Priorities:UVA University Student Priorities
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2014 UIF Leadership Circle
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 an emergent tech incubator, HackCville, and we will partner with their mission and culture of design, mentorship and self-starter ingenuity. Our strategy 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 field projects and support them fully from upstream to downstream by riding 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 Fellows Grant was bestowed upon Angela Lee 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 an idea than to 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 oneself 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 operational 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 the quantification of sucess to show possible investors/supporters.
Medical Hackathon
Description: A short-term goal of the UVA Leaderhship Circle is to host a medical hackathon that will get hundreds of students involved in healthcare 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:
- One, to recruit young students of different backgrounds and majors to join EMTV
- And two, have hackathon participants carry out projets that result from the hackathon
A medical hackathon could serve as the spark for serious undergraduate 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, professional medical hackathon to determine optimal ways of hosting them
- Recruit at least 5 first to second year students to help organize the first hackathon and eventually lead EMTV
- Obtain faculty advisors who have medicine, engineering and/or business backgrounds to advise on design challenges for hackathons and provde additional mentoring to students who pursue projects after hackathons
- Have at least 3 hackathon projects within 2 years place in the University of Virginia Entrepreneurship Cup or obtain some sort of competitive funding
- At least one startup formed within 5 years
2015 UIF Leadership Circle
Top Priorities
- Design Team Nurturing
- Entrepreneurship Council
- Medical Bridge
- Entrepreneurship Educational Tract
Dream Team Program
Description: A way in which students can form a "dream" team of diverse skills and backgrounds to pursure their innovative ideas. Students would be able to offer themselves up as "free agents" and be able to contact other "free agents" from a pool of students into forming a team. Through this process, students would be able to form design teams that could give them the best chance at creating a synnergistic team.
Goals:
- Students with ideas can come to the program in hopes of finding a design team
- Students who want to join exciting projects can offer their skills in the pool
- Students of all backgrounds and skills would join the pool
- Teams would have members with complimentary dynamics/personalities
- Teams would have a diversity of students other than Engineering and Business
- Teams would meet and use the newly created Innovation Space at UVa's Engineering School
University Entrepreneurship Council
Description: A group of innovation minded students and faculty who raise awareness of, increase transparency between and encourage collaboration of entrepreneurial organizations and initiatives around grounds. Regular meetings and discussions would strengthen ties between innovative groups and increase awareness of the opportunities available to students. Comprising members from around the greater university community the council would encourage the cross pollination of ideas.
Goals:
- Improve communication between entrepreneurial initiatives on grounds
- Raise awareness within the university community of innovative endeavors
- Encourage collaborative events that bring together different student groups
- Discuss potential entrepreneurial ventures and see them to fruition
- Bridge the gap between disjoint groups: students, professors, administrators, alumni, community members
- The council would meet regularly in the newly created Innovation Space at UVa's Engineering School and play a role in its development
Med-Bridge
Description: An online platform that serves two main purposes: 1. It is a network where people can discuss and identify problems associated with the medical system. 2. a community for students and professionals of different backgrounds to come together and formulate optimal solutions for these problems with their unique talents. This creates a platform for students who are interested in industrial design, business, project management or any other related disciplines a place to explore and find real life problems to work on.
Goals:
- Give medical professionals a platform to post problems they'd like help improving
- Creates a question bank for student innovators to go to if they are looking for a problem to solve.
- Give innovative students a place to start brainstorming solutions for real problems
- Encourages students to collaborate with each other and learn from professionals that have the same passion
- To build a strong a supportive network of communication between students, professors and professionals in the area
Potential ideas for expansion:
- The forum is regulated by a voting system
- The popular issues and solutions will be pushed to the top of the page
- If the votes exceed a certain number (ex. 300), a crowd-funding system can be started for it
Introduce an Innovation and Entreprensurhip Educational Tract
- I believe this can be housed in the already existing Engineering business minor, which is extremely popular among current students
- By Spring 2016, introduce the first design class for the engineering business minor
- Encourage students to take their ideas and create products and companies around it. This may require restructuring the curriculum, so that the last capstone class, in which you create a product idea, is taken before a student's final year
- Within 3 years, hire faculty that have experience with technological innovations to inspire and empower our students
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