Project Name: Innovation and Entrepreneurship Pop-Up Series

Project by Faculty Innovation Fellows Candidate Felipe Wilson

Why is this project important to you, your department, & your Fellows?

This project is important because it will allow us to motivate and expose more students to I&E. Our UIF cohorts have discovered that students feel distant from these concepts, and I want to help them to be creative and innovate.

Description

Through our UIF candidates, and the 2020 cohort, we have realized that there is a lot to do in terms of exposing our students to innovation and entrepreneurship. Students don’t participate in current activities and are not aware of the opportunities that our university provides. We also see that students are very isolated within their programs, and don’t have enough spaces to collaborate and share experiences.

The idea is to have a series of pop-up activities (not limited to classes) open to our whole student body, that will allow students to interact, participate in innovation and entrepreneurship and motivate themselves to become more involved in what the university offers. These pop-up activities will be open to everybody and co-created with our UIF students, in order to let the students voice be heard. We are also aiming at having the wider university community participate, for example inviting alumni to lead some of these activities.

Stakeholders served

Undergrad Students of Universidad de los Andes - All undergrad students at our university (aprox. 9,000), from all the different schools and programs. Depending on the type of activity, we will focus on freshmen and sophomores, to juniors and seniors, always looking at mixing people from different programs, cohorts and backgrounds.

Key Milestones

December 2021: Secure ok from University authorities, and green light to design pop-ups.
March 2022: Start the design for the First pop-up offering for the second semester (August to December according to Chilean Academic year) - First prototype session
June 2022: Ready to implement the first series (Second Semester)
September 2022: First round completed (2 to 3 activities) and feedback analyzed.
December 2022: First semester of Pop Up Series completed (5 to 6 activities). Feedback from whole round collected
March 2023: Implementing 2 round (first semester 2023) + Reflections and discoveries from 1rst round.