Disseminating Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiatives throughout a STEM-Focused Campus: An Agile Experience

Colorado School of Mines is a top public research university focusing on the STEM disciplines, with rigorous academics and a culture that encourages students to make a positive impact on our world. There is an undeniable thrust across engineering education to propel innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the undergraduate student experience, and it applies to our institution. In the fall of 2015, a small team of faculty and one student initiated a ambitious effort to build an ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship at Colorado School of Mines from the grassroots level using an agile approach of learning, doing, and iterating. This agile approach quickly created a critical-mass of activities, involvement and support. Remarkably, within one academic year, the effort successfully cultivated a vibrant and growing culture of innovation and entrepreneurship across the university’s community of students, faculty and staff. The journey continues, but this paper describes the approach and activities applied to generate this new culture in a traditional STEM focused campus. Applying Agile, Lean and Design Thinking Across many engineering programs in higher education, there is a wave of energy focused on learning-by-doing and human-centered design. From the business and engineering domains, students are being introduced to the concepts of Lean and Agile to inspire new ways of accomplishing collaborative, team oriented projects that require rapid iteration towards solutions for open-ended problems. A significant portion of STEM Faculty spends a great deal of time and energy incorporating these concepts into effective pedagogy applied to undergraduate engineering education. Often, these same faculty members are eagerly engaged in advancing the entrepreneurial learning ecosystem in their institutions. In engineering and other STEM programs, we apply innovation and entrepreneurship as the catalysts used to help guide students into the learning experiences and outcomes that represent the skills and knowledge they will need to succeed in their careers. Yet, these efforts do not come naturally in many of the university ecosystems. In many more traditional engineering programs, these same agile and lean approaches, not to mention the concept of design thinking, fail to get incorporated into the improvement process for curriculum, co-curriculum and program development. The Grassroots Efforts At Colorado School of Mines, it all started with a comment from a prospective student and an inquiry from a non-traditional undergraduate who was looking for something outside of the