the capabilities offered by nature. If design engineers can express technical problems in these same functional terms, they will then be able to connect their problem/need not only to known man-made solutions, but also seamlessly explore relevant biological solutions. Several examples are illustrated in the paper and a comparison is made to the taxonomy employed by the Biomimicry Institute (www.asknature.org).
The authors believe the proposed approach can greatly facilitate the integration of biomimicry into the engineering design process.
Genrich Altschuller's theory of inventive problem solving, TRIZ, is built on the vast quantities of manmade solutions available in patent databases. By defining contradictions, TRIZ leads the design engineer to principles that have been applied by inventors faced with similar contradictions. The authors propose a technique, which they are dubbing Bio-TRIZ, that extends the basic philosophy of TRIZ so that an engineer/designer faced with a contradiction who is referred to one or several of Altschuller's principles is simultaneously presented not only with manmade illustrations of the relevant principles but also biological examples of those principles.
The authors believe the proposed approach will more efficiently and routinely allow designers to employ principles of biomimicry to everyday problems.
Nature provides a rich source of engineering solutions, but undergraduate engineering students often have difficulty making the conceptual leap required to apply natural solutions to open-ended design problems. It is imperative that students uncover evidence that will enable the useful application of the laws of nature. The authors developed biomimicry cards to help students apply nature's laws to design problems. The prototype biomimicry cards are designed to expose students to the fundamental mapping problem between function and form. One stack of cards presents biological principles that might be applied to design problems. Another stack of cards presents design problems to be solved. The authors developed a card-based activity in which the students explore links between biological principles and engineering problems. This activity is designed to provide a quick, fun, interactive introduction to biomimicry.
Epicenter Principal Investigator Tom Byers moderates a provocative industry panel comprised of entrepreneurial leaders to discuss the importance of creating a nation of entrepreneurial engineers. Panelists will include a variety of leaders from established firms, technology enterprises, and Silicon Valley startups who will tell it like it is when it comes to the skills they need in engineering graduates.
We have found that the failure of clean water and sanitation facilities in poor urban settings is due to an overemphasis on facility technologies alone, which does not guarantee success or sustainability; instead, we hypothesized that focusing on business best practices was also a necessary condition for success. From our work in a major urban slum in Nairobi, Kenya, we learned that it is a combination of both governance and business practices that is critical to the success of such facilities.
In our case, the business practices included development with community members of standard operating procedures (SOPs), a quality management system for performance measurement against objectives, and project management oversight with respect to adoption of SOPs. Specifically, we have been examining how SOP training, adoption of SOPs, and degree of project management oversight can increase facility usage, and improve operations, ROI, and sustainability. In the area of governance, we have been examining the active engagement of the community in facilities management and oversight, water access and maintenance, and outreach.
Survey, usage and observational data, as well as financials, are being examined to determine the role of these factors and their interactions in creating a sustainable WATSAN model for subsequent replication using a social franchising model.
The value of engaging students in venture creation and other hands-on entrepreneurial experiences is enhanced through students' concurrent involvement in original, institution-approved, and publishable research. An underway case study traces the experiences and perceptions of students through the research process, from design to fieldwork to analysis to dissemination. The study highlights the benefits and challenges of involving students in undergraduate research connected to hands-on entrepreneurial experiences. Undergraduate research adds value and dimension to educational efforts that are already time- and resource-intensive; this value accrues to students, faculty, programs, and universities. The case provides one model for how undergraduate research may be meaningfully incorporated into entrepreneurship education. The case's curriculum sequentially involves students in venture creation and research design, field and research experience in developing country contexts, and seminar-based reflection to develop publishable papers and other research products.
Base-of-Pyramid ventures must be designed with the intimate involvement of all stakeholders to ensure that the designs meet their needs and use preferences and contribute to a self-determined improvement of livelihoods and agency. Participatory research engages community members in identifying their problems, articulating their context and resources and developing effective, affordable, appropriate and sustainable solutions. The research aspect is crucial to developing the product, business model, implementation strategy and scale-up strategy. Participation in the research endeavor can lead to expectations and ownership, which, although desirable, have the potential to negatively impact the success of the venture and limit its scalability. Simultaneously, the information inaccuracies that owe their genesis to the expectations built by the venture can compromise the validity and integrity of the research endeavor. This paper explores the tensions and conflicts that arise on integrated research and entrepreneurship ventures in developing country contexts.
