UofSC Innovation Think Tank Lab held the 103rd session of Innovation Think Tank Certification Program!

UofSC Innovation Think Tank Lab organized the 103rd session of Innovation Think Tank Certification Program. The event attracted interdisciplinary participants from the University of South Carolina including members from the South Carolina Honors College, University of Missouri, and Eastern Connecticut State University.

Innovation Think Tank, part of the Chief Technology Office of Siemens Healthineers, organizes the experiential learning trainings based on the experience of successful implementation of Innovation Think Tank Programs and Labs at Siemens Healthineers and executes them in a number of prestigious institutions worldwide.

This event is a part of Big Data Health Science Center (BDHSC) Technology Hub (Tech-Hub)’s activities. The BDHSC, an interdisciplinary enterprise established in April 2019 with a competitive $3 million grant from UofSC, promotes and supports Big Data health science research at UofSC and across the state through capacity development, academic training, professional development, community engagement, and methodological advancement. The mission of the Tech-Hub is to support content cores by providing consultative services to bring researchers, data sets, infrastructure, analytics and analysts together to solve large scale data driven problems on the UofSC campus.

The interactive training is designed to develop creative pioneers capable of delivering innovative and customer centric solutions to the world’s greatest challenges in healthcare in their own field of profession. At the first day of the program, the participants received a comprehensive training on Innovation Think Tank Approach and Methodology developed by Sultan Haider, Founder and Head at Siemens Healthineers Innovation Think Tank; Program Director at the UofSC ITT Lab. After that, the teams worked on a co-creation exercise for countering challenges in infectious diseases, including SARS-Cov-2 mutations, and came up with various ideas and propositions in the field of detection methods, digitalization, and infrastructure.

All participants completed the program successfully and fulfilled the following training goals:

• Learn the Innovation Think Tank methodology,
• Explore intrinsic creativity, and
• Make use of diversity for out of box thinking,
• Gain hands on project experience,
•  Experience learning by doing,
•  Expand the network of like-minded people,
•  Learn from the best practices shared amongst the participants, and
•  Apply experiential learning to gain understanding of various innovation methods and tools.

The participants have chance to further develop their projects at our UofSC ITT Lab. They can also showcase their Innovative Project at Siemens Healthineers’ External Innovation Think Tank Exhibition (eITT 2021) which will take place on 28^th July in Germany. https://ittlab.cec.sc.edu/siemens-healthineers-eitt2021/

Impressions from the Participants

Sophie Greenwell, Biomedical Engineering student at UofSC said:

I would say that even though the program was very short, the Siemens team set very high standards each group and acted as great motivators towards hard work. I also had a wonderful time working with other students here at UofSC with drastically different backgrounds than me, including different majors and degree-levels. We had to bond as a team and collaborate on which tasks and ideas would be best fit for our interests and specialties.

Kausik Lakkaraju, PhD Candidate at Computer Science, UofSc shared:

“Thank you so much for setting up this wonderful program. I am happy that I got this opportunity to work with such a self-motivated team. I have never worked with a team with such a diverse background before. It was a one-of-a-kind experience for me. I had the opportunity of learning various new things from other teams as well. The program was well structured. The feedback session on day-2 was very helpful. My key takeaways are: Working as a team with a diverse group, following a well-defined process to reach a solution, learning new ideas, and concepts.”

Sydney Reichardt, Nursing Major student, Honors College Smart Start Program, UofSC said:

Being accepted to participate in the Innovation Think Tank Certification Program meant so much to me. As an incoming freshman, I never imagined I would receive an opportunity such as this. The ITT CP allowed me to both ask questions and express my ideas without feeling judged or pressured. Its overall structure was extremely important in helping me finish the program successfully. Day 1 of the program taught me research vocabulary and workflow ideas so that I could be prepared for interactions with my team and development of ideas later on in the program. My main takeaways from this program were learning how to work efficiently with those both in other fields and other stages of life, and that motivation and an openness to learning from others will take you far in the world of research.

Dilcia Yamileth Sanchez, Health Science Major student at Eastern Connecticut State University told:

“The Innovation Think Tank Certification Program was enriching, I’m glad I was brave enough to get out of my comfort zone and apply. The teams were very welcoming and reassuring, very igniting experience to collaborate with amazing capable people. We were all innovators in desire of finding solutions to problems.”

Leandro T. De Castro, PhD Candidate, Department of Chemical Engineering, UofSC said:

“The certification program provided the participants an overview of the ITT methodology which covers a step-by-step activity covering the critical part of motivation generation to final prototype creation.  For this certification I learned new approaches in realizing the “motivation” and “the big picture” thru KOL, KPI, stakeholder, pain points/challenges and solution identification. The program is challenging but really is a learning thru experience.  I do highly recommend this training especially to new engineers starting their career in the field of R&D.”