Oregon Tech holds innovation clinic to encourage entrepreneurial thinking in Klamath County

Oregon Tech welcomed 140 junior and senior high school and college students to campus Oct. 25 for Ready, Set, Innovate, a daylong annual clinic focused on inspiring innovative and entrepreneurial thinking. The event brought together junior high students from Brixner, high school students from Henley, Horizon Christian, Klamath Union, Lost River, Mazama, Phoenix, and South Medford, along with college students from Oregon Tech. Community mentors and volunteers joined to teach creative, team-based problem-solving.

Participants engaged in design-thinking workshops and attended a one-on-one interview with Richard La China of Ninja Mountain Bike Performance, strengthening connections among students and local leaders. Through design thinking, students tackled two real-world challenges to focus on community growth:

• Improving opportunities for youth in the area.
• Attracting and retaining young professionals within the community.

Design thinking involves decisions based on user needs rather than historical data or intuition. To approach the two challenges, students gathered insights from "customers" by interviewing community volunteers and refining their solutions around community priorities.

"Students used design thinking to learn more about solving problems. This human-centered approach helped them understand how to spot pain points, ideate solutions, and explore and imagine creative, user-centered prototypes to fix them," said Event Organizer and Oregon Tech Professor Hallie Neupert. "Through this experience, students learned the mindsets of innovators and the power of these mindsets to help them affect change in their future careers as they are called upon to solve the world's messy and ambiguous problems."

Jacques Zaneveld, Ph.D., CEO of Lazarus 3D

The clinic's keynote was delivered by Jacques Zaneveld, Ph.D., CEO of Lazarus 3D. As a scientist and entrepreneur, Dr. Zaneveld co-founded Lazarus 3D in 2014 to address a critical need in surgical preparation: providing surgeons with realistic, patient-specific models for practice. His company's Pre-Sure technology, the first FDA-cleared platform of its kind, allows surgical teams to rehearse procedures on 3D-printed replicas of patients' organs, supporting accuracy and confidence before surgery. Lazarus 3D was created to target a specific user need, showing students an applied design-thinking approach.

Cascade Health Alliance sponsored the event and was essential to its planning and success. The Planning Committee also included the Klamath County Economic Development Association, Klamath IDEA, Lemelson Foundation, and Sky Lakes Office of Innovation & Strategy.

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