SubscribePaper 04: An Innovation Council Could Nurture
The moon is in the 7th house. Jupiter is aligned with Mars. It’s the dawning of the age of… innovation in North Carolina. Maybe.
Last Wednesday, NC Gov. Bev Perdue told a group of Wall Street bankers that her goal is to make North Carolina a dramatically more innovative state. Last month, at the first meeting of the state Economic Development Board, she said her goal was “harnessing NC’s spirit of innovation,” and that to do it she will form an “Innovation Council that draws together science technology and other experts to make policy recommendations for how we can build our innovation economy.” The goal, Perdue stated, is to create a “State of Innovation.” Additionally, the Economic Development Board is forming an Innovation, Technology, Education and Workforce Committee (with that title, why not add Peace In Our Day too?).
State Treasurer Janet Cowell (who manages the state’s $60 billion pension fund) will play a key role on the Innovation Council. The state House and Senate have formed committees focused on increasing innovation. On Thursday, public university leaders met to discuss implementing a plan to increase the amount of innovation that emerges from NC universities.
So game on. It appears appointments to the Governor’s Council will come in the next month. This group has a chance to recommend some real changes that could dramatically improve the innovation landscape in our state, moving us closer to being the most innovative place in the world.
But we all know how easy it is for task forces, commissions, blue ribbon panels to flame out. Sometimes the roundworms chew them up as seeds before they sprout. Other times they have pumpkin-sized fanfare, but raisin-sized recommendations. Other times they just lose their way like a kid in a corn maze. And sometimes they make great proposals that just sit there festering, drying up like a spilled Coke on a Fayetteville sidewalk in August.
How do we make sure that doesn’t happen with this one? Since the major league playoffs are about to start, let’s use some baseball analogies to look at how the Council might hit this pitch out of the park?
- Take homefield advantage:Any team has a built in edge if it can rally supporters before the game even starts. That means figuring out who will be needed to help implement recommendations on the back end and getting their buy-in on the front end. Make them commit to take seriously recommendations seriously. Have them stand up with you and say it. Take pictures. Sign autographs.
- Hit singles: Task forces can start to struggle after the first few meetings. People begin to wonder if they will really be able to make a difference, to change anything. The Council should make some early basehits, successes that prove to Council members and observers that they can make meaningful change.
- Play baseball – just baseball: The Council must define a clear definition of innovation (we like to call it the process of turning new ideas into new products and services of value) and a scope of work for itself early on. (We like making recommendations for ways to improve the state’s innovation climate — in business, education, nonprofits and government). Don’t be tempted to solve other worthy, but distracting, challenges.
- Play it hard: Council games, while they’re on, demand thoughtful attention. For those months of the members lives, the Council must take the game seriously. They need to do the reading and the listening (to all sorts of people) that it will take to uncover and hear the best ideas.
- Don’t go for game-ending quintuple plays: Less is more, or, as Erskine Bowles puts it, “If you’re about everything, you’re about nothing.” It’s tough for a task force to pull off more than a few big changes. Find the 5–7 most critical fixes, the best lever points, and put all the energy into explaining and advocating for those.
- It ain’t over till it’s over: After a task force report comes out, most members are burnt out, sometimes talking smack about each other, and ready to go back to their old lives. But that is just when they need to work harder, making sure others know what they recommended, why they recommended it, how much it will cost (if anything) and who will pay for it and with what funding source, who’s responsible for making it happen and by when. A report without a clear follow up plan and clear followup planners risks becoming policy astroturf — good-looking stuff to step on, but with no life of its own.
A focused, energetic Council can make a real difference in the state. And let’s not forget another opportunity swinging into alignment: the Obama Administration has just announced a series of steps it is bundling as the nation’s first-ever official “National Innovation Strategy.” US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke is creating a new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and an innovation advisory council in his department. Why? As President Obama noted on August 5, “the competition is keener; the challenge is tougher; and that is why innovation is more important than ever. It is the key to good, new jobs for the 21st century.”
Regardless of what you think about any specific proposal in the national plan, there is a clear commitment to a series of efforts with potential to improve our climate for innovation: raising up innovative people; conducting cutting edge scientific research and development (with the goal that more than 3% of US GDP will be devoted to R&D, oriented to solving the Grand Challenges of the 21st century); and forming regionally-focused innovation clusters and other innovation-oriented efforts (requesting $295 million total for these in the 2010 budget). The policy will take on big problems like capital access, tax policy and intellectual property rights.
A North Carolina that knows where its innovation strengths and innovation gaps are will be well-positioned to take advantage of the national commitment: to model new educational strategies, attract a greater share of R&D investments; and host one or more of the nation’s major innovation clusters.
