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Gerald Fine, who leads, and helped create, ENG\u2019s Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC), has been named executive director of Innovate@BU, a $20 million University-wide initiative giving all students the opportunity to engage in solving real-world problems and hands-on innovation. Photo by Jake Belcher.<\/em><\/p>\n Three BU students, three creative problem solvers and innovators:<\/p>\n Clarinda Blais (CAS\u201917) started the\u00a0Free Philosophy Project<\/a>\u00a0to bring Aristotle and Plato to women in homeless shelters in Boston as a way of getting them to talk about their lives.<\/p>\n Conor Gately (GRS\u201915) worked with Lucy Hutyra, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of earth and environment, and Boston city officials, using cell-phone data to model traffic exhaust fumes block by block and creating a map that could help policymakers plot ways to\u00a0reduce air pollution<\/a>.<\/p>\n Computer science major Jacob Dansey (ENG\u201917) and a team of other computer science majors and students from the Questrom School of Business created civic engagement software to ease communication between elected officials and constituents. By the time Dansey and his team graduated, they had formed a company,\u00a0Involved, Inc.<\/a>\u00a0With guidance from the\u00a0Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0Spark!<\/a>\u00a0they were meeting with state legislators who wanted to try out their software. With help from\u00a0Questrom\u2019s BUzz Lab<\/a>\u00a0accelerator, they continued to fine-tune it over the summer.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s only the beginning.<\/p>\n Robert A. Brown, University president, wants BU to do more to get this kind of thinking about, doing about, and solving of real-world problems percolating among undergraduates and graduate students. With that aim, he is launching a University-wide initiative to give all BU students, whether they\u2019re studying science and engineering, the arts and humanities, business, or communication, opportunities to learn and engage in creative problem solving and hands-on innovation.<\/p>\n \u201cI believe that we have an obligation to give our students the ability and opportunity to innovate, which means converting their ideas into tangible impact.\u201d\u2014Gerald Fine, executive director of Innovate@BU<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Funded by a partnership of the University and a group of alumni, BU is starting the new initiative, called\u00a0Innovate@BU<\/a>, with support of $20 million for the first 10 years. It is not tethered to a single school or college. Rather, Innovate@BU is designed to draw students, and ideas, from across the University.<\/p>\n In addition to people and programs, a key ingredient for the initiative is a highly visible space. The University is turning the former Radio Shack store, at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and St. Mary\u2019s Street, into a 6,000-square-foot home and student hub for Innovate@BU. Called the BUild Lab: IDG Capital Student Innovation Center in recognition of the lead support from\u00a0IDG Capital<\/a>\u00a0and its CEO, University trustee Hugo Shong (COM\u201987, GRS\u201990),\u00a0the space will have wraparound glass walls, plenty of team meeting rooms and student workspaces, offices for Innovate@BU program leaders and mentors, oversized video screens for presentations, and lots of open space for hackathons, accelerators, classes, and hands-on workshops with mentors and experienced innovators from industry, government, nonprofits, and the arts. Expected to open in January 2018, the BUild Lab will be a place where students can connect with advisors, find funding sources, collaborate with other students on projects, and get help with matters from design and prototyping to legal advice and marketing.<\/p>\n \u201cI am delighted that the contribution from IDG Capital will help students to realize their dreams by working at this innovation center,\u201d says Shong.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Brown views Innovate@BU as an essential part of preparing students to navigate a workplace that is being rapidly transformed by start-ups, big data, robotics, and artificial intelligence. To succeed in the new economy, he says, young people will need to be \u201cself-motivated, self-directed, and self-actuated\u201d and to have this same combination of skills and mind-set to create new enterprises that benefit society and to search for creative solutions to societal problems. He hopes the new initiative will help create more innovators interested in solving social issues, engaging in the arts, or creating new businesses.