Educate to Innovate Factors That Influence Innovation: Based on Input from Innovators and Stakeholders (2015) / Chapter Skim
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4 Skills, Experiences, and Environments That Contribute to Innovation: Analysis of the Interviews
4 Skills, Experiences, and Environments That Contribute to Innovation: Analysis of the Interviews
Pages 15-38
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From page 15... ...
Innovator and entrepreneur Anoop Gupta concurred and drew on his own experience to illustrate the point: "I think everybody can be innovative. I think it is some combination of intrinsic abilities and the environment.
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At the workshop,When askedsimilarly aboutthe application attributesof creativity for invention, innovation, participants to think noted the skills and necessity that contributed to their success, the interviewed innovators cited and entrepreneurship. According to Ryan Bailey, "I think you can be creative without being innovative, but it would be hard to • creativity, be innovative dissatisfaction with the status quo, described creativity this way: "Creativity is the • without being creative." KT Moortgat ability to think about the world in new ways, thinking from a clear, open perspective.
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From page 17... ...
According to Ryan Bailey, "I think you can be creative without being innovative, but it would be hard to be innovative without being creative." KT Moortgat described creativity as "the ability to think about the world in new ways, thinking from a clear, open perspective. It involves thinking de novo, and somehow leveraging historical or existing solutions, without being encumbered by them." Some innovators considered innovation and creativity synonymous, viewing the exercise of creativity as having a useful purpose.
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From page 18... ...
" Then you're immediately sharing, and that I think leads to a kind of curiosity that leads to a kind of flexibility in thinking, because I'm opening myself to your world, you're opening your world to me. Curiosity is the second value. The collaborative spirit is leading to a kind of energy of its own, curiosity, and the more curiosity there is, the more you have the ability to imagine. Imagination is the third value, because imagination is obviously required in any form of innovation. You have to be able to sense that "Oh, this could be possible," or you could just do things blindly and hit on it, but then if you don't have the imagination to see the reality of something that's happened, you don't recognize that that innovation has taken place. – Yo-Yo Ma Dissatisfaction with the Status Quo Innovators usually are dissatisfied with the status quo and willing to challenge it. In Tim Cook's words, "Innovation requires not being satisfied with the status quo, almost an individual that's never satisfied, a perfectionist." David Hornik contends that innovators get frustrated when they encounter problems and constantly think about how to improve everything they encounter in their daily lives and "the fact that people are not making it better, and so they see lots and lots of opportunities to make the world a better place, and they envision ways in which to do it." As an artist, Jad Abumrad characterized innovation as a blend of the positive feeling of creation and the negative feeling of being disgusted with the status quo: "I think innovation might be as much a frustration and a disgust with the ordinary or status quo as it is some sort of positive longing for what could be." Intense Curiosity Intense curiosity is a hallmark of successful innovators.
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From page 19... ...
Ivan Seidenberg said, "[I am curious] and was never driven by any sort of closet fear that I would look dumber; little kids are curious, and they have no fear of asking a ‘bad' question." Ability to Identify Serendipitous Moments Serendipity plays an important part in innovation.
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From page 20... ...
There's a big difference between encouraging failure and discouraging fear of failure. The really big wins, from an innovation perspective, are often risky and uncertain. You can't tell if you're going to succeed or fail when you start. You have to build and be unafraid of failing on the other side. You don't have to like failure, but in order to get the big win, you cannot fear it. – Regina Dugan David Agus echoed Regina Dugan's comments: "you have to figure out a way to really encourage risk taking. To me that's everything." Andy Walshe talked about the importance of distinguishing between perceived risk and actual risk: "We need to differentiate the perceived level of risk versus actual risk.
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From page 21... ...
It is also important to balance passion with reason. In discussing what he looks for in potentially innovative job candidates Jad Abumrad explained, "I would look for a certain kind of relentless, obsessive unease, but there is also something in [successful innovators]
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From page 22... ...
Innovators are people who are real misfits in their field, because they can see across borders, they can see across borders of discipline, geography, all of that. They're the ones who can make those disparate connections between, say, DNA and a hard drive, and say "Let me make a DNA hard drive." – Nina Tandon According to Michael Frenkel, interdisciplinary teams -- "people with broad and diverse areas of expertise and variety of skills working together" -- are one of the main reasons the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been able to solve complex problems.
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From page 23... ...
She calls herself a "jack of all trades" and said, "I always argue that I know just enough chemistry and know just enough biology to be dangerous, and I think that that's true." Frans Johansson considered a different angle, positing that work in a "promising" intersection may not yield successful results because it is "reactive" -- someone has already identified the area as promising. The real challenge, he said, is in predicting "what the new powerful intersection is": I believe you end up in trouble when you try to figure out where the most fruitful inter sections are at the moment.
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From page 24... ...
to communicate an idea that's highly technical to a group that isn't technical." From the Workshop: Additional Skills and Attributes Workshop participants were encouraged to discuss the findings during the first breakout session and suggest other skills and attributes. Several participants stressed the importance of the ability to handle uncertainty, which is closely related to the ability to take risks described earlier and the experience of finding and solving open problems described in the next section.
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From page 25... ...
