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Revision as of 22:20, 19 September 2011

Venture Design Engineering Laboratory conducts research on designing and sustaining ecosystems for innovation in less industrialized economies. Innovation ecosystems are environments where people from diverse cultural and professional backgrounds are enabled to work together to create new technology and business ventures that address societal needs.

We follow an approach of creating test-bed fellowship programs in different field-sites around the world. These programs nucleate innovation ecosystems in the surrounding regions to accelerate venture formation and growth.

The fellowship programs nurture high performance teams to discover deep societal needs, create technological solutions and launch innovative business ventures to address these needs. Venture founding teams are empowered with design methodologies that cut across disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, engineering, product design, entrepreneurship and finance. With an emphasis on en-skilling teams in collaboration, innovative behaviors, and scalable venture formation, the teams are the nucleating agent for the innovation ecosystem.

Venture Design Engineers observe, analyze and implement interventions in collaboration with local partners to study the process of team-based technology venture formation and development of innovation ecosystems.

Field Sites:

Institute for Venture Design, Abeokuta, Nigeria

The Institute for Venture Design (IVD) has been established at Abeokuta in Nigeria in collaboration with Fate Foundation. IVD's goal is to set-up a series of activities within a purposefully designed space to develop people with a sustained mindset of collaboratively exploring new ideas, and realizing those ideas in terms of commercial success and positive social impact. IVD aims to simultaneously effect three changes
1. Transforming individual mindsets
2. Creating sustainable business venture teams
3. Creating an extended community of investors, entrepreneurs and engineers to nurture, buy and sell innovative businesses

Website: http://www.the-ivd.org/

VentureStudio, Ahmedabad, India
VentureStudio has been established at Ahmedabad in India in collaboration with Ahmedabad University. VentureStudio offers a product and business creation oppurtunity through a full-time fellowship program for entrepreneurs, engineers, innovators and designers to learn and practice designing their own companies. Focus is on creating scalable, innovative ventures within a six-month period.

Website: http://www.venturestudio.in/

People:

Larry Leifer, Faculty and Principal Investigator - leifer@stanford.edu

Ade Mabogunje, Senior Researcher - ade@stanford.edu

Malte Jung, Postdoctoral Scholar - mjung@stanford.edu

David Cannon, PhD Candidate - dmc@stanford.edu

Neeraj Sonalkar, PhD Candidate - sonalkar@stanford.edu

Publications:

Sonalkar, N., Jung, M., & Mabogunje, A. (2010). Emotion in Engineering Design Teams. In S. Fukuda (Ed.), Emotional Engineering (pp. 311): Springer.

Jung, M, Sonalkar, N., Mabogunje, A., Banerjee, B., Lande, M., Han, C., Leifer, L. (2010) Embedded Theory: A blueprint for designing theories that bridge design research and practice. Paper submitted to the Eighth Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS8). Sydney

Lande, M., Sonalkar, N., Jung, M. and Han, C. (2010) Mapping Design Thinking: Studying Professional Software Design with Design Thinking Culture Metrics. Paper presented at Studying Professional Software Design Symposium. University of California at Irvine, February 2010.