Here at Florida State’s Office of Digital Research and Scholarship we are planning a creative and unique way to attract, vet, and build out our project portfolio. There is a lot of talk in the Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) literature about services, partners, etc, but to my knowledge not very much about strategic portfolio growth (I know I sound like a banker, and I hate it too.) Jen Vinopal’s work in this area is all I’ve seen.

So… in the spirit of the great entrepreneurial push of Academic institutions of higher learning (which we could discuss on the side), we’ve decided to launch a Digital Projects Incubator at the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. We’re borrowing a bit from the models on an “incubator,” and “accelerator” to focus our work on HOW we advance digital projects from ideation to execution.

For his hack session, I’d like to spend time creatively problem solving the following questions:

• What are the characteristics of a digital projects incubator?
• Organizationally, who could/should be connected to something like this?
• How would a program like this be structured?
• What models of tech incubators are useful to refer to?

The goal and product of this session will be a short one-size-fits-all document that outlines this incubator, so that any of our colleagues in other DSC’s could spin one up with little to no effort. The plan is for this to be a collaborative, fun, think outside the DH box session. No Tech/Silicon Valley expertise necessary!

Got ideas right now? Here’s the planning document!