Student Leaders are Shaping Campus Priorities at Michigan and Beyond
Entrepreneurship is a contact sport—if institutions are to scale their efforts in entrepreneurship they must find innovative ways to change their ecosystems outside of the traditional classroom model. The panel presents two key examples. First, University of Michigan students have created competition called 1000 Pitches, the largest student-run pitch competition in the U.S. Last year, they collected over 4,000 pitches ranging from economic development needs to medical devices to clean energy and are sharing the model with Pennsylvania State University. Second, The Epicenter Student Engagement Strategy, an NSF-funded STEP Center, supports student changemakers to enhance engineering education on their campuses, encouraging entrepreneurially inclined engineering students to address the gaps crucial to their experience. Examples of student-led impact will be described where University Innovation Fellows address gaps in their innovation ecosystems. The University Innovation Fellows will each describe how they addressed a missing link in their innovation ecosystems.