A central challenge facing educators is the development and assessment of programs and activities that cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset. One approach to facilitating program development and assessment is the creation of relevant learning outcomes and construction of a rubric that operationalizes each learning outcome. Schools participating in the Kern Foundation's KEEN initiative developed seven learning outcomes that collectively characterize the entrepreneurial mindset. A rubric was developed for each learning outcome to guide development of curricular elements and assessment. This presentation will report the findings from an exploratory investigation into the application of a subset of the rubrics by faculty. Lessons learned for designing curricula to cultivate the entrepreneurial mindset will be shared.
Globalizing entrepreneurship education through innovative programs is becoming crucial. Some of the goals of the many entrepreneurship courses and programs around the country are: preparing students to be independent, world-class technology innovators; engaging students in interdisciplinary and/or international teamwork; and fostering a sense of responsibility for the environment and welfare of others, locally and internationally. Therefore, it is important for students to learn international virtual team skills. The development of international and interdisciplinary virtual teams at an undergraduate institution that bring together multicultural and multidisciplinary faculty, students and industry mentors will be introduced. We will conclude with the presentation of how a recent Course and Program grant from NCIIA has been leveraged for success in developing international and interdisciplinary virtual entrepreneurship teams at Penn State Berks, an undergraduate institution in the Penn State System.
The University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) is located in the poorest county in the state and one of the poorest regions in the nation. The Thomas Family Center for Entrepreneurship (TFCE) was created to encourage innovation and business start-up and growth in the area. TFCE has developed academic entrepreneurship programs for almost all UNCP disciplines. The interest in entrepreneurship has produced new laboratories for innovative research. The TFCE has also developed counseling programs and summits for local entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship programs aimed at community colleges and high schools have been initiated. Financial resources are also being created in the area for small business development including a newly formed angel fund. The goals of these initiatives are to provide a basis for new business development and to persuade UNCP students to create new businesses here.
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 an evening exhibition for NCIIA conference attendees as well as an exhibition open to the general public and a video competition.
This session (part one of a two-part series) is based on the successful two-day Shaping Entrepreneurial Engineers (SEE) workshop developed through the Kern Engineering Education Network (KEEN). The workshop has been developed for faculty members who believe that elements of the entrepreneurial mindset should be incorporated into undergraduate engineering curriculum. The entrepreneurial mindset includes critical thinking, teamwork, customer awareness, business skills, and societal values. During part one of this two-part workshop, participants will engage in activities that reinforce their ability to apply critical and creative thinking to ambiguous problems in a team setting. Participants will also review and critique case studies on how globalization and social responsibility can be included in technical courses with an added focus on the NCIIA Open Minds event. These activities and case studies can effectively be incorporated into participants' classrooms as a means to enhance technical courses with entrepreneurial skills.
What do creativity and innovation bring to the modern enterprise, which seems to rely on connectivity and instant information? How do creativity and innovation help?
Barnett (1953) in the book titled Innovation: The Basis for Cultural Change brings in qualitative value as an indicator of innovation. Jacobs (2007) in his book Adding Values: The cultural side of innovation discusses the need for understanding the cultural side of innovation. What both these authors seem to emphasise is that while innovation, especially radical innovation, is likely to reap economic benefits to enterprises, its benefits may not be sustainable if entrepreneurs fail to understand the cultural value of innovation.
In this paper, the author shares his thoughts on the need for entrepreneurs to understand how culture and innovation are related and how they can determine the success of their business ideas.
The University of Alaska Fairbanks is the state's flagship campus. It generates approximately $200 million in research activity each year, but virtually none of the intellectual property developed at the university has found commercial applications. Two years ago, the institution initiated an effort to harness the research process as an agent of economic change. Given the university's history and Alaska's unique economic structure, this provided the basis for an expansive organizational experiment. This paper documents the university's efforts to identify, develop and commercialize IP created by faculty within the context of an organizational process paradigm. In particular, efforts aimed at stimulating organizational and faculty interest in commercialization, fostering student interest in entrepreneurship, and connecting the state's business community to the research process are examined. Successes and failures in fostering an entrepreneurial culture are described and prescriptive suggestions for the future provided.
