SubscribeInnovation Profiles: The Research Scientist
*Note: Profiles in Innovation is a developing series of imagined “case studies,” looking at what could happen in North Carolina if we change nothing OR if we take steps to become the most innovative place in the world.
NC in 2012: “Status Quo” Scenario:
Patel breaks the news to his lab team with mixed emotions. After eight years, after getting that close to finding the right process for manufacturing the nanoparticle that could target the treatment that would cure pancreatic cancer, he was closing down the lab at NCA&T/UNCG and moving back home to India. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he said, quoting one of those American movies he had come to love. And what an offer it was: nearly unlimited budgets for equipment and clinical trials, attractive salaries for up to twelve graduate assistants he could pick (three of his current team had already agreed to go with him). “Home” – it was a strange notion: five years ago, if you’d asked him, he’d have told anyone: “North Carolina is my home,” even if it was a hassle getting his visa extended every year. Now he heard himself telling his lab team: “Times change. We all have to take opportunities when we see them…”
Is this what we want to have happen? Or would we prefer something else. Imagine this….
NC in 2012: the “State of Innovation” Scenario:
Patel introduces the two new graduate assistants, Frank and LaShonda, to the rest of his lab team. After eight years of work on finding the right shape for the nanoparticle, he tells them, they could be on the brink of getting it right if they can just stick together. The two new graduate assistants were not chemists – Frank was a mathematician; LaShonda was a computer scientist – but he needed them to get the modeling and calculations right. Besides, they were almost completely paid for thanks to the new North Carolina competitive research grant he had gotten, designed to translate innovative research from the lab into commercially viable products. But this day, he couldn’t decide what was more exciting, the new hires or his new citizenship. The federal government’s agreement to let North Carolina pilot a “Science to Citizenship” program for people like him had enabled him to become a US citizen five years early. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” he told his friends in India, “And if we get this particle right, I’ll be calling you about investing in a company that will manufacture it here.”
Also worth mention is Elena the lab tech, who graduated with honors from the local community college. “When I came to the U.S. from Mexico with my parents I believed that I was someone special. I am so glad that North Carolina encouraged me to attend college. Now with the immigration reform I am work authorized and on my way to citizenship. You can bet that I will contribute all that I can.”
Colin: We’ve got a huge challenge in getting the kind of workforce that supports innovation ready for the economy of the future.
In less than ten years, figures we’ve pulled together here my workplace, UNC General Administration, show the makeup of our high school senior class will move from majority white (64% white; 27% African-American; 4% Hispanic) to majority minority (47% white; 25% African-American; 23% Hispanic) by 2017.
That means the groups our workforce will be dependent on in the future are precisely those we are doing the worst job in educating. So as we try to compete in our innovation-based economy in the future, we are entering the battle with half of our brain tied behind our back.
And when it comes to innovating, if one measure of innovation capacity is entrepreneurship, research from the Kauffman Foundation has established that immigrants start companies at nearly 2x the rate of native born citizens (0.46% v. 0.27%).
We need to deploy our WHOLE brain to compete in the future!