As a Cohort, Continue to Seek Out Diverse Perspectives

In order to build a truly integrative project around innovation and entrepreneurship at the university, it is fundamental to obtain the opinions and perspectives from diverse groups, including students faculty and staff from several fields and also administration alumni and companies.

Strategies

Set up booths on the Drillfield (center of campus), to get the community opinion about important topics.
Promote small town hall sessions in different areas of campus aiming to get input from diverse groups.
Stimulate discussion through VT official social media channels.
Create fun events to get faculty, student and administration together in collaborative challenges.
Set up online polls asking all segments about their desired future paths for the university.
Add a comments box to be displayed every time a person logs in on the university computing system so that feedback can be readily recieved.

Knowledge about available resources

The landscape canvas showed that VT offers a set of diverse resources in innovation and entrepreneurship that are high-quality and fully available for students. However, the knowledge about these resources is limited and students from majors outside business and engineering still feel disconnected.

Strategies

Create a type of Netflix “Max” that suggests resources from goals that people input.
“100 resources you have as a VT student”, partner with local press to create this article.
Rely on student to share by word of mouth.
Start a “Did you know” series
Have students stories include resources they used to succeed.
Video content to walk students through resources.

Partnerships with industry/sponsors

Establishing more partnerships with industry and external sponsors that offer direct opportunities for students to learn and practice in real-world settings is a key component on a strategy aiming to expand the impact of innovation for students at the university.

Strategies

Create multidisciplinary groups
Ask for money
Brag about company sponsors, include them in newsletters.
Allow companies to sponsor more events on campus.
Create more job fairs across all majors.
Build close relationships with companies by keeping alumni involved.

Becoming a student-centered university

Increasing importance of getting students “on-board” for the realization of the university’s projects - engaging students on planning and making their own learning environment and system is a key feature for universities’ aiming to build a new and improved experiential college for the future.

Strategies

Use surveys, focus groups and other strategies to capture students’ perspective
Promote Town Hall meetings (with free food)
Delegate more student representatives such as the board of visitors student rep.
Share student success stories
Start a student podcast
Bring back TedX talks.

Note: After talking with diverse stakeholders and co-creating in several change mode canvases addressing our priorities, we were able to uncover underlying issues and potential gaps. We discover converging aspects and an opportunity to position ourselves as mediators between those audiences needs and offerings - in particular, the new experiential learning initiative at Virginia Tech emerged as a potential setting for our work to catalyze change and facilitate shared endeavours between students and admininstration.

Priorities:Virginia Tech Student Priorities

Contents

As a Cohort, Continue to Seek Out Diverse Perspectives

Knowledge about available resources

Partnerships with industry/sponsors

Becoming a student-centered university

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