How does a group of faculty infuse entrepreneurship into a large agricultural college? In this presentation, we describe our on-going journey with entrepreneurship in Penn State's Ag space. Since its inception in 2006, the College of Agricultural Science's Entrepreneurship Initiative has experienced several states of transition and has gained significant momentum. Our charge is to develop entrepreneurs across the college's students, faculty, alumni and external constituents. We will discuss our successes, failures and lessons learned during our journey over the last five years. Example themes discussed are enlisting the college's entrepreneurial hybrids across students, faculty and alumni, pollinating cross-university entrepreneurship networks, avoiding the blight of debating entrepreneurship and pressing on with the chore of cultivating entrepreneurship. These topics will be framed with the question: how do we keep entrepreneurship growing in Penn State's Ag space?
This workshop describes the second part of an NCIIA-sponsored project. The first part of the workshop was presented at the 2010 NCIIA conference. For new tech-based companies, technical capability alone will no longer be a distinguishing feature. Clearly, a broader-based educational experience must teach leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship to managers. There is a need to focus on thinking outside-the-box, taking risks, and being critical thinkers, creative and imaginative. This workshop will discuss traits of innovative companies, and how to build and sustain innovative environments. Participants will gain knowledge of what's common to many innovative companies, such as Gore, P&G, Google, Apple, 3M, and FedEx, Ideo, and Samsung, as well as how to become one. This part of the workshop will emphasize (i) vision, values, and leadership, and (ii) environment and culture, keeping in mind the importance of innovation as a continuous process.
In an NCIIA Sustainable Vision grant, we looked at setting up enterprises in the Ifugao region of the Philippines. Of the ones explored, small scale hydroelectric power generation has risen to the top for further development. Two students who worked on the sustainable vision grant are in the process of preparing to spend a year in-country to develop a detailed business plan. The development of the students' learning, particularly in entrepreneurship for the developing world, will be presented in this paper.
A partnership has formed between eighteen organizations to produce the Open Solar Outdoors Test Field (OSOTF), which has been designed to provide critical data and research on solar photovoltaic (PV) systems optimization in the public domain. Unlike many other projects, the OSOTF is organized under open source principles. All data and analysis when completed will be made freely available to the entire photovoltaic community and the general public. This paper documents how the teamwork between educational institutions and industry has resulted in one of the largest systems in the world for this detailed level of analysis of PV systems performance in real-world conditions. The challenges to this approach will be addressed and appropriate models for garnering industrial team work will be discussed. Conclusions will be drawn on how to scale other opportunities for the sharing of data to assist in improved optimization of socially beneficial appropriate technologies.
In Colombia, a significant part of the population's basic needs remain unsatisfied. Engineers should have the knowledge to design solutions for this situation as well as the skills to carry out social initiatives. This work presents a project that aims to develop social entrepreneurship skills in engineering students. In an undergraduate course, students observe situations of social injustice, then conceive and design engineering solutions that aim to improve living quality in vulnerable communities. The solutions must be innovative, sustainable and culturally appropriate. Preliminary results show that social entrepreneurship skills have been developed. It is expected that future engineers will be able to develop several initiatives to impact positively the social situation in the country.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation reports that nearly 30% of US higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2009, an increase of nearly one million students from the previous year. This 21% growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 2% growth rate in the overall higher education student population. As 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 and offers untapped potential for global innovation and entrepreneurship. However, best practices for teaching and learning online do not track with traditional classroom experiences. In this workshop, practical tools, techniques, and curricular examples from MCAD's Sustainable Design Online program will be shared to inspire the development of quality and compelling online courses that foster global and collaborative designs.
This session is part two of the two-part Shaping Entrepreneurial Engineers workshop. Participants will learn the concepts of painstorming and creating unique value propositions. Painstorming is a creative technique in which individuals try to identify a list of pains (frustrations) customers associate with a product/service. Solving these pains will often result in highly desirable and innovative products. During the session, participants will both be sensitized to the pains customers feel in using everyday products and introduced to successful alternative products. Any successful product provides a unique value proposition. The second part of the session will help participants to understand the elements of a value proposition and the role of product differentiation. This session will help participants to easily identify customer pains and create a unique value proposition for the product/service. These activities and case studies can effectively be incorporated into participants' classrooms as a means to enhance courses with entrepreneurial skills.
