April 17, 2026
Walking into the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Southeastern Student Conference at Russell House on USC’s campus, on March 26, 2026, it was immediately clear we did not quite fit in. Most all of the sponsors represented aerospace and engineering firms, leaving us as the odd ducks in a sea of engineers.
Boeing, Molinaroli College of Engineering and Computing (MCEC), Amentum, and others were present at the conference — and then there was SCInnovates.org, representing the SmartState Center for Innovation + Commercialization and the Darla Moore School of Business (DMSB) Graduate Strategic Innovation Certificate (SIC) program. It appeared as though our differences represented a gulf too vast to overcome. That difference is exactly where innovation lives. We brought a different perspective—and to our surprise, it worked.
AIAA’s Regional Student Conferences are student centric and built around student research presentations in a formal technical setting. However, just as essential is the exchange of ideas. Our focus is less on engineering and more on how to successfully develop the skills needed to manage science, technology, and innovation in the workforce. A few students were definitely curious about how the “SIC” could complement their engineering backgrounds.
One of the best moments of the day though was seeing Wout De Backer (Wout De Backer | LinkedIn), an Assistant Professor at the MCEC. We had come full circle –Wout was in Professor Cardinal’s innovation course during her first year at USC when he was a post-doc. Laura B. Cardinal, a professor in the DMSB, pioneered the SIC that launched in 2022.
If anything, our time at the conference made the conversations more interesting, demonstrating that strategic innovation belongs at the table, even when everyone is not sure if it is a duck.