1. Invention, Innovation and
Entrepreneurship (i2e) Across the
Curriculum
Bruce Garetz, Chemical & Biological Sciences
Joel Wein, Computer Science and Engineering
Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Brooklyn, New York

2. i 2e
• The vision:
Engineering Schools should be made to
include invention as a third pillar along with
research and teaching

3. Overview
• Polytechnic doing many things to integrate i2e
– Incubators
– New freshman courses
• “Freshman Forum” course that introduces the notions of i2e
to students during first semester
• “Introduction to Major” courses that may also have an i2e
component
– New graduate MS program in Biotechnology &
Entrepreneurship
– Inno/Vention contest
– Branding/Message definition

4. NYU:Poly website home
page, featuring i2e elements in
faculty research

5. This Project: i2e Across the
Curriculum
• Inspired by “Writing Across the Curriculum”
• Basic principles of WAC (http://wac.colostate.edu)
• As one response to students' lack of writing practice throughout the
university curriculum, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)
programs emerged in the 1980s. The philosophies underlying these
programs generally agree on certain basic principles:
– that writing is the responsibility of the entire academic
community,
– that writing must be integrated across departmental boundaries,
– that writing instruction must be continuous during all four years
of undergraduate education,
– that writing promotes learning, and
– that only by practicing the conventions of an academic discipline
will students begin to communicate effectively within that
discipline.

6. Educationally, i2e embodies:
• Delivery of science/math/technical foundation in the
context of technological
inventions/innovations, carrying through to market
place inception
• Enabling students to partake in these activities with
increasing degree of originality and
independence, beginning with a freshman forum
and culminating in a capstone project: i2e spine

7. i2e Across the Curriculum
Basic Idea:
• Make discussion of i2e something that happens in
many student courses.
• Designate certain courses as i2e-intensive
• Require students to take a spine of these courses.
• Currently being piloted in Chem/Bio and Computer
Science.

8. What is an i2e-intensive course?
• Goal:
– Make students aware of i2e.
– Encourage students to think about i2e as
something they can do.

9. What is an i2e flavored course?
• Computer Science –
– integrate modules about high-impact or high-interest
i2e ventures.
– where relevant integrate insightful anecdotes about
the creative process.
– prepare students for an i2e-focused senior project
option.
• Chem/Bio –
– integrate modules about innovators in the fields of
chemistry and biology.
– include laboratory experiments that encourage
innovative thinking.

10. What is a high-impact or high-
interest i2e venture?
• Ideal examples:
– Something that combines an
• interesting technical paper
• patent
• A commercial venture you can learn something
from, succesful or not..

11. Spine of Computer Science courses to include
an i2e component
FALL SPRING
Introduction to Engineering
YEAR 1 Introduction to Major
Freshman Forum
Computer Architecture
YEAR 2
and Organization
YEAR 3 Algorithms Operating Systems
Elective: Graphics or Parallel &
YEAR 4 Distributed Systems Senior Project
Software Engineering and Design

12. Computer Science Course Modules
Examples
• Operating Systems:
– Virtualization, VMware. Academic project  $2B company that
has dramatically changed how people think about computing.
– LINUX
– Mobile Operating Systems
• Algorithms
– Google
– Algorithm design
• Graphics
– Academy Awards
– Graphics processors

13. Parallel and Distributed Systems

14. Parallel and Distributed Systems
• Insight into the creative process:
• http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

15. • Jim Gray once told me that he had heard two different
opinions of this paper: that it's trivial and that it's brilliant. I
can't argue with the former, and I am disinclined to argue with
the latter. The origin of this paper was a note titled The
Maintenance of Duplicate Databases by Paul Johnson and
Bob Thomas. I believe their note introduced the idea of using
message timestamps in a distributed algorithm. I happen to
have a solid, visceral understanding of special relativity (see
[4]). This enabled me to grasp immediately the essence of
what they were trying to do. Special relativity teaches us that
there is no invariant total ordering of events in space-time;
different observers can disagree about which of two events
happened first. There is only a partial order in which an event
e1 precedes an event e2 iff e1 can causally affect e2. I
realized that the essence of Johnson and Thomas's algorithm
was the use of timestamps to provide a total ordering of
events that was consistent with the causal order. This
realization may have been brilliant. Having realized
it, everything else was trivial.

