Strategy #3: Generating Awareness and Excitement for Innovation & Entrepreneurship

There are many students and faculty that are currently doing some incredible things that push forward a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship on campus. By highlighting their hard work and success, we can raise the profile of these faculty and student members. Moreover, it would get the word out about current resources on campus, and generate excitement for such activities.

Problem Addressed

Student organizations tend to be ineffective at carrying their missions and goals through in an academic year. We have found that students, as individuals, are the ones that carry though real change. Instead of highlighting students groups, highlighting individuals could inspire others to take action as well. Another aspect of this is that some faculty and do not recognize the importance of being innovative and entrepreneurial, and therefore, do not pass this knowledge to their students. In order to raise the profile of I&E, faculty should be recognized and celebrated for their efforts in teaching students how to be innovative.

Implementation

Feature Student's Projects on Posters around Campus - In order to promote a culture of innovation, it is important to recognize students who are currently engaged in I&E activities. Through featuring students and their projects around campus via posters and news articles, we hope to inspire other students to follow in their steps.
Create an Award for Outstanding I&E Professors - In addition to recognizing student achievement, it is equally important to recognize outstanding professors who install I&E mindsets in their courses. Through this award, we can encourage more professors to incorporate I&E into their courses.

Strategy #4: Incorporate I&E Into Coursework

One of the most important ways to foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within a school is to incorporate these mindsets into classroom experiences. While student run clubs and extra-curricular are all great ways to drive passion for innovation, but the only way to guarantee that all students gain this valuable mindset is to enforce it in the classroom. For this reason, we are proponents of changing/adding classes to the university's curriculum that pull in students from all majors and encourage a collaborative culture within those students. We want to foster an environment in which students are excited about working with students from other majors because we feel that this not only creates a more successful product, but prepares them for the real world in which they will be forced to work with others who may not share their same perspective.

Tactic #1: Revamp and Expand the Engineering Innovations Course

The school of engineering currently offers an introductory course for all engineering students that focuses on engineering innovation. This course has the potential to be expanded to students across the entire university as an intro to I&E course. With the help of the UIF cohort, the course can be redesigned to include entrepreneur content and make a lasting impression on students which they can carry through their time in college.

Tactic #2: Instill I&E Concepts in Existing Courses

While it is tempting to create new courses that teach I&E principles, there is a lot of potential for adding I&E content to existing courses. The addition of the planned makerspace to the University of Dayton I&E ecosystem provides educators with an opportunity to incorporate an innovative mindset in the courses they teach. This can be accomplished through creating homework or group projects that require students to not only use the makerspace, but collaborate with their group members to reach innovative solutions to course assignments.

Strategy #5: Develop Student Experiential Resources

Tactic #1: Organize a Hackathon

While there was an Air Force Hackathon held locally in recent years, the University of Dayton has yet to sponsor a hackathon on their own campus. Hackathons are a great way to engage students in a fun and exciting approach to I&E. There is a great ammount of potential to bring students together from many different departments within the university in order to solve a common problem. In addition to fostering multidisciplinary collaborations, a hackathon has the potential to introduce a wide variety of students to innovation based activities.

Tactic #2: Get Students Involved with Design Competitions

Based on faculty input, one of the highly desired outcomes of the planned maker space is to foster multidisciplinary collaborations. One potential way to accomplish this is for the UIF cohort to organize design teams to compete in national design competitions as well as locally hosted competitions for University of Dayton students. Competition formats would range from poster presentations, pitching ideas, or rapid prototype development. In order for these events to be highly inclusive of students from all parts of the university, challenges will be selected which focus on innovative approaches to problems rather than technical ability. The previously mentioned hackathons will be able to build off of these competitions in order to quickly move ideas generated in the design competitions into an early prototype phase.

Priorities:University of Dayton Student Priorities

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