Interdisciplinary Collaborations Experience working in interdisciplinary teams is crucial, because, as Kalyan Handique said, "that's what happens when you go to industry, you are trying to create a product that has a lot of elements." He added that the most valuable aspect of his doctoral education was "the interdisciplinary environment," and that without it he probably would "have not gained much and would have been of less value to industry." [Interdisciplinary collaboration] helps us understand cultures of how biologists operate different from chemists, how engineers view the world differently, how medical doctors work, and so on. That's really valuable: understanding the significance and having some appreciation. It is also healthy as it can help you see and feel that you're contributing to something bigger. – Ryan Bailey Workshop discussants noted that the members of an interdisciplinary team can expand the abilities of a single innovator by each contributing the skills and knowledge needed for a project.
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From page 26... ...
every summer. – David Morse Some workshop participants argued for practical experience rather than specifically industrial experience, noting that any real-world context can add to the excitement of research and innovation. During the interviews, John Rogers reflected on his doctoral education, and felt "being able to do at least some fraction of your research that has an outcome that people care about, beyond your field of specialty, was an exciting thing." Rakesh Agrawal acknowledged the value of industry experiences to his own success: "Industry experience was beneficial to me because it forced me to learn who I am!
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From page 27... ...
was doing undergraduate research. . . . I just think that's an incredibly important thing because there are all these kids who don't really know what research is and don't have any way of finding out about that." John Rogers similarly stressed the importance of opportunities for undergraduates to conduct research: "In our lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we have a super heavy engagement at the undergraduate level.
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John Hennessy clarified that "role models clearly are inspiring! You can say, ‘Here's the office that Larry Page and Sergey Brin had when they started Google,' and people find that inspiring and think that they could do that." Robert Metcalfe colorfully illustrated the point: You get two things from role models.
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From page 29... ...
I start out by saying "I'm not going to tell you how I succeeded, because frankly I don't know. I can pretend that I know, but I'm just retro fitting success backward onto things; most books written about successful companies are just retrofitting based on what happened. But what I can do is tell you how to fail better, because that I know a lot about." And then I just talk all about my failures, and a lot of people are like "Wow, we finished 90 minutes with Mark, and he never talked about, you know, these big innovations." You don't learn much from those! Those are the random things that happen because you tried so much, and you were able to try so much because you were good at failing. – Mark Randall Upbringing That Nurtures Innovation Many of the interviewees described their lives at home as influential to their innovative capabilities.
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Frans Johansson said his experience growing up in an interracial and multiethnic family contributed to his openness to diversity, despite the fact that the town in Sweden in which he was raised was not very socially diverse. Spending some of his childhood in the projects of the "worst parts of Brooklyn," Carmichael Roberts grew up in an environment with few resources.
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George Whitesides observed that the best innovative environment takes the form of a social enterprise that helps people do what they want to do. In fact, he recognized Dewey, John.
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" The innovators' thoughts and recollections about environment yielded the most detailed understanding of the types and characteristics of this influence on their lives. Environments that encourage innovation should • explicitly encourage innovation, • have physical spaces for free/open/informal discussions, • facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, • encourage following one's passion, • place a strong emphasis on the value of education, and • provide freedom to tinker.
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From page 33... ...
– Regina Dugan Have Physical Spaces for Free/Open/Informal Discussions The value of physical spaces for informal discussions in fostering innovation was repeatedly mentioned by the innovators, who felt that the best innovative ideas seem to occur through informal discussions, sometimes over coffee. David Morse elaborated: "Facility ergonomics are important to maximize the cross-pollination of the inventive capacity of an organization: offices, labs, common sharing areas, IT-enabled conference rooms, large gathering areas for open technical reviews and poster sessions." The key, according to Anoop Gupta, is in ensuring informality: "I think informality helps.
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From page 34... ...
From the days of the single-room office with a door to the more recent cubicles and rooms with bean bags, Robert Metcalfe said he's seen it all in his career and believes that current open office designs and workspaces support the exchange of ideas: "We've reached the point where the cubicle is passé, and you just stack tables upon tables and fill them up with monitors, and people jack in and put headphones on, and they're like cattle in a big open room, and that's what Google and Facebook and everybody looks like. I'm convinced that it works -- that is, the idea of putting people in proximity and dropping the walls has a generally positive effect, most to motivation and morale, but also to idea exchange." Whatever the structure or organization, Nina Tandon cited four elements to keep in mind in designing physical space: • proximity to ensure that multidisciplinary people are close to each other; • interdependence because unless people are interdependent they won't collaborate; • untidiness -- an open area for freeform discussions and experimentations; and • privacy, because most innovative thinking happens during private downtime.
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From page 35... ...
They identified the following characteristics of environments that facilitate collaboration: • Intellectual freedom. Michael Frenkel stated that "Intellectual freedom is an extremely important component for success in science and engineering, and intellectual freedom implies the free exchange of information and collaborative efforts, but again culture itself plays a significant role." • Interdependence.
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From page 36... ...
And the other key thing I think we've done that's been successful is for new activities where we're trying to inspire and encourage cross-disciplinary work, we've actually had a venture fund that will fund faculty research projects, . . . and the key rule is that it has to include faculty from at least two different departments who've never collaborated before." An open-door policy, suggested at the workshop, would allow students from all departments to use the equipment and lab space of any other department and thus foster interaction among students from different disciplines with different skill sets.
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From page 37... ...
– Uma Chowdhry The innovators recognized that, in addition to all the skills and experiences described above, students must be prepared in a "useful" field to succeed in the global economy. As Ivan Seidenberg explained, "Schools, universities need to prepare kids.
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From page 38... ...
In fact, adverse environments foster innovation; this was also mentioned by several interviewees when discussing reasons that lead to an innovative idea.
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