Description

These workshops are for graduate students, postdocs, and early career faculty.  The goal is to inspire you about the impact that your careers/research can have and introduce you to the “entrepreneurial mindset."  By expanding your mindset, we can help you see new possibilities for your research and/or careers. By exposing you to diverse examples of impact and cultivating ecosystem connections, you will be more likely to find your passion and have a support system to help you pursue it.  

Participants are not expected to have a commercialization project in mind nor is there an expectation that you will have had any commercialization experience.  Therefore, the topics and exercises are meant to be relevant to a wide audience of PhDs, postdocs, and early faculty not just those pursuing the commercialization of an idea.

Objectives

• Inspire researchers to think about the impact of their work and to think beyond the publication. Said another way, we want researchers to think beyond their curiosity and desire to understand something new and ask the question, “Assuming I figure this out, so what?”
• Have researchers think about their personal goals and what roles in innovation best fit their interests and talents. Expand their understanding of the different careers that they can have in multiple contexts:  academia, industry, government, consulting, non-profit/NGOs, etc.
• Provide a set of tools for researchers to shape their research objectives to be more use-inspired and impactful.
• Reduce psychological barriers and conceptual misunderstandings about innovation that prevent people from seeing themselves as inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs.