Collaborations

With TCU Courses and Academic Programs:

Neeley Leadership Program (Neeley School of Business). IdeaFactory leaders partnered with juniors in the Neeley Leadership Program. The purpose was to teach human centered design frameworks that allowed students to scope their impact projects and ensure that their work is centered on understanding the problem they are working on and who they are solving for.

“Dr. Grau and her team are great! We (the BNSF Neeley Leadership Program) have partnered with the IdeaFactory to help students ramp up their impact projects for several years and the results have been easy to see. Students learn valuable frameworks and get intense coaching that pushes them toward a deep understanding of stakeholders’ interests, which in turn drives stronger and more innovative projects. Moreover, the lessons that students learn apply well beyond the classroom. When they get a complex, messy problem later in their careers, they’ll have the tools and confidence to dive in and lead a team toward a viable solution.” – Dr. Brad Harris, Associate Professor of Management, Neeley School of Business and Academic Director, Neeley Leadership Program

Public Communicators Certification (Strategic Communication). IdeaFactory leaders conduct a workshop called “Innovating in the Public Sector: An introduction to human centered design.” We have given this workshop for each cohort usually during the summer during their on campus experience.

“Our CPC professionals understand the need to innovate and pilot ideas for communication and engagement with their communities, and that is why design thinking and human-centered design are important concepts for them.” – Jacque Lambiase, Professor of Strategic Communication and Founder TCU Certified Professional Communications program

Chancellor’s Leadership Program (Student Development Services). IdeaFactory leaders have worked with juniors in the Chancellor’s Leadership Program (CLP) to provide tools and frameworks for them to use as they develop their legacy projects.

“I have had the incredible opportunity to work with the IdeaFactory’s remarkable team of Stacy and Cedric on a handful of different occasions, some of which were focused on students ideating about projects creating social change, while others were focused on looking at ways to rethink process and structure in the services we provide our students at TCU.  The IdeaFactory’s team truly has the best interest of any group they work with at heart, providing wise council, engaging opportunities to challenge previously known ways of doing things, and working alongside to ensure that any innovation vision has the ability to be addressed.  They care deeply about the success of any individual and team that they work with and believe that creativity is best done collaboratively.  The expertise and communication style of the IdeaFactory team allows anyone that works with them to visualize a positive image of the future, no matter the topic or focus for innovation!” – Dede Williams, Director of Student Organizations/ Learning & Development

College Advising Corps (CAC).  IdeaFactory participates in the summer training for all new and returning college advisers. In 2021, as part of a huge increase in the number of advisers, we launched life design for college advisers to help them determine their own career direction. Additionally, we are partnering with CAC for the Sophomore Project. The goal is to design tools aimed at high school freshman and sophomores to help them determine their college interests. This is part of a larger ongoing research project to enrich advisers’ toolkits. We use human centered design to develop the toolkit.

PLR Leadership Program (Human Resources). In 2021, we will be working with faculty and staff who are participating in the PLR program. We will be presenting a three-part series on Designing Your Work, that is geared to helping people design the best options to maximize success, happiness, engagement, energy and balance.

TCU School of Medicine. Starting in 2021, the IdeaFactory will be working with the TCU School of Medicine to embed human-centered design into their community projects for third year medical students. This is multiple year project.

TCU Student Support Services. We believe story telling is an attainable skill. A partnership between Idea Factory and TCU Student Support Services has given many students an opportunity to participate in our public communication workshops. Students were taught to share their ideas confidently and clearly, speak up and ask questions, introduce and interact with potential employers with poise, communicate value with impact and how to present effectively using PowerPoint presentations, More importantly, students learned the mindset of a great communicator.

Catalyst by Rogue H20. IdeaFactory has provided workshops for this annual convening of water communication professionals around the world. In the summer 2020, the workshop centered on an introduction to human centered design and how to innovate during times of uncertainty. In summer 2021, the program was focused on the communicators – and we developed a new workshop on how they can use human centered design frameworks to design their idea work life.

“I’m a huge design thinking fan, so when I learned that there was a guide to translate this into my work life I was pumped. Stacy asked some powerful questions that really forced us to dig deep. I think this was absolutely essential coming out of a global pandemic, but it will be a game changer to have these tools moving forward.”  Stephanie Corso, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director Rogue Water Lab; Co-Founder Catalyst; Co-Host of the Water in Real Life podcast

Grow Southeast

TCU Student Organizations. When Dede Williams took her new job as the leader for student organizations, she visited with IdeaFactory to get a good idea of how to proceed forward. We spent a few hours working through a journey map to help identify pain points for student leaders and developed ideas to assist them as they take leadership of student organizations.

TCU Student Development Services (SDS). The 2020 year was certainly challenging for TCU students. As they worked to keep up and succeed in classes, they were also trying to find connection to each other and the campus overall. The team at SDS worked with IdeaFactory to tackle two areas – how they could great opportunities for greater student engagement and how also how to work together to leverage the talents for their entire team. We spent a few hours working through both challenges by designing personas and journey maps for each program and identifying areas of collaboration. The afternoon was spent with tools for team building.