Changes

The GVSU innovation fellows realized that while there are many great resources for entrepreneurs in Grand Rapids, they often don't have the inspiration or the information to start. The two strategies we propose to work on immediately focus on introducing better methods to inspire young innovative students at Grand Valley and to intrduce communication pipeline so that good ideas can travel to a place they can be developed into a solution. 

This project would be collaboration between the College of Engineering and the College of Health Sciences. Both of these buildings are located in downtown Grand Rapids within a half mile of the Medical Mile. Often times, student nurses, physical thereapists, occupational therapists and other health science students will do a semester of clinical training out in the field. These clincal students are brand new to the hospital scene and therefore have an easier time determining what problems exist in the biomedical field. For example, while a seasoned nurse might assume that completing a task would be time consuming becasue "that is the way they have always done it", a student nurse might ask why it has to be done that way and be able to suggust a way to do it differently. 

The goal of this project is to get students inspired to create and innovate. We hope to host a TEDx talk at Grand Valley and try to focus on the innovative ideas in the community and state that have made large impacts. If we cannot get licensing for a TEDx talk we would host our own version of TEDx to get students inspired with the focus on local celebrities, investors, entrepreneurs, and resources. 

GVSU has a new major as of this year, the entrepreneurship major. This major is in the business college and therefore, like all business majors a Grand Valley, requires the busines capstone class. In addition, all senior engineering students are assigned a two semester senior project immediately before they graduate. We believe that for some of the senior projects it would be benficial to assign them a entrepreneurship/business major to write business plans, run finaces, etc to determine if the design project would make a viable business. 

There are a total of 8 colleges in West Michigan which all came together for the first time last year in West Michigan's first multi-college business model competition. In hopes of gathering people from all majors and fields, we believe it would be a good idea to create club or meeting group that crosses the college boundaries to pursue innovation. Several of the colleges in West Michigan specialize in a particular field, this would be helpful in creating a diverse group of people with whom a student could brainstorm with or get help on a project with.