This is a speech I’d like to hear from a university president. I’ve imagined a lunch keynote, in a mountain retreat, to folks interested in innovation, technology transfer, and commercialization. Put your dream caps on, folks, imagine tall Douglas fir trees all around, salmon and asparagus on your plate, with some cornbread on the side…
Thank-you for the opportunity to speak to such an impressive gathering of minds in such a spectacular setting.
I would like to say a few words about innovation, a rather difficult concept that for a long while was a term of disparagement and has come recently to be acclaimed as the economic driver that provides us with most everything good. Innovation is an expected result of research, a goal for economic development, a marker for a productive society. There are calls that we need more innovation, that universities and governments are not doing enough to provide us with new things that can be sold to the world, making for jobs, wealthy investors, and increases in local tax revenues.
Much of the time, a university’s research efforts appear to have little or no effect on either innovation or job creation. Appearances can be deceiving. Putting bureaucratic controls on our faculty and students in an attempt to make the work more efficient, such as by claiming ownership or establishing set processes for patent marketing, however, often does more to stifle than it does to enhance opportunities. This is a difficult lesson for order-seeking administrators to accept. Innovation is something that often strikes us as outside our comfort zone. It may appear disruptive, rogue, breaking the rules (even the rules at a university). To want innovation is to find the status quo isn’t satisfying, our daily routines need change, and our expectations of the future are not made out of the right stuff. Innovation more often makes problems obsolete rather than solves them. When we innovate, we may change the very composition of our problems, and with that, what we study at universities, and what we teach.
Innovation thus evidences itself at a university not in the number of patents that issue, or licenses granted, or royalty income received, but rather in changes in curriculum, in areas of research activity, and in the collaborations we form to advance our mission. Changes in these things reflect changes taking place in the communities that the university touches. A university in this way is a kind of sensor of society, one that amplifies small signals of possibility. When these new things become adopted by universities, in their research and instruction, there’s a great chance that we are on the verge of important change. University medical centers are quick to adopt the newest, proven methods. And there is no surprise that it has been universities that have led the adoption of the internet, after having had a key role in creating it, as well as email and web browsers.
Innovation, however, is not an unqualified public good. A new product or discovery may cause tremendous upheaval. People can lose their jobs, or the product may have adverse side effects or people can feel that their values and beliefs are threatened. Innovation may attack, exploit, unsettle, and dismay. For every iPad tablet or Sonicare toothbrush there are also computer viruses and robocall auto-dialers. Not every innovation succeeds, as we have seen with the recent failure of Solyndra, at a cost of over $1b in investment, a substantial portion of which came from the federal government. In desiring innovation, we must accept that we desire more than change that on reflection we like–we are desiring as well disruption, failure, irritation, and challenges.
All that is quite a thing for a society to call for, or for a government to want, or for a university to step up and offer. It is all the more surprising to think that innovation will be the result of research, or that it will be found by industry working collaboratively with universities, or that patents–lots of patents–will do this for us.
When we call for innovation, we are not expecting all these things that attend changes in technology, or services, or belief systems. We are divided on the matter of gay marriage, one of the great innovations of our time, as we are with medical marijuana clinics, use of cell phones while driving, and state-mandated immunizations. Innovation sparks such debates, and it is a hallmark of an innovation society that it can sort out the good innovation from the bad, can recognize what will make us stronger and better, and can act to adopt those things, and at a pace that gives us the needed time to adjust. Some innovation goes rapidly. Does anyone remember typewriters? Other innovation appears always just over the horizon, tempting us, as with advertisement-free television.
It is this debate in society about change that matters. It is our strength as a society that we have these debates, not just in legislatures and city councils over laws and policies, but also in the malls, in churches, in universities, at the stadium, and on talk radio. It may be that the fundamental role of universities in innovation is not patentable inventions or startup companies but rather extending the capacity of a society to recognize new things, to develop them, and in the process deal with complication and failure, and most importantly, to be able to discuss, and debate, and work through change, to be comfortable with doing so–as we do in gatherings like this one–and at the end of the day, still be on speaking terms with one another.
We do not know where innovation will come from. Oh, we may chronicle some of the sources–from research or exploration, from a spark of genius, from a chance meeting, or from a mistake, such as the discovery of penicillin or x-rays. Imagine if our innovation policy called for the making of more mistakes by highly qualified people, or kept as a metric how many random meetings with unlikely people university faculty were able to have in a year. These things matter, however, and perhaps every bit as much as research funding and patents. It may even be that university research and instruction alike are grand excuses for meeting new people and making productive mistakes, just as entrepreneurship shows resiliency and learns from its failures what markets–that is, us, the bartering, buying, adopting masses, actually want. We may not be able to explain what we want–we may not even be able to imagine it–but we often know it when we see it.
It is this capacity we have–to recognize and debate and embrace change–that makes our industry strong, our science strong, and our society strong. This capacity also makes our economy strong. If we are to innovate and benefit from the fruits of innovation, we must be vigilant to cultivate our capacity to recognize potential change and to bring it into our discussions of the future. We must be mindful of innovation’s sources and challenges and the many unexpected ways by which innovation operates. No one organization or industry or government can dominate and control innovation. We cannot plan out innovation in advance, nor can we do a decent job at picking the winners before they race. But we can provide opportunities–in instruction and research and public discussion–to broaden our reach of ideas, to meet new people, to consider new phenomena and new ways of doing things. We can maintain our sense of perspective as well as our readiness to adjust, extend, and change our ways. As Louis Pasteur once put it (and he put it various) ways, ‘La chance ne sourit qu’aux esprits bien préparés’–‘chance smiles only on the well prepared mind.’
