How many anthropologists does it take to develop a mobile application? Maybe just one, when your team also includes engineering, business and graphic design students! A good example of cross-discipline collaboration in teaching the entrepreneurial process comes to us from Florida Atlantic University:
About 80 FAU engineering, business, graphic design and anthropology students recently teamed up to develop health-related mobile applications during a unique interdisciplinary course titled “Android App Design and Project Management” designed to expose students to the product and business development life cycle for a mobile application.
The outcome was seven new and potentially marketable applications, which were included in a press release this week:
· Quick Key Campus -- an emergency call application intended for students in an emergency situation. The application has a special code for setting off an emergency alert on the phone and notifying university authorities and emergency support services.
· Croyza -- an app that tracks symptoms for patients so they can give doctors a journal of all problems, aches and pains as they happen throughout the day.
· DocQuest -- an app that helps people find doctors, see reviews and make appointments.
· ePrescription -- a prescription tracking app that sets a schedule and notifies the user that it’s time to take their medications.
· eScriptPlus -- an application that allows doctors to electronically write prescriptions, send them to the pharmacy for fulfillment and keeps a record for each patient. This procedure will be needed to comply with new government regulation that all prescriptions have to be electronic with at least 40 percent of all Medicare being automated by 2013.
· EvaculateNow! -- an application specifically geared to support organizations that help elderly and disabled patients during a time of crisis like hurricanes and tornados. This too lets these organizations comply with government regulations.
· Uninsured Solutions -- an app for the uninsured in the area who need to find support, especially emergency support without insurance.
From taking the class, Mathew Hudson, project leader of the Quick Key Campus team, learned that bringing people together from different disciplines to reach a common goal and help people "is my passion, it's my heart."
Hudson, a senior majoring in international business, has already started the business with one of his class team members, Andrew Stadtlander, an engineering major. They named the company Stadson Technology and they brought on three members from the class team, plus others. They plan to bring the app, now in the demo phase, first to FAU, and then go nationwide.
"We had a blast doing it. Now we have created a business out of it and we have office space at the Entrepreneurship Development Center (part of the Technology Incubator) just off campus," Hudson said.
Some of the other teams also said they will continue to work on their projects.
Jeanne McConnell, instructor in the College of Business who teaches entrepreneurial classes, was one of the four professors, each from a different college, who taught the Spring semester class. She explained that the seven teams developed prototypes and marketing plans. "At the end of the class, instead of a final exam they presented a business plan -- very practical, very real life," said McConnell, who also said a group of her business students were working at Lockheed Martin this summer on mobile technology.
OK, but why anthropology? "We needed programmers, we needed art students for the user interface and of course the business students. But when you put together a bunch of personalities, the anthropology students offered a human perspective we wouldn't have had otherwise," McConnell said.
One of those students was Mark Anthony Burgarelli, who graduated in May in anthropology and is now working for an advertising agency doing market research. He also plans to pursue his master's in anthropology. In one of the groups, he acted as an observer studying the group dynamics (one finding: most of the problems came down to miscommunication). As part of a second group, he applied his considerably deep anthropological research skills to doing market research for the team.
"The students loved the idea of working on something that is really current," he told me. "Students often ask, when will I use this stuff? It's this kind of project that shows where you will use the stuff."
(Photo shows FAU students who collaborated to develop the Quick Key Campus application. Team members from left to right: Andrew Stadtlander (engineering); Haley Grosky (business); James Matthew Gan (graphic art); Ashley Elder (engineering); Jourdan Fletcher (business); Cherie Thompson (anthropology); Rufus Jones (engineering); Mathew Hudson (business).