Teaching How to Innovate

Great universities foster natural, transdisciplinary crossroads where people from a broad array of disciplines collaborate to advance their fields and inspire ideas that serve the common good.

That purpose lies at the heart of our Innovation Scholars program. Led by Upinder Dhillon from the School of Management and Vice Provost for Online and Innovative Education James Pitarresi, it recruits sophomores from every corner of campus into a three-year program.

“We want to prepare students for the 21st century economy, where there will be more emphasis on solving large, unstructured problems,” says Dhillon. “We put students in an environment to learn not only how to come up with solutions, but how to structure problems.”

That environment is the Innovation Lab, which—much like the skills being honed—is flexible and multi-purpose, encompassing the Zurack Family High Technology Collaboration Center, a scholars lab, a group study room, the Bartle instructional lab and breakout rooms to spur student collaboration and student-faculty interactions.

Here, Innovation Scholars and students from across the campus employ design thinking to tackle challenges small and also very large, like rethinking local housing and eradicating global hunger. Students often devise unexpected, novel approaches, proving that innovation can indeed be taught.

It’s a theory Pitarresi has always espoused: “Binghamton makes innovation real. The focus of this program is to prepare students to be thinkers. That’s about a more digital, diverse, global society, where the ability to collaborate, to have a framework for addressing thorny problems and brainstorming solutions is really critical. If we can achieve that, we will have graduated generations of students who are going to be true leaders into the future.”

To have a conversation about investing in the Binghamton Innovation Scholars and the Innovation Lab, please contact Rebecca Benner, Associate VP for Advancement and Campaign Director, rbenner@binghamton.edu.