Case Study: The Journey of the UIF Program at Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science

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Fellow Shivanika Shah interviewed Fellows and faculty at Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science to better understand the impact of the University Innovation Fellows program at their school.

By Shivanika Shah, Fellow, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Noida

The journey of the University Innovation Fellows in Andhra Pradesh, India was ignited by 6 inspiring students from one of the esteemed colleges of India: Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science (MITS). These students, the first Fellows at MITS, worked passionately towards developing a community and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in their ecosystem. With their continuous efforts and zeal they were successful in creating an impact on their campus.

Before and after the UIF program at MITS

Before participating in the UIF program, students at MITS weren’t fully aware of the resources and the various opportunities they had at their campus. They stayed divided in their own comfort zones, not interacting with other students of different years and departments, nor with faculties and administration. Students didn’t know whom to contact for their ideas, growth and development and thus struggled for opportunities outside their campuses. 

But, now with the onset of UIF program at MITS, the Fellows have successfully created a learning community in which the students of all fields, years and backgrounds are invited and build products and solutions for the real life problems. The students are guided and encouraged by the faculties and management. The system has now been channelized by the Fellows and faculty champion through community development, interactions and now an online platform.

The changes can be seen in the selection of candidates for the UIF program too. Earlier, the fellows were selected on the basis of their past achievements. Now UIF candidates are all selected by clearing all the screening rounds by the faculties, management, and the MITS UIF team, giving equal opportunity to everyone to showcase their skills.

Transformation in relations 

Initially, the students didn’t interact much among themselves, with the faculty or the management. The Fellows brought the necessary transformation into these relations by building a campus that has a student-friendly culture. Management and faculty are now more sensitive to the needs of students. They cite UIF workshops, student-faculty interactions and regular stakeholder meetings as the key events which brought the transformation. 

The changes didn’t happen overnight, but rather over a period of time with the sustained efforts of the MITS UIF team. Vijaya Lakshmi, the faculty champion of the MITS Fellows said, “It wasn’t a revolution but an evolution in which slowly and gradually the barriers were reduced among students and faculties for which 1st batch students worked very hard. hey still provide support and guidance to the future batch of fellows and are always available.”

Now, the MITS Fellows have built an online platform to further encourage students to interact and collaborate with any of their peers and faculties for their development, growth, innovative and entrepreneurial projects and ideas.

The first cohort of University Innovation Fellows at MITS: Priyanka Bonthala, Sindhu Bhonsley, Charan Sai Pala, Sameer Ahmed M N, Anitha Narnavaram and Sai Kiran Kumar Reddy Y

Changes the UIF program brought in the MITS campus ecosystem

  • Improved relations among students and between faculties and students
  • Inclusion of more innovative and creative ecosystem
  • Platform for interaction with like minded people of diverse fields
  • Involvement of students in decision making
  • Onset of interdisciplinary events and projects
  • Building of a makerspace
  • Development of student friendly ecosystem
  • Focus on Entrepreneurship
  • Focus on product development and problem solving.
  • Commencement of Design Thinking course as an open elective.
  • Online platform for learning and collaborations.
  • Making students ready for professionalism and way of working of corporate sectors
  • Increase in campus activities and reduced dependency on outside organizations
  • Channelized and systematic ecosystem

Future goals and plans for making the UIF program sustainable at MITS campus

The MITS Fellows Team is looking forward to continuing to select students as future UIF candidates for the program. They plan to include a “Design Thinking” course as an open elective in their curriculum and have designed the syllabus and textbook for the same. They aim to spread and share this knowledge to every student of their campus and then to the entire community and world!

Experiences of the MITS Fellows team

Vijaya Lakshmi, the faculty champion of the MITS Fellows said, “The UIF program and especially the UIF Silicon Valley Meetup gave the students the inspiration and the confidence to participate in other programs. Three students were selected in ASIA Pacific Innovation Academy program and are currently undergoing three weeks onsite training. Amazing impact can be seen in every Fellow’s personal life and the impact is positively contagious.”

