Pathways to Innovation

Our Vision Statement is to a make California State University, Northridge (CSUN) an innovation and entrepreneurship hub in The San Fernando Valley, where aspiring entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs can go get the guidance and support they need to be successful, i.e, we want to provide an opportunity to aspiring entrepreneurs in the local area. At CSUN, we have already started working towards this vision and have made a fair amount of progress, which will be discussed in the History section of this narrative. In the next 1 year, CSUN sees itself being an institution in the San Fernando Valley which can provide services to students and people in the local area to be able to tinker with ideas and work with faculty and advisors to develop their ideas further and take them from an idea to a reality, which could be a prototype or further market research. Additionally, our goal is to increase the number of ideas that are proposed by students and as a result that there could be new companies that could be spun off from these student generated ideas. Ideas will be evaluated by a team with entrepreneurial experience and those that are considered worth pursuing will be forwarded to the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator that has just recently opened on our campus. This would open up a whole new range of opportunities and connections for these students by being part of the incubator. Lastly, we wish to introduce new courses in innovation & entrepreneurship at the undergraduate level that can be offered as Considering that the population of The San Fernando Valley is 1.8 Million people as well as the fact that CSUN has over 42,000 students and is the largest campus in the California State University system, the impact that CSUN could have by becoming an innovation and entrepreneurship hub is tremendous. It is for this reason, in the next 5 years, CSUN would like to approach local industry and government for funding and by explaining the value proposition build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in The San Fernando Valley, including the possibility of expanding our maker space and making it a space for design thinking and making. This idea is supported by discussions at CSUN related to design thinking and other proposals being written for improvement of the undergraduate STEM education offered at CSUN. Lastly, CSUN has a list of 7 planning priorities which include goals ranging from student success to sustainability. Hence, enrolling CSUN in the Pathways to Innovation Program also would help in achieving these goals as student success and sustainability are both centered around innovation and an entrepreneurial mindset.