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NTU Creativity & Entrepreneurship Program
students Tseng Wei, Lee Chin­chieh (front) and
Hsiao Ying­ta proposed a solution for bicycle theft.
NTU Creativity & Entrepreneurship Program
Cultivating the Next Morris
Chang
By Rebecca Lin
From CommonWealth Magazine
Published: November 27, 2014 (No.561)
University campuses are going all­out to
cultivate students’ entreprenurial spirit and forge
ecosystems to support entrepreneurship, so that
students come for the creativity and leave to
start their own businesses.
Photos: cw
It is possibly the biggest nuisance all 30,000 National Taiwan
University students face: bicycle theft, and hapless police response.
As darkness envelops the world outside the classroom, some people
see opportunity. Tseng Wei, a fresh­faced student who enunciates
her words with clear precision, says, “How can we prevent bicycle
theft? By making the pedals disappear.” By pressing a quick release
button, Hsiao Ying­ta and Lee Chin­chieh remove a pair of shiny
pedals. A bike bereft of pedals is enough to make even a wily thief
give up and move along to another target.
The smart pedals Lee Chin­chieh holds in his hand are easily
removed and can even be fitted with software to run with an app for
tracking the bicycle’s whereabouts.
Establishing an entrepreneurial support ecosystem
Could this be a good business? Over a hundred pairs of eyes watch
this “performance,” in which 16 teams must present a complete
“problem­oriented creative proposal” in six minutes or less. A panel
of three judges composed of faculty members selects 12 teams, and
by the end of the semester only eight remain. Today is the first
round, and each team plays the role of a “corporation.”
One team presents a dream robot, responding to the coming age of
robotics with a 3D­printed robot. Observing the growing popularity of
tourism, another team combines travel maps and global positioning
to record routes for collecting photographs and memories. Still
another team proposes a collective kitchen, so that people
accustomed to eating out can experience the joys of cooking away
from home.
“The students are full of creativity, but this stage is just for conceiving
ideas; real­world testing comes later,” relates Professor Ji­Ren Lee,
director of NTU’s Creativity & Entrepreneurship Program (C&E).
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