Asee peer logo

GreenLab Startup Weekend at Palm Institute - Incubating Student Startups in Ghana

Download Paper |

Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division (ENT) Technical Session 3: Projects and Student Learning

Tagged Division

Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division (ENT)

Page Count

11

DOI

10.18260/1-2--43834

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/43834

Download Count

93

Request a correction

Paper Authors

author page

Peter Carlos Okantey

biography

Clifton L. Kussmaul Green Mango Associates, LLC Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-1660-7117

visit author page

Clif Kussmaul is Principal Consultant at Green Mango Associates, LLC. Formerly he was Associate Professor of Computer Science at Muhlenberg College. Visiting Fulbright-Nehru Scholar at the University of Kerala, and Chief Technology Officer for Elegance Technologies, Inc.

visit author page

author page

Esther Mensah

author page

Eugene Eluerkeh

author page

Oscar Rodriguez

Download Paper |

Abstract

This paper describes the Palm Institute GreenLab and its first GreenLab Startup Weekend to encourage and support entrepreneurial student teams. Palm Institute is a 10-year-old liberal arts university-college in Ghana, whose mission is to educate ethical and excellent leaders in Africa. The Palm GreenLab is an innovation and incubation lab designed to unearth talents that solve wicked problems with creative ideas, nurture and scale the growth of some of the most ambitious entrepreneurial projects in the world. The GreenLab plans to provide an array of offerings and support for student entrepreneurship. A Stage-Gate model details the activities and expectations for projects at each level of maturity. In Fall 2022, the Palm GreenLab ran its maiden Startup Weekend - a two day intensive experience in which students pitched and evaluated ideas, formed teams, worked to identify and address important elements and issues for their project, and present their project. This paper briefly describes the current and planned structure of the GreenLab; describes the Startup Weekend; reports results from students' reflections and interviews; and outlines lessons learned and future directions. Projects included agricultural products, education software, and election software. During the weekend, participants completed a Strength-Improvement-Insight (SII) reflection. Themes for strengths focused on teamwork and collaboration, entrepreneurial thinking, and creativity and problem solving. Themes for improvements focused on teamwork issues and the food provided. Themes for insights focused on the value and challenges of teamwork.

Okantey, P. C., & Kussmaul, C. L., & Mensah, E., & Eluerkeh, E., & Rodriguez, O. (2023, June), GreenLab Startup Weekend at Palm Institute - Incubating Student Startups in Ghana Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--43834

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2023 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015