Fellow Preethi said, “We have seen students overcoming their own limitations and do wonders. They feel the UIF program is not only for fellows but it’s theirs too.”

“We as Fellows act as bridges between the students and faculties.” said Fellow Hema. “Students now know whom to contact for their ideas and problems and are fully aware of all the resources they have at MITS.”

The Fellows themselves have experienced impacts in their lives. Hema said, “I have realized the importance of teamwork and in general can see the increasing graph of development everyday at my campus.”

Preethi remembers the time when she was selected as a Fellow and had to face intriguing questions. She shared, “My peers asked me, why have I been selected as a Fellow? What have I done? I didn’t have any answer at that time. I worked and fulfilled all my responsibilities as a Fellow. Later, after one of the workshops I conducted, my friends came up to me and said that I am the right candidate for being a Fellow. I guess, being a Fellow you don’t need some extraordinary skills, but it’s all about empathy. I am glad to be selected as a Fellow and interact with so many amazing people out there.”

Indian Fellows in the Global Spotlight

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Fellows from India have conducted design thinking workshops at several large global conferences. JSSATE Fellow Shivanika Shah shares reflections from several of those events.

By Shivanika Shah, Fellow, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Noida

The UIF program welcomed its first Fellows from India in Fall 2016, thanks to an international initiative supported by Google. Since that time, more than 300 Fellows from 40 institutions in India have joined the program. 

Fellows have been very active at their universities, holding workshops, creating organizations, and honing their facilitation skills. In 2017 and 2018, the UIF program team invited several groups of Fellows to help conduct design thinking workshops at large global conferences. Below are reflections on just a few of these events.

Google Developer Days, Bangalore

Google Developer Day events are web developer-focused gatherings around the world held annually by Google. They include seminars and codelabs focused on building of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, HTML5, Chrome, App Engine, Google Web Toolkit. These events give participants an excellent chance to learn about Google developer products as well as meet the engineers who work on them. 

“This was the largest conference I’ve been to and it certainly didn’t disappoint!” said Fellow Asher John Sathya at CMR Institute of Technology.

Google conducted the GDD event on 1-2 December, 2017, in Bangalore, India. At the event, 16 Fellows conducted a design thinking workshop with the UIF Team. In order to take part in this opportunity, Fellows completed a challenge set by the UIF program to conduct a series of design thinking workshops at their own schools.

Attendees showed an amazing level of excitement and interest for the event. “I still remember that the seating capacity in the hall was for 120 and we had the longest queue of about 400 candidates waiting in advance to attend our workshop,” said Priyanka Srivastava, a Fellow at CMR Institute of Technology.

In addition to students, many tech enthusiasts and professionals were part of the 3-hour-long workshop.

At the end of the day, Fellows learned, networked and collaborated with tech professionals of various different companies and domains. 

“We acted as knowledge transfers to the working professionals.” said Fellow Siddhartha Mondreti of Godavari Institute of Engineering and Technology. “The most exciting part was that we learned tech opportunities from them and we gave them design thinking skills.”

The Fellows made the best use of this opportunity to create an impact.

“There are many people who are using design thinking as a part of their daily lives in different ways,” said Suchitra Nidiginti, a Fellow at Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science. “After the workshop when all the participants in my team came and shared that his workshop had taught them different ways to implement design thinking, I felt happy.”

“Conducting a workshop for the experienced attendees was the hardest part,” said Fellow Sameer Ahmed M N of Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science. “But after conducting the workshop, I learned that it’s not about age. Everything depends upon the worth of knowledge that you are sharing and the energy of positivity that you are passing on with confidence. Then everyone will be ready to accept what you are sharing with keen observation.”

“I feel that design thinking will surely help them in their fields, because in programming it’s 90% design and 10% coding,” said Fellow Sai Kiran of Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science.

Developer Students Club Summit, Goa

Google India conducted the Developer Students Club summit for the first time February 23-25, 2018, in Goa. The goals of the event were to broaden access to world-class technology curricula for students and to make it easy for students and developers to gain the skills they need to be successful in the changing technology landscape.  

