The TIA team partnered with two ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ students, Jacqueline Stern ’20 and Risako Yang ’21, who are part of ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ's innovation fellows program, to improve student engagement and learning outcomes by enhancing the monthly TIA workshops and running an optional immersive design thinking workshop.
The Innovation Fellows is an innovation consultancy group focused on human-centered problem-solving both on and around the ÌÇÐÄÊÓƵ campus. The program was developed by Karen Harpp, professor of geology and peace and conflict studies who teaches a course about design thinking, and Michael Sciola, associate vice president for career initiatives.
In August, the Innovation Fellows collaborated with the TIA team to offer an immersive design thinking workshop for incoming TIA students before the start of the fall semester. Over the course of three days, twenty students learned the design thinking process—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—and applied the process to their venture ideas. The experience led the student to challenge their own ideas, talk to users directly about the problems they were tackling, and present their first pitches.
For the next four months, Jacqueline and Risako worked with Wills and Carolyn to enhance the monthly workshops. Together, they decided to restructure the day: a networking brunch now kicks off the workshop, facilitating conversations between mentors and students; breakout sessions were moved to the morning, to capitalize upon high energy levels and standardize breakout durations; and the afternoon developed into a standard routine of pitches, feedback, presentation, and sharing of successes and failures.
Each month's presentation topic was revisited to add interactive elements. During the November presentation on building a team, ventures sat at tables with mentors and worked through an analysis exercise that asked them to identify the key skills brought by each member of their team and the missing skills still needed. Several teams returned in December having added new teammates to their venture. In the December workshop on knowing your user, students designed their ideal backpack and then pitched it to their neighbor, only to discover that their idea of "perfect" didn't necessarily equate to what their customer wanted. During the presentation, students observed customer interviews—one of a potential customer, the other of an actual customer—by two TIA ventures and then reflected on those interviews. Teams ended the day by completing a handout that asked them to identify their target customer, questions to ask, and their plan for connecting with 15 individuals to interview over winter break.
As the TIA team prepares for the spring semester, they will continue to follow the same process of analyzing each workshop's content, even though the innovation fellows' consulting project with TIA has ended. Before concluding their work with TIA, Jacqueline and Risako presented a series of recommendations for the TIA program for the team to consider for the following academic year, so the work that these two students put toward TIA will continue long after their formal engagement.