Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Magic wands have recently been delivered to the Fab Lab and we’re ready to start distributing them to all the middle school and high school youth that come to visit, study at or make things at Fab Lab ICC. We’ve also handed some of them out to community college educators at a conference a couple of weeks ago.

These magic wands can be used to make anyone’s dreams come true. The instructions to use are fairly simple. First, find a pencil sharpener—rare these days, but they do still exist. Second, sharpen the magic wand as if it were a pencil. Third, write down the dreams you wish to come true, sometimes again and again. Fourth, wait for the dreams to come true. Sometimes they will come true quickly, sometimes it may take a while.

While this magic wand may look like a pencil, the magic of expressing the dreams on paper is related to the power of thought. The power of thought is a lost art that has never been discovered by many of us. Many of the youth coming to Fab Lab ICC are not aware of the power of thought. When we write down the dreams we want to come true and review those dreams every day, we begin to drive our daily actions toward the dreams and over time they come true.

The power of thought is a timeless concept and it’s been available to mankind since the first cave-people dreamed up the wheel. Somewhere, in some cave, there’s a hieroglyphic of the first wheel that served as someone’s written dream of an easier way to move things around. Since the power of thought is timeless, the magic wand doesn’t have to be computerized or require batteries.

In the early 20^th century, a young magazine writer named Napoleon Hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie challenged Hill to make a life’s work of studying various successful people of the time to see what made them successful. In the decades of work that followed, Hill discovered that everyone he studied used the power of thought to become successful. In his book “Think and Grow Rich” he shares many of these stories as well as a methodology to harness the power of thought. The first step; write it down. Although Hill doesn’t say anything about using a magic wand—that idea came from a banker friend of mine—the magic wand concept helps demonstrate the power of thought and the written word to young people.

In March of 2016, Fab Lab ICC manager, Tim Haynes and I put one of our dreams in writing; an open letter about how we would use $700,000 to expand the Fab Lab space. Today, we prepare to break ground within the next 60 days on the building. Soon after, Tim coined the phrase “Fab Force” and we wrote a paper about a new kind of work force training that focuses on a variety of technical skills combined with entrepreneurial mindset, character and communication training. Today, we are just a few months away from “Fab Force” becoming an academic and work place reality.

Using the magic wand to express dreams on paper does work and we will be sharing these magic wands with everyone visiting Fab Lab ICC now and in the future.

 

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

We see many young people in the Lab. Most are in the age range or 11 years old and up. Some are through visiting school groups, some through our Boot Camps, most recently in collaboration with the Greenbush education cooperative, some through the work-study program at ICC and some are through the youth employment program of Southeast Kansas Works.

There are several characteristics shared by many of these young people. First, most are not very good at working with hand tools and in general, working with their hands. With hands-on shop classes all but gone from many of our nation’s school districts, learning to work with our hands has taken a back seat to standardized testing. Some early adopter school districts are starting to incorporate hands-on, (also known as experiential) learning. Perhaps we are moving in the right direction.

We also see a fixed mindset in many of these young people. The emphasis has been on final results rather than the learning that takes place during the process. Many have not learned about the great knowledge available by learning from failure. Some students are hesitant to try anything new or try to make anything for fear it might not turn out well. Finally, we see students that when they get stuck on knowing what to do next, they raise their hands and stop working until a teacher or advisor can get to them and give them the answer they need to continue.

All of this combined can be thought of as education without agency. In this case, “agency” means self-confidence, self-reliance, self-efficacy and initiative all rolled into one. Without agency, many young people enter the work force (afraid to start a business on their own) looking for a job in the one area of study for which they went to school. Many go about their work days waiting for the next instruction from their bosses or the company instruction manuals. They have a hard time looking around to see what needs to be done, and doing it, rather than waiting for the next instruction.

We see this all the time in the work-study students and other young people we use at Fab Lab ICC to help us keep the place in shape; cleaned up and ready for our members’ use. We give them a tour and try to point out the things we don’t want to see; excess dust, clutter, dirty floors, etc. We’ve used cleaning check lists and yet it takes a while for most to learn to take initiative and take care of the items needing attention without waiting for use to tell them. Some are never able to make the transition to a “self-starter” with initiative to do what needs to be done.

We believe experiential learning—learning by doing while learning from our mistakes– at all levels of school would greatly help give these young people agency to go along with their education. In the Boot Camp example, we’ve found that the young campers can finally learn that there are tools like Google and YouTube to answer their questions when there is not a teacher available. This discovery is very empowering and helps them begin to see that they can figure many things out on their own. We strive to give all young people experiencing Fab Lab ICC a taste of this “agency” to help enrich all aspects of their future lives; academic, personal and professional.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter October 11, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Jim is attending the annual conference this week of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) in Tampa Florida so he prepared an updated encore column first published in June, 2016. At the conference, he’ll be co-presenting a session about the role entrepreneurial mindset and Fab Lab maker space in work force training, including “Fab Force” mentioned below.

We’ve scratched our heads for years at countless economic development meetings wondering how we can have unemployment in Southeast Kansas and yet companies say “We have jobs and no one wants to work.” The same companies have trouble with their employees’ “soft skills” or lack thereof. Many area companies offer decent pay scales and benefits but many do not and much of the work of the biggest complainers is repetitive and unappealing. The following classified ad actually appeared in a local paper a few months ago. I haven’t seen this one lately, but I suspect the conditions are the same, but the ad has been changed.