But it won’t happen if we don’t take advantage of this moment. Dozens of nations, from Great Britain to Sweden to Australia to Canada to Singapore are all developing national innovation strategies. In 2006, the Chinese government officially declared its goal of building an innovative country, and has already begun pouring billions into improving its universities and facilities to reach that goal; other countries are mounting similar initiatives. During a town hall meeting in Greenville in 2007, attorney Tom Taft put the need for change in dire terms: “We are as threatened now as we were when the Soviets launched Sputnik. We need the same bold strategies now as we did then.” National innovation guru John Kao, speaking at the Institute for Emerging Issues forum earlier this year, compared the importance of making this pivot to a space launch as well. We ignore this Sputnik at our own risk.
So what’s our response to Sputnik II? Which issues do you think the Innovation Council should take on if North Carolina is to become the most innovative place in the world? Let us know your thoughts via email, twitter or comment below.
Tags: commitment, early wins, Economic Development Board, focus, Gov. Bev Perdue, grand challenges, innovation climate, Institute for Emerging Issues, National Innovation Strategy, NC Innovation Council, nurture, Treasurer Janet Cowell, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke
I’m responding to Leslie Boney’s invitation for input on “what’s the single most important thing that would have to change in order for NC to become the most innovative place in the world….?” I’d actually been looking for an appropriate place to say something about a disturbing comment I read in a recent edition of The Daily Tar Heel. The UNC-Chapel Hill student body president (Jasmin Jones) wants to stop having bonfires as a part of Halloween on Franklin Street (I think that’s the occasion; it’s not important). The comment that struck me was that bonfires aren’t likely to stop, BECAUSE IT’S THE TRADITION TO HAVE THEM! Realizing that instances like this relatively trivial one happen everywhere all of the time, and for more important matters, I suggest that “the single most important thing that would have to change…” is for the unconscious effect of tradition, as tradition, to be broken. The question, of course, is: what things could reasonably be done to facilitate the breaking? A key might be in my selection of the word “unconscious.” People simply aren’t aware how enslaved they are by tradition. Consciousness-raising, is that what’s needed?
Les
You asked what was the “one” thing…
Well, there are five things..
1) Universities HAVE to spend more on marketing promising technologies to find investors.. and I don’t mean more boots on the ground, I mean marketing like corporations do.
2) Universities need to lose the “academic welfare” mentality. At one university where they take in over $20 million on licensing $40,000 is spent on marketing what a joke. Why? Because engineers, etc., see it as found money to buy gadgets, or hire another hand. Universities have to realize that they have been funded with taxpayer money and it deserves a return, and the welfare mentality days are over. The only question to a researcher is “where’s the beef?” This is not France: we do not have a professional called an “intellectual” What scientists need are incentives, i.e. royalties, just like an author gets from a book or a director from a movie.
3) Get the VCs out of the game. They are unimportant, they come in late in the game and their record is weak a) 9 out of 10 of their projects fail b) they take large shares of equity c) they want a quick return.
None of those say innovation… VCs spend on average 2% of their portfolios on new ventures, that is small change. They are rich guys who want to feel important and bang chests with other rich guys on the golf course. Who needs them?
It is worth noting that the two biggest companies of the 20th century, Microsoft and Google, were started and run by SCIENTISTS, as were HP, Intel, Apple and as was Ford Motor Company, (Henry Ford was an engineer), Chrysler Motors (Walter Chrysler was a railroad engineer). So don’t buy the David Day bs, etc.
Scientist for the most part are the best people to run companies: they understand the technology, they just need good financial and other advice.
4) Create a program whereby retiring engineers and others are encouraged to move to NC, I have suggested and continue to suggest a matching fund: if I spend $100,000 to start a company match it with $100,000 of State Funds. The SBIR and other stuff is too university-directed. What if I want to start a metal shop for building prototypes for the aerospace industry? What use is an SBIR?
5) Don’t waste time or money on business plans, do pilots and prototypes. Business plans are castles in the sky, pilots demonstrate something.
To Morris Dean’s post:
According to Atlantic Monthly writer James Fallows, there’s NO scientific evidence to support the old idea that frogs, put in a pot of slowly boiling water, will not notice that their environment is changing, and will just let themselves die because the change is so slow. Instead, repeated experiments (by sadistic scientists, clearly) show that is only true with frogs who have their brains removed; regular frogs will eventually get the message and try to jump out.
I think we have brains and we will figure out this need to change eventually, but that could be well after the time our state’s people, and our economy as a whole, get badly scalded.
What are some of the sacred frog traditions that Morris refers to that we should be naming now that would help us get out of our comfort zone in the pot before we get burned? How do we send those warnings in a form that people get?
