|
|
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
| Host Department |
All Depts for Morning
Eden - afternoon |
Engineering |
Business School |
EDEN |
Eden Morning
All Depts for Afternoon |
Morning
9:30am – 1pm |
Welcome
Introduction
Housekeeping
Icebreakers
Teamworking
The Marshmallow Challenge
Overview of Innovation & Entrepreneurship
The Challenge - explaining to the students what is their big team challenge for the week |
Technology trends and how to use them – and avoid them
Quantifying the technology challenge
What goes into making a product?
What they don’t teach you in Coder Dojo |
How to develop a business model?
How do innovations help to enter a market?
How can established companies respond to innovative entries?
|
Principles of Lean Startup
How to develop winning concepts
Consumer Closeness
Ethnographic Research Exercise in Manor Mills
|
The Perfect Pitch
How to make a professional and compelling presentation
• The problem you solve
• Who you are?
• What you do?
• Practice your business plan pitch
Refining your slide deck and prototype |
Lunch
1pm – 2pm |
Lunch |
Lunch |
Lunch |
Lunch |
Lunch |
Afternoon
2pm – 4:45pm |
Creativity & How to Generate High Potential Ideas
Introduction to Design Thinking
What are Wicked Problems
Creating a Customer Journey Map |
How to build a prototype/source materials/estimate product costs
Thinking around problems - the Egg Drop Challenge |
How can companies market innovative products and services?
Which marketing mix should companies choose? |
2 Entrepreneurs Stories
Guest Talks by Two Entrepreneurs with Q&A
Testing your concepts |
Teams present their ideas to expert panel of academics and entrepreneurs.
Feedback Session
Prizes awarded
Wrap-Up and Close |
At the end of this week, participants will:
- Understand the process of entrepreneurship
- See setting up their own business as a realistic career option
- Be familiar with different ways of boosting creativity
- Understand how to develop successful Innovation
- Get familiar with the basics of coding, app development and IT
- Learn how to develop a business idea
Assessment
- Students will be put in teams and asked to come up with a proposition for a new idea based on the theme of the week they attend
- At the end of each day, the students will rate the programme using a net promoter score
- At the end of the week, students will complete an online evaluation of the programme.
The School of Business
The School of Business aims to introduce the students to the question of how they can develop a convincing business model for their idea. During the day students will get insights into different aspects of developing a business model. Firstly, students will be introduced to the development of a convincing business model from the perspective of entrepreneurial companies. Secondly, this perspective will be contrasted with the perspective of established companies.
In particular, the day provides the opportunity get insights into three broad areas, the development of a business plan, the development of an innovation strategy, and the development of a marketing strategy for innovative products and services.
The teaching approach for this content is based on interactive lectures, video materials, in-class exercises and activities. More specifically, interactive teaching and learning methods will be used in order to actively engage students into the teaching and learning process. Appropriate real-world business cases and examples will be used to illustrate the topics covered in the lecture. Throughout the day students will have the opportunity to apply the lecture contents to their own idea to solve the challenge.
EDEN Centre
EDEN is the university’s centre for entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. EDEN will be the programme’s main host and is coordinating the inputs of the collaborating departments.
Through EDEN, the students will learn the nature and value of creativity and why organisations place such a premium on hiring smart-creative people. They will get to understand the difference between operations and innovation and how companies looking for revenue growth seek and find promising ideas. They will also learn about the start-up community and will be exposed to guest speakers from both start-ups and from established companies pursuing new ventures.
They will learn techniques for boosting their own creativity and they will find out how they can increase their own creative competence and confidence. EDEN’s teaching approach is collaborative, action-oriented and fun!
The students will be put into teams and shown how high performing teams work together. They will be given a challenge and shown how they might design a solution for it.
EDEN helps students become more competent, confident and effective in converting their ideas into action. These actions will advance the students’ personal goals, society’s goals and might indeed even have a commercial output too.
Department of Design Innovation
Businesses and governments are increasingly recognising the power of design to produce superior outcomes both to society’s problems (like climate change or crime) and to commercial opportunities. Design Thinking is a toolkit to help manage both innovation and problem solving. It is customer centric, involves insight and observation, rapid prototyping, simultaneous business analysis alongside creativity. But, helpfully it comes with a useful set of tools and rules - tools like journey mapping or empathy maps.
On this course, students will learn the basics of design thinking and these are skills that are in high demand in the jobs market right now. In developing their projects on this course, students will be shown how to use design thinking as the means of designing a better or preferred outcome.
Our department of Design Innovation is home to some of the country’s foremost experts in design thinking and the students will get to work with them. They will also get to use our prototyping lab where they can do 3D prototyping, use autocad and other product design tools, under the supervision of our highly experienced studio manager.
Department of Electronic Engineering
Electronic Engineers make things work! Students will get an overview of trends in electronics; they’ll learn a little about coding and software development. They’ll hear how to design and develop apps and websites and they’ll do a little coding. They’ll learn about the maker movement and get the opportunity to make things and find out how to make them work!
A hallmark of our programme will be a high level of involvement from industry practitioners from large companies, from SMEs and start-up entrepreneurs. Here in Maynooth we have a vibrant and dynamic incubation centre for start-up businesses - it’s called Maynooth Works and we will bring students to meet the businesses and mentors while they’re on campus.
In addition having the opportunity of experiencing the process of innovation in their own project, students will have the chance to interact with entrepreneurs and managers responsible for innovation in larger, established corporations during their invited talks on Thursdays. Through these talks we aim to provide insights into the life of innovators in both types of companies and to inspire students to pursue further education in the fields of entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation in a broader sense.
We believe if we bring some inspiring stories into the programme, it will really resonate with the students and increase their passion for creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation.
