The Entrepreneurship in Professional Studies course is designed to help students enhance their personal and professional development through innovation guided by faculty members and professionals. The course offers students an opportunity to integrate disciplinary theory and knowledge through developing a nonprofit program, product, business, or other initiative. The real-world experiences that entrepreneurship provides will help students understand how academic knowledge leads to transformations, innovations, and solutions to different types of problems.
https://catalog.odu.edu/courses/cpd/
Cybersecurity Awareness Program for Everyone (C.A.P.E)
Elevator Pitch
Throughout the Entrepreneurship in Professional Studies course I learned and reflected on what it means to be an entrepreneur in a series of blog posts, about how to think, and what to consider when developing innovative solutions. After learning about interdisciplinary entrepreneurial theory for the first few weeks, my classmates and I began moving to work on an interactive group project.
I was assigned to Group E, alongside John Wilson, Miles Morris, and Quinten Williams, in order to brainstorm and develop an innovative idea that concerned the field of cybersecurity. Our group met weekly on Zoom in order to discuss our ideas as we collaborated in our shared Google Drive folder of shared resources. We ultimately decided that we would pitch the idea of developing a non-profit organization for the purpose of spreading cybersecurity awareness training to the most vulnerable in Norfolk and the surrounding Hampton Roads communities, while also seeking to build up the next generation of cybersecurity professionals in this quickly advancing field. Once we decided on our innovation, we created an outline to flesh out the innovation details in order to craft our proposals.
We continued to brainstorm and discuss ideas that we could add to our non-profit organization activities outside of developing the cybersecurity awareness training program, such as giving back to the community by donating equipment to STEM programs within schools or creating after-school programs at schools that don’t offer any to allow for mentorship opportunities between university students and K-12 students.
Once we had all completed our individual proposals and received feedback from Professor Porcher, we met once again in order to discuss the feedback and improve our innovation by clarifying the target audience towards low-income seniors, assessing how to meet their needs, the cost associated with funding the business, and the format of the awareness training. Then we all began to work on our fifteen page academic paper regarding our innovation and later took the opportunity to meet with Professor Porcher to discuss our innovation.
Academic Paper
In my academic paper I introduce the problem with cybersecurity awareness, our solution of cybersecurity awareness training, and discuss how we plan to challenge the barriers to entry into the market. The paper consists of several pages of literature review in order to discuss scholarly articles that support our innovation. I chose to discuss the psychological aspect of the interdisciplinary nature of cybersecurity with regard to how computer users compromise their own systems due to cognitive biases, systematic errors in a user’s thinking that can cause them to act against their own self-interest, and how psychology plays a role in encouraging learners to build good habits and routines with respect to cybersecurity, rather than solely relying on fear and anxiety as a motivator. The paper concludes after determining how success is defined using metrics and key performance indicators, discussing the goals and requirements to make our innovation a reality, and reflecting on what I have learned throughout the project.
Cyber-Awareness-Training-Academic-Paper-1