Project Ideas for the McNair Center

Work with scholars outside of Rice

Potential Collaborators List

Work with space policy

George Abbey, Baker Institute Fellow, is a living legend. The McNair Center could do some Space Policy Research.

Rice Entrepreneurship News

Subscribe to list-servs across campus that are relevant and use them to get announcements. We might be able to subscribe with non-Rice email addresses (not sure). Get Hootsuite and manage social media announcements.

Albert is subscribed to:

• OwlSpark
• RiceLaunch
• FreeStyle

Note: Colleges aren't content generators. They just rebroadcast info from others.

We could use Twitter and Facebook as news distribution mechanisms and embed feeds/walls in our webpage. We could also build a LinkedIn group.

Ranking universities on their entrepreneurship ecosystems

We might want work out how to quantify university ecosystem performance. To start with, let's find out who ranks universities, what their methodologies are, and whether we can get their data.

Possible metrics:

• No. classes, students trained, degree of training
• Relevant faculty and experts
• No. start-ups by students, faculty/staff, and alums
  • And value created!
  • Resources provided (flex-space, fab shops, etc.)

This might also serve as a closed-system test-case for ranking urban ecosystems.

Lunch

We could do a monthly (?) lunch and invite alums. School of social science does one through the Gateway program. They invite 5 alums and a max of 25 students, and have 1 alum with 5 students. This isn't really networking, more life information. We could do something better?