MSU holds first-ever Innovation Accelerator

Dozens of Missouri State University students, faculty and staff gathered Oct. 27 at the Efactory business incubator for an inaugural idea-sourcing event.

The MSU Innovation Accelerator was designed for those in attendance to speak about pressing issues, concerns or problems they see at the university and suggest strategies to address them, said Executive Vice President Zora Mulligan.

“People throughout the organization may have ideas for how to make the organization better,” she said. “But they don’t always have forums where they can surface those ideas and workshop them with their colleagues. This event gives them an opportunity to submit an idea and then kind of pitch it to colleagues across the university.”

All of the roughly 50 participants made one-minute pitches to a group of judges who identified the most promising projects likely to be implemented and chose five finalists. The finalists developed their ideas with business coaches prior to making “Shark Tank”-style presentations.

“(The business coach) has the ability to sit with the team and help them work through each element of the pitch to make sure that it’s really fully thought through and ready for presentation,” Mulligan said.

The two winning ideas – one from a staff member and another from a student – centered on software packages and displaying art on campus.

The presenters also had an MSU resource team with which they could consult throughout the event – for example, staff from the university’s human resources and facilities offices, Mulligan said. Event judges were MSU President Clif Smart, Provost John Jasinski and Teresa Coyan, chief of staff and vice president of governmental relations for CoxHealth and MSU alum.

For the win
The two winning ideas came from MSU employee Brian Edmond and student Cooper Sago.

Sago’s idea was to provide students with more ability to display art on campus.

“We’ve got a lot of art on campus, but his suggestion was that we make it more clear that students have the ability to display their art,” Mulligan said. “There was a lot of support for that idea.”

Mulligan said Edmond, coordinator of management information systems at MSU, suggested a broader approach to the implementation of software packages.

“The idea is that we would develop a process for more communication during those decision-making phases, and then more cooperation during implementation as well,” she said.

Edmond, a 20-year university employee, said in the past 15 years, MSU has moved to more of a purchased software model rather than computer applications that were written by programmers who work for the school.

“Over that 15 years, we’ve basically gone from a handful – maybe half a dozen software packages – to more than 100,” he said, noting different groups find a product they want, buy it and ask the department he works for to help implement it.

Edmond said his idea is to centralize that decision-making and have employees help manage it, noting that would be a way to save money. The amount of savings is yet to be determined, he said.

“We want to eliminate the duplication of functionality,” he said. “We have software products across campus that could be used for other things. A bigger office may be using just one piece of it, whereas another office might get more use out of it.”

Additionally, he said fewer software packages equate to fewer contracts and applications to process among several departments.

“So, it kind of reduces workload on the university staff as well,” he said.

While the university’s administrative council discussed a monetary prize as a possible incentive in the event’s planning, Mulligan said it was determined that participation by itself was a significant enough incentive. However, the two winning teams did receive custom awards created by MSU art and design students that were in the shape of a light bulb with the image of a bear’s head in the middle, a nod to the university mascot.

Source of inspiration
When Mulligan started her university job in July 2022, she instituted an open-door policy – which she said became inspiration for the innovation accelerator.

“I let people know that if they have ideas or expertise that they want to lend to the areas I’m working on, I’m really happy to sit down and talk with them,” she said. “I also had an opportunity to be a judge in the CoxHealth Innovation Accelerator last year. That gave me a concrete idea of how the event might look. I was really inspired by the energy of people throughout the whole CoxHealth organization brought to shared problem solving.”

While there was a pause for a couple years amid the COVID-19 pandemic, CoxHealth began its annual idea-sourcing event in 2016, according to Springfield Business Journal archives.

MSU began discussions with Efactory staff around a year ago to start a similar event, Mulligan said.

Nicki Donnelson, Efactory’s director of marketing and communications, said via email while the business incubator still hosts the CoxHealth program, the health system’s leadership largely tackles a lot of the event’s management each year.

“There are many aspects of the MSU Innovation Accelerator that were modeled after those previous CoxHealth events,” Donnelson said. “Primarily, though, the similarities are logistical in nature and helped us ensure that we would be able to complete all the stages of ideation, team formation, presentation-building and final pitches in one day.”

Donnelson said the Efactory worked closely with Mulligan throughout the event’s planning and execution, noting she provided valuable feedback.

“At the event, members of our team also served as business coaches who helped the final five teams talk through business strategy and helped to guide thoughtful discussions,” Donnelson said, adding the Efactory would be interested to host similar events with other businesses.

Mulligan said there were a lot of good ideas at the event, adding the administrative council will review all 50 ideas to examine ways to move many of them forward. A second innovation accelerator also is likely in the plans.

“The Efactory team is compiling the evaluations from the people that were in the room,” she said, noting the event exceeded her expectations. “But it’s pretty close to a foregone conclusion that this is something we would want to do again. The energy on the day was really, really positive.”