Resource:How to Create a Cross-Campus Student Innovation Council

HOW TO CREATE A CROSS-CAMPUS STUDENT INNOVATION COUNCIL

New mindset, not perfect prototypes are okay

How to get change done on campus

Networking with students with similar views on UIF

Student Innovation Council:

• Started out as Student Engineering Council (attended meeting for different majors to come and meet)
• During freshman year, council didn’t survive because senior project focus
• Stuck around when organization was restarted and saw various failings
• “What’s the purpose of doing this and why am I spending extra time doing this?” (other people)
• Wanted to incorporate senior design with other majors, but found that lacking
• Joined UIF to find people to start the group with like mindsets
• A place for people to come together, share their ideas and bring them to fruition
• Have to build bonds to bring people together

Thomas:

• Wanted to bring in business aspect to everything they did
• Saw Briana’s idea as a good idea
• First idea was to bring senior design projects and bringing other majors into those

Resources required:

• Need people
• Don’t need a lot of money
• Cool meeting space
• Thomas had a space in business incubator for them
• Most money spent is on food for bringing people into meetings
• Pool people from different organizations so their resources can be used
• Social media
• Persistence
• Developing a mission and identifying the objective
• Be welcoming of people and inviting of their ideas and time giving
• Having like-minded people to form a support network
• Time and motivation
• Cheap to no cost
• Like UIF (a bunch of students together to think about problems)
• Looking at other clubs having overlap (ie. multiple resume building workshops)

Specific resources:

• Location to meet
• One person in charge and the rest to listen
• Identify all students with mentality to go above and beyond
• Having a time where all people can meet
• What would you like done on campus that isn’t being done yet
• Take two or three ideas that click and that motivates people
• Needs energy
• Fun activity (builds personal connections)
• Games with sticky notes (game show type things, play cards, etc.)
• Fun activity at first, do business, and go over takeaways

Major challenges:

• Need to have a perfect reason to bring people together
• What more can we do and how do we keep them coming back?
• Thought she had to do it all by herself
• Pay attention to the first followers
• Will demotivate you if you look at everyone in the organization (some will not agree)
• Communicating with people constantly (sends messages through Facebook and email)
• Students you will find are people dedicating a bunch of time on projects
• Getting people to understand the organization is a group of like-minded people getting together

Accomplishments:

• Successfully run an engineering network on the university
• Brought people from 14+ organizations to collaborate
• Speed mentoring event held with an organization
• A bunch of small events put on by people coming together and talking through the council that would not exist without it
• Allowed Briana to get collaborators and ideas for her senior design project

Methods of creating cross-campus council:

• Different methods for every school
• What works at one university might not work at another
• At Thomas’ university:
  • Reaching out to students and targeting people and professors to get the information out
  • Could reach out to other people using various methods
  • Speed interviewing, hosting events, speed mentoring, etc.
  • Be as creative as you want with your ideas and have fun with it
  • Each student paired up with an engineer and casually talking about engineering (speed mentoring event)
  • Could use a sign in sheet at the beginning so people can be able to communicate with people better

How to run the council:

• No correct way to run the council
• Tried to get everyone together
• Scheduled a once a month or once every month meeting
• From there, let go and see what happens
• Run through some tutorials in design thinking
• If it was made hierarchical, then the fun would be lost in the organization
• Can drive you insane sometimes since there is no set agenda
• Need to identify someone as the leader in the group
• Leader need to reach out to people and make them feel welcome
• Have to care for the organization (hear members’ voices)
• Pinpoint where exactly you want the group to spend energy on
• Need to narrow down with leadership group on direction
• Too many ideas causes less progress

Challenges:

• Getting people to come (especially new people)
• First meeting is the hardest challenge
• Executive board of all organizations change each year
• Trying to get everyone involved
• Not going to win everyone over, but try to get as much as you can going

Motivation:

• Briana: enjoys helping people, something university needed, something that could be bigger than us and impactful; the peoples’ stories and motivations and empathizing with them; inspirational and special people in group; care about helping others
• Thomas: still engineering heavy, gets to see different perspectives outside business, identifying the differences between engineers, opened eyes across the rest of university and the problems it faced