Engineering Enterprise and Innovation

The 2012 Workshop is co-located with the Academic Workshop in Computing for Underrepresented Ethnic Minorities and People with Disabilities 

The National Institute for Faculty Equity (NIFE) is organizing the 6th NSF Minority Faculty Development Workshop.  The 2012 workshop, entitled Engineering Enterprise and Innovation, is designed to provide participants with opportunities for professional development and the chance to gain a better understanding of research innovation and translation. The workshop is targeted towards early and mid-career engineering faculty who are members of underrepresented groups as defined by NSF (African American, Hispanic, and Native American).  NSF Funding will cover participant travel, lodging, and meeting logistics.

Recognizing that interdisciplinarity and collaboration drive innovation and that translational research that applies new discoveries to meet societal needs is paramount to maintaining global competitiveness and economic prosperity, and further that underrepresented minorities and women represent a pool of untapped entrepreneurial talent, this workshop is uniquely designed to provide professional development, education and mentoring towards career impacting innovation and entrepreneurship. Our approach to the workshop is research-based and fully integrates skills development in the areas of leadership, collaboration, management, marketing, enterprise, and the execution of translational research.  Through a series of informational and interactive sessions over a 2 ½ day period, participants from four-year universities from across the country and across engineering disciplines will become better prepared to excel in the academy, become innovative leaders and to pursue research with the potential for translation and commercialization. Incorporated with the professional development component of the workshop is a specially tailored mini-workshop on innovation, translation and entrepreneurship developed in partnership with the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation and modeled in part after their Coulter College.

The convener of the workshop is Gilda Barabino (barabino@gatech.edu).