An interview with Allison Rohe of Venture Lab

Students should be encouraged to emerge as empathetic leaders who are not just tech-savvy but also have people skills. | Photo Credit: Getty Images On average, 130 countries are represented on the campus of IE University, Madrid, Spain, each year. Over 75% of its students come from outside Spain. One of the programmes that the university offers is IMPACT, a multidisciplinary, academic programme that aims to enlighten students about some of the most complex challenges facing humanity today and to empower them through the IE Challenge, to help real-world enterprises whose missions are driven by sustainability or the Sustainable Development Goals amplify or scale their positive impact.One of the ways of doing this, says Allison Rohe, Deputy Director of Venture Labs, IE’s start-up incubator, is “to develop a working knowledge of the technologies that are applied to address these challenges, while also contemplating their implications.” She explains that students are encouraged to develop an entrepreneurial mindset by learning to ideate, design and validate business models that can create positive change over the long term. As part of the IE Challenge, student teams are termed as Innovation Consultants and help real-world enterprises amplify or scale up the impact of sustainability-driven missions.Consisting of courses in the Humanities (6 ECTS), Technology (3 ECTS), and Entrepreneurship (6 ECTS), the IE-IMPACT reinforces and brings aspects such as Diversity and Sustainability into the learning journey. “The aim,” says Rohe, “is to help students develop the skills, mindset, and tools required to become leaders of positive change.” The Humanities aspect of the course allows them to develop a humanistic mindset that can be applied to decision-making, interpersonal relations, and critical thinking. “We feel they need to be familiar with some of the technologies that have had the greatest impact on society in modern history and, that in order to understand it, they need to try to make something with it.” Hence, there is an element of the practical application of using technology to solve a problem. Studying entrepreneurship helps them work through uncertainty, identify opportunities, find problems worth solving, and develop business models that make it possible for the solution to be both enduring and scalable, reiterates Rohe. Allison Rohe, Deputy Director Venture Lab, IE’s start-up incubator | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement The culmination of IE IMPACT is the IE Challenge. “Students attend facilitated design-thinking workshops; meet and strategise together as a team; research and engage directly with their client’s stakeholders; consult with and brief their clients; and receive ongoing mentoring and support. In the future, we may open up the possibility for students to bid on the clients and challenges they prefer to work with. In the IE Challenge, students work in teams and, in each class/group, they are posed with the same challenge by the same client. At the end of the semester, if there are five teams in one class, then the client will walk away with five proposals for the same challenge. This year had as many as 1000 students in 30 different classes/groups and 150 teams enroll in the programme.” Rohe also emphasises the need for students to emerge as empathetic leaders who are not just tech-savvy but also have people skills, The IE Impact learning journey, she stresses, is designed to help equip undergraduate students with both soft skills and other tools that they require for this development. Published - February 27, 2023 12:57 am IST