New York Institute of Technology Featured in Groundbreaking Strategy Book
May 8, 2019
New York Institute of Technology’s work in increasing the opportunities for students to participate in innovation and entrepreneurship activities is being highlighted this month in a new book. Strategic Doing: 10 Skills for Agile Leadership shows leaders how to adopt a new approach to strategy and complex collaboration in open, loosely connected networks.
New York Institute of Technology was a participant in the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter) program. Three of the book’s authors from Purdue University’s Agile Strategy Lab worked with teams from 50 universities, helping them learn and use the Strategic Doing approach. The book discusses the success of the participating schools, noting that they launched more than 500 new entrepreneurship and innovation-related activities and programs using the principles.
The primary project outcome from New York Institute of Technology’s participation in Epicenter, which began in 2015, is a new interdisciplinary course offering, known as the Viscardi Industry Project, combining technology and project-based learning to support people with disabilities. The course was created in conjunction with the Viscardi Center, a network of nonprofit organizations, including the Henry Viscardi School, a model school for children with severe physical disabilities.
The university has developed an active working partnership with the Viscardi School and a new approach to multidisciplinary, high impact STEAM education that leverages New York Tech’s unique technological and entrepreneurial expertise while benefiting the local community.
In a fall 2015 project, New York Tech digital art and design, engineering, and management students created a driving simulator for a power wheelchair, a cooking video game, and a wireless remote to help disabled children and adults. In spring 2017, students from various disciplines collaborated on the creation of an entirely different set of products, including an educational board game and a web application to help persons with disabilities learn to code. Currently, university students in the Digital Art & Design and Communication Arts departments, as part of a service-learning course, are fully producing a short format film (Ready for Take-Off) about Viscardi students taking a JetBlue flight, as a means of advocating on behalf of people with disabilities. Professor Terry Nauheim, who has served as relationship manager between NYIT and Viscardi and is executive producer of Ready for Take-Off, describes the course's evolution: “In our third course offering, we have refined the experience to focus on community collaboration, working towards a single team project (in this case, a documentary film), with all student and faculty participants adding unique value while also experiencing first-hand a professional digital film production. New York Tech and Viscardi students have ownership in the film, as makers and as advocates on behalf of all people with disabilities.”
“New York Institute of Technology is a school for makers, doers, and innovators who are ready to change the world. Entrepreneurship is part of our institutional DNA, and the synergies with the Epicenter program and ‘strategic doing’ are tremendous,” said the university’s Epicenter principal investigator, Nada M. Anid, Ph.D., vice president for Strategic Communications and External Affairs and the former dean of NYIT School of Engineering and Computing Sciences.
Co-author Liz Nilsen praised NYIT’s work in the program. “It’s been remarkable how much great work has happened over just a few short years. These kinds of programs benefit the entire region, helping it build a reputation as a place where creative ideas are welcomed and nurtured.”
In Strategic Doing: 10 Skills for Agile Leadership, the authors introduce readers to a new way of designing and guiding complex collaborations by following a discipline of simple rules. Additional case studies from business, workforce development, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations illustrate the use of Strategic Doing as the foundation for a new way of doing business that leads to success. World-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma contributed the foreword to the book, saying, “I’ve been waiting for this book all my life. …Strategic Doing is precisely what we need at this moment. In a fast-changing world, filled with disruption, with institutions not equipped to absorb or deal with the pace of change, here is a way of thinking and acting – an agile strategy that makes collaboration take place at the necessary speed for social good.”
The Epicenter program was funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by Stanford University and VentureWell.
Contact Liz Nilsen at the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab (enilsen@purdue.edu) or 412.953.2693 for media inquiries about the book. Visit the links below for more information on the book, Strategic Doing, and the Agile Strategy Lab:
About New York Institute of Technology
New York Institute of Technology offers 90 undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs in more than 50 fields of study, including computer science, data, and cybersecurity; biology and biomedical studies; architecture and design; engineering; health professions and medicine; IT and digital technologies; management; communications and marketing; education and counseling; and energy and sustainability. A nonprofit, independent, private, and nonsectarian institute of higher education, New York Institute of Technology welcomes nearly 8,000 students worldwide. The university has campuses in New York City (Manhattan) and Long Island (Old Westbury), New York; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as programs around the world.
New York Institute of Technology embraces its mission to provide career-oriented professional education, give all qualified students access to opportunity, and support research and scholarship that benefit the larger world. More than 107,000 alumni comprise an engaged network of doers, makers, and innovators prepared to change the world, solve 21st-century challenges, and reinvent the future.
Media Contact
Elizabeth Sullivan
libbys@nyit.edu