<\/p>\n Brown has appointed\u00a0Gerald Fine<\/a>, a College of Engineering professor of the practice of mechanical engineering, as executive director of Innovate@BU. Fine has helped create and lead ENG\u2019s manufacturing and design facility, the\u00a0Engineering Product Innovation Center<\/a>\u00a0(EPIC).<\/p>\n \u201cI believe that we have an obligation to give our students the ability and opportunity to innovate, which means converting their ideas into tangible impact,\u201d says Fine, who has launched six successful start-ups and served on the board of several nonprofit organizations. \u201cImpact could be solving social problems, finding new ways to bring art to the community, or creating new businesses. Regardless of the path our students choose, these innovation skills will help position them for more fulfilling and meaningful careers.\u201d<\/p>\n Ian Mashiter<\/a>, a Questrom senior lecturer in strategy and innovation, who currently oversees BUzz Lab, will run the BUild Lab. \u201cIt\u2019s about achieving the impossible with limited resources,\u201d says Mashiter. \u201cIt\u2019s about begging, borrowing, and stealing\u2014getting your friend to do your website for free. It\u2019s about your cousin who knows somebody who\u2019s a great graphic artist. It\u2019s connecting, going to networking events. It\u2019s about making stuff happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Innovate@BU signals \u201cthat all of our students, when they go out into the world, need a creative problem-solving, innovative mind-set,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not about needing to make $10 million a year. It\u2019s about solving problems with limited resources. We want to put students into situations where they experience it, where they\u2019re learning by doing.\u201d<\/p>\n As BU undergrads, Matt Clark (Questrom’17) (from left), Caleb McDermott (Questrom’17), Jacob Dansey (ENG’17), Chad Bell (Questrom’17), and John Knollmeyer (ENG’17) worked together to launch a civic engagement software tool, and company, called Involved. Dansey is now company CEO, Knollmeyer is chief technology officer, and McDermott is head of marketing. Photo by Cydney Scott.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Reporting to Mashiter will be two program directors:<\/p>\n Rachel Spekman, former senior director of programming at Boston accelerator\u00a0MassChallenge<\/a>, will oversee business ventures, including start-up activities, grants, a summer accelerator, new venture competitions, mentoring programs, and workshops. She will also be a liaison to student organizations like the\u00a0BU Entrepreneurship Club<\/a>, preexisting resources at BU such as EPIC, and external programs like MassChallenge.<\/p>\n Blake Sims, the founder and CEO of\u00a0Epiic Solutions<\/a>, which creates programs that help middle and high school students to develop the mind-set of creative innovators, will develop and launch Innovate@BU social and cultural entrepreneurship activities, including a summer accelerator, competitions, mentoring programs, and workshops. A major part of her role will be working with the city of Boston and local nonprofits and connecting students with these partners to help develop solutions to their challenges.<\/p>\n In addition to the BUild Lab, Innovate@BU will include three other major components:<\/p>\n The new initiative grew out of a yearlong faculty study, Innovate@BU: Creating a Vision for Entrepreneurship and Innovation@BU, led by\u00a0Siobhan O\u2019Mahony<\/a>, a Questrom associate professor of strategy and innovation, and coauthored by Mashiter. O\u2019Mahony will be the Innovate@BU director of curriculum and research.<\/p>\n Fine says that there are already numerous programs and facilities supporting innovation across BU, ranging from the College of Communication\u00a0AdLab\u00a0<\/a>to its student-run public relations agency\u00a0PRLab<\/a>\u00a0to the Hariri Institute\u2019s Spark!\u00a0He also notes that O\u2019Mahony\u2019s original study identified more than 50 University courses that already teach some principles of innovation.<\/p>\n \u201cOur job is not to replace these activities, but to nurture them, grow them, supplement them, and make them more visible,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can graduate, in my wildest dreams, 1,000 students a year who have improved their creative problem-solving ability and are more flexible and creative about how they\u2019re going to enter the workplace going forward,\u201d Brown says, \u201cwe will have had a huge impact.\u201d<\/p>\n If some of those students become transformative social entrepreneurs, like\u00a0Wendy Kopp<\/a>\u00a0(Hon.\u201913), who founded\u00a0Teach for America<\/a>, or visionary innovators like Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook cofounder, he says, so much the better.<\/p>\n![\"BUild-Lab-logo\"](\"\/federal\/files\/2017\/11\/BUild-Lab-logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
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