Weekly Innovation Challenge

Weekly Innovation Challenge (WIC) is a key strategy to help develop an entrepreneurial mindset in students. The WIC uses real-life scenarios that require collaboration, innovation, investigation, and exploration. Student solutions to these challenges employ frugality, flexibility, and élan. These are critical qualities for successful innovators and start-ups.
Entrepreneurially minded engineers who innovate and create are in greater demand than ever. The WIC is an outstanding tool to develop these highly desirable skills both in engineering and non-engineering students. These challenges provide experiential opportunities that combine theoretical knowledge and practical skills in a powerful way. When facing a design challenge, students work in teams on important design skills that involve creativity, communication, and problem solving. These real-world challenges allow students to go beyond simple planning to create prototypes and then test them.
WIC's are like the real-world challenges faced by engineers on a day-to-day basis. The challenges and time constraints may be similar, but how leaders deal with them makes all the difference. As Apollo 13 NASA Flight Director Eugene “Gene” Kranz famously said: “Failure is not an option”. NASA mission control brought the team back safely through creativity and improvisation under tight time constraints, including improvising a carbon-dioxide filter from material on hand.
The WIC is designed to set aside a specific time each week to develop mental skills and creativity in a playful context. Materials used in the challenges, such as Lego blocks, crayons, construction paper, balloons, and popsicle sticks, reflect this “playful” aspect and refer back to a time in life when creative approaches to tasks where innate.
The WIC promotes action. Failure to act is the main problem for entrepreneurs. Gathering data and planning are not enough; ideas must be implemented. Constant action allows entrepreneurs to implement and refine their ideas quickly and to realize greater business potential. Not only is each WIC grounded in action, this action must be fast and continuous, as team members create prototypes, then constantly refine them. WIC participants become entrepreneurially minded engineers, focused on action.
Academic institutions use competitions as motivational tools to promote entrepreneurship and creativity. General competitions focusing on business plans or pitches are common, but new competitions are focusing on innovation in engineering. Examples of these types of competitions include the following: ASME IShow, Georgia Tech’s Inventure Prize, I2P (Idea to Product) Competition, Lawrence Tech’s Innovation Encounter, and the National Collegiate Innovators and Inventors Alliance OPENMinds Competition. These competitions are similar to WIC in the way they promote innovation, but they are intensive short-term commitments. WIC, on the other hand, requires consistent effort, is ongoing, and can easily be fit into a schedule of a typical student.
Weekly Innovation Challenge was conceived by Prof. Sridhar Condoor to creatively engage students outside the classroom. It became part of Saint Louis University’s ongoing commitment to entrepreneurship. All students and faculty are eligible to take part in WIC, which SLU offers every week of the school year. Unlike other competitions, WIC allows any number of participants and demands that teams be interdisciplinary. Anyone can show up when a challenge begins. At SLU, the competition is sponsored by the Kern Family Foundation and the Coleman Foundation.
WIC is adopted by Gonzaga University, Kettering University, Lawrence Tech, University of Detroit Mercy, Ohio Northern University, and Rice University. These challenges are not limited to academic institutions, which may have much to learn from “the real world.” Hill and Rogers stress the importance of innovation in both tech companies and universities: “To encourage more play on the job, colleges and universities could emulate nonacademic institutions like Google, Bell Labs, and IDEO by establishing playrooms and allocating time specifically for the purpose of fostering creativity”. WIC's create such playful experience to bring out the kid in everyone.

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