University of Florida: Students Sprint to the Catalyst Showcase
The Innovation Academy at the University of Florida is a one-of-a-kind program aimed to give college undergraduates an interdisciplinary innovation education through active learning courses and co-curricular experiences in a living-learning community that teaches creativity, leadership, ethics, and entrepreneurship. The first year of the Innovation minor culminates in a five week rapid prototyping course aimed to find viable solutions to big world problems. The team prototypes are presented at a juried community event called the Catalyst Showcase. The mission of the Catalyst challenge aligns with larger University of Florida initiatives: to be Gator innovators and to change the world for the Gator Good.
Four years ago a team of Innovation Academy faculty developed the Creativity in Action course curriculum using human-centered design thinking as its innovation model. This year, the faculty integrated the Google Ventures (GV) Sprint book into the curriculum as the foundational text for the course.
What question did you want to answer in your sprint?
In alignment with the Gator Good campaign and the University of Florida’s initiative to pioneer solutions to big world problems, Innovation Academy students were asked the question: How can we improve our planet by reducing food waste and loss?
Who was on the sprint team?
Two-hundred Innovation Academy students participated in the Sprint process. Nine course sections were divided in to self-selected interdisciplinary teams of approximately five people. Innovation Academy students have more than 30 unique majors in the colleges of: Agricultural & Life Sciences, Business, Design, Construction & Planning, Engineering, Arts, Journalism & Communications, and Liberal Arts & Sciences. Based on individual strengths assessments students determined their roles within their teams to be the Facilitator, Decider, Organizer, Communicator, and Enthusiast. The course instructors held the “Super Vote” if at any time the team of students needed outside direction or guidance.
How did you make your prototype?
Students made up to three iterations of their prototypes. They began with rough sketches and white paper sculptures ending up with to-scale functioning models, 3-D printed examples, sophisticated diagrams, and working apps.
What did you learn from the test?
Each group uniquely answered the big question: How might we improve the planet by decreasing food loss and waste? Students learned that there is a wide range of solutions to the proposed problem — spanning from educational programs and awareness campaigns, to food tracking and redistribution applications, to waste-to-energy converting technology. Tester feedback came from: UF faculty fellows, UF experts in food security, senior students, peers, and the Catalyst judges who were community partners, innovators, food security stakeholders, and local entrepreneurs. Each round of testing offered students constructive feedback and the opportunity to tweak their final ideas. Some groups even did a complete pivot, changing their prototype entirely after a round of tester input.
What’s next for your project?
Next, Innovation Academy students will take courses in leadership, entrepreneurship, and ethics culminating their Innovation minor with a capstone course. Students are encouraged to move their projects forward from Catalyst into innovation competitions and start-up endeavors. The goal of Innovation Academy is that by, or even before, students’ senior year they will have the skills and inspirations to launch their own products, design solutions, and entrepreneurial pursuits. The Innovation Academy living-learning community supports students to start a business while attending UF in dorm-incubator space in Infinity Hall, intern with the Gainesville innovators at the Innovation Hub and Sid Martin Biotech Incubator, and eventually occupy their own hatchery or incubator space in the city of Gainesville’s Innovation Square.
What worked/ didn’t work about the sprint process?
This course is administered during the summer semester which is time-condensed. Therefore, students met for three hours and forty-five minutes, two times per week, for five weeks. As a result they had to find ways to keep the synergy of ideas moving for a longer period of time than the recommended GV five day sprint. Students coped with the challenge of taking other courses simultaneously; and multiple courses used the classroom space, so students had to find creative ways to store their ideas instead of leaving them posted on the walls.
The Innovation Academy has been running the Creativity in Action course for three years prior to adopting the Sprint book. The book offered a well laid-out structure to a process that can be very complex. It was an asset for new faculty to be able to jump into the process quickly and effectively. The book provides an essential guide for decision-making and delegating throughout the innovation process.
“The [GV Sprint] text is accessible and actionable which made it ideal for Creativity in Action. Students could literally pull step-by-step directions from the text to guide prototyping.” — Professor Jenny Lee
Many of the students also comment on how helpful the book was to reiterate course learning concepts. One student stated:
“Through an easy-to-read guide we learned valuable skills from the Sprint model. We were taught not to accept failure but rather to work through [it] and find a better suited solution. We were taught the value of teamwork…working together as opposed to working against one another, as seen so commonly in the competitive corporate world. We were taught to accept shortcomings, work through our personal and technical problems, while also being practical. The time constraints allowed us to quickly think of new solutions if the ones we thought of were flawed. [The Sprint book] gave us a toolbox to physically manifest our ideas that instead, would have been stuck on paper, or in our minds.” –Student, Natalie Ordonez
Did you make any modifications to the process?
The five day Sprint was extended into a five week sprint to meet the course meeting-time requirements. Although the number of hours spent in the sprint become almost equivalent, it is clear how a five day Sprint could be even more powerful.
Additionally, all of the students were freshmen and just beginning their general college coursework. This is different than the GV model of working with interdisciplinary experts. There is a huge learning curve upfront for the students, but they rose to the challenge and quickly became “specialists” in their Sprint question topic. It forced students to rely heavily on the experts in the community and aligned fields which was excellent networking experience for students.
Will your team sprint again?
Integrating the Sprint book into the Innovation Academy at UF’s Creativity in Action course was a home run. It offered a sense of structure to the process that was previously more nebulous. It also validated the course experience for students who were able to connect their applied course experience to the real-world experience of GV portfolio companies. Innovation Academy is planning to continue to use the Sprint book in future semesters of this course!
