Fellow:Adam Marcinkowski

Adam is a junior Mechanical Engineering student and University Innovation Fellow Candidate at the Colorado School of Mines. He transferred from the United States Air Force Academy where he studied Political Science with a focus on how to innovate within large organizations. Adam became a UIF candidate to join the ranks of take-charge, unconventional change leaders.

Adam is currently a Mines Venture Associate at his university's Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He helps launch and coordinate innovative and entrepreneurial activities across the Mines campus. These include the hackathon-like "Hackmines Innovation Challenge", the Mines Maker Society, campus makerspaces, the Golden Startup Festival pitch competition, and more. A firm believer in the benefits of a competitive spirit, Adam has either captained, launched, and/or helped popularize different business and engineering competitions across campus.

He is a systems-level thinker trained in organizational intrapreneurship and innovation, and hopes becoming a UIF will challenge him to put his educational background to the test. His stint as an Air Force researcher in Silicon Valley was spent investigating two key questions: what is it about the DNA of Silicon Valley companies that makes them so agile and adaptable? More importantly, how do we export those elements to other organizations? His work combined the good (growth mindset, rapid experimentation, culture building), the bad (the many ways bureaucracies try to kill innovation) and the ugly (building political capital, navigating bureaucracies, and culture change).

Besides innovation and entrepreneurship, Adam is heavily involved in aerospace on campus. Adam's mission in life is to help move human civilization offworld so that we can live permanently in space and on other planets. The best way to do this, he believes, is through space mining - Mines is Planet Earth's top-ranked mining university, and the only one to have a program in Space Resources. But large-scale human space colonization relies just as much on human development as it does fuel, construction, and manufacturing. Adam is still a social scientist at heart and aims to help others rethink education, ethics, and society for the 21st century.