Tag: Disruptive Innovation

This fall, Washington University students will have yet another way to get off campus and engage with local innovators: the InSITE Fellowship.

The INSITE Fellowship is a nationally renowned leadership program designed for full-time graduate students interested in entrepreneurship and venture capital. As a partner school, WashU joins a cohort of other top institutions: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, UPenn, Georgetown and UC Berkeley.

In this three-semester program, students will have the opportunity to perform high-impact projects for local startups and venture capital firms. The fellowship also connects students with a nationwide network of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, through annual sponsored events, such as:

• Free passes to South by Southwest (AirBnB even dontates housing for the INSITE Fellows in Austin, TX!)
• A fireside chat with Fred Wilson, author of the popular AVC blog, and co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a NYC venture capital firm known for its investments in tech companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, and Kickstarter
• INSITE Connect, a biannual conference where fellows present their projects

All full-time Business, Law and Engineering graduate students are welcome to apply. The deadline is THIS WEDNESDAY, 9/23 at 11:59 pm. APPLY NOW  

Please reach out to Jessica Stanko (stanko@wustl.edu) with any questions!

Washington University alumni with Dr. Samuel Chun, Assistant Dean of Executive Programs, at the Raytheon Thought Leadership event on innovation.

As part of Raytheon’s 2013 National Engineers Week activities, Olin Executive Programs was invited to share its perspectives on innovation with an audience of Raytheon employees, as well as Washington University alumni around the Dallas, TX region.

Dr. Samuel Chun, Assistant Dean of Executive Programs, delivered a thought-provoking presentation about turning an abundance of great ideas into action while underscoring the “change leadership” required to ensure the organization’s survival. To successfully and sustainably innovate as an organization we must first rethink the process of invention:

1. Don’t ask the customer, watch the customer
2. Identify the right problem
3. De-anchor old biases
4. Prototype

Despite the abundance of great ideas, an organization’s behavioral inertia often inhibits new ideas and business models from taking root because of perceived or real threats to existing business models. The leadership challenge is not only about managing our past successes, but also about being the engine for change necessary to deal with the disruptive threats to the organization’s very existence.