Students can learn so much about a school from online tours, readings, and even campus visits. The issue is that you can never truly experience something until you have lived it. As far as I know, Clark University doesn't offer 'overnight stays', except for athletic prospects.
Other schools do offer this, and still run into the same issues - it is impossible for a school administration to create a method in which a student experiences exactly how campus life will be. There are certain things that different people care about - use or disuse of drugs and alcohol, class scheduling, rules for dorm life, and most importantly, the general atmosphere of campus.
Some of these can be answered by the school itself - rules, class scheduling. Others, it cannot, simply due to the fact that it is a school. As an example, with drugs and alcohol, the official statement of the school has to be 'not tolerated'. However, we know, as students, that the policies are much different than what is written.
 The best way, albeit unrealistic, for students to experience what Clark University is like, is for those students to attend the school for a week. Filter them into different classes that they may be interested in (they wouldn't need to produce real work for these classes, instead they would be given special assignments on the material that was currently being covered), with real students. Put them into open dorm rooms - the school would have to have several rooms kept open in different dorm halls for this purpose. The explanation that the school would give would be: "These are potential transfer students,". The dorm halls would have activities made to get those students knowing people. In the course of that week, it should be apparent to the student how college life actually is. 

Continuum is an innovation and design consultancy, which helps other companies with regards to products, branding, and services. Companies come to them asking for help with regards to a specific task, product, or perhaps even questions regarding how they might improve their current processes. Continuum takes what the company asks and creates a design which can help them solve that question or problem.

In the case of Proctor and Gamble, the Continuum website reads:

"In 1994, the director of Corporate New Ventures at Procter & Gamble asked the right question:

'There has got to be a better way to clean a floor. Cuhttp://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6393021620917980479#editor/target=post;postID=7504808846599749380rrent mops are the cleaning equivalent of the horse drawn carriage – where’s the car?' "

Continuum took that question and did some research regarding cleaning floors and peoples habits when doing so. Through this, what they call "design research", they set out to create a product that either filled, or mitigated most, if not all, of the issues that their research brought up. The result was the Swiffer, which has gone on to be a wild success.

Creating innovative products to help solve existing problems is not even half of the services that Continuum provides. Continuum helps companies to optimize existing products in tight markets - discovering what combination of things like quality, price, availability, or something as minor as the aesthetics of the packaging, will allow that product to achieve its potential, perhaps even beyond it.

In situations where the company is not concerned with their products themselves, Continuum aids in the overall experience of the product. In one of my earlier posts, I spoke about Apple's brand compared to Samsung's. This is a perfect example of where a company such as Continuum could find itself a job. Apple has its own 'Apple experience' - this is what Continuum can help to create. Advertising, packaging, company policy: all of these fall into that company's, or maybe even that product line's, brand. Continuum helps companies to streamline their brand - taking what they refer to as 'brand DNA' and translating it into 'design language'. Continuum then shows that company how to impose its brand upon its products, helping those products to speak that same language to consumers, providing a rich, multi-level experience that will be both satisfactory, and memorable - hopefully creating brand loyalty. 

Services provided by a company are also not beyond Continuum's ability. Perhaps the service doesn't fit the brand experience, or perhaps there are certain facets that could use tweaking, or maybe even the company wishes to implement a brand new service. In much the same manner, through research, test models, consumer feedback, and above all, innovative design, Continuum provides assistance in this area as well, streamlining existing services, creating new ways in which a service may be implemented, informing the company of the ways that they can make their experience more seamless, and more effective in the real world - not just on paper. 

Continuum's services stretch from the most basic forms of assistance, such as improving scheduling in an office, to helping the company to create a plan and model for its initial and continued growth. Such a consultancy is something that the corporate world should embrace with open arms, especially in such a day and age when specialization is becoming the only way to continue a companies success. Continuum can help you to make sure that the manner in which you are specializing will succeed, and it just might be able to find a way to improve upon something that everyone thought could not be improved upon.

