Entrepreneurship and Innovation Graduate Program Webinar

I say Mary Catherine's with us.

She said.

So we'll just wait a few seconds for people to join.

Yeah.

Mary Catherine, are you a mind student currently?

She says no. I'm finishing my undergrad in Wisconsin.

That's great welcome.

Thanks for joining us.

Will just give it a few minutes for other people to join us.

There may be a little technical difficulty if you're in the wrong browser, but sounds like you're fine. Mary Catherine.

Well shall we get started anyway?

Why don't we get started?

Alright, so welcome to this session of a little overview about controversial online certificates and my name is said Salama Faculty. I'm an associate professor teaching associate professor here in Economics and Business at mines so teach entrepreneurship. I'm also the associate director of the Center for entrepreneurship and innovation, and I want to introduce Johnny Crawford. She's our assistant director of the center and Jenny and I work very closely on these certificates and.

Other challenges programs courses what have you all related to entrepreneurship and innovation.

Great, so the main purpose behind why mines put together a certificate in entrepreneurship is to simply allow you as much versatility in making you more marketable when you go out and look for work. And the idea is that a lot of new careers these days require innovation. Require entrepreneurial thinking, don't really mind set, so you don't necessarily need to be focused on starting a business, but you could.

Innovate within a large organization so the entrepreneurial mindset is the key behind how we want to sort of help you proceed through the certificate.

And.

It doesn't know what your background is. If you have an engineering background, that's great. If you don't, that's fine, but ideas. We leverage your skills to help you add the entrepreneurial mindset, plus financial and business skills. So whatever your background is, you'll be able to leverage those in a way that makes a difference in adds value to any organization, small or large.

And feel free to jump in with any questions. Generally have coordinated this so that she can jump in and speak your questions and that way you can make it interactive. So want to first share with you quick video about the entrepreneurial mindset.

You're an engineer or an engineer.

This question is.

So now I'm going to talk to you little bit teaching outcomes. What comes out of our courses and how do we build on this entrepreneurial mindset approach. So I'll give you examples. We one of our courses in this certificate have.

Companies, organizations, government, what have you submit problems and projects or could be in some cases we had one company submitted patent and asked us to work with students to help figure out how to turn that into a product. We've had. Government organizations submit problems. For example, the Military Department of Defense agencies like the Air Force. We've also had FEMA.

As part of the Department of Homeland Security, submit problems and all of that, what we do is we work on defining the problem and we in the class we help you validate the problem by working with the sponsor. The source of the problem. We also then figure out how to leverage engineering skills to develop solutions that could be tested. So we call these Prieto types so these are pre prototypes. Because when you're starting out you're not sure what the solution is going to end up looking like.

So you're testing fit and viability and feasibility and all of that.

And then once you're the owner of the problem, or the person or the company or the organization that's experiencing the problem, realizes that your potential solution is starting to fit. Then we talk about what's that going to look like. How do you launch it? Is the business model? Is there a social business model or an economic business model? Even sometimes environmental business model? And I'll go through a lot of these examples and just to show you how relevant our teaching.

Uh, is in this example we've had a company called cipher skin come to us with a patent that they've developed. It was basically a mesh kind of path.

Mechanism that train tracks movement very very closely and we had two different student teams work on this.

One student team decided to rap that measure and oil pipelines, water pipelines, gas pipelines and detect the structural integrity and see when they might be getting ready to crack and leak oil or cause something to happen like that and over the course of a semester they developed that concept. They've actually typed it in the class. We brought plastic PVC pipes and.

To, uh, censor and were able to detect motion and prove that this could be a viable solution, and the company then prioritize. This, commercialized it and.

In fact, Boyett Petroleum found it attractive enough to invest $1,000,000 into cipher skin to develop this and apply to the network of extensive pipelines. So clearly there's a connection between what we teach, what industry values, and that's the theme of how we think, right.

The whole idea is you have an entrepreneurial mindset you're looking for interesting waste, creative ways, smart ways to solve really important problems that people are having a hard time solving.