This paper will present a series of emerging education and assessment models, methods and techniques being developed and put into practice by the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN), a network of twenty private universities committed to developing a new class of entrepreneurial minded engineers. KEEN strives not to develop engineers who create new firms, but a new class of intrepreneurial engineers providing know-how and leadership to improve American competitiveness. Faculty will share curricular and extra-curricular programs and assessment models being developed and employed to reform undergraduate engineering education. Examples of defining and benchmarking learning outcomes, creating and evaluating assessment models, methods and techniques will be discussed. This will include both school-based models and the early results of the KEEN TTI Assessment Project that had over 2,500 student participants in its first year. Data from this initiative will be presented, discussed and critiqued.
Development of any robust instrument starts with an in-depth review of current instruments on the topic of concern and a clear definition of the construct to be examined. While the literature does not provide a coherent definition of innovation, an examination of assessments in the literature can help clarify common perspectives. In the literature, diverse methods have been used to assess innovation or aspects of it. One dimension of efforts focuses on aspects of innovation such as creativity, ideation, design, and entrepreneurship. A second dimension focus on traits that support innovation such as skills and perceptions of people, innovative qualities of solutions, innovative qualities of processes, and characteristics of organizations that cultivate innovation. The purpose of this presentation is to develop a definition of innovation from the examination of published assessment tools. These definitions will also be compared with the definitions shared by the audience.
This presentation will review the literature and explore the relationships among entrepreneurial education practices, learning satisfaction, and learning effectiveness for the Entrepreneurship Program in the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. The paper provides an overview of conceptualizations in entrepreneurial learning and examines how entrepreneurial education and learning approaches are currently being used. A conceptual framework outlining the relationships was constructed to illustrate how entrepreneurial education practices enhance learning satisfaction and effectiveness in the entrepreneurial program successfully. From the study results, important implications and recommendations are generated: strengthening entrepreneurial education practices is a wise way to develop learning satisfaction and effectiveness in the entrepreneurship education setting, and well-developed learning satisfaction and effectiveness are advantages for students to foster successful entrepreneurial education practices.
Starting in August 2010, Auburn University planned and executed its first annual invention2venture Apprentice Challenge Workshop in a partnership with the NCIIA. One reason for the success was our adaptation of NCIIA's proven template for such programs. Our unique changes to the template were: (1) presenting a 72-hour challenge to teams to produce maximum possible income from a new business idea using a refundable $100 in seed money, (2) awarding a $1,000 first prize and $500 second prize to the teams with the best results, (3) using a panel of experienced entrepreneurs to speak to the teams before they launched their ventures, and (4) offering the Challenge Workshop over a popular weekend football game, when the city's population doubled with out-of-town football fans. The Auburn Student Inventors Club and the Business-Engineering-Technology program presented the workshop. This presentation will address replication by other universities.
The School of Business and Economics at Michigan Technological University launched its Business Development Experience in 2010. The program brings together business and engineering students in a collaborative, hands-on, entrepreneurial atmosphere. Students have three tracks to complete the Business Development Experience senior-year capstone project. Two tracks require spending a full year with a College of Engineering Senior Design or Enterprise team, acting as consultants and writing a business plan. Therefore, the business curriculum integrates a senior year project in which a team of business students develop a business plan for a technology that is emerging, not imagined. This presentation will explain the curriculum, provide examples, and discuss implementation strategies leading to schools working together to provide a unique entrepreneurial teaching and learning experience.
For the last 18 months, Arizona State University has been collaborating with the NCIIA to build a virtual mentoring platform to support both in-person and distance mentoring programs of a variety of types that are both local and global in nature. This paper discusses the overall platform, the different types of mentoring programs implemented and possible, mentoring philosophies used, approaches to mentoring administration, pros and cons of the system and lessons learned to date. It also discusses future evolution of the system into a national and global mentoring capability that can support the NCIIA?s network of universities, investors and other stakeholders, as well as their global collaborators.
Status quo approaches to new product development often result in manufacturing processes that exploit overseas labor and environmental resources. In the 21st century, we can and must do better. In this session, we'll discuss the difference between consumer-centered and human-centered approaches to the development of new products, services, and systems and engage in a group exercise that enables us to learn, through experience, a human-centered approach. By thinking beyond the consumer when we develop new products, services, and systems, we can help inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs create innovations and new businesses that not only benefit shareholders and consumers but also improve life and create meaningful work for people from all economic strata.