The attendees learned about various emerging technologies through a series of engaging sessions from experts from Google and industry as well as through one-to-one mentoring activities.

11 Indian Fellows had the opportunity to conduct a 4-hour design thinking workshop with UIF team member Ghanashyam S in Goa as part of the event. The workshop participants were 200 students from 98 cities across 170 colleges in India. 

During the workshop, attendees collaborated with a wide range of professionals from industries such as retail, travel, fitness, music, body art, and shipbuilding. The participants used design thinking on real life problems and designed multiple, scalable and reliable solutions for the professionals. 

“In my team, they were trying to solve the problem of a musician who’s passionate about passing on his knowledge in music to others,” said Sai Kiran, a Fellow at Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science (MITS). “He was not able to find ways of doing so. He said that teaching music to others is what makes him happy.”

“My team interacted with a gym instructor whose major problem is advertising,” said MITS Fellow Suchitra Nidiginti. “The solutions for the same ranged from giving free gifts to customers developing an app for the gym. Students felt very happy when they figured out solutions to a problem.”

In general, the Fellows had a great experience conducting the design thinking workshop. It was a unique opportunity for the Fellows to learn, collaborate and create impact.

“As we are dealing with the actual problem solvers, the thing we have to do is to show them the path to find the best possible solution. From that point, the ball will be in their court, said Fellow Sameer Ahmed M N of MITS. “Teaching that proper and effective connection to bridge the gap taught me how to understand the recipients’ requirements and to model the teaching methodology.”

“I was thrilled and super excited by the idea that people use coding to make a difference in the lives of others,” said Sai Kiran.

Fellow Priyanka Srivastava was impressed with participants’ desire to tackle and solve real world problems. “The feedback I got from the attendees at the end of the workshop was that his is an  innovative approach, and an interesting and interactive way of prototyping for real world problems.”

Deshpande Foundation, Hubballi

Indian University Innovation Fellows had a chance to facilitate a design thinking workshop in the prestigious Deshpande Foundation’s Development Dialogue on the 3rd and 4th February, 2018 at Hubballi, Karnataka.

Development Dialogue is an international social entrepreneurship ecosystem conference that brings together numerous social entrepreneurs as well as those who believe in and are involved in creating ecosystems to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship. The conference is attended by participants from for-profits, global visionaries, impact investors as well as local communities to share proven models, innovations, and transforming perspectives.

The Fellows held 5 sessions, each 2 hours long, for diverse groups of people like leaders of the Deshpande Foundation, participants of conference and students from various organizations.

“I facilitated for groups of 6 to 22 students!” said Fellow Asher John Sathya. “Each group was unique. There were groups of college students, high school students and other groups had members from the various programs run by the foundation.” 

The Fellows familiarized attendees with the design thinking and then asked them to apply the methodology to the various problems they face in their daily lives.

“Students came up with different problems like communication, stage fear, pollution, lacking practical knowledge, smart village, etc. They came up with crazy solutions to the problems they defined,” said Fellow Sindhu Bhonsley. 

The Fellows faced the challenge of communication as a barrier while interacting with the attendees, as some of them spoke local languages which Fellows weren’t fluent in. But being the true Fellows, they didn’t stop; they adjusted and collaborated with the attendees and made the event a success.

“I was able to explain to them in Telugu and Hindi very well, but my Kannada was not that fluent. Somehow I managed to explain them in Kannada and they helped me to explain to them in their language.” said Sindhu Bhonsley.

At the end, the event was a success and Fellows experienced both a challenging and life changing event.

“This event is one that has totally changed the way that I look at people and the way I think,” said Kollu Nishkala. “This is a place where I met students from different educational backgrounds. There were some students among them who can not even understand what others speak due to lack of basic communication skills and lack of basic knowledge on things. After this event, I have started going to some government schools in my locality and started interacting with students and teaching some spoken English and technical classes.”