To Peter Doyle’s post:
Love the idea of a recruit-back strategy for retired engineers (I’d broaden it to include younger engineers, technologists, gamers, etc. — we could figure out the top profiles we were interested in) — (see Innovation Paper 05 on the way). Universities have pretty good ideas who the “rock star” academics are; university alumni offices often have good information about graduates of their engineering or math (or social sciences) schools and could help if they would be willing to share information about them; industry roundtables might be willing to share “smartest people in my world” lists.
Agree universities need to get much better at marketing what they have. One of NC’s real strengths, according to the really-helpful report of the NC Board of Science and Technology, is the amount of academic R&D that we perform. We discover all sorts of useful new knowledge, some of it just a few feet, and some of it inches from being things other people could turn into new or improved systems or products or companies. But the world is busy, and we don’t do as good a job as we should alerting the forest to the sound when we fell a tree.
There are some ideas about how to do it better in the new report the UNC research office has done, in partnership with IBM — deeper ongoing relationships with corporate partners, for example, and a new systemwide expansion of a “lookin” searchable database developed by UNC-Chapel Hill — but the report is largely silent on how or whether there could or should be a “pushout” effort to market cutting edge research to others. How would that work most effectively and would it be worth the investment?
It works for a scientist to head a company if 1) the person has any interest at all in doing so; and 2) that scientist surrounds him/herself with a strong TEAM that together knows product (scientist usually), marketing (scientist not so often) and business management (scientist rarely). It’s not just true for scientifically-driven enterprises. There’s a good line (well more than one) in Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship where he says that turning an innovation into a company “requires above all application of the basic concepts, the basic techniques of management to new problems and new opportunities.” Some scientists get really good at that; most are much better at science.
The thing about retired engineers is that they can mentor young engineers. They understand how things go from the bench to the marketplace.
I left out of my last post where VCs are very useful. I mentioned Ford and Chrysler: well GM was started by Billy Durant who was a VC in his day, he had a background in automobiles and money, what he did was buy already established start ups, like Buick, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet (all companies started by engineers).
That know how “bundling” companies is where VCs with a backround in a particular industry.. can grow a business.
I agree you need a team to bring other things to table, such as marketing , sales, manufacturing etc. The reason not to cut out the scientist is not just their knowledge, but that they have a passion for what they are doing, and a vision… and that motivation drives innovation. It is worth reading some of the history of the PC industry books like “Hackers” by Stephen Levy, these companies were driven by a pure love of the possibilities and competition to overcome challenges. The starting point was computer scientists who belonged to Model Railroad Society at MIT and their need for switches to make more complicated model train systems.. that’s what drives innovation.. passion, and that is why the scientist has to be a major player.
One other thing, you need rich media, you need to be able to produce short videos to sell technologies, because executives don’t have the time to visualize a technology, and furthermore, both you and I know it gets results… and that requires teaching scientists to communicate using rich media tools. I call it Digital Media Literacy — something lots of highschoolers and undergrads have.
Here are some mindstorms for creating the State of Innovation: one thing that could really make a difference and a few ways to help enact it…
CREATE A CULTURE OF LEARNING
*Elevate the status of the teaching profession.
(higher pay, lower student/teacher ratios, special awards and events)
*Promote learning as making.
(Everyone knows “you learn something best when you teach it.” Just as literacy involves not only reading but also writing, being “literate” in 21st-century modes of communication and expression involves not only viewing but also making movies, not only playing video games but also developing them, not only using computer applications but also programming them. Arts and STEM go together in today’s world. We need learning environments that support immersion in creative activities and understanding of the revised role of teacher as continual learner and partner in learning.)
*Strengthen connections between different kinds of learning environments.
(universities and community colleges / higher ed and K12 / formal and informal / museums, senior centers, athletic clubs, etc.)
*Spawn new places for community members to convene, collaborate and create.
(experiment with alternate structures for learning: universities “without walls,” no grades, broad access to rich media environments, etc.)
*Connect areas and people with good transportation and communication systems.
(trains connecting regions, metropolitan areas, downtowns / international flights from PTI / 10 gig broadband infrastructure statewide)
*Fund the creation and broad distribution of compatible media representations.
(teachers as heroes / kids as entrepreneurs / collaborators as winners / polymaths as sexy / parents as curious nurturers / older siblings and friends as role models / younger siblings and friends as learning buddies)
*Perhaps of interest — some notes on connections between learning and creativity:
http://ncsu.edu/iei/newsroom/2009/8/debate.php
Carol: these ideas (in your post with your “mindstorms”) are particularly valuable because they really get at the portion of the innovation continuum that we haven’t talked about much: the infrastructure side. You do a good job of outlining what the infrastructure of innovation looks like: what spaces work? what are the tools that they will need? how can we make it easy for them to bump into each other?
Do others have a sense of what spaces are working now? What collaborative tools work? What the highest leverage investments would be in transportation?