A Common Workspace for Implementing Innovative Ideas

A Common Workspace for Implementing Innovative Ideas

“THE SECRET OF CHANGE IS TO FOCUS ALL OF YOUR ENERGY, NOT ON FIGHTING THE OLD, BUT BUILDING ON THE NEW.” - SOCRATES

by Aditya Shasank PSKPVS University Innovation Fellow Aditya College of Engineering

While pursuing my bachelor’s degree, one of the Central Government Organizations of India called for Innovative Projects through a program called Chhatra ViswaKarma Awards. Our team, along with several other teams, attended the Region-Level Meet with their ideas from different colleges. My idea, to prepare a model which automatically delivers grocery items based on consumer choice, was submitted under the title “Ration Distribution Management System,” and we secured first place. We were asked to present the working model with minor additions at the National-Level Meet. We participated at the National Level meet by enhancing the suggestions as a working model. The proposed idea and functioning of our model was well appreciated by the panel of judges. As a part of this I have implemented the logic for inventory maintenance, consumer biometric authentication, digital payment. However, during the Regional Level Meet, many of the teams were disqualified for various reasons, and only a few teams were selected for the National Level Meet. One question that dwelled on my mind was the reason for disqualification of ideas that are found to be good and interesting. We started interacting with those teams and analyzed the same. We found that most of the projects are related to multidisciplinary majors, and the team didn’t have a proper combination or they don’t have proper understanding of the majors that were involved. Another aspect is the lack of knowledge, coordination, and guidance as the problems chosen are related to multidisciplinary majors. After analyzing the reasons, we University Innovation Fellows thought that we could address this problem on our campus. This change is implemented with a concept called Common Workspace for Implementing Innovative Ideas. This is the space where students can express their ideas and form teams and start working on the ideas.

If a student in a particular major has an idea and wants to start implementing the same, it may require expertise and support of technologies from different majors. The common workspace provides a platform to acquire the expertise and peers from different majors who are interested in collaborating and implementing to make it successful.

We expressed this total scenario with purpose and proposed change with the peers, Faculty Champions, campus advisors, stakeholders. Based on the feedback and suggestions received from the stakeholders, we came up with a proposal to have a common workplace equipped with components and tools that may be needed in implementing different concepts. For this we got the approval from authorities for implementing the same on a trial basis.

The following steps were followed in implementing the trial run.

• All the students are informed regarding the availability of common work space emphasizing the purpose and asked them to register their area of interest/expertise along with their idea if any. • Provision to view other peers with similar/suitable expertise related to other majors is provided so that collaborations are formed.

• The best few ideas are considered, and the mentor(s) allocated for each of them. Mentors coordinated the team formation by choosing a pool of people for each idea.

• Budget required for procuring the necessary components, tools if any are provided to the teams.

Procurement is done by the team and the same was monitored by Mentor. • The considered ideas are converted into models and the same are presented to the stakeholders and few of them enhanced based on the suggestions given. • These three models are exhibited in different competitions and two of them won the Best Idea/ model prizes and the other model got appreciation.

As the trial run results are successful and there is a visible improvement found in the students to work on multidisciplinary majors, the college authorities approved to enhance the workspace so as to cater more number of students. Now, we are at a point of making the workspace ready and the same is going to be inaugurated soon.