Kick Start: UWS Student Innovation Workshop 2: Idea Generation

Kick Start: UWS Student Innovation Workshops

At UWS, we exist to be a university of curiosity and new thinking.  We want to create new solutions for future challenges that our communities will face.  Kick Start is a student innovation programme designed by the University of the West of Scotland, which goes beyond classroom-based learning, focusing on providing students with the knowledge and skillset to recognise that innovation and entrepreneurship are powerful ways to implement change within their chosen sectors.

Our mission is to ignite, elevate and engage the next wave of leaders for the future, through skills development, innovation and entrepreneurship.  Expand your ideas, build up your creative confidence and innovate your ambitions.  Become the next entrepreneur that the world seeks.

We are calling all students who are interested in something different, who are keen to unleash those creative, innovative and unique ideas whilst developing a reusable skillset, beneficial for the future.  This is a unique opportunity to build up the areas in which you may already excel, develop knowledge of the working environment and have the ability to make a real impact for future businesses.

Kick Start will be hosting a series of workshops that are designed for Postgraduate and PhD students, who are looking to improve their knowledge and skillsets based around innovation and entrepreneurship.  Each workshop session will be 120 minutes long and will be hosted on Zoom.  All three online workshops will be delivered by Head of Business Innovation, Johnny Mone, with guest speakers attending the workshops to share their personal innovation journeys.

The second workshop will explore Idea Generation:

In this workshop, it’s all about design thinkers sparking off ideas in the form of questions and solutions through various creative activities.  Idea generation techniques will help you into creative thinking mode and will boost innovation as well as focusing on the process of generating new ideas and concepts to solve specific problems.  The main aim of an Idea Generation workshop is to uncover and explore new angles and avenues—to get you to think outside the box.

Benefits of an Idea Generation Workshop:

• Generate new innovative ideas
• Boost your innovation through creative thinking mode
• Ask the right questions and innovate
• Bring together your person perspectives and strengths
• Uncover unexpected areas of innovation

Dave Hughes (CEO and founder of Novosound) will be joining Kick Start for this workshop.  Novosound was founded as the first spin-out from the University of the West of Scotland in April 2018.  Dave mentions how the company was spun out to "allow the research that I was doing to get out there into the real world and have important impact".  Today, Novosound has rapidly grown to become a global business working across a wide range of diverse industry sectors and markets.  The company have created a ground-breaking technique for the mass-production of printable ultrasound sensors.

Participants will be emailed the link for the Zoom call ahead of the event.  While these events are free to attend, advanced registration is required. 

If you have any questions about this event or would like to find out more about the Kick Start programme, please email cpd@uws.ac.uk 

To stay up to date with Kick Start and to be the first to find out about future events, follow the Kick Start Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

• Expand and develop your knowledge and skills through a series of interactive online workshops
• Learn from experienced business experts
• Network with other like-minded individuals and local entrepreneurs
• Build up your own creative confidence and innovative ideas