The MIG is a flagship educational initiative for Monash University.
The MIG was designed to bring together students, innovation leaders and industry as an innovation community. Students are empowered to engage in real-world issues and contexts, transform their capacity to drive positive change and benefit their partner organisations, people, and the planet. The offering aims to support our students and partners by fostering an innovation mindset and network. Partnerships and collaboration are at the heart of what we do.
A challenge owner is typically a representative from a corporate or social enterprise, a not-for-profit or a research group, or a government or UN agency. A challenge owner is a partner who shares a real challenge they are facing, from any part of their organisation, with a student team.
Interdisciplinary student teams will then approach this challenge over the course of an intensive three-week innovation design sprint. Our Monash staff in partnership with Australian innovation leaders will coach students through an innovation process used by the most successful companies in the world.
You will gain fresh perspectives, prototypes, recommendations and or solutions to your challenge at the completion of the three weeks. In some ways, the students act like consultants to create impact.
This unit was designed keeping in mind the busy schedule of our partner organisations, with only 3 key touch points and there are no costs involved. We want to make this experience as easy and accessible to all our industry partners as possible.
The key requirements to be a challenge owner for MIG 2024 are:
Fill out the application form and provide us with a clear challenge statement along with a brief summary you would like to put forward.
During the 3 weeks of the MIG, we will have 3 key touch points (one each week) that you or someone from your organisation can attend. This is designed to provide the organisations with an opportunity to engage with the students as well as for the students to gather relevant information for their challenges. We are very mindful of how busy our industry partners are and this time commitment would not exceed 1.5 hours per week (unless you wish).
Industry partners/challenge holders provide an open challenge statement (a question or an issue you are grappling with) and a brief summary of any background to the challenge that you wish to put forward for context. Some of our 2023 partners proposed multiple challenges and had more than one group working with them. In the form, it’s great if you can indicate the kind of disciplinary and professional backgrounds that would be ideal for that particular challenge, so we can form effective student teams.
Through the course of the 3 weeks of the MIG, your interdisciplinary student team will work on finding a solution, prototype or recommendation for their specific challenge. They will be guided by their coach as well as academics and innovation leaders in our program. At the end of the 3 weeks, teams will deliver you an overview of their solution during the final pitch night and then in the form of individual reports.
You can look at some examples of challenges from MIG 2023 here.
The Monash Innovation Guarantee is a three-week summer intensive unit that will run in January 2024.
Expression of interest (anytime from now): Please fill out the application form to express interest in becoming a challenge owner for MIG 2024.
Challenge brief document (within two weeks): We will build a challenge brief document for students based on the information you share with us and send it to you for your feedback. This document is aimed at the student teams, to give them an overview of the challenge they will be working on.
Challenge coach (October): Check in with you with a proposed Monash industry-focused coach/s for your team to suit your particular challenge. This coach will help you collaborate with the students as they will work with and mentor the teams throughout the course of the MIG.
Pre-MIG briefing (October): The MIG team will organise a time to brief you on the way the unit will run and schedule your three check-in points with students in January.
Challenge teams (January): We will check in with you with the proposed challenge teams, which will consist of students from different backgrounds, as per the requirements of your challenge.
MIG 2024 (January): The MIG team will coordinate with you to ensure that all three touch points go smoothly as well as answer any questions or concerns you may have.
MIG reports (March): We will share the challenge reports that your challenge teams will be putting together with you.