“Though it was a bit difficult to conduct workshop for almost 80 students for each session, I got inspired by their energy levels. They were very happy about the workshop and most of them said that they have come out with great insights and learnings related to leadership. Overall it helped me connect with the people’s problems and get to know more about the issues they are facing in their lives,” said Anitha Narnavaram.

“Facilitating design thinking is always a fun learning for both the facilitators and also for the participants because it always makes us to learn how to deal with many different types of people. We received a good feedback from the attendees who participated in the workshop we could also see the zeal in them to learn more about design thinking,” said Sindhu Bhonsley.

Design Constraint Yields New Global Event

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By Katie Dzugan

When we hold the Silicon Valley Meetup in California every year, we invite a huge number of people: 250+ Fellows, 24 FABs (UIF leaders/support), 20-30 faculty champions, speakers, special guests and more. Due to space constraints at the d.school and at Google, we’re limited to 300 people. Fitting all of these people in one building for an event has been one of our biggest design constraints in the program.

Then, in the last year and a half, we began to have a surge of interest in the program from schools in India. Thanks to funding from Google, since Fall 2016, we’ve welcomed 226 students from 40 institutions in India. With the addition of this amazing community (the largest global population of Fellows), we quickly began to far exceed our capacity at Silicon Valley Meetup. The cost and requirements of traveling from India to California were also proving challenging for many of the students.

This design constraint encouraged our team to get creative in hosting this event. It led us to develop a hypothesis — let’s bring the Meetup to the other side of the globe!

We tested this with the first ever Eastern Hemisphere Meetup in Bengaluru, India, on May 4-6, 2018. 55 Fellows from India and Australia joined us for the in-person, 3-day event.

The purpose of the Meetup is to solidify the mission of the students who are passionate about changing higher education and creating learning opportunities for their peers. This event connects Fellows with change agents across the globe – to see these people; to meet them; to learn from them. It strengthens their confidence that they are the dreamers and doers who can make a difference in the world. Gathering in person confirms the network of support that they access online throughout the year and creates a whole new level of relationship with the Fellows in attendance.

Fellows take part in a team building activity during the Eastern Hemisphere Meetup.

To accomplish this in India, we made plans to hold the event at CoWrks in Bengaluru, the largest co-working space in Southeast Asia, and at Google India. These two spaces, plus the people who run them, were our first of many affirmations that replicating the Meetup would work because the people and spaces, much like the d.school, exist in all areas of our world. You just need to find them.

Fellows share their reactions to an activity at the beginning of the event.

We built the first evening, on May 4, around creating social relationships and connections. Even when all participants are attending the same event and are part of the same program, it does not mean each person is there for the same reason. We opened up the evening with progressive introductions for the Fellows, faculty, and team members who were registered. This introduction method is a rapid way to get participants mingling with everyone in the room. We then moved on to team-building, which to us means that we split up into four groups and created a team dance.

The following days included sessions about different approaches to thinking and how to utilize them; using space as a learning tool to enhance learning environments; teaching design thinking to others in teams or small groups; and a series of ignite talks from FABs.

Fabs, experienced Fellows who helped run the event, gave talks to attendees.

“We take great care in making activities and examples relevant to Fellows — and their countries — through the challenges and examples we propose,” said Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, co-director of the UIF program, about the design of the overall event. “We really talk to the students about the issues they are facing; we read and listen to the news, and really pay attention to what is going on in the world around these students. It’s not about copying the Silicon Valley Meetup; it’s about making it unique to the students in India.”

The three days were also designed to incorporate topics from the UIF online training — storytelling, design thinking, and more — in order for students to engage with the information in a new way, through an in-person facilitator. The participants also explored leadership through movement, participated in design challenges that represent issues across India, and listened to speakers who are experts in industry.

Fellows participate in a movement workshop.

By balancing design challenges, mini-sessions, and more, participants were able to discover new ways of learning. We also created an atmosphere for them to share their feelings, learnings and emotions. This helped them dig deep into learning experiences so they could design “sneaky lil’ experiments” to be implemented back at their schools.

