Innovation projects offer great opportunities for resume building, professional experience, and solving real problems facing UW students. Here are some considerations to ensure that your project will have the impact that you are looking for.
On this page:
Setting Expectations
Prototypes vs. Products
Project Pathways
Considerations for Successful, Responsible Innovation
Common Risks and Mitigation Tips
Setting Expectations
Innovation is largely about risk, failure, and —most importantly— learning something new. Innovation isn’t about cashing in on your first idea. It is about rapidly developing your solution ideas to the point that you can evaluate them and determine what needs improvement. From there, you learn how to grow, adjust, or pivot to make further investment less risky.
Success doesn’t mean launching a new product. Many ideas will hit a dead end. This isn’t failure. The knowledge and experience that you gain from understanding a problem space, identifying a promising solution idea, developing the idea to the point that you can test it, and assessing the feedback you get for insights is invaluable. It is a unique opportunity that showcases self-motivation, ingenuity, and enterprise to future employers and collaborators. Additionally, other work can build from insights gleaned from abandoned ideas and projects.
Innovation and problem solving thrives on intentionality and purpose. Take time upfront to understand what you are trying to accomplish, both for yourself and your intended audience. This clarity makes your life much easier, serving as the basis for decision making throughout your project and as a confident narrative when talking about your project to others, including collaborators and potential investors.
Collaboration can take your project to a new level. Great ideas seldom come from isolation. Look around you. As a student at the UW, you are surrounded by some of the most passionate and talented people in the world. Find folks interested in working with you to find problems and explore solutions.
Prototypes vs. Products
It is important to take time to acknowledge your goal and motivations with your project. This starts with determining whether your next step is to build a prototype or a product.
The role of UW-IT’s Student Innovation Lab is to encourage students to explore and prototype innovative solutions that improve the UW experience. We emphasize prototyping, as this should be the starting point of any innovation project or potential solution.
Prototypes are artifacts created for experimentation, testing, and validation. They are not intended for real-world production use or deployment, but help you illustrate and evaluate your idea before investing in full-scale development. Additionally, prototypes allow you to illustrate solutions without the risk of violating official UW policy. Once you have a strong prototype, you can use it to convince others to invest in your idea.
Prototypes are not products.
Products are fully developed and made available to users, either for free or for a fee. As such, they require you to take on more responsibility and risk for safety, compliance, and —in the UW space— institutional oversight. Products in the UW space must comply with UW policies on IP, data use, trademarks, security, etc. and may require formal UW review, approval, or coordination with UW units, even if “unofficial” or low-scale.
Additionally, products are typically far more complex, making them costly to develop and maintain, and more difficult to change in response to feedback. In this way, you tend to lock yourself into your first idea when you skip prototyping, rather than test and iterate until you land on the best idea.
Figuring out your next steps
As you think this through for your project, we can help. Email us if you have any questions or feel free to schedule a consultation with SIL.
Project Pathways
Innovation projects aimed at improving the UW experience, including prototypes created with SIL resources, can take many different directions. SIL can help connect projects to the right pathways forward so your ideas continue to evolve, the outcomes meet your personal goals, and your projects are effective in their impact.
While every project is different, you want to be clear about what pathway you are on. As early as possible, ask yourself what you want the outcome of your project to be.
To get started, finish the following statement:
I am interested in…
While any innovation project can be, if approached in the right way, a wonderful learning experience for you, SIL can help you make decisions that will help you pick a project that will showcase the outcomes that you (or your future employers) are looking for and pick a process that will help you be efficient with your time and resources on your road to success.
SIL can help you:
- Identify the right problem to solve.
- Provide feedback on your idea or artifacts.
- Find potential collaborators.
- Use our tools to create realistic prototypes.
- Understand how to test your prototypes/ideas and iterate.
- Determine next steps.
If you have ideas to better support the UW experience, either through new products or adding features to existing UW services, then this pathway is for you! SIL can help you determine the right approach to deliver the outcomes you want and to develop your ideas into clear recommendations that can be delivered to the UW units responsible.
This pathway is about gaining professional experience and handing your ideas off. At the end, you will have a great project for your portfolio and/or GitHub repo and will have handed your work off to UW service teams to consider in their future work. Additionally, you can submit your work to be considered for addition to our Community Project Showcase.
If you are hoping to retain your IP, SIL will happily advise you on other pathways that support this, as well as identify potential issues that you may run up against. Sometimes this is just a matter of shifting your focus on problems facing higher education in general, rather than solving problems specific to the UW.
SIL can help you:
- Find potential collaborators.
- Identify the right problem to solve.
- Understand and navigate the relevant guidelines, policies, constraints, risk, ethics, and other complexities in this space.
- Provide feedback on your idea or artifacts.
- Use our tools to create realistic prototypes.
- Understand how to test your prototypes/ideas and iterate.
- Determine next steps.
This pathway is about YOU owning your IP, so that you can try to profit from your idea or implement it yourself, taking the responsibility for running, maintaining, and growing the service. While this sounds nice, it is by far the most difficult pathway.
