Exploding Pumpkins!

What do exploding pumpkins and design clubs have in common? Elliot Roth, our Student Ambassador Candidate from Virginia Commonwealth University. Read all about it at the new post published by our collaborators at the Epicenter…  

Why Student Ambassadors?

Today, we are starting our new online training for 8 student ambassador candidates. This departs from our typical format of bringing 20 or so students to NCIIA headquarters in Hadley, MA to indoctrinate them in the lessons that make a great student ambassador. The online training consists of six one-hour sessions with experiential learning during […]

Brilliant Student Innovations Address Global Challenges

The NCIIA grants program is one that has given rise to numerous student-led companies. Actually, given that NCIIA has been around for 17 years, many are ‘all grown up’ and employ hundreds of people, garnering millions in economic impact…. but I want to highlight the ones that one might classify as ‘International Development’. If you’re […]

Secret Agents of Change WANTED!

Secret Agents of Change WANTED! Become a Student Ambassador. NCIIA and Stanford University, as partners in the Epicenter, are pleased to announce a new online training program for the Student Ambassador program. We are accepting a maximum of 12 students. Students should expect to put in between 1-5 hours a week during training. If you […]

E-Boards, Awesome Boards and Gigantic LCD Screens

Flyers, sidewalk chalk drawings, tweets and Facebook events are some of the usual suspects when it comes to campus promotional methods… but giant whiteboards? These days Student Ambassadors are deploying creative methods of reaching out to fellow students with the message that innovation and entrepreneurship are happening activities on campus. We first learned of the […]

Sparking Entrepreneurship at UC Davis

On Monday October 8, 44 students and 2 professors came together for the first ever Engineering and Technology Entrepreneurship Club (E-TEC) general meeting at UC Davis. Freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and graduate students from all engineering disciplines on campus were represented. Students from chemistry, biology, and business also attended the meeting. The event consisted of […]

How to Pick Great Speakers

Who better to tell our Student Ambassadors how to pick great speakers than Matt Harvey of Stanford Technology Ventures Program. As Content and Communications Director at Stanford, Matt is responsible for finding some of the great speakers who come talk to Stanford engineers within the Entrepreneurial Lecture Series class. Most of these talks are made […]

Epicenter Retreat, Sierra Camp at Lake Tahoe

NCIIA Staff are together with Stanford partners at the Epicenter Retreat where close to 75 Engineering Deans, Faculty and Administrators are engaging in an ‘Unconference’. Participant tweets reveal teams engaging in prototyping, discussion of online courses and more. Tune in to the hashtag #epiretreat for more.

Former Student Entrepreneur, Eben Bayer, at Clinton Global Initiative

We first met Eben Bayer and his business partner Gavin McIntyre in 2007 when the team applied for an NCIIA E-Team grant of $20,000 to take their initial prototype out of their dorm room. For those who haven’t heard the Ecovative Design story, the team grew mushrooms under their dorm-room bed where they thrive … […]

2011 Student Ambassador Featured in New York Times (Print Edition)

“The Theil Fellows, Forgoing College to Pursue Dreams,” reads the front page of the  of the New York Times. Reporter Caitlin Kelly writes on September 15, 2012 about Eden Full’s pursuit to commercialize her low cost solar device while on paid leave from Princeton. Eden first trial of her high school invention was in Kenya […]