Priorities:University of Puerto Rico - Mayaguez Student Priorities

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Encouraging faculty innovation and entrepreneurship

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The Chancellor of our University has stated multiple times that “I&E is one of his most important priorities on campus”. However, changing decades of institutional culture is not something that happens in a year. Institutional policies sometimes impede faculty innovation and entrepreneurship through research. An example of these policies are that if a professor chooses to give a selected number of hours of class, say 12hrs a week, institutional policies don’t encourage him to do research. Likewise, those professors that do develop research possess the entrepreneurship mindset in the sense that they search for funding outside the university, but whether they spin-out and commercialize their projects is still in construction. In the other hand, some professors are not aware of the commercialization potential of their projects because they have not been exposed enough to know the indicated processes. In order to change the impact that the disorientation can cause, preparation and training for professors that have research projects in every faculty should be a high priority.

Despite the challenges, the University of Puerto Rico- Mayaguez has a group of champions in the faculty that keeps growing. This group has been submitting proposals for courses, programs, researches, among other successful initiatives that promote I&E. This group is the spark that will illuminate other professors and administrators to keep the momentum.

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Facilitating University-Industry Collaboration

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Only recently has our university started to open their arms to the concept of a University-Industry relationship. Our school is a public institution in which the bureaucracy of the government is also transferred into our world. This level of bureaucracy has slowed things down to a point that we need to carefully plan everything so that it can progress with a positive outcome. We are currently developing programs in which students get the resources need to provide students the resources required to take their ideas into the industry. With the help of local incubator Vitec, the UPRM E-ship Network and our makerspace movement we hope to achieve what has been very difficult to do in our university. The relationship between the academia and the private sector.

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