And we don't just help. You cannot test and promote different solutions to problems, but we also give you a lot of support. So as you get creative with ideas as you think about How do I solve this problem was a good idea to work around this or that you run into barriers, constraints, roadblocks, what have you, and what we've done is, we recognize that you are always going to run into some constraints on Berry or some Rd block.

What we've done is we've brought in experts minds, alumni industry experts. These are mentors.

And we bring in these mentors into the classroom to interact with you. And so, as you're working on entrepreneurial project, you're innovating something you have experts to consult with an check in with, and their main goal is to understand what constraints are you facing so that they can help you get around those constraints. So if you say, you know I'm trying to do XY Z, I'm having a hard time finding the right battery to connect to power source to this thing. Well, maybe somebody in this group is going to have a contact or two or three.

Instead.

That may open the door and help you find the either the solution. To fix that you're looking for, or a work around it, and so yes.

That's absolutely correct.

Oh married a Mary Catherine had a question she said. Which is correct. She said that, uh, she thought she heard that you don't need an engineering background and that's correct, but she said it would preferred we have a stem background.

Right so we jennys right? We don't care what your background is.

And the reason? So if I talk about engineering is because we have one minds. We have a lot of Engineers, but again you don't have to have an engineering background. An again. The reason is you learn fast in our courses and so you start working on solution. You may find out. I'll just make up an example here out of thin air.

Your solution requires quantum computing an you just decide that everybody talked to all the research says you need quantum computing. You know nothing about quantum computing. Like I, I don't, and So what do you do? Well, it can just say OK, forget it, move on. Now in our courses in our minds environment there's going to be so many ways you can learn about that, just enough to be able to solve your problem or to find someone to collaborate. Maybe you end up finding a student.

Who is a quantum computing student and they get excited about the problem you working on the team up with you. Now you learn just enough to work with them. They learn enough to work with you and so you don't have to have.

The issue is always how do you know what skills? What knowledge base to have? Because you might run into, you might need it in the next few months or years. Nobody knows. So rather than be prepared to learn everything now just in case you're going to use it tomorrow. Well, we teach you how to learn fast in any situation because knowledge changes. The problems, change, the situations change. So hopefully I've answered your question.

I would also say he said that I mean a key component of your classes, networking and how to build your network. So if you need someone that has a scale that you don't have you network to find that person that has that skill.

Absolutely. In fact, this is probably more important than anything else, because sometimes the best way to find a solution or a way around the road block is not to look for the answer itself, but to look for people who give you different perspectives on that situation. And those are the mentors, so they're more in network. The more you learn, the more refined.

Intuitive, obvious ways to solve a problem and networking is definitely the key for that. Thanks for mentioning that great, so keep those great questions coming. So just like we have mentors in the classroom.

We've built an entire ecosystem around. Our courses are certificates and the idea here is that you need a broad set of resources. You need mentors. You need to network. You need access to Makerspace in it to make stuff. You need to talk to people of different backgrounds. So we have all kinds of ways to support you. So I'm not going to go around in a specific order, but we have challenges to sort of like.

Where we have different companies, different industries come in and bring in problems. Again this is shorter than a course, so this could be anywhere from a flash challenge that takes 2 hours all the way to 24 hour hackathon or something that takes two or three months to work on. We have student clubs, we have Grand Challenge scholar programs. We have a humanitarian engineering area as well and we have our technology or engineering and Technology Management Masters degree. So if you want to.

Go beyond entrepreneurship.

You take the certificate of entrepreneurship and that's a non credit certificate and then you can take the business analytics certificate and that will give you a Masters in engineering and technology management. That's a one year master so we can get it done very quickly.

Any questions?

OK, I'll keep going. Just jump in with questions anytime. We also have cornerstone of capstone projects for Undergrads, but sometimes they could be places where you can use the areas to your own project as part of a graduate team. We have the library we can check out tools we have maker spaces where you can make stuff. We also have all kinds of competitions and wraparound courses.

Now again, as part of that.

We've received alumni grants and gifts that have allowed us to plan and get ready to build two different buildings. The first one is this minds innovation hub and this is going to be pretty large facility. I forgot how big it is, but I think it's it's pretty large and it's going to house all of these different activities you see in this picture.

