Wichita State may offer innovation design degree program

Hassan Farhoud’s education at Wichita State University is both success story and cautionary tale, his faculty adviser says.

For most students, WSU’s degree program works well, faculty adviser Jeremy Patterson said.

But when students like Farhoud develop a new invention or want to explore outside the lines of their degree program, they can find themselves frustrated.

University degree programs are sometimes too rigid to adequately serve the smartest students, Patterson said

But next spring WSU hopes to offer “Master in Innovation Design,” a new degree program that will allow some of WSU’s brightest students to help design their own programs and take more courses they actually need, Patterson said.

WSU is seeking final approval for the program from the Kansas Board of Regents Wednesday.

“There was rigidity there, a limitation,” Farhoud said, a biology major. “This program will eliminate a lot of the limitation.”

This program and others like it could help modernize higher education, Patterson said.

It will free up people like Farhoud, who Patterson says might soon create not only a new invention but a new way to treat patients remotely everywhere.

Blurring the lines

Farhoud, the son of a Wichita cardiologist, is still only a junior at WSU. But Patterson said he’s already done much to advance his future.

The device he’s developing – he’s named it “Medipaq” – will eventually be a washable, wearable vest embedded with sensors. Patients would wear it while their doctors, at any time, from anywhere, could monitor heart sounds and other vital data in real time and consult with the patients by Skype on how the patients are doing.

The project has real business promise, Patterson said.

Patterson would know; he teaches in WSU’s human performance studies department and has a doctorate in Clinical Exercise Physiology. And yet much of his work in recent years seems unrelated to those areas and shows instead how complicated science, research and education has become in recent years. He works with athletes but taught himself a lot about electronics, software and how the business mind works.

In the world outside academia, he said, traditional lines between business, science and possibilities have become increasingly blurred.

Patterson helps inventors develop start-ups and works intensely with business strategists, psychology researchers and software developers.

At WSU in recent years he helped develop and test an iPhone application that can better manage head concussion injuries. He helped develop another device that can read heart pulses in peoples’ faces.

If innovation is the wave of the future, at WSU and elsewhere, he said, blurring the lines between disciplines will be the best way to serve students like Farhoud and a graduate student he mentioned, Jeremy Sendall.

Bending program rules

Sendall, a graduate student studying exercise science, is developing a lawn sprinkler system that could distribute not only water but fertilizer, weed killer and nanotechnology, all while doing a better job of conserving resources and protecting the environment.

And yet when Farhoud and Sendall tried to acquire the training in business and entrepreneurship, obstacles appeared, Patterson said.

Intense degree program requirements make it difficult, in time and cost, for students to take courses not related to a student’s major, Patterson said.

“I want to graduate on time,” Farhoud said. “But logistically speaking, it would be tough for me to take entrepreneurship courses. They won’t apply to my degree. There wasn’t an option for a biology-business degree.”

To get the training he needed, Sendall said, “I’d have to take a bunch of minors in which you’d need 15 credit hours for each. Or you’d have to stay in college and get multiple degrees.”

For both of them, Patterson as an adviser advocated for bending degree program rules.

“He has allowed me to take entrepreneur classes, learn how to develop a business plan, study franchise management and technical development,” Sendall said.

Stewards of knowledge

Rule-bending will become more institutionalized once WSU implements the new master’s program, Patterson said.

The idea came from the top at WSU, from Tony Vizzini, the provost and senior vice president who has an engineering background.

“I heard companies talking about the kind of student they are looking for,” Vizzini said in an e-mail. “The engineer with business acumen, the engineer who understands the practicality of their design, the engineer who could appreciate form as well as function.”

What those companies wanted didn’t always line up neatly with what traditional university programs offer, Vizzini said.

And with WSU pushing much harder to create “innovation,” Vizzini thought the university needed a degree program pioneering more academic innovation.

So he pitched the idea for Master of Innovation Design.

E-mails were sent to hundreds of WSU juniors and seniors asking their opinions on a new program; 275 students responded saying they were interested, Vizzini said.

They surveyed businesspeople as well. Ninety percent of respondents said the most important skills they seek in new employees are critical thinking, communication, the ability to keep learning and the ability to solve complex problems. One other thing the new program will emphasize, Patterson said: storytelling. It’s not enough to invent, Patterson said. You have to tell a good story.

Faculty members restless about degree rigidity, including Patterson, got appointed by Vizzini to research and write the program specifications.

The chair of that committee, by design, was not another engineer. It was Rodney Miller, dean of WSU’s college of fine arts.

Some faculty won’t like how it works, Miller said. Especially the part where students get to have a strong say in what they study. “In the typical degree program, it’s all laid out for the student by us,” Miller said. “That’s the old 20th Century model.”

That’s not enough now, he said.

“No longer are we gatekeepers of knowledge, we are stewards, and as stewards we should shepherd and steward students rather than dictate,” he said.

Gap for people who build

The new program will be offered to 20 students a year.

According to the proposal Miller’s group wrote for the Kansas Board of Regents, students chosen for the program will have backgrounds in arts, science and technology.

The program overall will focus on developing students’ design-thinking skills. The four required courses include new product development, prototype development, communication and creativity. Other than those four courses, students will craft their own curriculum.

Both Miller and Vizzini said this program might teach WSU much about how universities of the future could adapt and improve.

Farhoud agrees. He’s a biology major now working with prototype specialists, software experts and people who know how to find business investors.

His biology education at WSU is excellent, he said.

But it can’t teach him all those other things.

“There was a gap for people who can build something,” he said. “This new program would fix that.”

This story was originally published September 12, 2015 at 5:28 PM with the headline "Wichita State may offer innovation design degree program."