by Linda Jacobson, Education Dive
Throughout rural Southern India, agricultural development is getting a boost from a line of irrigation and sprinkler products that was first developed far away in Minnesota. Called MyRain, the company was launched in 2012 by a business graduate and engineering graduate at the University of Minnesota (UMN) who were each participating in a social entrepreneurship program. Part of UMN’s Institute on the Environment (IonE), the program, Acara, demonstrates how faculty members and students from different disciplines are working together to find solutions to the world’s problems. “Real-world problems never sit in a discipline,” says Jessica Hellmann, the director of IonE, adding that the traditional university model of being organized into colleges and schools is a “great way of getting a basic education, but [they] are crappy at problem solving.”
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