Overview

Strategy #1 - Introduce a Featured Startup Company

One of the major issues uncovered during our landscape canvas was student engagement with innovation or entrepreneurship. We need to help show the general university population that innovation and entrepreneurship is for everyone and it can help them in all different ways throughout their life.

To help encourage more involvement by students and therefore improve innovation at the University of Technology Sydney(UTS), we need better advertisement strategies. We believe students will respond well to featured Entrepreneurs of the week or month. This way we can prove to current students that Entrepreneurship is something normal and the mind set can help them with their everyday lives.

At the bottom of the advertisement there will be a QR code or website address, where students can find more information about all innovation programs offered by UTS. The website which lists them should list them in stages, starting with small design thinking workshops already running at UTS to the Hatchery Plus. This way students are encouraged to take small steps and approach design thinking workshops.

Another well documented engagement strategy is design thinking workshops. Perhaps weekly events at the university bar and teach the basics of design thinking could be set up. At the moment most students don’t know what design thinking is, so they are unlikely to go to events at the h. We can provide that basic knowledge, build their fundamentals and act as a gateway to further innovation/ Entrepreneurship studies and actions.

Strategy #2 - Creation of an Entrepreneurship & Innovation Help Centre

Recently, UTS has begun encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship around campus. This strategy aims to boost students' interest in both entrepreneurship and innovation through the creation of a common place or hub where students can obtain advice. Advice can be offered by any individuals familiar in this area and can involve things such as,

How to register a Business
How to do customer research
When to seek legal advice
Different funding options that are available

The aim is to encourage studentes to launch more successful start-ups, whilst developing a passion for innovation and design thinking principles.

Various interviews with students has shown that there is a demand for this type of help centre. There are many different obstacles which students must overcome to start successful start-ups. Through helping students through these initial stages, UTS will be able to incubate and launch many more successful businesses. Further concreting the universities place as the most innovative and forward thinking campus in Australia.

All programs including this will need support and funding to make it successful. Initially, our aim was to obtain funding from the Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) which is a compulsory fee paid by all students. However, after consulting with various staff from different faculties, we have received incredible support and many resources made available to make this space a reality.

Strategy #3 - Improving communication of current innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities to students.

During interviews with first year students at UTS we discovered that communication of existing innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities was lacking and potentially resulting in students not attending events or not gaining a proper understanding of the existing opportunities.

As a result we would like to identify methods for improving the communication between innovation resources and students and help connect interested students with events and activities that can help them on their entrepreneurial journeys. Our current prototyping has found that QR codes while initially seaming like a fun and interesting way for students to interact is actually seen as a hindrance and may not be fully utilised as would be expected.

We would like to trial more advertising and communication techniques such as an "innovation board" in a communal area of the university, "abstract links" that get students completing a challenge or game to gain access to a link to information or mass advertising drops using interesting mediums such as bouncy balls with links or slickers found all throughout the university.

The Plan:

To start off we would first like to pilot the "Innovation Board" idea using a small group of students from a common area on campus such as the main lobby of the UTS tower. A UIF leader with a whiteboard divided into sections would prompt students to add a "card" (sticky note) to the board under particular sections. These sections could be for example "What does it mean to be innovative", "What skills does an entrepreneur need" etc. The board would also have information about where to find out more and events comming up on campus that could help them in finding out the answers.

Initially students would be guided to the board and asked questions about the board such as "how they would use it", "did they find it intuitive"," was the experience fun/educational" etc. Using this feedback we could start to get a better idea of how students would interact with such an instalment and how we could improve it so that they get the most value from it. In the long term we would like to find ways to integrate the innovation board into related classes, subjects and courses to help it become a focal point of innovation and entrepreneurship at UTS.

By increasing student awareness of the programs, opportunities and other students that exist both on campus and in the surrounding community we hope to increase the innovation and entrepreneurship culture at UTS and generate higher motivation within our peers to take on new challenges and follow through with innovative ideas.

Strategy #4 - Social Events to Break Down Faculty Separations

When interviewing students from various degree backgrounds, it was often evident that rarely interacted with students who were apart of a different faculty to themselves. In many occasions, they barely interacted with people outside of their own course.

Examining the current ecosystem of our campus, it was clear that the university has recognise a need for students to learn about innovation and entrepreneurship. As a direct response to the demand. The university has introduced incubator-like programs for students and undergraduate courses to support ongoing students and new alike, in this area. There has been many successful programs and it has been well received by students of all disciplines.

However examining the bigger picture, it is clear that these programs overlap and no coherent community was formed between these programs and faculties. One of the problem space this strategy plans to address is the segregated but successful programs the university is producing. The problem space became apparent - how can we conjugate these groups of highly talented people and their ideas to entwine a larger network and form stronger presence of innovation and entrepreneur at the university.

Following this observation, the University Innovation Fellows plan to host a series of social events in the aim of joining programs and communities. These social events are designed to cultivate conversations for students, staff members and those in the industry. It will be run regularly by students with creativity. Events such as interfaculty debates or startup fairs are a few among ways to get individuals involved.

Ultimately the aim is to connect current communities on campus and allowing new students to find ways to get involved. This strategy hopes to influence the success of other strategies being implemented at the University.

Strategy #5 - Creating a Cohesive Innovation and Entrepreneurship Environment

UTS is a large university with approximately 45,000 students currently enrolled. As a result, the UTS campus is vast and spread out over a large geographical area. As each building is home to a specific faculty, this creates a sense of pride and belonging within each faculty however it can also contribute to a feeling of disassociation with the rest of the university. This is especially true in the case of the innovation building which most students are completely unaware of.

After interviewing several students from the Faculty of Engineering and IT, we could not find a single student who was aware of the existence of this innovation building where so many of UTS' I&E programs take place. Through our own experiences at UTS, we have observed a rift between the students who frequently engage in I&E activities and those who do not. After speaking with students, most told us that they would have gotten involved in these activities had they known about them. From these discussions coupled with our own experiences, we believe the main cause of this is poor advertising and the physical isolation of I&E programs and initiatives within the innovation building.

Instead of perpetuating an environment in which students are forced to seek out I&E programs and events themselves, we believe the solution to this problem is to bring small I&E experiences into the everyday life of the UTS student. We are still investigating how best to do this with ongoing ideation, prototyping, and feedback.

Priorities:University of Technology Sydney Student Priorities