In today’s society, many people may say they want to make a difference in the world, but admit that they don’t quite know where to start. Colgate’s Innovation Fellows tackled this challenge by pioneering change on a smaller scale: right here on campus. Whether their goal is to strengthen sustainability, enhance technology assistance, or integrate different student groups, the fellows are solving legitimate problems for students and faculty. The Innovation Fellows program is not simply a class or a club but rather a community of student consultants who research common issues on campus and collaborate with each other to solve them. This team serves as a bridge between students and the institution to make campus a beneficial environment for the entire community.
The program — founded by Karen Harpp, professor of earth and environmental geosciences and peace and conflict studies — is a student-led initiative that emphasizes creativity, design, and campus engagement to support Colgate’s innovation ecosystem. The overarching goal of the Innovation Fellows this year is to further engage students in campus initiatives. Since students are more likely to approach other students concerning problems on campus, fellows lower the barrier for their peers to be involved in innovation at Colgate. This concept was modeled with inspiration from Colgate’s Outdoor Education and the Stanford d.school Innovation Fellows program.
“We want students to get experience and confidence solving complex, real-world problems as consultants; we want the campus community to realize that students are wholly capable of tackling multi-faceted, challenging problems in creative ways, and that to include the student perspective provides invaluable insights to addressing tough questions on campus and beyond,” expressed Harpp.
Innovation Fellows are committed to bettering the community. They train in human-centered design methods to create solutions that benefit everyone in the Colgate community, pursue a major innovation project each semester, design and run workshops to facilitate student engagement, and collaborate with clubs and organizations for partnerships. This year, there are three major projects that the six Innovation Fellows are tackling. The first is assisting the Information Technology Services (ITS) team in revamping its service desk, the second is establishing a Colgate chapter of Design for America, and the third — we’ll just have to wait to see.
The renovation of Colgate’s ITS Service Desk came about when the Innovation Fellows were consulted to identify the challenges in servicing the technology needs of the campus community. The team jumped on the opportunity to help make the service desk more easily accessible to students.
“Two IFs [Innovation Fellows] did a six-week initial project to gather observations (interviews, working at the service desk, doing training as an intern, etc.) to identify the challenges. After consultation with Chief Information Officer Niranjan Davray, we all decided to focus on the service desk as the first project,” said Harpp of the problem-identification process.
Phase one of the project consisted of identifying accessibility challenges from the service desk; students met to collaborate multiple times per week in addition to data collection and analysis. In phase two this spring, the team will further analyze observations and begin discussing strategy and design. With implementation on the horizon, the Innovation Fellows’ work will soon be moving off the whiteboard and into campus life.