During the next Wednesday Night Wisdom (WNW) event, participants will hear from faculty and students who led the conception of the recently unveiled De Le Vega INNOVATION LAB, created the prototype and envisioned a space to prepare NIU students to tackle the world’s toughest challenges and change the world through empathy, creativity and innovation.

This WNW online speaker event “Empathy, Creativity, and Innovation” is scheduled for September 15th from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Registration is free and open to all at: http://go.niu.edu/wnw

Panelists

Furkan Gur, assistant professor of management. Gur teaches the course creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship as well as the course entrepreneurship and business designs. His research interests focus on interorganizational relationships, geographic clusters and entrepreneurship.

Tim Michaelis, assistant professor of management. Michaelis teaches a variety of entrepreneurship classes. His research focuses primarily on developing original research around the topics of resourcefulness and the efficient use of resources in entrepreneurial ventures.

Christine Mooney, Barsema professor of social entrepreneurship. She teaches courses in social venture consulting, social enterprise development, and creativity and innovation. Mooney also develops and delivers workshops in creativity and innovation, as well as business model development.

Event moderators feature two young alumni

Jason Kaye graduated from NIU in 2019, when he double-majored in marketing and operations management and information systems. He also minored in business analytics and in social entrepreneurship. His involvement in NIU’s university-wide student organization CAUSE (Collegiate Association of Unreasonable Social Entrepreneurs) opened his eyes to the social impact that businesses can have in the world. Kaye ultimately served as CAUSE president. Through the social entrepreneurship program, Kaye became involved with Innov8, a cross-functional team of students and faculty members, to build out the initial design and scope of the De La Vega INNOVATION LAB. Presently, Kaye works at Abbott as a product security analyst focused on commercial and sustainability initiatives.

Kerrian Miller graduated from NIU after completing studies in marketing, nonprofit management and social entrepreneurship. Early on in her collegiate career, she joined several student organizations focused on leadership, social impact, and volunteerism. Among them, these organizations included CAUSE, Huskie Service Scholars, and Delta Sigma Pi. During her last year on campus, she joined Innov8 where she was able to assist in the ideation of and initial design for the Innovation Lab. Kerrian currently works as a marketing operations analyst for Blend, a financial technology startup that recently made its debut as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.

Registration is open to the broader NIU community and the public for the WNW online speaker event “Empathy, Creativity, and Innovation” scheduled for September 15th from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

~ posted by M. De Jean, Director of Marketing, NIU College of Business