Ray Price continues his series on category creators exploring the importance of asking the right kind of questions and while discussing the three kinds of questions that can be asked: How, what and why. Check out the video in the embedded player

or in iFoundry’s YouTube channel here.

The Vancouver Sun (10/2 Sankey) reports on must-have skills in the new economy and, of no surprise to iFoundry students, most of  the “missing basics” are among them.  The ability to self-manage in combination with effective interpersonal skills ranked highest in demand.

The Vancouver Sun article may be read (here) in its entirety.

Thom Tremblay, a Mechanical Engineering Solutions Specialist with Autodesk, will demonstrate some of the new features available in Autodesk Inventor Professional 2010 Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 6:00pm in 151 Loomis.

Thom works with Autodesk’s Worldwide Education team, and has been with the company for eight years. Thom writes the Engineering Education for the Mechanically Inclined blog on Autodesk’s award winning Student Engineering and Design Community web site.

Thanks to Xavier Llora at NCSA, all blogs in the iCommunity are now aggegated here.  Keep tabs on iFoundry/iCommunity postings with an RSS feed or through frequent visits to the site.

iFoundry fellow and NPR Radio Personality Bill “Engineer Guy” Hammack has contributed an excellent four-page summary in pdf form (here) of the Heath brothers’ book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.  Made to Stick was referenced in the iFoundry freshmen course ENG198 Introduction to the Missing Basics of Engineering (syllabus here) in the lecture on Labeling: The Most Elusive Missing Basic of Engineering (here).

The Technology Entrepreneur Center is hosting the University of Illinois I2P (Idea to Product) competition, a unique academic competition looking at ideas at their earliest stage.  Online entries for the Illinois campus round of I2P are due by October 12, 2009, with up to ten student ideas being selected on October 22, 2009.

More information about this competition and online submission may be found (here).

DesignMatters 3 is hosting Jan Chipchase of Nokia today, October 5th 2009, at 5:30pm in Wohlers Hall, Room 141 (1206 S. 6th).  The event is free.

Jan is a human-behavior researcher and specializes in taking teams of concept/industrial designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists, and ethnographers into the field to better understand how people use, or might use, Nokia telecom products.  Visit the designmatters3 site for more information.

The Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) and the College of Engineering would like to send up to 25 students to Silicon Valley during winter break for a 10 day technology entrepreneurship workshop.  TEC is holding informational lunch sessions this week as follows:

Wednesday, October 7, 2009: 301 CSL(Coordinated Science Lab), 12-1pm

Thursday, October 8, 2009: 1109 Siebel, 12-1pm

Friday, October 9, 2009: 166 Wohler, 12-1pm

More information may be found (here).

iFoundry Student Advisor, Lisa Mazzocco, is among a team of students from UIUCs Office for Technical Consulting Resources (OTCR) who has won a $50,000 grant from the Ford College Community Challenge, an initiative of the Ford Motor Company Fund.

OTCR is a student-run consulting firm and the team will use this grant to build an online database to show the energy efficiency of rental properties in the community.

In the sixth video of the series on category creators, Ray Price talks about the importance of sticking with difficulty problems and how persistence, hard work, personal responsibility, long and short term goals, perseverance can help. The video also talks about challenging the status quo and independence come into play for category creators. Check the video below

or in iFoundry’s YouTube channel here.