Priorities:GVSU Student Priorities
OVERVIEW
The GVSU innovation fellows realized that there are many great resources for entrepreneurs in Grand Rapids, although they often don't have the inspiration or the information to start. The two strategies we propose to work on immediately focus on introducing better methods to inspire young, innovative students at Grand Valley to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. Afterwards, we want to develop a communication pipeline so that good ideas can travel to a place they can be nurtured and grown into a solution.
PROJECT #1 - Mobile Maker Space [9 months+]
This project is an intro into a maker space. Due to the spread out nature of our campus, getting a single space would make it difficult to include everyone. Using a more mobile area would make it easier to engage both the downtown campus and the main campus 20 minutes away. Currently our main initiative is to get students and faculty behind the area, as the students will be the driving force behind an ever increasing maker space. Without student and faculty backing, the space wont ever create the environment of innovation and collaboration we're seeking.
We've discussed the idea of partnering with local businesses to promote collaboration between students and professionals in the community, and will be looking into this further in the future.
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1PlqMd97pZhDLxHEkSo_tkOKxDZSdpFuuNxYEIwFUJmc/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1EhUtVbTGgIYEgt0wp4nGdF6lx2yZi_G4_OTu91swgrc/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/15aTpI_-WQ_kjcch9RaBOkJF-piyyLDF_LxeQu1ejTJo/edit
PROJECT #2 - TEDX Meetups [6-9 months]
The goal of this project is to get students inspired to create and innovate. We hope to host a TEDx talk at Grand Valley and try to focus on the innovative ideas in the community and state that have made large impacts. If we cannot get licensing for a TEDx talk we would host our own version of TEDx to get students inspired with the focus on local celebrities, investors, entrepreneurs, and resources.
We recognize that inspiration is a key component to having student innovation at a university; currently there are a good amount of resources for entrepreneurs but they are not known to any students outside of the business school. In order to have successful innovative ideas come from our University, students from all disciplines need to come together on projects to highlight a variety of talents. By providing a resource of inspiration to all majors and promiting this even campus wide we believe we can reach many students and inspire them to start creating together.
Various businesses in the Grand Rapids area are interested in doing a monthly version of this, if we partner with them it may bring in a wider audience and allow for more renowned speakers to attend.
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1D6mBEnfS7rnFGB_w9FBcAI-nzLSJNzSF00meyV3E28Q/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1FdtBoPnnWprIj4h5wZOKuQeGRxYZtrlzedGVPzv_SM8/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1AZdlHE36lcgGa43KZhr0DsYjlqX-sQyMgdKpcZiihQM/edit
PROJECT #3 - Business and Entrepreneurship Collaboration [24 months]
GVSU has a new major as of this year, the entrepreneurship major. This major is in the business college and therefore, like all business majors a Grand Valley, requires the busines capstone class. In addition, all senior engineering students are assigned a two semester senior project immediately before they graduate. We believe that for some of the senior projects it would be benficial to assign them a entrepreneurship/business major to write business plans, run finaces, etc to determine if the design project would make a viable business.
This would not only encourage collaboration between colleges but would also give students a sense of how products are designed in the real world. This would also introduce business concepts to the engineering students and technology to the business students.
In addition, this could be run as an add on to PROJECT #1 once it gets going. Since the projects coming from the Idea Pipeline would be for a new product, having business majors on a team for that would be quite beneficial in order to determine if the product would be viable in the real world.
If we see success in this program, possibly utilizing a style similar to the Purdue EPICS program, it can be expanded to include other colleges and majors.
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1Umz-VVrzDUHHbUnY2Q_As4L8kaCyCM62VwI4YcfN8bU/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1sN_bnMv58g0QlOdlq9CSEOzkZ8fXa4yrHw4ueAUHuRs/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1KHkZmD5BF6unbVhoMzZQI3mfj_KaSmE6MIkdBg_nVls/edit
PROJECT #4 - Student Inovation Group [12-24 months]
There are 8 seperate colleges at GVSU, but there is very little ollaboration between the seperate majors. In hopes of gathering people from all majors and fields, we believe it would be a good idea to create club or meeting group that crosses the college boundaries to pursue innovation. All of the colleges at Grand Valley specialize in a particular field, which would be helpful in creating a diverse group of people with whom a student could brainstorm with or get help on a project with. With such a diverse group of students, many different ideas would be feasible.
We have several contacts at a few of the schools, however, more research and networking would need to be done (possibly between existing clubs on campuses) to gather student interest at each of the colleges. This club would be able to tackle problems both on and off campus, work to create student run products, and create an environement of innovation and entrepeneurship on campus.
There are several places in Grand Rapids that exist to help entrepreneurs and to bring entrepreneurship to West Michigan and we believe they would be more than willing to host or even sponsor a group like this. There are also many issues on campus that seem to lack multi-disciplinary involvement or are being tackled at a slow pace, and with a diverse group there would be many opportunities for collaboration.
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1X7ItylFXqw4B2EqMdQ5v5vbd1wnHlkDKd9c2JpJyfBk/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1GBFv5ofwfwIEv3v3I3s0cPTRnZtCvq4e_jwdtcNEdqM/edit
https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1ctUJO1E2I1xcn_jGE8gniZfIf0IpNs-rKEx_sDkkdmM/edit
PROJECT #5 - Hackathon/"Hacking" for non-hackers [6-9 months]
At GVSU, we believe the pipeline to developing a strong entrepreneurship and innovation community is bottlenecked at the discovery phase.
Observations and conversations around campus have eluded to the interest in entrepreneurship within the student body. Faculty have been developing a curriculum with a focus on venture creation and interdisciplinary collaboration to scale with the interest in startups. Design thinking is becoming a buzzword around campus through multiple events that have tested and validated the student response to innovation programming. This new wave of interdisciplinary, creationary classes have garnered more interest than the new, albeit traditional, entrepreneurship classes housed within the business school.
In addition to classes testing the value proposition of entrepreneurship and design thinking, two competitions have emerged on campus promoting diverse teams to solve problems within society. The initial response has been a mix of students from diverse backgrounds. This signals that the entrepreneurial mindset is expanding to fields of study outside of business, engineering and computer science.
A hackathon for non-hackers is a smaller commitement than a semester-long class and less intimidating than the national/international competitions currently available. The event would be ideal for students to test the waters in a fun, low commitement way. The ideal outcome of the hackathon would be to ignite and build the community of entrepreneurs on campus.
With a stronger community dveloped, the growth of resources offered becomes justified by the demand. This cycle would help maintain momentum through semesters as the champions of entrepreneurship graduate.
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