During World War II, there was a dire need for penicillin. But it could not be produced quickly in the form in which it had been developed since its discovery in 1928. British scientists flew to the United States to escape the German bombing and to get help with production. They found that help in unexpected places. James Stine, an expert in using penicillium in the production of Camembert cheese, was recruited from Kraft Foods. Driving to the USDA’s lab in Peoria, Illinois he noticed the corn fields and realized that the British did not grow much corn—as Americans call it–and likely would not know that corn steep liquor, a by-product of corn production, could be an exceptional growing medium for penicillium molds. Pfizer as well provided a scientist, Jasper Kane, who proposed the use of deep vat fermentation, a method he had developed for making citric acid commercially. These suggestions allowed production in much larger volumes, but the strains of mold themselves were still not sufficiently active to make the quantities of penicillin needed. The Peoria Lab put out a call for anyone to bring in samples of mold to be tested for new strains of penicillin, in the hopes that a better would could be discovered. Mary Hunt, an assistant at the lab, found a moldy cantaloupe melon at a Peoria fruit market and brought it in. That melon had a fast growing strain of mold on it, and it was a modified version of this strain, with 3000 times growth of the original British strains, that produced the penicillin that has saved lives for nearly 70 years. We might say, chance smiled multiple times on prepared minds, in just those unexpected ways that innovation thrives upon and we find it next to impossible to plan for.
If we had but one policy goal for innovation, it would be not to establish metrics for patents and products, or to be preoccupied with envy-producing stories of success, but to explore how we, as a society, can best go about cultivating such prepared minds that we should be so fortunate as to have the chance for discovery or invention to smile on us—and multiple times as needed. For a community seeking innovation, the prepared mind is not only that of the solitary investigator or explorer. It is also the mind of the teacher, the minister, the lawyer, and the doctor, the farmer, the cheese producer, the lab assistant. We need and benefit from the prepared mind of the shopkeeper, the administrator, the union worker, the activist, the nurse, the computer programmer, the artist and the call center operator. We need to be prepared throughout our community, so that we can have discussions like these, not only in settings like this one, but on the streets of Tacoma, in the wineries of Walla Walla, and on the ferries sailing out of Anacortes.
It is our capacity to go beyond what we think to imagine that allows chance to smile on us. Recent studies in neuroscience suggest that we remember our personal pasts with much of the same neural systems we use to imagine our personal futures. We literally remember our future and imagine our past as readily as the other way around. If this is the case, then it points to what we must do to be prepared: we must get out more, to meet people, to learn new things, to keep ourselves a bit unsettled, prepared for most anything, rather than growing comfortable with the idea that science is settled or that a plan or policy, once on paper and approved, has done the job of preparing people for us.
Neal Stephenson, a Seattle-based author, has written that the explorer succeeds when he finds himself truly be-wild-ered–that is, finally and incontrovertibly in the wilds, he knows not where. It is this be-wilder-ment that is an early indicator that we have extended our range of experiences to new territory, and can now draw on this new experience to imagine a new future. We have to be willing to admit that sometimes–perhaps more often than we would like to admit—even as experts we do not know, that we are confused and vulnerable—and all the more so for policy-makers, thought leaders, and administrators–and we will find things out in time if we stay with it, and explore, and ask for help, and expect to obtain help, from what we take to be the unlikeliest of sources.
New things are near us all the time. As another Northwest author, William Gibson, has it, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” One might say, some people here and there have experienced something new, that perhaps once bewildered them, and now is part of their experience, and therefore available to their thoughts about the future, and that sooner or later, we may very well experience this same thing, if someone puts the right things together. How long will that take? Another author, Bill Buxton, who works for Microsoft, calls this the “long nose” of innovation [link is now to Buxton’s revised version of the article], an innovative poking into the present here and there before most of us see the entire face of a product or practice. Then, suddenly, there is an iPad or a Prius or a flash mob.
If we are to be prepared, then, we must also be on the lookout for the long noses of innovation. These may be weak signals, outliers, ungainly things, as noses often are. We may not find such things among “best practices’ or among experts. Surveys of what is popular, also may not help us, unless we leave a big space for “other” and pay attention to maybe one or two responses there that are unlike anything else we’ve ever seen. Rather than dismiss these responses as insignificant, it may be that these are the very bits of the future we should be preparing for. To seek out innovation means to pay attention to minority experiences, not because it is politically correct, perhaps, to do so, but because it is where we will find, likely, our innovative future–in the rare event, the weak signal, the random thought, the experiment that failed, the silly thing that becomes the next steam engine or 3d printer.
It is in this way, by encouraging exploration, preparing minds, creating forums for discussion, and paying heed to the minority view because it may be the emerging one, we create policy conditions that support innovation. Universities have an important but not singular role to play in doing these things. Other institutions of society must also play their roles–government, industry, church, and banks, hospitals, civic clubs, and philanthropic organizations.
If innovation is to provide us with a better future, then we must start in the here and now to experience a broader, more challenging present. If we can create policy that motivates us to new places, and to see details and patterns we had previously overlooked, then we can know that we are making progress. We cannot plan for where the next innovation will arise that transforms our way of life, or at least provides us with an alternative to cable television, but we can plan to give everyone in our society access to education, to the discoveries of research, and to the best new products that companies have to offer. Then we let things fall where they will–where we as a community collectively choose to take them. And perhaps, then, we will recognize chance is smiling on us.
I believe dessert will be served in just a minute. Please enjoy the rest of the day in this beautiful setting.