The ad said:  “Now Hiring; Must be able to work 40 hours a week plus scheduled overtime. Ability to work in extreme heat, noisy areas, lifting 45lbs, lifts to waist and chest with some overhead lifting, continuous bending and stretching, pushing, stooping and twisting, and pulling in excess of 50 lbs. Standing/walking on concrete for 8 – 12 hours. Operation of fork truck may be required.  Wages start at $11 & $12.  Benefits available.”

The jobs listed offer no hope of advancement and from your $12 per hour you have to purchase your own benefits.

We began moving toward jobs like this, away from being independent farmers, merchants and entrepreneurs after the Civil War. The devastation in the south, the industrial revolution in the north, and a recession or two in the late 19^th century started a transition away from self-sufficiency to a dependency (sometimes today we call it learned helplessness) on the steady income resulting from repetitive factory work. Workers weren’t expected to use their brains to think of anything new, only to have the bare knowledge to do the repetitive, many times back-breaking work of the job without complaint. The schools–and I mean the big ones, Harvard, Yale, and the others, helped industry and the government design K-12 school curriculum that taught rank and file students just enough to do repetitive production work and be happy about having a job.

Now comes the “entrepreneurial revolution” starting in the 1990’s with the advent of the Internet and a world full of people wanting a piece of the American market. Global economies characterized by entrepreneurs and creative thinkers along with factories using robotics and automation to stay competitive are becoming the norm.  The companies that will survive this new economic game will need workers that think creatively and be active contributors to solving their customers’ problems.

At the same time, most people today want to work in an environment where they are appreciated and can contribute in a positive way to solving the problems of the company; not so much interested in “continuous bending and stretching, pushing, stooping and twisting, and pulling in excess of 50 lbs.”

The entire answer is complex, but companies will continue to have increased difficulty in filling the repetitive, menial jobs like the listing above even if the pay is higher. There are vendors that can help provide automated, robotic solutions for the “pushing, stooping and twisting” at a lower cost than the $11 – $12 (and even $13 to $15) hourly wages and related workers compensation claims and premiums.

On the worker side, our technical training programs need to provide a well-rounded introduction of topics and disciplines, including robotics, electronics, automation, machining, welding, coatings, character, conflict resolution and communication; all these subjects under an umbrella of entrepreneurial mindset, which is all about critical thinking and problem solving.  I’ll have more on this new “Fab Force” training in a future edition.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter October 4, 2017

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Since I started working with entrepreneurs and small business owners in 2006, the idea of business incubation has seen ebb and flow popularity. When I first heard of it, the idea was to set up small spaces where start-ups could start and grow to a point they’d be ready to move out of the incubator to their own space. Some incubators have time limits. If you’re a new business, you may only have a year or two before you have to move out. Once, in those early days, I toured an incubator at a university that was essentially a room partitioned off into maybe a dozen cubicles. Although there was a certain electricity in the air, once seated in your cubicle, you were pretty much isolated from the others working to grow their businesses.

The idea of the incubator was—and is—to make it easier and less expensive to launch and grow a business. A sliding rent scale over the first year or two, sometimes starting at no rent for a few months, ramping up to full rent after the first year or two, was supposed to be the incentive to inspire people to start businesses. There are a lot of expenses and other considerations to starting a business and reduced rent, while being a nice incentive, did not make people run out and start new businesses.

For retail businesses, the incubator is only good if the location is good for the business. We were involved in a good partnership with the city of Independence to use the iMall at 325 N. Penn as a business incubator a few years ago. The city rehabilitated the building and we offered the sliding rent scale to new businesses. While I’m not sure we attracted many people to start businesses, the arrangement was very helpful for several tenants that had already just started their businesses. A couple of years ago, some of the tenants went together and purchased the building. Today, although no longer an incubator, all spaces are rented and there is likely more foot traffic into the iMall than just about any other building in downtown Independence.

Our newest effort at business incubation will be in the expansion building at Fab Lab ICC. (We hope to be breaking ground on the new building shortly after Thanksgiving.) This time, we’ll be using a class, Entrepreneurial Mindset, to help aspiring business owners develop and validate their market solutions and use Fab Lab ICC for prototyping and promotional materials. Individual business coaching will continue to be offered and for those that need space, a sliding-scale access to an incubator we’ll call the Entrepreneurs Bullpen Growth Accelerator. The analogy comes from the fact that in baseball, pitchers prepare and warm up for the game in the bull pen. In our Bull Pen, entrepreneurs will prepare and warm up for their entry into the marketplace.

The physical Bull Pen will feature an open collaboration design. We see big advantages in the various clients being able to network and collaborate with each other while working on their own businesses. Participation in the Growth Accelerator won’t be limited to those renting space in the Bull Pen. Other new and growing businesses can access the services even though they already have a location.

Inspiring people to start new businesses comes down to inspiring a change in mindset and self-confidence. That’s what we’re doing with the Entrepreneurial Mindset class and the Fab Lab experience. The new Entrepreneurs Bullpen, coming in the summer of 2018, will extend that mindset change to a physical collaborative space for those that are ready to move their new business into this special location thus reclaiming their dining room tables, spare bedrooms and/or garages.

 

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.