16. • … This is my most often cited paper. Many
computer scientists claim to have read it. But I
have rarely encountered anyone who was aware
that the paper said anything about state
machines. People seem to think that it is about
either the causality relation on events in a
distributed system, or the distributed mutual
exclusion problem. People have insisted that
there is nothing about state machines in the
paper. I've even had to go back and reread it to
convince myself that I really did remember what
I had written.

17. Spine of Biomolecular Science courses to
include an i2e Component
FALL SPRING
YEAR 1 General Chemistry Introduction to Major
YEAR 2 Physical chemistry
YEAR 3 Biochemistry Analytical Chemistry
Prototyping Laboratory
YEAR 4 Senior Research Project
Senior Research Project

18. Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses
Honors General Chemistry for Engineers
Each week features Chemical Innovators. A few examples below:
Week 1: Daniel Fahrenheit and his temperature scale
Anders Celsius and his temperature scale
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and his temperature scale
Week 5: Alfred Nobel and the invention of Dynamite
Week 9: Fritz Haber and the synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen
Ernest Solvay and the industrial production of sodium carbonate
Week 12: Charles Martin Hall and industrial production of aluminum
Week 13: Henry Perkin and the synthesis of the first synthetic dyes
Felix Hoffman and Arhur Eichengrun –synthesis of Aspirin
Stephanie Kwolek and the synthesis of Kevlar

19. Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses
General Chemistry Laboratory
From soap to nanotechnologies.
Objective: To make soap and to discuss its structure and properties. To relate
soap and surfactants to the self-assembly principle and the basis of
inventions in the area of nanotechnology.
Discussion includes:
1. Soap molecules and surfactants
2. Liposomes
3. Cell membranes
4. Self-assembled monolayers
5. Coatings technology and sensing applications
Innovation and invention: students challenged to come up with other
applications of the self-assembly principle.

20. Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses
Physical Chemistry Laboratory
Floating glass beads on water.
Objective: To learn surface properties such as surface tension and contact
angle, how to measure contact angle, how to modify the surface of glass, and
how surface modification changes the surface properties.
Module consists of:
1. Silane chemistry (lecture)
2. Thermodynamics of a surface (lecture)
3. Measurement of contact angle (lab)
4. Surface modification of microscope slides (lab)
5. Surface modification of glass beads (lab)
Innovation and invention: students asked to come up with other methods of
measurement, other uses of methods learned.

21. Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses
Summer Internship
“Seek and Destroy” for Undergraduate Lab Training
Objective: To engineer a strain of E. coli bacteria that can search out
nerve toxins and destroy them. Exposes students to cutting edge
research in the area of synthetic biology, whose aim is to re-engineer
cells/organisms to perform a defined task.
Students pursue the genetic engineering as part of a summer research
internship. If successful, the engineered bacterium would also be
submitted to the iGEM (internationally Genetically Engineered
Machines) competition for undergraduates held each year at MIT.
Invention and innovation: students given a toolbox of genes from which
they can create/invent their own cell/organism.

22. Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses
Senior Capstone Laboratory
Invention Prototyping Laboratory
Objective: To provide students with the toolboxes and guidance they need to
build and test a prototype of an invention, such as a biosensor.
Students are provided with optical, electrical, mechanical, etc. toolboxes from
which they can build a prototype.
Senior Research Project
Objective: To expose students to a modern research laboratory and the
opportunity to interact in research with faculty, postdoctoral fellows and
graduate students.
Students are required to carry out an original research project, under the
guidance of a faculty member.

23. Summary
• Piloting the notion of an i2e spince across the
curriculum.
• There exist great opportunities for doing this in a
natural and non-disruptive fashion in our
undergraduate majors.
• wein@poly.edu, bgaretz@poly.edu

24. Acknowledgement
• We thank the office of the Provost at
NYU:Poly for supporting this pilot program
to incorporate i2e in the undergraduate
curriculum through an “Angel funds” grant.