Innovation Incubator – A Growing Community of Innovators and Entrepreneurs

Thank you to Dominic Blank and Thomas Riordan for contributing this post.

On January 11, the Innovation Incubator had its first meeting of the Spring 2012 semester. Special guest and globally recognized innovation thought leader Praveen Gupta, guest lecturer at UIC and Director of IIT Center for Innovation Science and Application, gave an informative talk on a learnable and powerful framework for innovation called Brinnovation™.  More than 25 students, alumni and professors attended the event. Besides the College of Business, representatives from the School of Public Health as well as Architecture and The Arts came to join the meeting.

In the second half of the session, all attendees engaged in an exercise on ideation, creativity and innovation where randomly selected teams turned every day items into innovative products of the future. Those products had to be described and presented to the rest of the group by sketching out the solution on a white board along with their respective team members. This drawing was then presented in a quick 90 second elevator pitch.

As a teaser for the upcoming Innovation Incubator meeting on February 8th, three teams of students and alumni gave yet another 90 second elevator pitch introducing their innovative and interestingly sounding venture ideas. Those pitches will be elaborated out in more detail as part of 10 minute presentations followed by a 5 minute Q&A conducted by all meeting attendees.

As a side note: The executive board members briefly highlighted the current status of the Innovation Incubator. The latter will soon be its own and independent student organization and is thus looking for pro-active and talented students who want to join the team for leadership roles in communication, succession and planning. The Innovation Incubator and its leadership team invite all interested innovators to come out to the next meeting on  February 8 at 4:30pm in the UIC Innovation Center.