Project Pitch Video

Strategy #1: Increase Awareness of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Engineering

Freshmen students with majors in the College of Innovation and Design and the College of Engineering live together and take a class which involves community service and team building, as well as aspects of the different majors encompassed by CID and Engineering.
This Living-Learning Community (LLC) was just established (formerly it was only engineering students), and thus could be a great place to prototype the implementation of I&E concepts and engage freshmen with these ideas
This is also a great place to test the effectiveness of LLCs in creating a community across disciplines

All incoming freshmen engineering students are required to take ENGR 120 (Introduction to Engineering) or ENGR 130 (Introduction to Engineering Applications)
These courses are project-based, and teach students about engineering disciplines, as well as developing critical thinking and provides a "design-oriented engineering experience"
ENGR 130 involves a service project where students work with a client from the community to apply the engineering design process to solve a problem
While some design thinking is already a part of these courses, there could be room for the addition of more explicity human-centered design principles into the curriculum
This could also be a platform to introduce engineering students to entrepreneurship concepts to which they may not otherwise be exposed

The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program unites undergraduate education and faculty research in a team-based context
Undergraduate VIP students earn academic credits, while faculty and graduate students benefit from the design/discovery efforts of their teams
The Boise State University VIP program is part of a broad national and international consortium of universities
While this program already exists in an early phase, more work remains to create campus-wide awareness about the vision and purpose of Vertically Integrated Projects in order to attract students and faculty to participate in current and new projects
This program presents an inherent opportunity for a culture of I&E to thrive in a community of students and faculty from different disciplines across campus
VIP projects differ from a traditional research lab setting in that the experiences, interests, and abilities of all members - faculty and students alike - are valued equally
Close-knit VIP teams provide an opportunity to support vulnerable populations of students who might not finish their degrees without a supportive community and mentorship opportunities

The New Product Development Lab, housed within the College of Engineering, mostly provides rapid prototyping and design consulting services to local businesses and entrepreneurs outside the university, but is also a resource available to student entrepreneurs that is not currently well-publicized
While Venture College's services are available to all students, and they have been expanding their reach to Computer Science majors, this services is still unknown to most engineering majors
A goal for the future would be to implement a program which partners engineering students with ideas with mentors from the local entrepreneurship community and/or students from the Business College to help them work toward commercializing their ideas (or co-developing ideas for new ventures)