Student storytellers celebrate UCalgary innovators

What happens when students are matched with UCalgary innovators to tell their stories?

The Innovation Untold contest invited students across campus to connect with a UCalgary innovator and create a compelling three-minute video to showcase their work. Student storytellers can win a grand prize of $5,000 and $1,000 for the showcased innovator.

Starting from March 27 until March 30, everyone will have a chance to vote for their favourite video by liking it on the UCalgary YouTube channel. The winning entry will receive $1,000 as the People’s Choice award.

“There’s incredible creativity and innovation taking place on our campus,” says Laura Whitton, program and community development specialist at Innovation@UCalgary. “Our students are some of our greatest innovators. They have so many unique perspectives. We wanted them to create and tell these video and audio stories and engage our campus and community by sharing them.”

Innovation Untold started as a collaboration with Innovation@UCalgary and a senior-level communication and media studies course instructed by Dr. Samantha Thrift, PhD. As a final project, students were matched with innovators and tasked with exploring different storytelling mediums including podcasting, zine creation, and video games.

“This collaboration invites students to question the typical paradigm of who gets to be an innovator and whose work gets counted as innovative,” says Thrift. “The students’ individual projects allow them to use critical storytelling methods to challenge these narratives and create more inclusive spaces for recognizing innovative activities, research, and people at the university.”

Innovators from a variety of faculties across campus including kinesiology, arts, medicine, business and engineering were matched with students interested in submitting to the contest. Winners will be announced on the Innovation Untold web page April 15.

Innovation Untold is supported by the Research Support Fund and the Incremental Project Grant.

The federal government’s Research Support Fund (RSF) assists Canadian post-secondary institutions and their affiliated research hospitals and institutes with the expenses associated with managing the research funded by Tri-Council agencies (CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC). The Research Support Fund helps the university create an environment where researchers can focus on their research, collaborate with colleagues, and translate their discoveries and innovations. The Incremental Project Grant is a new stream of the RSF that focuses on innovation and commercialization activities, facilities renewal, information resources, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. Read more about how UCalgary uses the Research Support Fund.