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Yale students generally do not like taking risks, so we need to find a way to encourage risk-taking. The top 15% of students from many schools, Yale included, are swept away to work in New York and consulting and financial companies. These are the students who are most likely to succeed with their own businesses. These are the smartest people that you want to be working on the biggest problems in the world. Instead, rational thinking about stability and security has prevented entrepreneurship from being a valid goal that they strive for.
Yale students are passionate people and it is really easy to excite someone about a meaningful and valuable goal. Social entrepreneurship is thus an effective way to provide motivation because it takes a different set of metrics into account and encourages people to look at impact instead of stability as "success." Clubs such as [[Engineers_Without_BordersEngineers Without Borders|Engineers Without Borders]] take service trips and formally structure them. This allows many people to work together on a project and succeed easily where a single person may have a hard time.
Classes such as 'Appropriate Technology for the Developing World' also align the ideas and goals of a larger set of students in a slightly more structred way to encourage innovation. These kinds of guided entrepenuership classes and clubs help to ease people into the idea of innovating. Successive failures can be demoralizing, especially for younger students, so these kinds of activities are esepcially useful for freshmen and sophomores.
Having a larger group usually makes activities less risky, so trying to bring people together is an easy way to minimize risk. Another way this can be done is by showing 100 people that if we assign their passion/idea to a slightly more general problem, we can easily link multiple people with the same interest. Thus, 100 startups with 1 person each can easily become 10-20 groups of like-minded individuals all working towards the same end goal. This is acomplished in groups such as [[Design_for_AmericaDesign for America|Design for America]], where, on the first day, everyone throws ideas onto the board, but those ideas are narrowed and focused by forming groups. Similar strategies can help other organizations.
Finally, groups such as the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute are making progress towards structuring the process of innovation and providing mentorship at every step. Having someone who has gone through the process guide can make students feel safe when they're starting a new company, and having a dedicated group whose goal is to incubate start-ups further reduces risk by providing experience and knowledge.
Providing a way for all, even someone with no experience, to get involved is important for gaining new students and retaining them throughout their time at Yale. We need to find a way to encourage roles for freshmen and sophomores that will work with their limited engineering skillset and enable them to create without knowing advanced physics or 3D modeling. Perhaps working with freshmen and sophomores as leaders while juniors and seniors help lead but also do the heavy lifting on the engineering front. This encourages big ideas for younger students and gives older students the opportunity to take a deep dive without sacrificing the longevity of a project or club.
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= Strategy #4: Give Students More Time to Create =
Certain classes currently exist that are heavily lab based and involve students playing with arduinos, sensors and other basic electro-mechanical elements to create projects. At the end of the semester, the class of predominantly freshmen were able to complete and present engineered solutions to a plethora of problems. Working in small 3 people groups, they develop a range of products and projects, simply because they were given the time to do so. If Yale can somehow make students less busy with coursework, they can encourage students to spend that free time innovating. Almost everyone I talked to said they would innovate and think big if they had time to do so. <br/><br/>Google values this kind of "free time" very highly. Every employee is given 20% time, a time where they can work on thier own ideas that may or may not directly relate to their work. If we consider a student's time, 20% would be a LOT of manhours. 20% is approximately one class per semester here at Yale, and I think that there should be required entrepenuership, innovation, or independent work class. This is a new kind of thinking that should not be left out of a liberal arts education simply because it is new.
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= Strategy #5: Teach Students the Basics of Entrepreneurship<br/> =
Intro micro-economics is the bread and butter of a Yale Education. The class is always taught and is the fundamental class many Yale students take at some point during their time here. It is a basic overview of rational thinking and an equivalent style class for innovation would be an amazing move towards completely changing the way our campus looks at engineering and innovation. At a school as traditional as Yale, it is important that we take time to explore the wild possibilities, and many people get locked into a conservative viewpoint early in their time here. There should be a contrast to intro micro-economics, the class that all Yalies want to take, and that will ideally be taught by an engineer.
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= Strategy #6: Increase the Reach of Engineering and Advertise Better<br/> =
[[Chinmay Jaju]]
[[Category:Student Priorities|Student_Priorities]]