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3 Mar 2004
uwRyan.com This website is meant to provide value to UW students by delivering information. Please provide feedback on what I write as well as give me suggestions of topics to cover. You can send e-mail to me to ryan[at]uwryan[dot]com.
uwstudent.org
Federation of Students 
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Ideas need implementation
Few of us doubt that there is a wealth of talent at UW. It is even emphasized with "Building a Talent Trust," the slogan of UW's soon-to-be-launched fundraising campaign, Campaign Waterloo. It would be a shame then not to capitalize and benefit from the talent. Recently, a group got together to generate ideas to improve UW, but those ideas and others that people have conceived still have to be pursued, implemented and realized. About 30 members of the UW community and one from Laurier, Tudor Costache, met for an idea generation workshop on Tuesday night. The purpose was to generate ideas on how UW could be improved in the future. It was an expansion of a smaller group that had been meeting (in which I also participated). First, groups of about five discussed different specific topics such as first-year student issues, the campus or internationalization, and talked about how things could be improved in these areas. Later, groups were formed to generate ideas on anything to do with the university. The teams filled up many blackboards and took digital photos of the recorded ideas for later transcription. Now we face the question of what should be done when the ideas are right there, just waiting to be implemented. I can think of cool initiatives like the following: CUTC, the technology conference; Engineers Without Borders; the new Waterloo Unlimited high school enrichment program; and uwstudent.org. But there are many other ideas that aren't realized. We need to emphasize social entrepreneurship in addition to business entrepreneurship and provide more resources for UW-related initiatives. Prime Minister Paul Martin acknowledged the value of social entrepreneurship in his response to the speech from the throne. "Just as entrepreneurs are essential to a strong economy, social entrepreneurs are essential to strong communities and they require our support," he said. Some possibilities include more encouragement to implement ideas, sharing ideas and getting them to the right people and providing support and resources. When someone has an idea, they should feel that UW is a place where it can be realized. When someone hears a new idea, his first thought should not be how it won't work, but how can it work. This change is rooted in the attitude of individuals. Sometimes the originator of an idea is not the best person to implement it, so ideas need to be shared to better realize them. A system of recording and publishing ideas, as well as targeting ideas to those who can help them, would increase the level of initiatives. Some formal and informal resources already exist for supporting new endeavours, but there is room for more, possibly including grants for students to work on initiatives for a term. Even without the recent idea generation session, people have and would have conceived new ideas. We must realize these ideas so they move from our minds into the world. |