Recommendation 1: Prepare faculty, graduate and undergraduate prepare
students, staff, and the broader Carolina community with the knowledge, skills, and connections necessary to translate new ideas into innovations.
Goal 1.1 Ensure that faculty, students, staff, and the broader Carolina community understand the University’s commitment to innovation and the resources available to help them reach their related goals. In the future, Carolina’s commitment to innovation will be well understood and embraced by the campus community. Faculty, students and staff will consider how their work in the classroom, lab, studio and that of the entire research enterprise can advance Carolina’s collective positive impact on society. From the moment they are recruited through the day of graduation, students will have the opportunity to consider how their learning applies to innovation and what they can do to actively participate in the process. Faculty, students, and staff will be drawn to the University because of its commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship. Action 1.1.1 Reach multiple audiences. • Provide a sustained, coordinated and focused communications strategy to deliver core innovation messages to various constituents inside and outside the University. Work with campus communicators to craft messages, prepare collateral material, and use the University’s websites and existing publications to reach key audiences in multiple ways. • Create a team of speakers drawn from the broader Carolina community who will make presentations about Carolina’s approach to accelerating innovation, the implementation of the Innovate@Carolina Roadmap, and the eventual results. Faculty: Communicate how the University’s innovation goals can connect with faculty research and teaching priorities. Encourage innovative faculty to promote understanding of the Innovation Roadmap goals with their colleagues. Integrate the Roadmap with the Academic Plan by working with Academic Plan Steering Committee members, the Chair of the Faculty, and other faculty leaders. Students: Communicate innovation messages to Carolina’s more than 28,000 undergraduate and graduate students to leverage their creative potential toward greater impact. • Infuse messages about innovation at Carolina throughout the recruiting process. + Host a recruitment event for admitted and prospective students who have an interest in entrepreneurship and innovation. + Emphasize innovation at Carolina in the application. This emphasis could include a required short-answer question such as 1) What local, national, or global human or environmental world problem do you find most compelling and how would you address that problem during your time at the University? or 2) What does innovation mean to you? + Emphasize innovation and entrepreneurship on campus tours for prospective students led by student ambassadors.
Current Status The relevance and importance of innovation are not often presented in a way that entices faculty and graduate students to become engaged and indeed can sometimes be seen as working against the academic goals of the University. The academic base for innovation and entrepreneurship is limited to the research of a few faculty members, and, in the main, their research has not been broadly communicated to campus audiences. When someone is interested in learning more about innovation, it is not always clear how to get started, what resources are available, and who can help them. Carolina faculty and students have few central dedicated physical places to engage with each other, and with mentors, or to convene teams around ideas. There are a number of outstanding entrepreneurship educational programs targeting specific audiences but with limited collaboration among them. Significant gaps remain. Further, there is no longer a management team providing integration, and the main grant that funded these programs has ended.
Photo courtesy of Gillings School of Global Public Health
• Create online media, social networking tools, and print publications to build awareness and enhance the reach of existing communication resources. + Create a student publication devoted to innovation that could take the form of a virtual quarterly magazine released by the proposed Innovation Hub.
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill