WORKING COLLABORATIVELY AMONG UNIVERSITIES A DENSE NETWORK APPROACH

摘要

In "To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World," author James Davison Hunter espouses the idea that the engine for driving change in virtually any context is in dense networks. According to Hunter, a dense network is defined as a mechanism for change. According to Sarah Miller Caldicott, grand niece of Thomas Edison and the Founder/CEO of Power Patterns of Innovation, "A dense network includes a handful of key components including a passionate focus, diverse skills and competencies related to the passionate focus, a robust outreach network, the desire to disrupt unneeded orthodoxies in core institutions, and - perhaps most importantly - an inspirational leader." In the past year this paradigm of collaboration has been applied in the academy in two specific instances. Schools from the Kern Entrepreneurship Education Network (KEEN) have formed two such networks, each with the intention of accelerating growth in the area of promoting an entrepreneurial mindset among all engineering students, and for the purpose of using these networks to better benefit students and change the institutional culture at the institutions involved. One network, which has members from six different universities, was formed to promote and spread innovative approaches to entrepreneurial education. The other network, comprised of four other universities, will work collaboratively to create engineering graduates who are world changers and who direct projects that change the world. This paper will document the design, development, and early implementation of these two dense networks, including the challenges faced throughout these phases, lessons learned, and early assessment results.