Priorities:UVA University Student Priorities
The University of Virginia UIF team will create a physical space for Health Innovation and Incubation as the centerpiece of our future plans. The space will be housed in a emergant tech incubator, HackCville, and we will partner with their mission and culture of design, mentorship and self-starter ingenuity. Our stratedgy addresses the gaps identified in our landscaping of UVa's I&E capacity; while there are a multitude of programs and accessible funding avaible on grounds, they are restricted by student-organization transience and their lack of coordination and. We can develop the connectivity needed to to field projects and support them fully from upstream to downstream by riding off of the exisiting momentum and experience in the tech-entrepreneurship field. The proximity to this work is helping to foster a healthy new culture at UVa; under the new physical location and presence we plan to build out new events and programing to create visibility on campus. These include the Lawn Innovation Invation, the Grit Challenge, the Medical Hackathon and IdeasEverwhere Walls- elaborated upon below.
Grit challenge
In 2013 the MacAuthur Genius Award was bestowed upon Angela Duckworth for defining the term "Grit" as the best metric of sucess.
This will be a challenge designed to counter the typical one-off nature of traditional buisness competions and pitches that focus on how well an idea is presented at one point in time. Wise speakers at NCIIA warned us about the dangers of extoling a singular idea instead of the people or process, and honestly we see that play out when the winners of business competitions are more incentivised to dress-up and idea than propel it forward. In order to shift these expectations, we propose to design a competition that measures the fearlessness and reckless abandon of true entrepreneurs on a mission- the tenacity to start scrappy, shoot high, allow onesself to fail in a productive way, in which they are able to use it experientially to propel themselves further forward; true GRIT! We are experimenting with the idea of shaping the challenge into 1 month segments, starting with a low opperational budget of $10 and incrementally increasing amounts of award money for those able to stay in the rounds. This also teaches an important lesson in establishing credibility for those starting with next to nothing, through incrementally growing steps and quantification of sucess to show to possible investors/supporters.
Medical Hackathon
- Description: A short term goal of the UVa Leadership Circle is to host a medical hackathon to get hundreds of students involved in health care entrepreneurship at UVa in a fun, relaxing, and engaging way. The student run organization that will put the hackathon together will be a new student run club called Emerging Medical Technology Ventures or EMTV. The end goal of the hackathon is two fold: 1) recruit young students of different backgrounds and majors to join EMTV and 2) have hackathon participants carry out projects that result from the hackathon. A medical hackathon could serve as the spark for serious undegraduate involvement in healthcare and medical technology innovation. The reason for emphasis on recruiting young students is to help ensure that the UVa community can continually become engaged in medical technology and healthcare innovation for at least 3 years as demonstrated by additional hackathons and successful project grant applications.
- Team Leaders: Dasha Tyshlek, Rachel Smith, Kelly Thomas, Anish Dalal, Alex Zorychta, and David Chen (Director of UVA Coulter Foundation Program)
- Milestones:
- Attend a large scale and professional medical hackathon to determine optimal ways of hosting them
- Recruit at least five 1st or 2nd year students to help organize first hackathon and eventually lead EMT
- Obtain faculty advisors who have medicine, engineering, and/or business backgrounds to advise on design challenges for hackathons and provide additional mentorship to students who pursue projects after hackathons
- Have at least 3 hackathon projects within 2 years to place in the University of Virginia Entrepreneurship Cup or obtain some sort of competitive funding
- At least one startup formed within 5 years
Strategic Pitch
