The IIIE Institute will draw its strengths from the contributions of faculty from multiple departments, much like an interdisciplinary research center that is not subsumed within, or managed by an existing academic department. This structure emanates from the mission of the institute as one that focuses on integrating inventions and innovations emerging from the departments by faculty and students and linking them to entrepreneurship, i.e. the proactive consideration and realization of open source and commercialization opportunities through various institutional pathways such as Tandon’s Tech Transfer and Future Labs, which facilitate licensing, joint development agreements with industrial partners, and startup incubation.

Research Mission:

• Lead and coordinate schoolwide research activities that promote the I2E mission within and between academic departments and across various academic programs.
• Facilitate and accelerate cross-school research collaborations and partnerships around I&E.
• Provide a Lab2Market framework and the support structure to help translate engineering inventions into technological innovations with market potential.
• Lead, coordinate and support schoolwide interdisciplinary research on technological innovations that solve important and complex problems of societal relevance

Research Programs:

• A forum for faculty to engage in exploratory and interdisciplinary research, sabbatical research (including in-house sabbaticals), and to form entrepreneurial collaborations and broader applied research programs that cross disciplinary boundaries.
• Seed grants and PhD Fellowships for I&E-relevant research initiatives; Consider e.g. research initiatives on a set of specific high impact and potentially disruptive research areas, e.g., AI, cybersecurity, VA/R, gaming, 5G Wireless, organizational and societal impact of emerging interdisciplinary technological innovations, etc.
• Assistance in the preparation of proposals that promote entrepreneurship such as NSF’s Partnerships for Innovation programs, Accelerating Innovation Research, I-Corps Sites etc. as well as assistance with SBIR and STTR proposal preparation and identifying potential academic partners for startups submitting SBIR/STTR proposals.

Educational Mission:

The institute’s educational mission should have at is core the objective of creating an entrepreneurial mindset among our students. This should not be confused with a mission to encourage every student to create a startup company. Rather, the objective is to create a curriculum that provides every student with the opportunity to acquire the skill set and knowledge of what it takes to identify inventions and technology innovations that solve an important user or customer problem and that lend themselves to being commercialized and turned into a viable commercial product, if they desire to go that route. A curriculum that achieves these objectives may contain the following components (with the understanding that course, program, and curriculum initiatives require discussion, review, and ultimate approval by the Tandon faculty and the appropriate curriculum committees):

• Design and supervise experiential learning-based courses and programs that convey best practices, such as user centered design, as well as the basic tenets of technology innovation and entrepreneurship, both for credit and not-for-credit and offers a variety of relevant extra- curricular programs.
• Create and institutionalize a forum for transforming engineering education to stimulate entrepreneurial thinking among all our graduates by reformulating curricula, pedagogy, and student learning.
• Provide a solid foundation for engineering students at both undergraduate and graduate levels in design skills and an entrepreneurial mindset by introducing to them to state-of-the-art design methods, strategies for successful technology commercialization, new venture creation, and best practices for fostering innovation.

Educational Programs:

• Workshops, competitions and experiential learning opportunities for students and faculty to try out entrepreneurial ideas, connect with the venture community, and form collaborations with peers from other departments and schools.
• Provide content, support and coordination for existing UG programs; conceive of potential new programs, but avoid stand-alone degree programs that would exist in isolation as they do not foster integration.
• Modules in existing courses, stand-alone courses, a minor, MS and PhD components integrate into the study plan of every student to diversify career opportunities; certificates, executive and professional education programs incl. online offerings as appropriate.
• Design and staffing of courses that provide students with interdisciplinary and experiential learning opportunities through which they develop an entrepreneurial mindset and the skills to enable their inventions to solve complex and important user problems and to create significant economic and social value.
• Support existing core engineering programs to integrate appropriate courses into their degree and certificate programs.
• Support the development of new programs, e.g. a Technology Entrepreneurship Minor for our undergraduate engineering majors and a MS degree in Technology Entrepreneurship, perhaps jointly with another School of NYU.