The Stanford University Innovation Fellows (UIF) program is an organisation that teaches teams of students key principles of design thinking and innovation to empower them to become agents of change in higher education. Housed in the Stanford d.school which also hosts the program's annual fellow meet-up, students are connected with UIF alums as they undergo 6 weeks of intensive training centered around a single question: "How can we improve student's physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being using and revolving around innovation and entrepreneurship on our campus?". 

 

In the Fall of 2021, I was selected along with three other students in the NEXT Innovation Scholars program to become UC's inaugural class of Stanford University Innovation Fellows. Over the course of our training, we conducted interviews, read articles, and did brainstorming activities to refine our initial challenge statement into a more focused one that we could use to ideate our solution: "How might we empower students to explore UC's innovation ecosystem by pursuing interdisciplinary learning experiences fueled by their passions?". The result was our idea for an innovation passport: a system by which students could discover and track experiences across UC's innovation ecosystem that would simplify opportunity discovery, increase engagement, and drive students to engage with more and more diverse experiences. Responses to our idea from our peers and university administration were very positive, we were excited to start building out our big idea. As a first step, we piloted a prototype website with students in the UHP Gateway classes as part of a design thinking and innovation module that we were invited to teach. We received over 70 feedback responses from the students who would be our key audience demographic. The results were mediocre. 

 

While some students saw the potential in what we were pitching, many others saw yet another system they would have to engage with to do more things that didn't align with their goals with dubious incentives. We were sent back to the Mural board to reassess and in our own time, discover the power of the pivot. 

 

Key pieces of feedback helped guide a second round of brainstorming and prototyping, we combined our earlier research with specific criticisms of our innovation passport to come up with an idea that more clearly addressed student needs. A chance partnership with New Life Furniture Bank (NLFB), a local non-profit working to provide furniture for those in low-income and affordable housing situations provided the muse we needed to develop our Social Innovation Mini Module. A 2 week sprint that combined the design thinking learning we had implemented in our Gateway classes with the opportunity for students to make an impact on their community and earn service hours for doing so. We piloted the project in the Spring of 2022, teaching over 70 students the skills they would need to participate and generating 330 service hours for NLFB's community. Students were much more enthusiastic about participating and we were able to use the fact that UHP pulls from all over campus to keep the interdisciplinary focus that makes innovation work that much more successful. Below is a screenshot of the Mural board that guides students through our curriculum, introduces them to our partner, and helps them unlock the key skills to innovation that makes them effective global citizen scholars.