Over the three intensive days, there were lots of discussions about how to support women in tech and engineering; how youth in India can have a greater impact; how to encourage students to be more creative and opportunistic; and how to help students think of themselves as the driving force for a new economy, one full of new industry, technology and startups.

Participants work on a challenge during the event.

The Fellows in attendance were hungry to learn. Some even traveled 39 hours by train to join us! Their passion was palpable as they worked to figure out ways to solve challenges at their schools and in the world. From our team’s perspective, it was exciting to work with the Fellows and faculty in-person; to watch them engage in the way we deliver a learning experience and understand how they can teach other students and faculty at their own schools in a similar way.

This event wasn’t only for the students. The Meetup also invites faculty champions to step into the shoes of the learner. It is our intention to have both the student and faculty perspective readily available throughout the event because it takes a partnership to create the long-lasting, deep-rooted institutional change that we’re seeking.

One activity focused on helping Fellows enhance their observation skills.

“It’s important for students to understand that it’s also hard for faculty to influence change on campus,” said Humera Fasihuddin, Co-Director of the UIF program. “Having faculty voices in the room helps students understand that this movement isn’t just about students asking for things or advocating for change. For faculty, it’s about truly listening to the appetite for change on campus through the student voice. Having that two way dialogue is really important here because it builds trust and develops those partnerships between students and faculty.”

Fellows brainstorm during an activity.

From a stressful design constraint came an event that benefitted not only the students and faculty in attendance, but our team as well. We learned that we are able to transport the learning experience, energy, team and connections with industry to the other side of the world.

It’s thrilling to see the economy changing for a new workforce, and we are excited to support the next generation of learners. We eagerly look forward to hosting the second annual Eastern Hemisphere Meetup!

 

Event organizers included UIF team members, guest facilitators and Fellows.

Photos by Avinash Daniel Films and Siddhartha Mondreti

Creating an Innovation Revolution in India

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Changemakers from schools across India came together in Bangalore to reimagine public higher education.

When our program partnered with Google’s India developer training initiative, we knew that this collaboration would mean multiple trips abroad to understand the higher education system there. We never could have imagined that this would lead to our team standing in Bangalore’s beautiful coworking space CoWrks, surrounded by students and faculty whose mission was to lob hundreds of paper airplanes directly at us.

It felt like a one-sided snowball fight, but this was actually an exercise to understand how iterating through many prototypes relates to a project’s success. Several program team members bravely stood in front of the firing line to determine which paper airplanes flew the required distance and which did not (direct body hits to judges were not encouraged, but not disqualified).

(Left) Attendees test their paper airplanes; (Right) teaching team members judge which airplanes pass the test.

The scene afterwards — paper airplanes swept into a pile, laughter from every corner of the room, teams of faculty and students high-fiving one another — looked more like a playground than a workshop. But this was not a conventional workshop, and these were not conventional participants. They are the faculty and students who are leading an innovation revolution in India’s higher education system.

The event took place in Bangalore, June 21-24, 2017, and combined a workshop for 45 higher education faculty and administrators, called the Teaching and Learning Studio, with a gathering of 55 University Innovation Fellows from across India. The teaching team was comprised of five University Innovation Fellows team members and four colleagues from Stanford’s d.school, the University of Maryland and Clemson University.

The workshop helped faculty understand design thinking and incorporate it into their teaching practices. To do this, they took part in a multi-day design challenge exploring the question ”How might we help women succeed in the technology workforce?” They interviewed local women who worked in technology fields, identified challenges and prototyped solutions. On the third day of the workshop, University Innovation Fellows joined the faculty, and the group took part in sessions on empathy, team building and collaborative campus projects. One evening also featured inspirational talks from young local entrepreneurs and several faculty and Fellows.

Our team was there to learn as much as to teach. Below are just a few insights from our experience.

When passionate students and faculty become allies to create change, amazing things can happen.

This has been a core belief of ours since we started this program five years ago, and it was definitely reaffirmed with this group. We observed some great strides in empathy work during the event, as students and faculty shared challenges and wishes during group discussions, and worked together on projects for their respective schools.

