Last week marked the last day of my time as innovation coach for the University of Sunderland. Working with the Entrepreneurial Development Team, my role was to help create co-curricular and extra curricular projects for students to help inspire and encourage students to consider entrepreneurship and starting their own business as part of their career path.
The role was varied and very interesting.
For example, I worked with students looking to start their own business, and coached them to consider their business needs and where to start. This I found wonderfully rewarding. There were some occasions where I directly helped students clarify needs, but also helped them understand what to do next.
I also got to design workshops, sprints to be delivered at the classroom level. I worked on early stage co-curricular delivery projects where I designed and used activities to help the students explore innovation, design thinking on their course work.
I also designed a small game called “Your the boss” where students worked through a series of worksheets on their business idea, and gave them coins to spend on resources, people; and challenged them on what is money coming in, and what is money going out.
In summary
Overall, my time as Innovation coach was very rewarding. I got to work with different students and helped impact some into thinking about their next steps in their career.