Achieving Scale of Educational Innovations: A Panel Session of Start-Up/Entrepreneurial Approaches

Ann McKenna; Karl Smith; Chris Swan; Rocio Chavela Guerra; Russell Korte

doi:10.18260/p.23483

Achieving Scale of Educational Innovations: A Panel Session of Start-‐Up/Entrepreneurial Approaches Governmental, corporate and non-‐profit organizations have been calling for transformational change in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education in the U.S. for many years. As a result, a number of Federal agencies as well as corporate foundations have invested significant resources in an effort to improve teaching and learning in STEM disciplines. However, those efforts that may have the potential for transformative change often do not scale or extend far beyond their local settings; furthermore, they are difficult to sustain without continued external funding. This panel brings together several groups who are focused on fostering an entrepreneurial mindset to advance the scaling and sustaining of educational innovations. The panelists will offer approaches and strategies for achieving scale by examining the educational ecosystem, and offering entrepreneurship-‐focused models to embed this goal at the outset. The panel will consist of four representatives. 1. Epicenter offers entrepreneurship and innovation programs for engineering faculty and students; partners with leaders in academia and government to build a national entrepreneurship agenda in engineering; conducts research on higher education models; hosts online classes and resources; and forms communities around entrepreneurship in engineering education. (http://epicenter.stanford.edu/page/about) 2. I-‐Corps™ L is designed specifically for STEM educators with innovative teaching strategies, technologies, or set of curriculum materials. The principal goal of the program is to foster an entrepreneurial mindset within the education community and to impact the way innovations are designed and implemented. It provides real world, hands-‐on training and a model approach to assess the potential for sustainable scalability of education innovations. The I-‐Corps™ L program uses a lean startup approach to scaling teaching and learning innovations into broad practice by using established strategies for start-‐ups. (http://www.asee.org/i-‐corps-‐l/about) 3. The National Science Foundation established the Innovation Corps (I-‐Corps™) with the primary goal to foster entrepreneurship that will lead to the commercialization of technology that has been supported previously by NSF-‐funded research. Combining experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs with a targeted curriculum, I-‐Corps is a public-‐private partnership program that teaches grantees to identify valuable 1product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and offers entrepreneurship training to student participants. (http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-‐corps/) 4. VentureWell (originally called the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, or NCIIA) offers grants to faculty to start programs in technology entrepreneurship, particularly ones that focused on the development of E-‐Teams—groups of students, faculty and advisors working to commercialize a novel idea. VentureWell also funds the best E-‐Teams coming out of those courses and programs, helping them bring their inventions to market. The goal is to stimulate science and technology invention, innovation and entrepreneurship on university and college campuses, and move the strongest ideas rapidly forward to commercialization. (http://venturewell.org) Each of these group’s representative will provide unique insights, and practical and proven approaches on how to make headway for scaling and sustainability of educational innovations. The panel session will be designed to be interactive. The working schedule is given below but can be modified to adjust to the conference schedule. Short introduction of panelists (5 min) Panel Q & A with 5-‐7 key questions (55 min) Wrap-‐up with questions from the audience (10 min) 2

Achieving Scale of Educational Innovations: A Panel Session of Start-Up/Entrepreneurial Approaches

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