Now that you know what Davidson Innovation and Entrepreneurship is, what we hope to do, and why we think this initiative is so necessary and important here, it’s time to tell you the ways to get involved on campus.We have two exciting events coming this fall: 3 Day Startup and openIDEO.
This weekend, September 25-27, DavidsonIE will bring the national program 3 Day Startup to campus. Students will learn by doing as they progress through a series of modules that include ideation, team formation, customer discovery, rapid prototyping and pitch workshops.
Senior Shea Parikh has been working tirelessly to bring this program to campus. “3 Day Startup is a medium through which Davidson students can apply their liberal arts background to build and test prototypes in a startup environment,” he said. “There are a lot of students with strong entrepreneurial endeavors and I think this gives them a great opportunity to bring those aspirations to life.”
Sophomore Farzonai Muzaffar is excited to participate:
“I believe that almost every Davidson student is a creative thinker who is capable of developing ideas that could be easily materialized into successful projects,” Farzonai said. “Being a Davidson student myself, I understand that most of us do not have the time to put into developing our ideas. But what if we don’t really need that much time? I believe that just a weekend is more than enough to develop a working project and that the people that join the 3 Day Startup will discover the entrepreneurs in themselves.”
The second program coming this fall is the openIDEO Design Challenge, held between October 7 and December 9. Each semester, Davidson students, faculty and staff participate in this program. Over 10 weeks, participants learn and apply design thinking methodology to a “how might we?” problem posed by openIDEO and corporate or community partners.
This year’s problem asks “how might we make higher education more accessible?” Participants will interact with Davidson peers alongside global cohorts while providing and receiving feedback on their proposed solutions. At the end of the process, final designs are chosen with the possibility of receiving funding from openIDEO and its sponsoring partners. All concepts are generated under a Creative Commons license and thus shareable, remix-able and reusable.
This October, Davidson’s design challenge participants will tackle a major barrier in getting to and through college: affordability. Students, faculty, staff and Davidson community members will reimagine how to make higher education more accessible by getting creative about how, when and by whom college is paid for. We’ll explore alternatives that cut across the finance, technology, policymaking and education arenas to envision a world in which every young person can graduate from college.
Whether you have participated in a DavidsonIE program before, or if this is your first exposure to the initiative, come on out and participate. For more information follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and look for our flyers around campus.