Innovation

The Conway Center supports the Smith community in the development of new ideas. We aim to create an environment that encourages innovation by teaching skills, providing tools and experiential learning activities that will help you develop new and creative solutions to pressing problems.

Develop Skills

Through curricular and co-curricular initiatives, students delve into a range of subjects and develop specific skills such as leadership, resiliency, self-reflection, selling, managing people and communication.

Work Together

We partner with academic and other departments on campus, as well as visiting experts, to infuse entrepreneurial practices and perspectives throughout the college.

Test Ideas

We offer opportunities for the Smith community to generate, share, test and refine their ideas through a variety of activities, including competitions, challenges, pitch contests, business model workshops, start-a-thon and trade shows.

Innovative Strategies

S mithVent

Live Q&A conversation with members of the SmithVent team on Tuesday, October 6, 6-7pm.

FastCompany magazine called the SmithVent project “a master class in designing for the COVID-19 era.” Take advantage of this opportunity to learn from Smithies about what it was like to rapidly and collaboratively design a winning solution to one of our world's pressing needs.

The Future of Money: Digital Currency, Bitcoin, and Decentralized Technology

Thursday, October 15 2020 at 6:00 PM

A fireside chat with Dr. Neha Narula (Director, Digital Currency Lab, MIT) and Elizabeth Stark (Founder, Lightning Labs). Moderated by Chichi Wu ‘22 and Adriana Beltran Andrade ‘23

Neha Narula is the Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, where her research interests are in cryptocurrencies and distributed systems. She received her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2015, where she published work on fast, scalable databases. Neha has has given a TED talk on the future of money, was named to WIRED's list of 25 leaders shaping the next 25 years of technology, and was listed on Fortune's Ledger 40 under 40. In a previous life, she helped relaunch the news aggregator Digg and was a senior software engineer at Google.

Elizabeth Stark is CEO and Co-Founder of Lightning Labs, where she is building the future of internet money with fast, scalable bitcoin transactions. Elizabeth is a huge fan of open source, decentralized protocols. She taught at Stanford and Yale where her students studied peer-to-peer technology, privacy, open source software, and memes. She has been an active contributor to the bitcoin community, an advisor to startups in areas ranging from cryptocurrency to decentralized technology to AI, and is a fellow at Coin Center. She has a law degree from Harvard and is an avid listener of electronic music.

A Collaborative Design-a-Thon

For a better and more just post COVID-19 world!

A 36-hour virtual weekend event October 24 - 25, 2020
If...

You’re curious what design thinking, entrepreneurship, and/or collaborative change-making and leadership might look or feel like;

You want to get started with proactive problem-solving but don’t know where to start;
You’re interested in a fun, interactive challenge to tackle with other Smithies on a weekend.

Then bring at least one Smithie friend, or more. And if you are looking for a teammate, don’t worry - let us know and we can match you up with another curious, creative soul.

Because this is a chance to dive into a guided rapid co-design process and get constructive feedback from professionals. It’s also a launch pad for taking your ideas further.