Our program’s goal is to provide a STEM-enriched workforce with an early, inspirational, and interdisciplinary experience that fosters inclusive excellence. By seeking connections and joining a community, students envision a future where they can be involved, imagine, invent, and innovate (i⁴). Our program removes artificially created disciplinary boundaries to extend beyond STEM by including designers, social scientists, and entrepreneurs collaborating in diverse teams while using scientific discoveries to create inventions that lead to new careers, benefit society, and shape our future. We connect two recent revolutions by amplifying bioinspired design with the maker movement and its democratizing effects empowering anyone to innovate and change the world. By working in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams of diverse majors, pre- and post-assessment showed significant increases in students’ 21^st century skills that include interdisciplinary thinking, collaboration, science literacy and translation. We are disseminating our customizable, evidence-based program through a bioinspired design shared community that will energize students to participate in the discovery process where their diverse voices are necessary to invent the future.