May 2020 Innovation Studies Graduates
By Michael Halvorson, Chair of Innovation Studies. The Innovation Studies program is pleased to announce the graduation of five new Innovation Studies minors. Each has completed a program of study designed to foster innovation and design thinking in an interdisciplinary context. They graduated on May…
Life Under Drones Symposium
On September 18th and 19th, 2019, the Innovation Studies Program co-sponsored the Life Under Drones Symposium , which took place on the PLU campus and featured students, faculty, and an array of national experts on the subject. Life Under Drones was the first of its…
Sven Beckert of Harvard University to Give Benson Lecture
On October 9, 2019, the PLU community welcomed Sven Beckert of Harvard University to give the 15th Annual Dale E. Benson Lecture in Business and Economic History. The lecture took place at 7:30 p.m. in the Chris Knutson Lecture Hall, located in the Anderson University…
What Game of Thrones Teaches Us About Innovation
By Damian Alessandro ’19 The Innovation Studies program at Pacific Lutheran University is interested in the diverse environments innovation can be found in, including the entertainment industry. The popularity of HBO’s blockbuster show, Game of Thrones, highlights an important place to study innovation principles. Spoiler…
PLU adds Innovation Studies minor, helps students transition from college to career
By Thomas Kyle-Milward, Marketing & Communication TACOMA, WASH. (Dec. 19, 2018) — “Innovation” is a term that gets thrown around a lot. It’s had different connotations at different times over the years, both positive and some negative. Through the addition of a new minor, Innovation…
Celebrate Computer Science Education Week
By Michael Halvorson, ’85 This week is Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 3-Dec. 9) in the United States. I helped celebrate on Monday at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington in Seattle. The event was sponsored by Code.org…
Alice Steinglass Visits October 9 for Workshop and Lecture
Computer science drives innovation throughout the US economy, but the subject remains neglected or marginalized in K-12 education. Can more be done to improve student access to this important way of thinking? Please join Alice Steinglass of Code.org on October 9, 2018 at Pacific Lutheran…
Getting Creative: PLU’s Gateway Class in Innovation Studies
By Sarah Cornell-Maier ‘19. This Fall, Pacific Lutheran University is introducing a new class that serves as a gateway to the Innovation Studies Program . Hist/Phil 248: Innovation, Ethics, and Society is a team-taught course that combines many different fields of study into one. It…
How Innovative was the Apple II?
By Damian Alessandro ’19. In most popular histories of computing, the Apple II personal computer (1977) stands out as a pathbreaker among early devices in the PC Revolution. But how innovative was Apple’s first mass-market computer, and what design features and ideas helped it stand…
Innovation and Resilience
By Damian Alessandro, ’19 At Pacific Lutheran University, we’re pretty excited about innovation. Over the past few months, my colleague Sarah Cornell-Maier and I have been writing about several types of innovation that we see in the workplace and in our curriculum. This week, I…