The Colorado School of Mines is a public research university of engineering and applied science in Golden, Colorado.

1 Promoting student innovation and entrepreneurship
2 Encouraging faculty innovation and entrepreneurship
3 Actively Supporting the University Technology Transfer Function
4 Facilitating University-Industry Collaboration
5 Resources on Campus
6 Off Campus Resources
- 6.1 Denver Area Resources
7 Related Links
- 7.1 CSM Landscape Canvas

Promoting student innovation and entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship Advisory Council

This project aims to provide a resource for aspiring entreprenuers. Faculty, students, and local entreprenuers will host one to two office hours a week to provide council for students or faculty who are thinking about starting a business or organization. Office hours will be held in a conference room with room to pitch a presentation. To develop this program, we will need a rotating group of faculty, entreprenuers, and students who have backgrounds in entreprenuership to advise during these sessions. We may also expand the program to provide funding for projects if possible. The sixth cohort from the Spring 2019 session are organizing this project.

E-Volve Club (E-Club)

In the Spring 2014 semester, the Entrepreneurship Club at mines was restarted to become an active campus organization that has brought in local entrepreneurs to talk about their experiences. The club will organize several campus wide events in the coming academic year to increase awareness and exposure to innovation and entrepreneurship.

Website is under development.

Design Lab

The Director of Senior Design for Mechanical Engineering, Jered Dean, has taken steps to transform the mechanical engineering senior design lab into an open design lab that allows students to use equipment for any academic or personal project. The lab consists of 6 new makerbot 3D printers along with other prototyping equipment in the basement of Brown Hall. The entire Senior Design Program is Known as the Capstone Design Program and is named as such to Symbolize the "Capstone" at the end of the undergraduate program at Mines. As part of this program students can partner with companies and use the senior design lab as a space to innovate and generate prototypes and designs.

Another Option that is avalible to all Students as a resource for pursueing inrest in innovation and design is the Career center where students can connect with bussinesses that can assist with Ideas and projects students wish to pursue or apply for internships with Companies whose intrests align with there own.

In the past few months many new design areas have been added to campus some for all enrolled students like the Blaster Design Factory, and others for specific majors like The Outlet. Spaces like these and others provide students with the ability and the means to bring life to their ideas. Other spaces like the The Digger Design Factory and the Machine Shop are for a more hands on approach instead of a more design oriented enviornment.

Startup Summer

Employers participating in Startup Summer have come to Mines to promote the program where students interested in startups can have a paid internship and gain valuable insight into innovation and entrepreneurship. This program has been a pathway for post graduation employment for several Mines graduates.

Maker Society

The Maker Society democratizes 'making' on campus. The Society implemented a hub and spoke model to connect all of the maker spaces on campus with a brand new maker space at the center, the Blaster Design Factory (BDF). The BDF is a space for rapid prototyping that is open to all students and faculty. They foster innovation and connect students to the other spaces on campus. Their main focus is the idea that "anyone can create anything."

Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation

The center for entrepreneurship and innovation here at the Colorado School of Mines aspires to give students the opportunity to build skills which will vastly help them in their bright futures.

They have two primary objectives:

Educate our students in modern entrepreneurial thinking.
Provide the opportunity for our students and faculty to explore the commercialization of their science and technology ideas.

Their vision for the future is to create a Colorado School of Mines where entrepreneurs are seamlessly connected with the infrastructure, resources, and funding they need to achieve their goal: developing sustainable and successful commercial entities based on either Mines-derived or individual-derived technologies.

https://innovation.mines.edu/about/

Encouraging faculty innovation and entrepreneurship

Pathway to Innovation Leadership Team

Overall, encouraging faculty innovation and entrepreneurship has become a focus here at Mines. The Pathway to Innovation Leadership Team is a group of faculty members focused on promoting innovation and entrepreneurship amidst the student body.

The Pathways to Innovation Leadership Team partnered with the University Innovation Fellows to put on the first Inovation Competition for students at Mines.
The team has connections to other faculty members with experience in business and entrepreneurship. These faculty members have expressed interest in showcasing their experiences and running workshops around innovation and entrepreneurship.