We have those facilities today, but they're spread out all over campus.

The goal behind their minds innovation hub is to bring them all together in one place under one roof. For your convenience as a student so we can see we have 3D printers. We have places we can make stuff. We have machine shop. We have a wood shop. We have a place where you can pour metal and make cast cast out of mold, thing structures and come up with ways to going to build stuff. So there's.

It's almost hard to think of something that a student would need to do or make not find the place to do it on campus. And again, if you don't have an engineering background, no big deal. There is student assistance and research assistance available to teach you anything about 3D printing. No problem. There's someone who's going to show you how to make 1, how to set one up and how to print something again, all we want is for you to come.

With this insatiable Curiosity, if you're curious, you'll figure out how to learn quickly, and that's the key.

So why the certificate? Because as I've been building up, I'm going to learn how to creatively solve problems and apply this entrepreneurial mindset. Going to advance either your career or started. We have a lot of people who start out by either launching a startup 'cause they have a great idea they want to see, see, it's going to happen or they get a job and they want to deliver some value. Some creativity where they want to innovate. Solve a problem for the company and regardless of which one you started with you.

Some people with what we're seeing people who switch around, so they get a job for a few years, then 510 years later they want to start their own company or they start their own company and then after a while they sell it. Or they move on and they get a job. So it's kind of.

It's almost something you want to have just in case, and of course, as Jenny mentioned, you got to have a professional network because this is how you learn about the world. But what people need and how you get around barriers and obstacles and how you move around and deliver more value.

So in this certificate we have 3 grape courses. Start at the top just to go in order. So leading high performing teams. That's a great course and it teaches you how to work with other people so that everybody is moving in the same direction, delivering results. This is not only applicable in sort of a startup situation where you might be working with two or three people, but it works great as well. In a big company where you have to deal with.

A teams from anywhere from 5 to 50 or 500, and we find that our students end up in those situations quite often and maybe even in a startup where you only dealing with two or three people that your Co founding team. Your friends who agree to start to start up with you, you networking. Find people who want to do certain parts of that to help you out, and so we're going to need to figure out how to work with them as well.

Entrepreneurial finance, so in that you'll learn a lot about not only making financial decisions you know. Should you buy something or should you rent it? Should you invest in something or should you not? A lot of decisions in business have financial implications. They have cost implications. They have revenue projections associated with them. And So what you want to be able to do is figure out the concepts, the basic concepts to make those decisions wisely and soundly so you can.

Achieve what you trying to do.

An anthology of Preneurship. That's of course that talks about the inclusion, the importance of technology and entrepreneurship built around. Technology, of course, and so it's almost impossible to think of situations where you need to innovate and not use technology. And so we talk about the impact and integration of technology, innovation, projects and products.

Great, so I'm sure you'll probably have some questions, but as you think about enrolling or get ready to do that, Jenny and I are available, and here's Jenny's information in case you decide this is something that you're curious about and you want to pursue, we encourage you to pre enroll now and let us know you're interested. That way you can.

Take advantage of the time we have and get to know you over over the course of the summer. Maybe until you enroll in the next few months.

I answer shared a link to the website an on that website. There is kind of a little Google form that if you wanted to go ahead and fill that out, it's just your information and just a few questions about maybe why you're pursuing this to make sure that we can.

Yeah.

Up

better.

Yeah, so.

That is one question, how long does it take to finish the certificate? You can probably get it done in one semester 'cause it's free courses, so it depends on whether you work or not, but it's pretty easy to finish it in one semester, so that's basically 16 weeks.

And then it also she also asked our Mary Catherine also asked it are all three classes offered at the same on the same during the same semester and?

Yes so.

I believe so. I think yeah, in this case I know for sure that in the next semester all these three are going to be offered at the same time, but that may change, so it may be that two are available and you need one later, so.

The plan is offering together, but it may change.

Great.

Any other questions?

I don't think there's any questions.

Great.

Well, thank you very much for joining us and we hope to see you on campus very soon.

Or virtually.

Or virtually.

Yeah.

Great.