2021 Cohort, 2025-cohort-mentor
60
edits
Changes
===<h2h3><big><span style="color:cornflowerblue">Promoting student Innovation and Entrepreneurship</span></big></h2h3>===
<p style="text-align: justify"></p><span style="font-family:tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="background-color: transparent"></span><span style="background-color: transparent; white-space: pre-wrap; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: small">The constructive proposal of the University of Engineering & Technology (UTEC) integrates the specialized knowledge in scientific and technological areas with the competencies of management, humanities and innovation, which result in holistic training that further improves the professional value of our graduates. Innovation and entrepreneurship are encouraged on the campus through courses, extracurricular organizations and spaces where students become empowered to enhance their ideas.</span></span>
<h3h4> <strong> I&E Courses </strong> </h3h4>
<span style="font-family:tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0)"> Some of the courses offered are ‘Global Challenges’, in which students explore the design thinking methodology and apply it to a real problem in their local community. Two classes focus on business management and entrepreneurship: ‘Introduction to Business Development’, ‘Business Management’ and ‘Products and Services Design’. The last course on this chain deals more with innovative design and product development to propose realistic and accessible solutions, and it's called ‘Innovation and Product Development”.
<span style="font-family:tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0)"> Some courses don’t have a specific component of I&E because they are related to core areas, but students are required to go through an innovative process to develop a solution. The course ‘Biodesign’ is from the mandatory bioengineering curriculum. It is about the use of the design in order to create a solution to a specific problem following the steps of Design Thinking with biomedicine or biotechnology. Another course called ‘Information Systems’ gives students of Computer Science the opportunity to discover a specific problem that requires technology to be solved. For that, it is necessary to empathize with the objective public in order to design the best software that fits with them.
<h4> <strong> Extracurricular Clubs </strong> </h4>
<span style="font-family:tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0)"> Another essential element we have at the university is the presence of change-maker students who empower other students to develop an innovative scientific mindset and spirit of curiosity needed to have a strong entrepreneurship ecosystem. For that reason, SpinOut UTEC (before Comunidad I&E UTEC) was born in 2016, whose main mission is to improve the I&E ecosystem in the region, starting with UTEC students. This idea was born from the initiative of the first 4 peruvian University Innovation Fellows. They have been creating different workshops as micro classes, meetups with co-founders of Peruvian startups, speed-dating for startup ideas and a program to train new trainers in design thinking. There is also a student organization called ProUnity, which is focused on spreading information about business resources such as scrum, design thinking, project masterclasses, soft skills workshops and PMO consulting. In addition, this year students from different careers created IISE, a chapter of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering that seeks to promote research considering innovation.
<span style="font-family:tahoma,geneva,sans-serif"><span style="font-size: small"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0)"> Some means to diffuse these initiatives and organizations are the following: ‘Revista Piso 11, where news is shared with students through visual and audiovisual media, UTEC podcast, where students are interviewed to know more about their experience in areas like I&E; the social media managed by the university; and Bienestar Estudiantil, which manages an e-mail massive list to share the activities from students to students.
<h4> <strong> Maker Spaces </strong> </h4>
We have the UTEC Ventures accelerator, which years ago held events in order to promote I&E, like Global Startup Labs, GIST Startup Bootcamp, Peru Design Week, and the 1776 Challenge Cup. Nowadays, the accelerator performs certain activities under selection processes such as PreIncUVa, where students have the opportunity to discover a problem and work around it to develop a Business Model, and IncUVA which is an incubation program that allows students to search for the product-market fit of their solution. All the projects are presented in a Demo Day, open to all the students, to show the progress of all the entrepreneurship incubated.
<p style="text-align: justify"></p><p style="text-align: center">[[File:Disrupton.jpeg|287x158px|Disrupton.jpeg]][[File:Hack2.jpeg|316x158px|Hack2.jpeg]][[File:FirmaSOUTEC.png]][[File:Piso11.png|316x158px|File:Piso11.png]]</p><p style="text-align: justify"></p><p style="text-align: justify"></p>