In"The Way Forward for Samsung, and Innovation", it speaks at length about finding a manufacturer's own 'experience'. The example that the author used was Apple. Every Apple device works in the same way. The touchpad on an Apple laptop navigates the monitor in the same way that your finger would on an iPhone, and those same motions on the iPhone remain true for the iPad. The fonts are all the same, the way in which one would access information is the same, even something as simple as the ratios used (the Golden Ratio) for the dimensions of the device are the same. The 'Apple Experience' pervades through every single one of its products. When you buy an Apple device, you know that it will be just like any other Apple device (obvious product differences aside).

With Samsung, as the article discusses, this is not the case. The Samsung phone that I had when I was younger was different that the Samsung phone that my friend had. Obvious differences aside, such as a flip phone to a full keyboard, they were two entirely different things. The way I got to messages was different, if I pressed the left menu button on his phone I got taken to contacts, rather than recent calls. This issue pervades to this day, and it prevents Samsung from attracting 'true loyalty', of the almost cultish variety that Apple has.

With regards to ourselves, I feel as if the lesson to be learned here is to not fall into the trap that Apple wants everyone to fall into. There is no perfect formula for anything in the manufacturers world - there is always going to be something else out there that one could brand as their own. As innovators, our job is to create that something that nobody else has, rather than chasing a model that somebody else has already proven. We need our pinch-to-zoom, so to speak - using that same idea, as Samsung has tried to do, will always put you behind the original. Discover.

Innovation springs from the most unlikely of places, and also from the most likely. New ideas are hard to come up with, yet at the same time new things crop up almost at random. This is the unexpected. That event, good or bad, or perhaps completely unrelated, that somehow manages to change you, your community, your industry, or even your world.

As I believe we spoke about in class, Post-it notes were discovered in this way - a bad event. The glue that they were supposed to be developing was terrible. It was weak, and could barely hold anything together. But somebody had the thought - "Hey, what if we put this on paper?" And so the Post-it note was born.

People want to live in a 'perfect world'. Everybody wants to have everything that they ever wanted, not having to worry about bills, or food, or if the people they care about are safe - this doesn't exist. It can't exist. This issue was addressed by Mr. Smith in the Matrix, when he tells Morpheus about the first Matrix - how it was a perfect world. People's minds rejected it: to achieve, and know that you have achieved, perfection, the human mind seems to have an object of comparison - other people.

Much in the same way, innovation can stem from an incongruity in our lives. How we want to perceive the world, and how it actually is. The space for innovation lies somewhere bridging that gap. Can you create something that can bring people closer to the perfection that they crave? And is it better enough than the current options available to create a sense of elevation in the person who has what you created compared to one who doesn't?

The way your world, and the people in it, work can and will change the way you  think. As a white kid growing up in an urban setting, I have a very different perception of certain things than many of my friends, who graduated from my high school, a small private college-prep school. To them, there isn't as much of a sense of "street smarts", and in the same way, I feel out of place in suburban streets, and my thought process changes. What's around you will affect how you think - there are studies showing that people are more creative when they are sitting in a blue room compared to a red one, or a white one. The people around you, the social demographic, only do more to add to your altered environment. New ways of thought, sparking new roads, new ideas, and finally - something new. That is the creative process.

There are numerous new policies and innovations in our government today, the most recent being the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Although the concept of universal healthcare isn't a new one, the employ of any similar system (even one as convoluted as the ACA), is quite a change for our government.
Another example of an innovation implemented by our government is the Tennessee Valley Authority, in which the government produced electricity and then sold it, creating a benchmark for energy prices throughout the country.
One idea that I've fallen in love with is actually a modification and an improvement to the already prevalent public transit systems present in most of our major cities. I would outfit a fleet of buses with solar panels as well as hybrid engines akin to those in cars, the combination of which should make the cost of fuel a non-issue when compared to current fuel consumption in modern transit systems. In addition, I would run this system much more often than most conventional systems, allowing for safer transport (would run through the night), as well as more consistent, reliable, and more readily available transport - saving the people in my city money, as they would not need to pay for their own vehicle and fuel, as well as time spent in unpredictable traffic situations.