Overview

Strategy #1 Creation of an innovation space

Recently, UTS has begun encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship around campus, made evident by starting two team in the University Innovation Fellows program. Created by the previous and new candidate UIF’s at UTS, this strategy aims to provide a place to facilitate innovation collaboration and teamwork for students. Currently this strategy is already off the ground and we have already pitched our ideas to the heads of the Engineering and IT faculty and they are more than enthusiastic with our idea.

Milestone 1: Initial Stakeholder meeting - Completed

What got our project started was when the heads of the Engineering and IT Faculty emailed us expressing interest in re-purposing a previously unused space in the Engineering and IT building.

Milestone 2: Idea Pitch - Completed

Two weeks from our initial stakeholder meeting, we re-scheduled a meeting with the faculty leaders to pitch our ideas. We generated three ideas for our innovation space which had varying levels of creativity and many different features. We gained valuable insigth from the faculty leaders, as they provided many thoughts and opinions on what they thought would work and what was too far out there to be practicle.

Milestone 3: Investor Pitch - Completed

To provide funding for the room, the faculty leaders had a potential investor lined up who was interested to know what kind of opportunities this space could provide for students. We had a short meeting with the investor where we gave him a summarised version of our three pitches and explained why this un used space should be re purposed. Over all the investor had a positive opinion of our ideas and even had his ideas and suggestions to improve our ideas.

Milestone 4: Project Follow Up – Planned Feb 2018

In this milestone we aim to discuss potential strategies to take our ideas to the final stages and eventually turn the innovation space from an idea into a reality.

Milestone 5: Working with architects or designers – Planned March 2018

In this milestone we aim to create a design for the final product by working architects and designers. We aim to have a professional looking design that will be enticing to students as well as serve their practical needs for innovation and collaboration.

Milestone 6: Construction - Planned April 2018

For the construction of our space we aim for it to take as little time as possible, to minimise disturbance for the students, with the construction taking place outside of peak university times.

Milestone 7: Grand opening - Planned July 2018

In this milestone we intend to open our innovation space to the students. It is very rare to see new and interesting spaces open from existing spaces inside UTS, so we aim to have an awesome opening ceremony.

== Strategy #2: Formal Recognition of student involvement in extra-curricular acitivites

During interviews with first year students at UTS we discovered that a lot of students were extremely unengaged with extra-curricular acitivites, were intidimated to be involved, were not aware of opportunities or were wanting to be involved but didn't have the belief they were capable enough. Many students would go to class and go back home or to work.

As well as this, a lot of students also felt that they were unable to differentiate themselves when applyng for a job and felt that the only way to do so was through extra-currcular activiites, however, communicating their involvements was extremely difficult when integrating it in their CV.

By combining these 2 issues, we were able to ideate a solution to incentivise students to become even more engaged with university life outside of classes. This resulted in the idea to implement and recognise students’ involvement formally in their academic transcript to show employer's a student's involvement during their course of their degree.

As a result of this, students would feel the need to beomce involved in university to help distinguish themselves from others when seeking a job and feel rewarded for doing so.

The Plan:

We would begin speaking to employer's about what they seek when hiring people. We would conduct an empathy interview about students and the hiring process, and how extra-currcular activities could be implement when going through the job application process.

After this, we would speak to the Faculty of Engineering and IT about the demands of industry when it comes to job application, and provide them a list of reccomendations that industry expect from universities in regards to student exmployment. After this, would then get students to voice their concersn to Faculty about the needs of formal recognition in the Academic Transcript and then being to work closely with Faculty to being integrating this system.

After this, a checklist would be created to ensure that extra-curricular activities are monitored and thoroughly examined to give students opportunities to have these involvements formalised in their transcript.

We would then iterate the system if there are any flaws.

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Strategy #3 - Social Events to Break Down Faculty Separations

When interviewing students from various degree backgrounds, it was often evident that rarely interacted with students who were apart of a different faculty to themselves. In many occasions, they barely interacted with people outside of their own course. We have often seen that students who know more people in a cross disciplined environment often get involved with a much grander range of activities and therefore enjoy their university experience more.

Tactic #1 - Run innovation workshops for cross faculty students to encourage innovation and meeting of friends

Tactic #2 - Run social events that are not discipline specific

Tactic #3 - Host uni wide hackathons to get people involved

Milestone #1 - Host a networking event at which there is no more than 35% of students from a particular faculty

Milsestone #2 - Expland the UIF program at UTS outside of the Engineering Faculty

Milestone #3 - Make orientation a uni wide event with activites for all students.

Milestone #4 - commence uni subjects that are not tied to one particular faculty

Examining the current ecosystem of our campus, it was clear that the university has recognise a need for students to learn about innovation and entrepreneurship. As a direct response to the demand. The university has introduced incubator-like programs for students and undergraduate courses to support ongoing students and new alike, in this area. There has been many successful programs and it has been well received by students of all disciplines.

However examining the bigger picture, it is clear that these programs overlap and no coherent community was formed between these programs and faculties. One of the problem space this strategy plans to address is the segregated but successful programs the university is producing. The problem space became apparent - how can we conjugate these groups of highly talented people and their ideas to entwine a larger network and form stronger presence of innovation and entrepreneur at the university.

Following this observation, the University Innovation Fellows plan to host a series of social events in the aim of joining programs and communities. These social events are designed to cultivate conversations for students, staff members and those in the industry. It will be run regularly by students with creativity. Events such as interfaculty debates or startup fairs are a few among ways to get individuals involved.

Ultimately the aim is to connect current communities on campus and allowing new students to find ways to get involved. This strategy hopes to influence the success of other strategies being implemented at the University.

Strategy #4 - Creating a Cohesive Innovation and Entrepreneurship Environment

UTS is a large university with approximately 45,000 students currently enrolled. As a result, the UTS campus is vast and spread out over a large geographical area. As each building is home to a specific faculty, this creates a sense of pride and belonging within each faculty however it can also contribute to a feeling of disassociation with the rest of the university. This is especially true in the case of the innovation building which most students are completely unaware of.

After interviewing several students from the Faculty of Engineering and IT, we could not find a single student who was aware of the existence of this innovation building where so many of UTS' I&E programs take place. Through our own experiences at UTS, we have observed a rift between the students who frequently engage in I&E activities and those who do not. After speaking with students, most told us that they would have gotten involved in these activities had they known about them. From these discussions coupled with our own experiences, we believe the main cause of this is poor advertising and the physical isolation of I&E programs and initiatives within the innovation building.

Instead of perpetuating an environment in which students are forced to seek out I&E programs and events themselves, we believe the solution to this problem is to bring small I&E experiences into the everyday life of the UTS student. We are still investigating how best to do this with ongoing ideation, prototyping, and feedback.

Priorities:University of Technology Sydney Student Priorities