The weekly event iideas is an interesting homegrown case study in the generation of a digitalized integrated ecosystem which is the end goal of many enterprise evolution processes. In upcoming articles we will be fleshing out this concept of an innovation ecosystem, and this iideas case study will be a good reference point for many of the concepts we will be discussing.
The initial concept behind iideas was born at an all-hands Graduate School meeting at UPAEP in 2013. There, Dr. Manuel González stood and asked a simple yet powerful question: “Why don’t I know that the rest of you do?” He pointed out that after years of working together, each of us had maybe a tenuous grasp of what our fellow academics and researchers who were not in fields directly related to our own actually do. As a result, an informal event named “Grad School Fridays” was launched where different researchers from the various disciplines at the Graduate School could share a highlight of their research and innovative ideas in a way that would generate a more actively connected academic community as well as foster interdisciplinary thinking and innovation. Almost from the very first beginning people discovered that their own disciplines had much to offer each other. For example, one major environmental innovator presented an incredible project for rescuing contaminated soils, and people in the business community realized they could contribute with marketing, business plan, and knowledge transfer ideas to generate a greater impact for the presented work.
Even though that first semester only had 13 conferences, the work quickly ballooned out scope for one or two people to manage while handling a full academic load. The initial organization had all been word-of-mouth and personal invitations. Sign-up sheets were manually generated and collected, and the announcements were e-mailed to personal distribution lists.
From the regular attendees who had most enthusiastically supported the project, a committee was formed, and the work distributed more efficiently. These project champions came from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. From deans to administrative assistants, each volunteer contributed and continues to contribute a unique perspective on strategy, goals, and operations for the future of the project. A primary objective was agreed upon: contribute to the public’s comprehension and internalization of scientific research, design, and technological development through multi- and inter-disciplinary academic encounters, scientific journalism, and digital communication.
The first steps to digitalization for the project were testbeds or pilot programs for future changes implemented in the system. An online signup sheet was designed where individuals could propose future conferences that the committee could review and, if approved, assign a given date. An email distribution system was established through official university channels, and the events were added to the university’s daily news distribution system. The event were moved to one of the new videoconference rooms to allow for remote participants to join the conference live, as well as record the events for future uploads to online digital platforms. From 2013-2015, this work was completely self-funded by the volunteer committee and individual contributors. Even that minimal funding allowed the addition of a coffee break as a community-fostering event to preface the weekly conference, contributing to the mission of creating academic encounters.
The two years of work, lessons learned, and continuous improvement provided the committee with the experiences and arguments to seek institutional and corporate sponsorship. In 2015 the obtained combined sponsorships allowed for the hiring of a designer to generate a visual identity for the events, and the name iideas (Investigación, Innovación, y Diseño en Encuentros Académicos: Research, Innovation, and Design in Academic Encounters) was selected to encompass the entire academic community instead of the original “Grad School Fridays”. The visual identity was then formalized into all the digital documents. A web domain was purchased and used for a landing page to help communicate important items like videoconference instructions and how to apply to give a conference. The growing quality of the events received recognition by both the Office of Research as Science Communication or Journalism activities and by the Office of Personnel as employee continuing education hours. Graduate assistantships were provided to help manage a media presence on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter – allowing a greater digital presence with the audience and potential future speakers. A service provider was selected to manage the coffee breaks, receiving the orders by e-mail and handling all the setup and tear-down tasks that used to fall to individual volunteers in the committee.
As the project grew and matured, it became much more international, with speakers from 12 different countries providing 121 different conferences from every different discipline represented at the Graduate School (Fig. 1). Two radio + YouTube programs were founded within the digital ecosystem to provide an opportunity for different kinds of focused communication: iideas Radio and El extraño mundo de Max (Max’s strange world).
The continued funding in 2017 allowed for the next step in the project transformation to occur, by bringing onboard to the project a team of professionals to design and implement the digital platform upon which iideas could continue to grow. That platform was ready by August 2017, in time for the fall semester round of conferences. The transition and debugging processes continued throughout the fall semester, with each automation and digitalization component requested being brought to bear on the administration of the conferences. As of the writing of this article, the platform allows a user to get a homepage summary of the next event, get to know the history and purpose behind iideas as well as the various ways to connect with iideas, obtain instructions for streaming the videoconference or YouTube options, connect with the browse through upcoming events, obtain information on times, locations, speakers, keywords, and flyers for each event, share these events on multiple social media platforms, print out reminders, sign up for individual conferences, download certificates of completion for each conference actually attended and counted as accredited, browse news articles, view selected radio programs and event photographs, download selected conference materials, propose new conferences, and sign up to be a sponsor.
On the backend, the tools are many more than those for the end users, but the most important ones can be summarized as follows: the system now collects the information for sign-up sheets, event proposals, allows for verification of attendance to individual events, automatically generates diplomas for the speakers and the attendees, sends automated e-mails from the various interactions a user can have on the site, and so much more. The documented evidence is collected on an online platform that allows the sponsors to validate the impact of their sponsorship and continue renewing their support. This automation has reduced the workload by at least 75% on any given individual and allowed for a much greater audience participation.
Being a digital platform, the iideas site provides all the user data and insights that one could expect to leverage into more effective engagement strategies from such tools, with one example shown in Fig. 2. This large increase in data available is the beginning of the next evolution for iideas, as we learn to master our data and communication and become an ever-more effective integrated ecosystem. Our suppliers and “clients” (conference attendees) now have digital tools and access to allow for an online integration into our workflow and communication. The number of committee meetings needed to sort through tasks and volunteer work has dropped dramatically as those vertically within the iideas organization are able to accomplish more and more of their work in an automated or fully online way.
The iideas system is a long way from being a perfectly integrated next-generation digital ecosystem, but in the past 4.5 years it has taken concrete steps to go from a vision to a pilot program to a fully engaged system that identified specific growth and transformation opportunities to become a more seamlessly integrated ecosystem with data-rich insights. In the upcoming weeks we will see how these lessons learned and already applied in one small section at UPAEP help suggest the viability of a proposed roadmap for transforming into the University our society and partners need us to become.
Dr. Juan Manuel López Oglesby, Director, Graduate Biomedical Engineering Sciences UPAEP
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