Stakeholder meetings are an important part of the change process. As advisors, our stakeholders keep us accountable for goals while providing leverage to make an impact on campus. We met with our stakeholders in early February. After our initial stakeholder meeting, we realized the old methods of bringing innovation and entrepreneurship to campus were not effective. There were enough events and resources on campus. The problem is lack of student engagement.
Following our meeting, we decided to make it our cohort's mission to increase engagement of entrepreneurship and innovation on campus. In future posts, we will break down this goal further with numbers.
We have brainstormed several initiatives in order to investigate the lack of engagement. Our goal will be to prototype and experiment as fast as possible. By learning quickly and altering our methods, we hope to get closer to our goal of making a positive impact on Elon's community.
The six-week journey has made Elon’s 2018 cohort aware of several unknown issues regarding innovation on campus. Future cohorts will face the same dilemma of student engagement unless it is addressed immediately. Several actionable steps outlined above will be carried out. While design thinking has much to offer campuses, resistance still remains within some halls of academia. In order to bring it forth to classrooms, students must lead the movement. They must take advantage of the courses, utilize the maker hub spaces and support entrepreneurships and innovation events. This requires a strategy from the inside out by focusing on students who express interest in innovation and entrepreneurship first. The rest of the student body will take notice afterwards.