Resources for Midea

Faculty members have helped develop resources for the Midea Hub (online tool used by students looking for resources while in different stages of the innovation or entrepreneurship process). These faculty members range in expertise from design thinking to policy and paperwork regarding patents.

Building Relationships with Faculty Members

The Colorado School of Mines UIF Leadership circle focuses on building professional and personal relationships with faculty in order to encourage faculty innovation and rally support for the concepts of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Trefney Center for Innovation

Actively Supporting the University Technology Transfer Function

The office of technology transfer (OTT) has primarily been used to commercialize PhD research.

OTT has provided an extensive list of regional and national resources that might be of use for students interested in innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Office of Research Administration (ORA) is also a resource for students who are interested in researching a particular subject in depth. The ORA provides guidance for all steps of research, including proposal preparation, grant writing, and seeking for fundings. A full list of resources and contact information can be found here.

In addition to the above resources, Mines has recently put together a new website named Midea that contains resources both on campus and on the web. The vision for this website is to be a hub for all student innovation and entrepreneurial activities where students can see projects other students have put together, find inspiration, or seek help from other students or faculty. This site is still in its beginning stages and many of its pages do not yet have any information on them, but this will be changing over the next several weeks as information is continually being added.

Facilitating University-Industry Collaboration

Current collaboration exists between research groups and industry. These collaborations are primarily used to fund graduate students and do not promote innovation/entrepreneurship.

Resources on Campus

While the majority of collaboration is used to fund graduate students. There are resources that help students branch out and make lasting connections

CSM 101 Pathways Class Revision

CSM 101 is a required class for first years and transfer students, which aims to teach students about the various opportunities and resources on campus. This class aims to promote friendship between the peer mentors who teach the class and the students taking the class. However, students have felt that the class did not signifcantly help in either of the ways listed above. This project aims to revise the class by putting students with similar interests in the same class. Those students would then have the opportunity to all work on a project with the theme of their class. Students could list their interests before enrolling to find a class that fits best to their interests. Alumni from the classes can come back to teach other students.

This project would put like-minded students together, forming stronger bonds that may last throughout their time at Mines. Furthermore, it has the opportunity to allow students to have an outlet to express themselves. To do this, we would need approval from the coordinators of this program. This is organized by the Spring 2019 cohort.

Promoting Open Educational Resources at Mines

This is an ongoing project that aims to increase the adoption or creation of open educational resources on the Mines campus, which include textbooks or learning materials that are free of cost and able to be openly adapted. There are partnerships with the Trefny Center, Arthur Lakes Library, Undergraduate and Graduate Student Government, and the State of Colorado OER Steering committee. Recently, there we received a grant from the State of Colorado to increase the amount of OERs on campus. This grant is being used to incentivize faculty to create the OERs on their own time. Seven faculty on campus are funded through this grant, and it is estimated that two thousand students will benefit in the first year. To increase this program, we will need more funding to create more grants. This is an ongoing project by the Spring 2019 cohort.

McBride Honors Program

The McBride Honors Program is very generous in funding scholarships that can be used to travel abroad and help pay for internship costs. They also provide an extensive list of available internships and programs. Due to the engineering focus on Mines' campus, most of the opportunities are focused in engineering and creating policy around it. But there are opportunities that allow for experiences that can be used to learn a great deal about how other places and cultures run their schooling systems and how people associate in general.

One such opportunity is the various programs offered by People to People International. These programs link people through the exchange of experiences and ideas.

Career Center and Alumni Association

The Career Center at Colorado School of Mines does not fund students, but it does offer a wide range of career and internship opportunities. Many students take advantage of the Career Day and different workshops around campus to secure positions from a wide range of fields.

The Alumni Association also offers vast neworking opportunities outside of the university.

Advanced Energy Systems/NREL

The Advanced Energy Systems Graduate Degree promotes collaboration and transfer between the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) and Colorado School of Mines. Faculty usually are from NREL and have direct training in the industry, with a good idea of future technologies.

Off Campus Resources

Denver Area Resources

Off campus resources include places such as Innovation Pavilion where anyone can rent out conference rooms and use the on site resources. While places such as these so require additional cost, they are important resources to consider once becoming more established.

School:Colorado School of Mines

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