Keep in mind that the UW is a unique, idiosyncratic environment with a limited customer base and very little opportunity to profit. When students create products in this space, they are seldom sustainable after the students graduate and move on. This creates problems for the UW community members who use the no longer maintained product. We know this first-hand, as we usually end up cleaning up the mess.
We don’t say this to discourage you, but rather to ensure that you enter into this laborious path with clarity.
If you really want to follow an entrepreneurial path, we welcome the conversation and are happy to support you in any way we can.
While we aren’t experts in starting a business, SIL can still help you clarify, develop, validate, and iterate your ideas. We can provide feedback to help you focus on compelling problems, follow an efficient and effective process, and tighten up your pitch to attract collaborators and potential investors.
When you are ready to create a product or develop your business, we can connect you to other UW units, groups and collaborators who can help you move your project forward.
Considerations for Successful, Responsible Innovation
The User-Centered Design process provides a good framework for creating successful solutions that provide clear value to end users.
Regardless of where you are in your innovation process, SIL is here to help.
For any project, you will need to think about…
- What problem are you trying to solve? How is this problem significant and relevant to your target audience?
- Are you sure that you are trying to solve the right problem? Have you validated the problem with potential users? Is it possible to simplify the problem and still provide value to your users and stakeholders?
- Who are the primary users or beneficiaries of your project? What goals do they have for your proposed solution?
- Who are the primary stakeholders in the space? How might you provide value that they would recognize?
- Who else is trying to provide value in this space? What is the ecosystem in which you are working within? What implications might this have on your solution?
- What does success look like for you? What project pathway will achieve your personal goals for the project? What value do you want to provide to others?
- What different ways might you provide value in the problem space?
- What is the simplest solution that would provide value to users and stakeholders?
- How might you avoid unnecessary complexity that adds risk or cost?
- How do you expect your solution to work within the larger ecosystem? Where might you be unintentionally competing with existing systems? How might you leverage existing systems?
- What policies, laws, or guidelines might be applicable to your work?
- Have you identified the resources you need (technical tools, mentorship, funding)? How do you plan to secure these?
- Are you aware of UW resources and support available to students?
- What are the technical risks (security, scalability, maintenance)?
- What are the legal and compliance risks? See policy resources and risk and mitigation tips.
- Will your project collect any personal or student data?
- Is the data absolutely necessary? Are you providing the user with enough value to justify collecting it? Remember that you are responsible for the data you collect.
- Are you aware of UW policies regarding data privacy and student data?
- How will you obtain informed consent from users if collecting data?
- How will you secure the data you collect?
- What are the risks if data is breached or misused? See risks and mitigation tips.
- Have you considered the ethical implications of your project? What harm could it potentially cause users?
- How will you mitigate these risks?
Figuring out your next steps
As you think this through for your project, we can help. Email us if you have any questions and feel free to schedule a consultation with SIL. We would love to think through these questions with you.
Common Risks and Mitigation Strategies
When creating products using UW resources, using UW data, and/or focused on UW audiences, you will need to understand your risks and responsibilities.
Here are a few of the most common that you need to be aware of:
Risk: Misuse of UW resources, computing infrastructure, networks, or institutional data can lead to disciplinary action.
Mitigation:
- Make sure to get the necessary approvals or data access permissions before using institutional data and resources.
- Make sure you have read, understand, and follow any relevant UW policies.
- Use authorized UW platforms for hosting or deploying projects involving sensitive data.
Risk: It is possible that IP created at the UW will not 100% belong to you.
Mitigation:
- If you intend to retain ownership of your IP, then understand IP ownership policies at the UW and how they specifically relate to your work.
Risk: Registration is a problem that many students would like to improve, but it has very clear policies around it (e.g. UW’s Registration Tampering Policy). If you break these policies or encourage/enable others to break these policies, you will be held accountable.
Mitigation:
- Make sure you have read, understand, and follow any relevant UW Registration policies.
- Avoid creating or using automated tools or services that interact with UW’s registration system, unless you have explicit permission.
- Prototyping —using HuskyFetch or some other mock data source— to explore and validate an idea you have in the registration space is fine, as long as it is EXTREMELY clear to users and others that your prototype is not an actual registration tool.
Risk: Collecting more personal or sensitive data than needed can increase privacy and security concerns.
Mitigation:
- Collect only the data that’s really needed for your project to work.
- Use anonymized data when possible.
Risk: Unauthorized access or data breaches can compromise privacy and may violate UW policies.
Mitigation:
- Implement strong access controls and restrict data access to only those who need it.
- Use encryption methods for storing / transmitting data.
Risk: Handling institutional data without following UW and FERPA policies can lead to disciplinary action.
Mitigation:
- Take time to review FERPA guidelines before working with student educational or personal records.
- Consider using the HuskyFetch API for prototyping to reduce FERPA-related risks.
Risk: Not reporting a suspected data breach or unauthorized disclosure promptly can lead to much bigger issues.
Mitigation:
- If you suspect a data breach or unauthorized access, report it to the UW Privacy Office immediately.