Priorities:GVSU Student Priorities

OVERVIEW

The GVSU innovation fellows realized that there are many great resources for entrepreneurs in Grand Rapids, although they often don't have the inspiration or the information to start. The two strategies we propose to work on immediately focus on introducing better methods to inspire young, innovative students at Grand Valley to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. Afterwards, we want to develop a communication pipeline so that good ideas can travel to a place they can be nurtured and grown into a solution. 

PROJECT #1 - Health Science and Engineering Idea Pipeline [6 months]

This project would be collaboration between the College of Engineering and the College of Health Sciences. Both of these buildings are located in downtown Grand Rapids within a half mile of the Medical Mile. Often times, student nurses, physical thereapists, occupational therapists and other health science students will do a semester of clinical training out in the field. These clincal students are brand new to the hospital scene and therefore have an easier time determining what problems exist in the biomedical field. For example, while a seasoned nurse might assume that completing a task would be time consuming becasue "that is the way they have always done it", a student nurse might ask why it has to be done that way and be able to suggust a way to do it differently. 

Recognizing the problems in the biomedical field is only half of the battle. Once student nurses and other clinical health science students discover a problem they. generally, do not have any way to fix it or report it. This is where the Idea Pipeline comes in. The Idea Pipeline creates a way to report problems in the biomedical industry from student experiences and takes them directly to the engineers who have the background in technology to develop innovative solutions. 

Not only does this promote collaboration between differnent colleges at the university, it also gives projects to professors in the engineering college for their classes, and provides engineering students with a real life issure to solve. In addition, this Idea Pipeline has the potential to create biomedical start-ups in a city that has many resources for testing and promoting biotechnology. 

The project would start as a partnership between the College of Engineering - Product Design & Manufacturing section and the College of Nursing clinical students. The project will start with a presentation to the Student Nurses Association and hosting an event for Nursing Extra Credit. This will give use access to several student contacts and allow us to test out the Idea Pipeline. Next semester we hope to incorporate it into the cirriculum and have an online reporting system up and running through Grand Valley's website. The problems reported will be put into a pool and the top problems will be implemented as projects for the Product Design courses. 

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1cE2chUHjT9FmKaY1vV1X-GeZ_-C3kUSFZg6eEyl2IQk/edit?usp=sharing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH7qA0P-_JI&feature=youtu.be

PROJECT #2 - Catalyst: Inspiration Event [6-9 months]

The goal of this project is to get students inspired to create and innovate. We hope to host a TEDx talk at Grand Valley and try to focus on the innovative ideas in the community and state that have made large impacts. If we cannot get licensing for a TEDx talk we would host our own version of TEDx to get students inspired with the focus on local celebrities, investors, entrepreneurs, and resources. 

We recognize that inspiration is a key component to having student innovation at a university; currently there are a good amount of resources for entrepreneurs but they are not known to any students outside of the business school. In order to have successful innovative ideas come from our University, students from all disciplines need to come together on projects to highlight a variety of talents. By providing a resource of inspiration to all majors and promiting this even campus wide we believe we can reach many students and inspire them to start creating together. 

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1XkiPwkR6MdM7GCNgcFpNqWWzGfcY1wg7Uud4p10sPrQ/edit?usp=sharing

PROJECT #3 - Business and Entrepreneurship Collaboration [24 months]

GVSU has a new major as of this year, the entrepreneurship major. This major is in the business college and therefore, like all business majors a Grand Valley, requires the busines capstone class. In addition, all senior engineering students are assigned a two semester senior project immediately before they graduate. We believe that for some of the senior projects it would be benficial to assign them a entrepreneurship/business major to write business plans, run finaces, etc to determine if the design project would make a viable business. 

This would not only encourage collaboration between colleges but would also give students a sense of how products are designed in the real world. This would also introduce business concepts to the engineering students and technology to the business students. 

In addition, this could be run as an add on to PROJECT #1 once it gets going. Since the projects coming from the Idea Pipeline would be for a new product, having business majors on a team for that would be quite beneficial in order to determine if the product would be viable in the real world. 

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1nxIFRM9dljXvOBbQ1Y7gDOll-cy8sdixY_nKtg6iunU/edit?usp=sharing

PROJECT #4 - Student Inovation Group [12-24 months]

There are a total of 8 colleges in West Michigan which all came together for the first time last year in West Michigan's first multi-college business model competition. In hopes of gathering people from all majors and fields, we believe it would be a good idea to create club or meeting group that crosses the college boundaries to pursue innovation. Several of the colleges in West Michigan specialize in a particular field, this would be helpful in creating a diverse group of people with whom a student could brainstorm with or get help on a project with. 

From the business model competition we have several contacts at a few of the schools, however, more research and networking would need to be done (possibly between existing clubs on campuses) to gather student interest at each of the universities. This club would serve to inspire new innovation by bringing in speakers and hosting workshops while also serve as a place to further develop and design existing ideas into companies. 

There are several places in Grand Rapids that exist to help entrepreneurs and to bring entrepreneurship to West Michigan and we believe they would be more than willing to host or even sponsor a group like this. 

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/13q03TmItvyul6dNp4EZSR-kIP4v5S8syeyxJb4c_W3A/edit?usp=sharing

PROJECT #5 - Hackathon/"Hacking" for non-hackers [6-9 months]

At GVSU, we believe the pipeline to developing a strong entrepreneurship and innovation community is bottlenecked at the discovery phase. 

Observations and conversations around campus have eluded to the interest in entrepreneurship within the student body. Faculty have been developing a curriculum with a focus on venture creation and interdisciplinary collaboration to scale with the interest in startups. Design thinking is becoming a buzzword around campus through multiple events that have tested and validated the student response to innovation programming. This new wave of interdisciplinary, creationary classes have garnered more interest than the new, albeit traditional, entrepreneurship classes housed within the business school. 

In addition to classes testing the value proposition of entrepreneurship and design thinking, two competitions have emerged on campus promoting diverse teams to solve problems within society. The initial response has been a mix of students from diverse backgrounds. This signals that the entrepreneurial mindset is expanding to fields of study outside of business, engineering and computer science. 

A hackathon for non-hackers is a smaller commitement than a semester-long class and less intimidating than the national/international competitions currently available. The event would be ideal for students to test the waters in a fun, low commitement way. The ideal outcome of the hackathon would be to ignite and build the community of entrepreneurs on campus. 

With a stronger community dveloped, the growth of resources offered becomes justified by the demand. This cycle would help maintain momentum through semesters as the champions of entrepreneurship graduate. 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QS0Tb4mLFEzWQadtjIyeLCn29TU8mumVrXQAKhhiJ_s/edit#slide=id.gbd9d7faf9_0_0

RELATED LINKS

Grand_Valley_State_University

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH7qA0P-_JI&feature=youtu.be