I joined the Innovation in Honors program at UTC and one of the requirements for being in the program is to take a year long innovation lab. The innovation labs are centered around various topics, and the focus of the courses are to give students a facilitated atmosphere to work with each other in order to solve a current issue within the Chattanooga community. The course I took was on improving active and alternative transportation in Chattanooga. In the class, we broke up into groups that we worked with throughout the entire year. Our professor guided us in gaining contacts and practicing several different exercises that helped us think through what we could do to improve the transportation system. Some of the things we did seemed crazy like listing 100 ways to improve transportation (nothing was off limits). We came up with some ideas like having jungle vines to ride on like Tarzan or having party buses, but some of the ideas actually came to good use. The idea we chose to work with had several parts. We wanted to implement an existing marketing plan that had been pushed aside but had great roots to it. We also wanted to create an Adopt-A-Stop program in Chattanooga to provide bus stops that are better kept up but also to promote community involvement and volunteering within Chattanooga. I learned so much from being in this course. I got to experience working with the same group of people for an entire year which posed challenges but was also extremely helpful because I work with teams in my line of work very often. I also got to learn about design thinking which has truly shifted my perspective of solving problems and thinking through situations. I use it often to get to the root of an issue rather than trying to solve it before I know why it happened. I learned so much from this class that I decided to take a business course about innovation to further my learning experiences in this field. Our report is attached below and here is a link to our final presentation: https://docs.google.com/a/mocs.utc.edu/presentation/d/1yGi3zommKgLobIcHBBhz-Vyt313mOgdqe5xI2Po3zrE/edit?usp=sharing