A team of Fellows and faculty members collaborate on a campus project.

Fellows in India have been working to improve the conditions needed to support innovation and entrepreneurship in higher education. The concept of students as change agents is fairly new in India, but Fellows have been encouraged by their campus leadership. They have met with success holding workshops, creating makerspaces, and working on projects such as enabling seamless wifi across their campuses.

Speaking from their experience as change agents, Fellows were asked to give faculty candid feedback about the factors that are impeding innovation, such as the little latitude students have in setting their own schedule, pursuing extra-curricular projects and choosing their own course of study. Students expressed that they feel as though they are between “a rock and a hard place” with pressure from their parents to focus on the highest marks, while hearing from industry that experience working with teams on real-world projects is a bare minimum necessity for entry-level employees. Yet, there’s little wiggle room in today’s constrained academic requirements to allow students to learn these much needed skills.

Fellows describe their challenges during an empathy exercise.

For their part, faculty were heartened to see that student initiative could support their own efforts of convincing campus leadership to embrace change. They spoke about the challenges of being a non-autonomous institution with governing bodies requiring adherence to curricular and academic guidelines.

In order to envision new possibilities, we have to challenge our assumptions and adopt an open mindset.

During the workshop, we heard several versions of this statement, including “to learn, you must unlearn,” and “you have to empty the glass before you fill it.” During their design challenge, faculty were asked to make explicit their assumptions connected to the challenge. They were then able to gather information to support or challenge those assumptions by interviewing women working in the tech field.

Faculty members list assumptions in the beginning of their design challenge.

This exercise shouldn’t be limited to design challenges; when we’re trying to solve a problem, especially as a team, it’s valuable to spend time identifying our assumptions about both the problem and the possible solutions. Doing so helps us empty our “glass” of all of our preconceived notions about what’s possible.

It’s also important to adopt an open mindset in order to explore new possibilities. One exercise we facilitated with this group to demonstrate this is “Yes, let’s!” We ask for group members to shout out actions, such as “Let’s do jumping jacks” or “Let’s lie down and look at the stars.” Then the group responds “Yes, let’s!” and role-plays whatever was proposed. This activity helps participants free themselves from judging and immediately rejecting anything that is new and unfamiliar. In order to innovate, it’s necessary to consider and explore novel possibilities even when they may seem outlandish at the beginning.

Faculty members take part in the “Yes, let’s!” role-playing activity.

A community of like-minded peers is an immensely valuable resource.

As our program continues to expand to new schools and countries, we’ve come across a huge variety of challenges on each campus that require unique and innovative solutions. However, the one thing that all of these schools share is a few (or more!) passionate students and faculty who are dedicated to improving their schools and helping others.

Fellows and faculty take part in a tournament-style “Rock, Paper, Scissors” competition.

Members of our UIF community have reported that a key ingredient for success has been belonging to a community of like-minded peers on their campus. Strong allies have the potential to become collaborators, mentors, champions and resource providers. These allies can be both faculty and students, and can come from places including outside their home department and even their schools.

When you find your community, keep one another motivated and inspired, celebrate one another’s successes, and help one another learn from failures. As Fellow Sai Karan from MITS said in his talk during the workshop, “It’s not about getting inspired. It’s about staying inspired. How do you do that? You inspire others.”

There’s more than one way to throw a paper airplane.

Sure, you can pinch an airplane in between your thumb and forefinger, arc your arm back, and toss. Do you know about the two-handed fling? Many of the planes that passed the finish line were thrown like this….

Of course there’s a metaphor here. Even if we think we know how something is supposed to be done, there are always new ways, and there will always be people with new perspectives who can help us open up a world of possibilities.

– The UIF team

We are incredibly thankful to Google for giving us the opportunity to work with amazing change agents in India, and to CoWrks for providing their incredibly versatile space for our workshop and taking such good care of us and our participants.

