Author: Julia Allworth (page 3)

By Julia Smeed, Innovation Hub Project Lead

We are so excited to launch the Innovation Hub blog to provide a space for dialogue about innovative mindsets and methodologies and to document the story of the Hub.  Over the past two months we’ve been busy identifying our domains for innovation and preparing to build the Innovation Hub teams.  I’d like to first take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to the hundreds of students, staff and faculty who were part of this process.  It’s been so wonderful to work collaboratively and I am so excited to continue this work with you!

Our Innovation Hours continued this week with a look at the proposed plan to build the Innovation Hub teams.  This past Tuesday a group of students and staff met to discuss the draft team structure and roles and share questions and insights about how the team will come together.

On June 16th we continued our learning with a focus on learning how innovative methodologies from a wide variety of industries might be applied to the student experience at U of T.  Speakers included many of our own faculty/staff from some of the most innovative areas of U of T and colleagues from the community who are doing some great work in this space.  You can check out our Google Drive folder for more details about the Day of Learning and a collection of some of the presentations.  We wrapped up the day with a very human-centred debrief time on the Cumberland House Lawn.

We launched the Innovation Hub on May 16th at Chestnut.  This was a great day where we over 260 students, staff and faculty gathered to explore the mindset of innovation and discuss how we can bring innovation to the student experience at University of Toronto.  our AVP of Student Life, Lucy Fromowitz, reminded us that our role is to “hold the door open” for students.  She shared about the incredible innovation that is already happening across the University and encouraged us to explore ways to deepen our collaborations to explore how “when we work together the sum is much greater than the individual parts”.