Curriculum Development Projects

Ciocca Center promotes the development of the Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) through a variety of activities to include the teaching of courses. In support of that activity, we propose to administer a ‘mini-grant’ program in which faculty/staff would receive modest support to develop or enhance a curricular component that exposes students to key concepts implicit in the EM. These curricular components might include a small module (perhaps a
single lecture/assignment, lab, etc.), possibly a 1-unit course, or other curricular products. The proposal requests $25,000 to support this effort through to December 31, 2024; an external matching grant of $5,000 may be obtained to enhance this initiative.

Many Santa Clara University students are interested in learning how their food is produced, and how production impacts the environment and those who grow their food. Students understand the need to face pressing issues such as climate change and food waste in order to secure a more equitable food system and healthy future for themselves and the planet. The course titled “Future of Food Leadership: Society and Culture” is designed in a survey modality. The objective of the course is to study the existing food system, what works and what does not, and pressing issues such as food access, food justice and food sovereignty. Entrepreneurship is a key component of the course. This course emphasizes cultural competency, societal impacts from food and agriculture and community engagement as crucial to innovation and entrepreneurship.

Design Thinking (DT) is a process and suite of techniques centered around creative problem solving. It typically involves the development of deep empathy for those being served, the identification of specific problems, the use of creativity techniques, the development of prototypes, and the evaluation/test of these prototype concepts. As such, it can be considered as an area within the overall domain of the entrepreneurial mindset.

This course will enhance student understanding and practice of DT concepts and principles, challenge students to solve complex problems motivated by the real needs of actual corporate clients, and engage students in collaborative activities with international partners, thereby exposing them to different cultural practices and design considerations and requiring them to operate in a distributed manner with different schedules.

This project will develop an online course to support school and district leaders to use design thinking to address organizational and educational challenges at all levels, from day-to-day to more complex problems. Design thinking provides a process and techniques for educational leaders to reframe challenges to create effective solutions. Engagement in design thinking has the potential to support educational leaders’ competence to problem solve and develop their compassion and understanding for the multiple stakeholders in their institutions. Engagement in the design thinking process also has the potential to give voice to those whose voices might often be overlooked in educational settings. As such, design thinking has some alignment to various Jesuit values.

This course will enhance students’ understanding of the existing food system and provide a framework for determining how and where they might contribute to a more sustainable and just system. The objective is to study the existing food system, issues of food access, justice and sovereignty as well as opportunities to use technology and innovation to create a more just and sustainable food system. It is designed with multiple experiential learning components, and a focus on utilizing innovative methods to address significant issues in the food system and with a professional component to help students who are interested in transforming the food system to network and learn about jobs in the food industry.  

This course will teach students how to create relationships with professionals to accelerate their career exploration, tap into the hidden job market, and build self-confidence related to career. Career Launch is a social enterprise that was incubated at Santa Clara University and scaled through Sean O'Keefe's participation in the Bronco Venture Accelerator. The purpose of the course is to teach and guide students to be intentional and proactive to build professional relationships from scratch as a means to access the hidden job market. Students will learn how to access companies and organizations they are interested in. As a result of the course, students will increase their self-confidence and professional skills to access the hidden job market.

This curriculum and staff/faculty development project address issues at the intersection of ethics, innovation and entrepreneurship. In thinking about how Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) align with the culture and values of Santa Clara University, the Jesuit “way of proceeding” has cultivated principles and practices that are precursors to the principles and practices which we now associate with I&E. This project develops course modules that integrate seemingly disparate disciplines such as philosophy, engineering and business. It also offers training to our faculty, and gives them an opportunity to deepen their knowledge on the relationship between ethics, technological innovation and entrepreneurship, including distinctly Jesuit perspectives. Students, staff, and faculty will learn about key concepts that define what is meant by “responsible” innovation and entrepreneurship, and will be able to articulate how these concepts apply to their technical discipline.

This research builds tools and interventions that inculcates an entrepreneurial mindset among Gen Zers.
Deeply rooted in the Ignatian tradition of vocational discernment, this project generates a replicable and
learning-by-doing experiential module. Specifically, the learning-by-doing Entrepreneurial Mindset
Experiential Module (EM2) offers a transformation experience for Gen Zers through the following interrelated steps:
The first stage of EM2 is educational and enlarges Gen Zers’ understanding of entrepreneurship as a
mindset – and not just a business model – with application across professional sectors and personal
life realms as a form of vocational discernment.
The second stage of EM2 is active learning and uses design thinking to invite participants through a
series of learning-by-doing exercises through which they grow their self-identification as innovators.
The third stage of EM2 fuses identity growth with durable skills that transform entrepreneurial
thinking into a lifelong practice inspired by Ignatian pedagogies that our students will take forward
into all facets of their lives.

This grant will support the conduct of two offerings of a 1-½ day workshop focused on developing and maturing external partnerships with companies, agencies, and other external organizations. The workshop emphasizes the use of the Entrepreneurial Mindset to create 2-way value propositions that both benefit external partners as well as students, academic programs, and faculty scholarship; follow-on coaching will help attendees execute their action plans to mature partnerships of interest to them. Versions of this workshop have been conducted for more than 300 faculty and staff across the country. The workshop is supported primarily through an NSF grant tnad through support of the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network. Ciocca funds will be used to provide stipends to participants and to fund refreshments during the event.

This grant supports the development of “Product Design – Make – Sell,” a sequence of two 1-unit courses that explore product development through an experience in which teams of students execute a simple but authentic end-to-end product development cycle. Students will explore customer needs, conceive and design a product, fabricate several dozen product units in the SCU Maker Lab, and sell the units in a venue such as the campus bookstore. The project experience will be supported through lecture modules, student presentations, active learning exercises, and product team design reviews and reports. This course sequence seeks to institutionalize the popular annual Design-Make-Sell extracurricular challenge that has been run for several years. The course sequence will be incorporated into the undergraduate Design Thinking Pathway and the Technical Innovation and Design Thinking minor; it will also be proposed for inclusion in the Entrepreneurship minor. The proposed effort includes the development/refinement and the initial offering of the sequence, assessment of results, and peer review of curricular materials. This course sequence will be a unique, highly authentic, and academically valuable addition to SCU’s portfolio of entrepreneurial mindset courses.