Priorities:Saint Joseph University of Beirut Student Priorities
Contents
Project 1: Inspiring design thinking
Students do not really seem to know much about I&E especially in their first two years at university. This is why we decided to work on promoting design thinking.
Strategy #1: Campus Information Book
Strategy #2: Organizing Competitions on Campus
Strategy #3: UIF entrepreneurial programs
Organizing UIF events and conferences on campus is also essential in order to share our experience with the program and the design thinking skills we acquired
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Project 2: Weekly Articles
Problem
There is a big gap between on one side investors, infrastructures supporting innovation and entrepreneurship and on the other side students
Solution
A weekly Article will be created by the USJ-UIF club members and will be posted online so that everyone can profit from the article.
Articles evolve around different topics. Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking, Investors, Financial literacy, etc...
Some examples are:
- What I look for in entrepreneurs (An interview with a Lebanese investor)
- How to create a startup with a vision?
- What is Ideation
- A Step by step guide to launch a startup
- Strategic Planning Process
- Hack the ecosystem at Berytech
- Things to do before connecting with investors
Project 3: USJ Extreme week
Solution
The aim of this program is to make USJ involved in the community. It consists of forming groups of students from different majors in order to work on a real problem encountered in a certain region in Lebanon. This way students will be initiated to multidisciplinary work, they will invest their potential and will be efficient in their community while using the facilities offered by their university. This may initiate future projects that students may be inspired to do after they graduate. This project will allow USJ to be better in the Spin-out section because our university has a lot of wet labs and offers several facilities but are only used for academic purposes and for research.
- Recruitment of students from all campuses
- Set a date that suits the majority of the students and is in harmony with the academic schedule
- Collaborate with Service de l’Insertion Professionnelle: Give the enrolled students sessions about the skills they need to acquire to be working in this program:
- Design thinking: 4 courses
- Teamwork: 2 courses
- Collaborate with Operation 7e jour: Select one region (a year) and identify one problem
- Organize a trip for the students enrolled to go visit the region and study the ground they will be working on
- Go back to the university and bring together all the ideas
- Ideate
- Follow up from the professors
- Prototype
- Follow up from the professors
- The final presentation in front of the professors
- Choose the best project and present it to the people concerned about the problem in the region
- Collaborate with USJ services (incubators, accelerators, funds, labs, etc) to find a procedure to execute the project
- All the students enrolled, not only those who came up with the project, will give feedback to the team working on this project to enhance the chances of optimizing the idea
- Invest in the project Or study the project more profoundly Or let it go
- Execute the project
Project 4: Awareness/Motivation and inspiration day for all USJ students
Problem
Students are limited to their academic performance and courses
Solution
Awareness/ Motivation and Inspiration Day for all USJ Students which will hold:
Professional Speakers
Example of Topics:
- “Success came out of experience and networking, not because of a high GPA”
- “What does it take?”
Young Start-ups coming: stands, Training, Recruitment sessions …
Workshops
Example of Topics:
- “How to think outside the box in my major?”
- “Ideation”
- “How to do a Business Plan”
Presentations from USJ and Berytech (or some Investors and Accelerator Programs)
- “How can USJ help you to get ready for initiating your start-up” - USJ
- “What do we want from students to help them with their start-ups” - Berytech
- “What you should have/know to start your new company” – Berytech
- Cocktail buffet, drinks, and music included
Project 4: Innovative Coffee Machine
Problem
Students at SJU want some self-development courses in order to succeed in life and become changemakers of tomorrow.
Solution
After checking the window of availability of most students altogether, we found the common time where they all meet is at the lunch break.
From here, we got the idea of Innovative Coffee Machine.
This project isn’t about a coffee machine that instead of coffee serves innovation, but instead of wasting their time students talking about random non-necessary topics, the Coffee Machine will help them start a discussion without them knowing.
Concept
- Where is it?
The Innovative Coffee Machine has not only one house but it’s going to have many houses on each campus.
- When is it?
The Innovative Coffee Machine will randomly be transported all over the campuses at a pace of 2 times a month for multiple campuses.
- What is it?
The Innovative Coffee Machine is a regular coffee machine that serves regular coffee for free. But what is special in this coffee machine is:
- Prototype 1: Key Speaker – A person sharing giving a workshop about certain topics
- Prototype 2: A whiteboard is written on it a topic that uses great marketing technics to promote itself and let students discuss it and learn from each other’s experiences
- Prototype (Idea – On - Paper) 3: The coffee machine talks to the students taking coffee using AI and suggest they talk about projects and topics that might be interesting and will help them develop their personal skills.
Project Video:
This is the link to the youtube video for our project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89d7Z_534tQ
Related Links:
Fall 2019 Cohort
Fall 2018 Cohort
Related links
