Blog Archives - Page 37 of 39 - The Innovation Hub

Innovation at the Impact Centre

Guest Post by: Scott McAuley, Communications Coordinator at UofT’s Impact Centre

The desire to enable innovation is all around us. From university campuses to corporate headquarters to government chambers, new programs are springing up that are designed to help bring ideas into reality, and reality into practice. The University of Toronto is no different. The University has always been an innovator, from the isolation of insulin to creating the pacemaker, but today’s technologies and markets provide new opportunities that require a new way of thinking.

The Impact Centre is a research institute at the University of Toronto that is dedicated to bringing science to society. We create and deliver events, programs and courses that are all designed to introduce students to innovation and entrepreneurship as well as give them the support they need to make those dreams a reality.

Some recent and upcoming programs:

Innovation And Public Policy

Guest Post by: Jonathan Kates, Master of Public Policy Student

As a graduate student at UofT’s School of Public Policy & Governance and an executive member of the student-led Policy and Innovation Initiative, the Innovation Hub’s human-centered design focus overlaps with my own interest in innovative policy design. The way policy is designed at the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government offers opportunities for or constraints to innovation. This is largely due to the fact that unlike businesses in the private sector who dream up a brilliant new product, governments rarely enjoy a first-mover advantage. That is, one of the main ways of selling policies to the public is by talking about a successful application of this policy somewhere else. “It worked well in the U.K.!”; “If Montreal can do it, so can Toronto!” The thing about policy is that it can be context-specific, so sometimes what worked in the United Kingdom or Quebec may not be what’s right for Canada or Ontario. But does that mean we shouldn’t at least try and find out?

The Innovation Hub at Civic Tech Toronto

By: Margaryta Ignatenko, Student Co-Leader, Communications and Events Team

On March 7^th, Ali Rodney, Julia Smeed and Tamsyn Riddle presented the Hub’s key insights and design process to a room full of energetic, inspired and innovative folks who are part of Civic Tech Toronto. Civic Tech Toronto hosts weekly “hacknights” which allow anyone with a project to collaborate and create with fellow community members. Participants worked on projects ranging from creating a WebCrawler to identify hate speech in Canada to creating a multimedia campaign that raises awareness of racial profiling and carding to a take down of fake news project (among others!)

Collaborating in a Decentralized Postsecondary Institution: Three Insights from the Organizational Learning Team

Headshot of smiling woman with red hair and glasses in red top Headshot of woman with blonde curly hair in blue top

By Denise Bentum, Kate Bowers and Alexandra Rodney

As mentioned in our last post, the Innovation Hub’s Organizational Learning team has been interviewing faculty and Student Life staff at the University of Toronto to learn about their experiences working with students and with each other. We have been exploring the topics of collaboration and student support, in line with a design-thinking approach, by trying to understand these things from the perspective of staff and faculty. Our goal has been to elicit stories of successful and challenging experiences supporting students and collaborating across the university’s many divisions and departments. We have analysed these stories in order to understand how to meet the needs of both students and frontline workers at the university, and to learn about what they value during intra-institutional collaborations and interactions.

Ideas from the Innovation Hub: Feedback Needed!

By Julia Smeed, Innovation Hub Project Lead

The Innovation Hub teams have developed 25 ideas to improve the student experience at the University of Toronto and we need your feedback! More than 100 in-depth interviews were conducted with students during the Innovation Hub’s insight-gathering process. After identifying key insights that emerged from needs expressed by students, the domain teams worked to develop ideas to improve the U of T student experience. These are the final 25 ideas, organized by domain team. These ideas are in prototype format and they are waiting for your feedback and input so that we can iterate them! After reading through the ideas, please follow the link to leave us feedback on the ideas!

Recap of the Innovation Hub Presentation of Insights & Ideas

By Josh Hass, Communications/IT Team Member

The Innovation Hub Presentation of Insights & Ideas took place on Friday, January 27 in Desautels Hall at the Rotman School of Management. The event celebrated the unveiling of the opportunity canvases that the five domain teams had developed during the ideation phase, in consultation with the U of T community.

Join us at the next Innovation Hour!

The Innovation Hub has been talking to students about their experiences at the University. We’ve also met with a number of faculty and staff to discuss their perceptions and insights about student experiences. We need your insights. Innovation Hub teams have crafted project ideas to help the University meet student needs. We would like to invite staff, students, and faculty to our upcoming Innovation Hours to learn about some of our ideas and provide insight and feedback. We hope to see you there!

From Research to Design: Six Key Insights from the Operations and Design Team

By Alexandra Rodney, Student Innovation Leader, Operations Team

At the Innovation Hub, the Operations and Design team is providing support to the five domain teams. Over the course of this project our team has switched gears from a focus on “research” to a focus on “design”. Why the shift? We purposely wanted to move the conversation to a focus on design-thinking in order to help team members break free from other research methodologies and approaches to problem solving. In this way we can encourage creativity by breaking free from our habitual practices and developing new ways of thinking. By encouraging a focus on design, we are contributing to helping the hub teams “undo” our learned problem-solving patterns and making way for innovation in both process and result.

Positioning Students as Partners in our Academic Community

By Jacqueline Beaulieu, Integrated Learning Experience Student Co-Leader

As a full-time PhD student in the Higher Education program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, I study decision-making processes in student affairs and services and implications for shared governance in higher education. As the student leader for the Innovation Hub’s Integrated Learning Team, I thought it would be appropriate to contribute a blog post that integrates my own learning as a result of participating in the Innovation Hub with that from my thesis-related work.

Can Innovation Be Equitable?

By Tamsyn Riddle, Student Co-Lead, Access for Every Student Domain

When the word “innovation” comes up, it usually refers to technological changes that make life more convenient: computers, smart phones, driverless cars. In equity-related classes, we often talk about the inequalities between the people who can afford such new innovations and the majority of the world, and we criticize innovation for focusing too much on capitalist notions of efficiency.

Category: Blog (page 37)