The Rural Infrastructure Challenge Summit is an in-person mentoring event and workshop to inspire the next-generation of solvers in rural communities. Involving students in real world challenges for rural communities is one step towards developing new creative solutions – such as identifying new business models, simplifying regulatory processes, and designing new technology that meets the needs of rural communities.
For students, this event is eye-opening to reveal the complexity of both infrastructure and rural systems. External professionals challenge students and push them to think more broadly about infrastructure issues. Students realize that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution and collaboration across sectors is critical.
The Summit design integrates networking with facilitated design exercises to support relationship building between industry and academia. As a result, this is an effective platform for participatory research that needs input from a wide range of stakeholders to inform program development. Since students are typically less knowledgeable about real-world systems, they both provide a fresh perspective and force experts to explain why the system is the way it is. This naturally supports doing root-cause analysis, which can spark new ideas. In addition, post-survey results suggest that brainstorming and role-playing activities at the Summit support societal engagement, empathy and perspective-taking, which are critical for an entrepreneurial mindset.
Resources are available to support efforts to replicate and expand this event:
- Toolkit includes facilitator’s guide, invitations, and evaluation results.
- Recording of the Fishbowl activity can be used to support classroom discussions.
- Open Access editable version of the post-survey can be adapted for future evaluations.
For more details, contact Casey Canfield (canfieldci@mst.edu). This project was led by Casey Canfield, Venkat Allada, Nicole Annis, Melody Lo, Heath Pickerill, Brandi Richardson, Joan Schuman, and Ray Walden as a collaboration between Missouri S&T and the University of Missouri Extension.