School:Western Michigan University

Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The word Entrepreneurship has been tossed around Western Michigan University's campus for quite some time. With the newly approved Entrepreneurship Minor and various Entrepreneurship Majors available to students, WMU has a lot of things going for them. From the department of Industrial and Entrepreneurial Engineering & Engineering Management comes a degree focused on the application of Industrial Engineering tools adapted to face the challenges of being an Entrepreneur. This degree is available as a Bachelor of Science. From the Haworth College of Business' Mangagement Department comes the Entrepreneurship major, minor, and nationally ranked Integrated Supply Management program that includes an array of courses highlighting the importance of Innovation and Design. Additionally, the College of Fine Arts has an Entrepreneurship Extravaganza which helps students with entrepreneurial workshops that are student centered and student driven. Through classes, workshops, and collaborative projects, students have the opportunity to develop the skills needed to be successful in their music career.

The Entrepreneurship Club at WMU brings together entrepreneurs, students, faculty, and business executives in the spirit of group innovation to help adapt their skills to today's changing global economy. The purpose of the group is to bring together anyone who has a passion for entrepreneurship through networking and brainstorming with fellow students. 

• Meetings / Speakers: The club meets to discuss entrepreneurship matters and also bring in local entrepreneurs, to help them with ideas and how to achieve goals. Former club president Matt Rumora says that "We provide speakers, presentations, and events so our members can gain necessary entrepreneurial skills while networking, building startups, and having fun. We encourage students from all disciplines and backgrounds to participate."

Western recently partnered with a local business accelerator in downtown Kalamazoo called Starting Gate to create the business PITCH Competition. Involving a variety of majors, this is one of the most popular entrepreneurial based extracurricular activities offered through the University. 

Faculty Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The projects and attitudes regarding Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the different colleges in the University reflect mutual goals. However, although the Haworth College of Business and the Parkview Campus of Engineering are only separated by 5 miles, there is very little information being shared regarding the direction of I&E within their respective colleges. The primary reason preventing this communication is taking place on the student level. Business students with ideas confer with other business students while Engineers tend to work with other engineers.

In terms of Innovation, the college has a great group of professors in the Engineering department that try to push the students to the envelope of coming up with new ideas. The Endowed Chairs for Innovation, Dr. Steven Butt (Chair of Department), Dr. Tycho Fredericks, Dr. Bob White, and Dr. Azim Houshyar, have a series of classes called Entrepreneur Engineering (I, II, and III) where their students come up with an innovative solution to a pain point in the form of a product, and learn how to model or produce a working prototype of it using the various labs on Parkview's Campus. 

Entrepreneurship seems to go hand in hand with the Haworth College of Business where they have a great group of mentors and professors that help their students grow and become more mindful of entrepreneurship in their school. The push for Entrepreneurship has come from the Dean of the college, Kay Palan. She has put a team together, along with the head of the Management department, creating the Endowed Chairs for Entrepreneurship which consist of Dr. Robert Landeros and his team of entrepreneurs in residence (John Mueller, Barcley Johnson, and Laurel Ofstein) who all come from a background of impressive entrepreneurship experience. 

University Technology Transfer Function

This is major place for WMU to improve upon because they are trying to get their feet off the ground there is more to go in this position. 

University-Industry Collaboration

Western Michigan University's Engineering Campus is filled with senior design projects from each and every engineering discipline, from competing in the "Chainless Competition" to re-designing residence halls to accommodate more residents. The college is involved with a lot of student and company projects, companies include, Stryker, Hayworth, Parker Hannifin, Eaton Corp, Fabri-Kal, Denso and many more. This is two semesters worth of work that ends up with inviting the company sponsors and the Kalamazoo Community to the day long event each group has a 30min window to present their project with a written report is due to the college as well as the sponsor company. This year will be the 152 senior presentations. 

Regional and Local Economic Development Dfforts

The Industrial and Entrepreneur Engineering student organization is currently a Gold Member of the Institute for Industrial Engineering which they are currently planning of a large conference for the Midwest region. The group is composed of mostly industrial engineers but they are able to show the region what kind of innovation ways that are taking place at Western Michigan University in the paper competition where some of the projects from the Entrepreneur engineering courses have been submitted. 

Starting Gate is a new project started by the "B-School" to help with startups to present students with the resources to help build and grow their small startups. By helping with the Business Model Canvas to reaching customer segments. This is only starting gates second semester but they have a diverse group of students from freshman with innovations from high school trying to further their knowledge to MBA students. 

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Christopher Woodward