The goals of the Conference "Biomedical Engineering: Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Alliance" are to:
1) Collect additional data on the initial experiences of different university programs involved in innovation, design, technology transfer and entrepreneurship in biomedical engineering. 2) Discuss objectives, challenges, and opportunities for further development of these programs including industry and academic perspectives. 3) Continue to explore the potential for sharing resources and creating community-wide assets and tools and recruit participants in the existing collaborative efforts (e.g. portal, contest, IP survey)
The Intellectual Merit of the conference derives from the realization that much can be gained by bringing together faculty with innovation as their common goal. Much is to be shared in terms of approaches to courses, curriculum, funding, facilities, teaching resources and team-based learning. In hearing from industry, foundations and others in academia, participants develop a better perspective on where their students are headed, what needs to be done in preparation for them, and how others are meeting those needs in their environments. This collaborative conference focuses on Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship.
The Broader Impacts are in sharing the discoveries, resources and materials with a larger audience through publication on the BME-IDEA website (www.bme-idea.org). Also, attendees will take ideas back to their colleagues at the many universities represented at the conference. All past participants in BME-IDEA meetings are notified when new resources are made available on the website; thus any one BME-IDEA meeting can provide additional resources to faculty at over seventy universities. The final report of the meeting is to include a detailed outline of the plan to use the data being collected in attaining the Goals of the meeting.
