Thinking Big at a Big School
By Liyang Feng, Juan Tramontin, George Valcarcel, and Kai Vogeler
In March, four Integrated Business and Engineering students at The Ohio State University ventured to California to learn about the Design Thinking methodologies and Entrepreneurship on campus through the University Innovation Fellows (UIF) Spring Meetup. Since then, we have been hard at work on campus. Here is what we have learned and what we are doing:
The opportunity for curriculum:
While at the UIF meetup this spring, our team identified several opportunities to improve student engagement to innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative problem solving (ICE) on Ohio State’s campus.
The largest opportunity is in coursework. As a student interested in ICE, you are forced to commit to a multi-semester course sequence. This is because almost all courses are restricted to minor programs such as the Innovation and Entrepreneurship minor and Design Thinking minor, each of which require 4-5 additional courses.
Secondly, there is a lack of interdisciplinary collaboration and training in real world problem identification and definition in classes. In school, we solve a predefined problem with the equations given. Real world problems are much more ambiguous and complex, and the problem is often obscured by a lot of noise and spans many fields. This warrants the introduction of Entrepreneurial Minded Learning (EML).
Entrepreneurial minded students view the world through the lens of searching for the problems worth solving. They approach these problems with knowledge specific to their discipline as well as the greater social, political, economic, and environmental context. EML trained students can communicate with those from other disciplines to collaborate on unique and valuable solutions.
While at Stanford, we uncovered the popularity of for-credit problem-centric design courses held over the course of several weekends, which allowed for busy students to get their first taste of design thinking. We want to adapt this shorter-commitment model to make ICE curriculum accessible to the broader campus community with the help of our sponsoring faculty and KEEN.
Where would these classes be held?
Before the UIF Meetup at Stanford, we believed that the space you work in was just that, a space. Sure, students could feel comfortable or awkward in a space, but it did not affect how well a team worked. From the time we spent out there, however, we realized that space is like any other member of the team: It can help the process or get in the way; it can facilitate ideas, or it can shoot them down.
Our favorite quote about spaces comes from the d.school: “Space is the body language of an organization”. This quote is at the beginning of a 72 hour time-lapse called Fluid spaces: the life of a d.school studio in 2 min (check it out at the youtube link below). The time-lapse shows how one space gets transformed from a meetup area with 4 couches in a square, to a panel discussion, to a presentation, to a workshop, and a brainstorming space.
Fluid Spaces: https://youtu.be/J65nuAzKnXM
Like the Room of Requirement, this space transforms to meet the needs of the user and doesn’t limit what they can do. Now that we are back on campus, we realize that it is not enough to have curriculum that teaches people about design thinking if it is taught in a lecture hall or a typical classroom. That is why we are transforming two rooms in Smith Laboratory so that they are flexible and can serve as prototype spaces for ideation and light creation to enhance student’s learning. From this, we will renovate more classrooms across campus to be more suitable for this curriculum.
Our projects are Moonshots:
On the first day of the conference, we were at Google learning about innovation from their Chief Technology Evangelist. A large part of the day focused on Moonshot projects: when you improve a process, idea, or product 10x rather than by 10%. This idea truly stuck with us and stressed three things:
- Fall in love with the problem, not the solution
- People follow people who inspire them
- Fail fast and fail better
Institutions which are 148 years old are okay with the incremental improvements. But when you are a student with 2 years left, that 5-year plan is not an option. That is why we are pushing for immediate changes to curriculum and spaces from the student side.
With this accelerated agenda, we have to inspire faith with our personalities. When a project faces incredible obstacles on the institutional level, you cannot rely on immediate results to motivate people, you need them to follow you because they believe you can make it work if you just keep pushing.
But with this quick turnaround, we must remember: fail fast and fail better. In California, failure is not a negative, it is celebrated because it means you learned something to make yourself better. It was vital to fail quickly to find out what is wrong with your idea and fix it immediately and push out a new iteration. Because of this, we don’t want to fully flesh out a 10-page proposal before we go and speak with administration or with student organizations. We want to make a prototype, pitch it, see the response, and adapt.
Where will students apply their new learning?
With everything the students will learn, where will they apply it? One hope is to encourage entrepreneurism. Universities in the Bay Area like Stanford and Berkeley have strong ties with the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. Being in the middle of the tech startup ecosystem, there is a tremendous interest in students to pursue the entrepreneurial path.
At Stanford we saw this demand for innovation has resulted in the establishment of numerous resources and programs on and around Bay Area campuses that help students finance, develop, and launch their businesses. There are many classes on campus that foster new ventures as well as an abundance of collaborative spaces for students to work together and brainstorm innovative solutions to challenging problems.
The conditions on campuses in the Bay Area makes it perfect for birthing and growing entrepreneurial venture and serves as a good model as we develop initiatives to foster innovation and entrepreneurship at OSU.
Coming back from the meet up we recognized the need to expose more students to the concept of entrepreneurship as a valid career path and to offer aspiring entrepreneurs on campus more resources and mentorship.
To achieve the first goal, Liyang Feng recently put on a startup showcase which brought 20 OSU-student and established startups in order to expose students to the entrepreneurial community in the Midwest and give them a chance to interact with founders and learn more about what it’s like to work in a startup environment.
To make strides towards the goal of bringing more resources and mentorship to entrepreneurs on campus, our team will be working closely with CIE to create OSU’s first accelerator program in hopes of giving student founders the support needed to take their ventures to the next level. Also, we are working to establish ties between clubs and engage clubs with the Design Thinking process so they are better able to identify areas where they can produce real value.