Priorities:Purdue University Strategic Priorities
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BoilerDriver Initiative
The BoilerDriver is an initiative to connect BoilerMakers across different departments to enhance the Purdue Community and provide a mainstream method for student innovators to gain input from experts and share their output with the world.
Our Model
The BoilerDriver Initiative attempts to address three objectives with a proven model consisting of four components. Our primary objective is to connect students by helping them find the organization, entity, or mentor in the university. Our second objective is to render an environment that allows student innovators and entrepreneursto interact and maximize their productivity so that they can join multiple organizations or volunteer to mentor someone else without having a workload overflow. We believe that prioritization is key, however, BoilerDriver offers strategies to not only help students prioritize but save time. The third objective is for BoilerDriver to be a Purdue-endorsed mainstream way for student innovators to publicize their inventions throughout the university and with the world. These objectives are essential to establish the proper ambience of student innovation and entrepreneurship. To address these objectives, it is imperative that four components should be accessible to students.
The four essential components will be offered to students through the BoilerDriver Initiative:
Website and Social Network
The primary component that facilitates the achievement of the aforementioned three objectives is the BoilerDriver website. The website allows Purdue students to sign-up as a member and search for clubs, departments, and mentors with in a particular field or industry. The website also gives student innovators the ability to get recognition and publicity for their breakthrough inventions and allows for an exclusive showcase of undergraduate and graduate projects. Finally, the website serves as a system that allows any Purdue students to connect with their peers through instant messaging forproject collaboration. This system allows student to keep in touchwith multiple clubs or programs to address the concern of conflicting schedules.
Workspace
The BoilerDriver workspace is an essential physical area that allows student innovators to privately meet to collaborate on approved projects. This space is provided primarily to give student innovators a place to work on their projects and store them securely. The workspace provides all common necessities used for rapid prototype and software development. BoilerDriver will also offer all modern computing platforms and electronic platforms to help innovators enhance their projects. All the website, community, and publicity related tasks are managed at the root of the BoilerDriver foundation: the workspace.
Community
A significant component that theBoilerDriver Initiative offers to Purdue students are the mentors and experts (Innovation Fellows) who makes up the community. Similar to a club, the BoilerDriver community comprises of officers such as the President, Vice President, Admin Assistant, etc. However, BoilerDriver Initiative will nominate a group of students to become ambassadors of student innovations each semester. This group is also referred to as the Innovation Fellows. Typical candidates for Innovation Fellows include students, professors, staff, and alumni who are professional innovators or have a passion to become a mentor. The community grows rapidly each semester. As a result, students (especially freshmen) will appreciate the ease of finding information about mentors available in the community through the BoilerDriver website.
Publicity
BoilerDriver will serve as a mainstream way for students to share their inventions or productions with the university regardless of the project’s academic relation. Student Innovators may submit their project information through the BoilerDriver website. The BoilerDriver team will carefully evaluate the project validity and publicize the invention in relevant forms of media throughout the university. Optionally, if an invention is a major breakthrough, BoilerDriver should have the streamlined ability to empower the student innovator through Purdue’s resources in regards to national and international publicity.
Our Vision
We envision the BoilerDriver Hub to act as the following:
1. A platform where student innovators are nurtured and motivated to pursue their entrepreneurial dream and develop technologies which have a broad scope and potential to become a big company rather than just licensing the technology to another company.
2. A space where passionate students work towards disrupting the existing industries and creating revolutionary and global products.
3. A platform which networks and connects departments, centers, investors, manufacturers and public with student innovators.
4. A workspace for student innovators to ideate, collaborate, innovate and develop products with a promising business potential.
5. A channel to beta test the prototypes developed by student innovators to gain consumer feedback and constructive criticism prior to market launch for increasing the success rate of the product/ process.
6. A place with an innovative and exciting culture for students, faculty and industry partners.
7. A professional skills development provider. This is obtained by leveraging the talents of BDI student innovators and other collaborations.
8. A virtual guide for students who are either looking for other student innovators, investors or research projects.
9. A resource to find students with specific skills for research, technological development, creativity and presentations.
Related Links
Purdue University Student Priorities
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University Innovation Fellows
Spring 2016
Fall 2015
Spring 2013
Jeff Ackerman
Ian Hamilton