(Left) The CoWrks event team; (Right) The workshop teaching team

Participating schools:
Alpha College of Engineering
Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC)
CMR Institute of Technology
Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering
Dhanekula Institute of Engineering and Technology
Galgotias College of Engineering and Technology
Galgotias University
Godavari Institute of Engineering and Technology
Google
IIIT – R K Valley
IIIT – Nuzvid
Institute of Management and Technology (IMT)
JNTUK
KKR & KSR Institute of Technology and Sciences
KLS Gogte Institute of Technology
Madanapalle Institute of Technology & Science
Malnad College of Engineering
Mount Carmel College
NMAM Institute of Technology
P.E.S. Institute of Technology (PESIT)
R V College of Engineering
RVR & JC College of Engineering
Sagi Rama Krishnam Raju Engineering College
Shri Shirdi Sai Institute of Science and Engineering
Siddharth Institute of Engineering and Technology
Sri Padmavathi Mahila Vishwavidyalaya
St. Mary’s Groups of Institutions
Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology
Visvesveraya Technological University

 

University Innovation Fellows Program Partners with Google on India Initiative

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By the UIF program team (Leticia, Humera, Katie and Laurie)

We are thrilled to share that the University Innovation Fellows program is partnering with Google on a new international initiative. Google India has committed to training 2 million mobile developers in India to meet the increasing pace of global technological innovation. At the Google University Summit in India, the University Innovation Fellows program was launched as one of the higher education efforts of this initiative.

The pace of technological innovation has been advancing at a historically unprecedented rate. In order for an economy to take advantage of this great potential, it needs to cultivate its citizens’ intellectual, technical and professional capacities. To support this substantial and game-changing economic impact, we must also cultivate and nurture the creative, innovative and entrepreneurial mindset of this emerging workforce.

To complement Google’s developer training initiative, our program’s goal as part of this initiative is to empower students in these countries as higher education change agents and equip them with the knowledge, skills and mindsets that will help them succeed in the workforce after graduation. Fellows in India will be tasked with creating educational opportunities to help their peers learn to be entrepreneurial, creative and innovative in addition to upskilling technical mobile development skills.

“Since we started this program in the U.S. in 2012, our campus partners have experienced significant benefits in collaborating with students to create lasting institutional change,” said Humera Fasihuddin, co-director of the University Innovation Fellows program. “We believe our partnership with Google will help us seed a similar innovation revolution in India.”

“By some estimates, India will overtake the United States in 2018 and become the largest developer population globally. But currently less than 25% of these developers are building for mobile, even though 65% of current internet users, and a majority of future internet users in India and other emerging markets around the world will access the internet only on their mobile phone,” said William Florance, Head of University Programs for Developer Training. “In addition to our faculty training efforts and recently announced Google Developers Codelabs, we are thrilled to help bring the University Innovation Fellows program to India. It is our belief the combination of these efforts can help prepare future mobile developers to become more creative and entrepreneurial in solving problems both locally and around the world.”

In early September, we accepted our first Indian cohort of 22 students from 10 schools. The UIF program team then visited India to better understand the challenges and opportunities in the higher education system there. We met with UIF candidates, their faculty sponsors, students and faculty at four school site visits. We were blown away by their passion and enthusiasm for this opportunity, and we’re excited to continue to collaborate with them. We accepted the second Indian cohort of 55 students from 14 schools in February 2017. This year, our India Fellows will visit the U.S. to attend the Silicon Valley Meetup, the program’s signature in-person event. We will continue to accept students from India with support from Google in our future application cycles.

In the next two years, we hope to reach more than 50 schools in India with the program. We are exploring new means of engagement including two upcoming events in Bangalore: a Regional Meetup for Fellows and their peers, and a Teaching and Learning Studio workshop for faculty and teaching staff.

“Cross-pollination and collaboration among students from different schools is at the core of our program’s success,” said UIF program co-director Leticia Britos Cavagnaro. “Thus, this initiative in partnership with Google will not only be a transformative opportunity for schools and students in India, but also for the schools and Fellows already participating in the program in the United States and beyond. It will be an unparalleled learning journey for all, and we are truly looking forward to making the most out of it.”