A five-course interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science concentration, Technology Entrepreneurship, is being developed. The concentration integrates the theories of computing, finance, health informatics, and entrepreneurship with their applications through the aid of industry support into a new discipline that focuses on knowledge transfer between the disciplinary domains and between theory and practice. Students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to design and develop innovative and imitative algorithms for competitive products, processes, or services in a technology oriented financial and health informatics related company or department. Additionally, student graduates are acquiring knowledge and skills in entrepreneurship and its application as well as the application of computing science and information systems theories and practices to other disciplines and industries such as business and healthcare.
Algorithmic solutions to real world financial and healthcare problems that could lead to beneficial discoveries are being developed by students working in teams and assisted by industry experts.
The project is allowing the expansion of computing application capabilities across disciplinary boundaries and the infusion of computing in finance and health sciences to help extend computing instructional focus. A unique blending of experiential learning and academic learning in an interdisciplinary computing setting using teamwork, cooperative education, and industry experts in the roles of mentors, project evaluators, and guest speakers represent the environment for the program.
under award number NSF 0942732, the four planned interdisciplinary courses (Technology Entrepreneurship, Financial Computing and Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurial Health Informatics, Modeling Financial Processes and Systems) were developed and offered to students with support and feedback from industry. The courses comprise elements of computing, entrepreneurship, finance or healthcare, and each had a project component. The two proposed goals for the project were met. They are (1) Students will acquire the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to design and develop innovative and imitative algorithms for competitive products, processes, or services in a technology oriented financial and health informatics related company or department and (2) Student graduates will acquire knowledge and skills in entrepreneurship and its application as well as the application of computing science and information systems theories and practices to other disciplines and industries such as business and healthcare. The Technology Entrepreneurship course was offered twice and other courses were offered once over the funding period. In terms of the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the project, computing students gained knowledge and skills in teamwork, innovation, entrepreneurship, business, finance, and healthcare and with computing applied these newly acquired competences to real problems in finance and healthcare to produce products/services, sometimes with business and other students. The students working in teams developed 15 innovative financial information technology and health informatics products/services supported with business plans. At least 40% of these products/services were considered to have market potential by the team mentors and external evaluators. Such products as the QR Code Bracelet and HospitalSafe have the potential to transform citizens’ access and use of their health information and resultantly improve the lives saved in medical emergency situations. Other broader impacts to date include five refereed papers, one workshop, and four refereed abstract presentations, plus one paper currently under review. Moreover, students’ retention, class performance, and feedback had been positive. In addition, the feedback from the mentors, guest lecturers, and external evaluators was positive, supportive, and informative. We expect that the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the courses developed under this project will take many years to become fully manifested in computing knowledge advancement and societal benefit from the students, faculty, university administrators, and industry personnel who participated in and were positively affected by the project.
