Mysuru: The University Innovation Fellows programme empowers students to become agents of change at their schools. The Fellows are a national community of students in engineering and related fields who work to ensure that their peers gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to compete in the economy of the future.

To accomplish this, the Fellows advocate for lasting institutional change and create opportunities for students to engage with Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E),  creativity, design thinking and venture creation at their schools. The programme is run by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school).

The five students of Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering — Dhruv Nrupesh Patel, Anushree J. Rao, Shashank M. Athreya, Peeyusha K. Shivayogi and Apoorva Singh — are the first University Innovation Fellows of Mysuru.

The Fellows underwent a six-week training which included the core concepts of Design Thinking and also complete quite a lot of assignments, all monitored by the UIF Founders and their team at Stanford University, before they officially got declared as Fellows.

Dr. V. Ravikumar, Prof. D.N. Sachin and Prof. Nithin Kumar closely monitored every course of action and made sure that they complete their assignments properly and before the due date.

With Dhruv Nrupesh Patel as the lead, the team researched about the needs and priorities of students and later worked based on their interests. The team aims at improving the Innovation and Entrepreneurial mindset of the students, along with improving the quality of higher education.

The team visited the Stanford University, Google Headquarters, Microsoft headquarters at Silicon valley in California. Apart from this, they also attended the Eastern Hemisphere Meet-up in Dubai in the month of April, 2019. They received further training and brought the tools which will help them in improvising the I&E at their home campus.