At the Indiana Institute of Technology's Center for Creative Collaboration (C3), in partnership with the College of Business, we launched the innovative C3 Speaker Series. This weekly event featured 30-minute candid conversations with over 40 influential entrepreneurs and creative minds from the Fort Wayne community, reaching 377 students.

Like all other C3 programs, the Speaker Series was meticulously crafted in alignment with a data analysis conducted by our department. This analysis delved into career affiliation, motivation, culture match, interests, and self-assessed skills through the CareerLeader self-assessment. The strategic planning behind the Speaker Series, guided by this Analysis, ensured that the Event was not just another program, but a crucial part of our efforts to provide students with the most relevant and impactful experiences.

This series was also born after a transition period for the C3 under the leadership and a process of realignment with the focus of the university: providing each student an opportunity to find their significance and worth. While still technically an entrepreneurship center, the C3 has evolved beyond a mere “start a business” model of entrepreneurship and adopted an economic definition – one who finds opportunities and acts toward those opportunities to create new value. This is something each of our students can do by leveraging both their formal education and their unique contributions. By developing the creative, critical, and collaborative thinking of all our students, we positioned them not only to add value to their first job, but to continue to leverage future opportunities for optimal career development.

In this new approach, we focused on the development of entrepreneurial students for a lifetime of value creation, not just the launch of a single venture. Our metrics of success have changed for the better and we hoped to improve our impact on student entrepreneurial skillsets development, student mental model creation, and resource leveraged problem solving, we facilitated the evolution of student business decision making from amateurs to professionals.

The goal of the speaker series was two-fold: 1) to create relational content that could be shared and utilized for the entire university community (online and on-campus) and 2) to create low-intimacy, low-risk opportunities to bring practitioners to campus and build up the professional community of practice in business for Northeast Indiana.

As a graduate assistant involved in this transformative series, my role spanned from brand development and event planning to engaging speakers and ensuring a seamless experience for both guests and attendees. My responsibilities included curating the speaker lineup, coordinating logistics like scheduling and catering, and crafting materials to support the event's promotion and execution. This initiative not only bolstered our commitment to student development but also strengthened the professional community within Northeast Indiana, marking a significant stride in our journey toward fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.