Eureka! Ranch Internship An Innovation Revelation For UMaine Students
Contact: Renee Kelly, (207) 581-1401 or rwkelly@maine.edu
Last May, four UMaine students arrived at the Eureka! Ranch in Cincinnati with high expectations of their impending summer internships at the invention and research think tank founded by UMaine alumnus Doug Hall.
The experience turned out to be much more for students Dan Lafayette, Nate Wildes, Brian Sandefur and Sushil Khadka.
The interns either worked directly for or had contact with hundreds of businesses – from Fortune 500 companies to small local firms – as they sought to innovate concepts and ideas for the Ranch’s clients.
No matter the business, the goal was the same: impart the wisdom and theories of Hall, a best-selling author, internationally known business consultant, and proponent of the new field of innovation engineering. Hall is teaching classes this fall at UMaine’s Foster Center for Student Innovation, to which in 2009 he made a 10-year commitment. In addition to teaching and working with faculty to lead the creation of this groundbreaking program, providing summer internships to UMaine students was part of Hall’s commitment.
Khadka and Sandefur have both graduated, but Lafayette, a business management major, will graduate next spring, and Wildes is a third-year political science major and innovation engineering minor. Lafayette and Wildes reflected on their internship of a lifetime.
We know about fields such as chemical or electrical engineering, but can you explain innovation engineering?
Wildes: It’s about giving students the tools and the confidence to create, communicate and commercialize meaningfully unique ideas. By meaningfully unique, we mean ideas that add new value to someone’s life. It’s all about a systematic approach to commercializing, creating and communicating. Just as you assume every civil engineer graduates with a systematic approach to civil engineering, it’s the same idea with innovation engineering, everyone who graduates has a base knowledge and a great approach to creating, communicating and commercializing ideas.
What is the benefit of interning at Eureka! Ranch as opposed to finding an internship with one company?
Lafayette: All summer long we did working with clients doing projects that actually changed the way they were running the company. We weren’t filing paperwork or doing small projects. We were working on some of the most important things they’re doing. And we were working on dozens of different projects. We covered everything, every part of the business from learning about cold call sales, to creating new ideas and working on their databases.
What’s a typical day like at the Ranch? What is the work environment like?
Wildes: At 9 a.m. there’s a focus meeting with the entire Ranch staff to talk about what you’ve learned the previous day and briefly about what you’re going to do that day. The Ranch is all about what you’re learning. Then you work through the morning until the whole company breaks around noon for lunch, which the Ranch provides. It’s a very social, very fun, family atmosphere. There may be a client there, so there’s great food. Then you work through the afternoon. You do not leave at 5 p.m. You leave when you’re done working. We were there until 11:30 p.m. one night. Other days we were done at 4. There’s no typical day aside from being at the Ranch at 9 a.m.
Lafayette: It’s a really open place. If you ever have a question you just yell it across the room or IM each other. There were no cubicles. They trusted you to do your work.
How did your clients react to working with students?
Lafayette: Every once in a while people would comment on how young we are. We just told them, look, we’ve studied this program in school and this is what we do. If we didn’t know a lot about their business we pointed out how that helps us, because we’ll ask questions that maybe they never thought about, and it could spark a new idea. The vast majority of the time people were open to listening to the idea and going with it.
So you don’t have to know a lot about a specific business or industry?
Wildes: As long as you’re learning, you’re a successful employee at the Ranch. They don’t expect you to know every intricate detail of a business. They wanted interns who were open to learning, open to trying new things, and not afraid to push the colors outside the lines.
What were some of the learning experiences you had?
Wildes: We had a project that was due 10 days out, so we expected to have nine days to build our process for doing it and show it on the 10th day. But on Day 2, it was, so what do you have? Day 3, what do you have? Clearly, the expectation and the business model at the Ranch was, you have 10 days to do a project? You do it in one day, do it again for the next and again for the next. You fail fast and fail cheap, every single day. It was a difficult process but the end product was clearly more superior than if we had spent nine days thinking about a process and the 10th trying to get it done.
You’ve been back at UMaine for almost two months. Looking back, what kind of impact did the summer have on you?
Wildes: It was a huge toolkit of approaches and systems. We learned how to work with people, how to work with companies, how to work with nonprofits, just a general approach to things that there’s no way I would have gotten that anywhere else. I’ve already seen and a felt a very distinct, noticeable difference in my classes. Everything is impacted in a positive way because of what I experienced.
Lafayette: It’s one of those things where the range of what we learned is so broad that you can pretty much step into any job and have a head start on anyone else.
Wildes: I think pretty much everybody got a few job offers, just casual comments like, when you graduate just give me a call. For the people we were working with, a seemingly casual verbal offer was usually serious.
Cincinnati is awfully far from Maine. What was it like to be away for the first time from home or the UMaine campus?
Wildes: I had never really lived away from home or worked by myself before that summer. So I showed up in Cincinnati and suddenly I had my first apartment, I had to feed myself for the first time off campus, I had a job to get to in the morning, and I had real-world responsibilities. That in itself was a huge learning experience and definitely one of the biggest areas of growth for me. I had to live and operate in the real world but I had such a fantastic, flexible job to do it in.
What advice would you offer for a UMaine student headed next summer for a Eureka! Ranch internship?
Lafayette: Rest up. Sleep in. Get ready. And don’t party too hard before you go out there.