School:Stony Brook University (SUNY)

Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Stony Brook Campus.jpg

Stony Brook University (SUNY) is a public University with a four-year accredited undergraduate programs ranging from Business to Engineering to Medicine. There are fast track programs such as the 5 year, engineering and MBA program for all the engineering students. Stony Brook is dedicated to advancement and progress and has spent over $225.3 million in Research and Development. This research has created an entrepreneurial culture allowing for students to pursue programs that they normally didn’t have access to before. It has even led to the creation of an innovation space in partnership with the College of Business and Engineering allowing for students to collaborate and prototype products of their choosing. Stony Brook also encourages the sharing of these projects through URECA that focus on students presenting the work and research they have completed within the last year and give opportunities to students to network with other individuals.

Regional and Local Economic Efforts

Currently, Stony Brook is partnered up with the Long Island Incubator as well as Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and has had students participate in both areas as well. There has been increasing interest in creating a startup space and panelists from Long Island startups have come in to discuss how they started and pursued their ideas. These efforts are still relatively small as the last attendance was limited to roughly 35 students, compared to the campus population which is about 25000 students (undergraduate and graduate). There are a lot of resources on campus available to students though there are not as many funding opportunities as desired. These would be probably be arranged through the local and regional companies and organizations; it will surely stimulate the development of the startup culture at Stony Brook University.

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Student Priorities

There are many projects that need to be implemented at Stony Brook University in order for the push towards entrepreneurship and innovation to occur. There have been some lone initiatives that have taken place which have seeked to inspire students to create and apply their design capabilities, though they have only been able to attract a small range of students. The goal of the campus is to become more of a collaborative community that nurtures students and assists in developing their abilities to create new products and resources. The primary mission of any academic institution is to allow students to expand their talents and to provide them with the resources they need to succeed. Having a cache of resources available to students but as well as creating a community that fosters collaboration allows students to not only interact with students of different disciplines but also opens up the resources that they would not have normally sought out. 

The current UIF Fellow, Saba_Khalid, is looking to develop the foundations for such a community by creating key partnerships with departments all across campus. One of the primary interests is to sign on the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) as leaders in pushing forward to provide students with opportunities to design products and collaborate with other departments across campus. Moreover, the fellow is looking to hold a Town Hall style meeting with CEAS leaders and its students once a semester so that students can identify what resources they want from CEAS to be available to them on campus. More so, this will also give CEAS and Stony Brook University a better idea of what students are seeking to learn and tailor their academic offerings accordingly.

Furthermore, to promote an atmosphere that cultivates innovation, the fellow is planning on launching a design competition, known as the Catalyst Challenge. The Challenge will require that teams of students be composed of at least one engineering and one business students, with a maximum of 5 members. It will be modeled after the 3-day startup and the Techcrunch Disrupt Challenge; the challenge will take place over the course of a weekend. Students will be required to submit an initial proposal of what they are seeking to build and design, understanding that they would have to achieve it in the course of 48 hours. Based on their proposals, about 10 ideas will be selected by the organizers and invited to participate in the challenge. Throughout the course of the weekend, teams will design and present their product to a panel of investors and company representatives on why their idea is worthy of investment. The panel will judge each team and give them ratings based on whether or not their idea is innovative and if their team has a strong business plan. The team with the highest rating will be given prize money for their idea and will have a member present their idea at TedXSBU. This challenge will allow students to not only network with each other but create vital industry partnerships they normally would not have been given the opportunity to do so. This project is highly doable, though it heavily requires the support of the institution.

 

Related Links

Stony Brook University

Innovation Lab

University Innovation Fellow: [[Saba Khalid|Saba Khalid]]