WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum

Seth Godin, marketer, lecturer, blogger, and writer points out that we rely too much on being picked by gatekeepers such as publishers or HR personnel, rather than picking ourselves.  It is empowering to “understand that there are problems just waiting to be solved, once you realize that you have all the tools and all the permission you need, then opportunities to contribute abound,” he asserts.  Many of the qualities that employers of high-salary workers covet such as leadership ability, adaptability, resilience, grit and perseverance are the same qualities that are required to be a successful entrepreneur or business builder.  An example, from this week’s technology news is Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app. The cofounders of WhatsApp, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, worked at Yahoo for about a decade before they started their company.  Ironically, after Yahoo both applied to work at Facebook and both were rejected.

The 21^st century global knowledge economy presents a new reality of work and the workplace for Milleninals.  The notion of work in American society is loaded with cultural ideas of one’s meaning and purpose. This is what anthropologist Katherine Newman wrote about when she characterized being laid off or downward mobility as “falling from grace.”  Work is put in a moral or Biblical framework.  As my ethnographic work unfolded I discovered that I was looking at something more profound than Millennials being victims of downward mobility or blocked entry into the professional labor market; I was witnessing Millennials both preparing to be employees in a new reality of a global knowledge economy, and acquiring skills to create their own jobs and jobs for others.  In this new reality employees are treated more like free agents than permanent employees.  401(k) plans and portable healthcare are a part of this new reality.  In another blog post I stated that increasingly employers are expecting that prospective employees be prepared to hit the ground running on day one.  These employers thus are shifting the burden of training from themselves to higher education institutions and the prospective employees. This phenomenon is a part of the broader change in the relationship between capital and labor.

The old career paradigm of “fixed apprentice–to–master craftsman–to–management”  has given way to a new paradigm of “free agency” whereby employees are increasingly becoming more responsible for managing their career path and skills acquisition, as well as managing employee benefits which were formerly the sole province of the employer: retirement savings and healthcare.  Essentially, 21st century knowledge workers are taking ownership over their talent, skills, and work product.  Another way to think about this phenomenon is that employees are being required to create value in order to maintain their jobs.  The cohort that I have been studying during my research, innovators, designers, inventors and entrepreneurs, are the most desirable people for employers in all sectors of the economy.

Nevertheless this cohort has provided me with mixed messages about whether they intend to pursue an entrepreneurial career path or whether they were merely curious about entrepreneurship and were dabbling in it within the safe confines of an ivory tower.   Regardless of their motivation for participating in innovation or entrepreneurial related activities, they were acquiring 21^st skills and know-how that is coveted by employers of high salary workers: collaboration, self-direction, curiosity, persistence, high-energy, and on-going skills acquisition.  An intellectual understanding of what is involved in creating a new digital product, service or device, and experiential experience in doing so, provides these students an ability to create value whether they work for someone else, or in an ownership capacity building something for themselves.

If risk and impermanence are intrinsic components of the “new mode” of employment, is it a rational choice to place yourself in a position to reap the rewards of the value you create?

Lego City

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” asserted anthropologist Margaret Mead.  An army of builders is being recruited and trained by Venture for America (“VFA”), the nonprofit founded by Andrew Yang.  On its website VFA announces that “It is a program for young, talented grads to spend two years in the trenches of a start-up with the goal that these graduates will become socialized and mobilized as entrepreneurs moving forward.”

The VFA, which was inspired by Teach for America, aims to place graduates of top universities in start-ups or early-stage companies in lower-cost cities such as, Providence, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Detroit, and New Orleans.  The goal is to introduce these graduates to business operations through on-the-job training and mentorship.  VFA pays the Fellows a stipend; puts them through a 5 week entrepreneurship boot camp before the Fellows are placed in a sponsoring company for two years.  Fellows who want to start a business after the two year stint are eligible to apply to VFA for seed capital of $100,000.

VFA’s mission is:

To revitalize American cities and communities through entrepreneurship.  To enable our best and brightest to create new opportunities for themselves and others.  To restore the culture of achievement to include value creation, risk and reward, and the common good.

Yang’s book Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America (2014) sets forth his vision for creating jobs and revitalizing America through entrepreneurship. Yang’s analysis of the state of job creation in the United States and the development of graduates of top universities as entrepreneurs, contextualizes my research among Millennials who are acquiring knowledge and experience about innovation and entrepreneurship.  Yale, like VFA, is providing young people a supportive environment where they are able to gain experiential training and mentoring.  These students are being empowered to build things (for-profit and nonprofit businesses) with a sense of purpose.  VFA’s program provides an alternative to the default path (finance, consulting, law, medicine, Teach for America, Grad School) pursued by the majority of graduates of top universities.  VFA attempts to make this alternative path, a valued path that is a rational, principled choice.  The aim is to foster an instinct toward building so that whether you are a founder or an employee it is hard to let go of the notion of creating value and having an impact.

In Smart People Should Build Things, Yang makes the point that if you are the sort of person who could start a successful business, you could pretty easily get a job.  Through this blog, I have been trying to make the point that we need our most eminently employable people to start and run companies.  People who have skills, exposure, credibility, resources, talents, character, persistence, know-how, networks, cultural capital, and intellectual capital should build things.  I believe that exposing undergrads to entrepreneurship will make them more likely to perceive the entrepreneurship path as a rational choice.  An example of this is a mechanical engineering Senior who was a member of the inaugural class of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design Summer Fellows program.  His team designed and prototyped a bio-medical sensor during the Summer of 2013; they proved that the concept was viable.  Since then the team has obtained a provisional patent on the technology.  This mechanical engineering Senior has not been involved in the traditional job interview process because his team has applied to the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellowship program (“YEI”).  If the team is accepted into this YEI program, they will spend the Summer of 2014 building a business around their patented technology.

At Yale, for instance, Start Something is a program sponsored by the YEI that provides students and faculty an opportunity to learn the basic tools that entrepreneurs use to launch new companies including the Lean Start-up method.  It is intended for people who have an idea and are not sure how to develop a business around the idea, as well as people who are wondering how to develop an idea that might morph into a business.

Former President Levin in his address to the Yale School of Management MBA Class of 2014 said, “What’s still missing in New Haven is more of a culture of innovative start-up companies with Yale graduates at the helm.”  What if Yale launched “Venture for New Haven,” a local version of VFA, that each year provided a fellowship to four Yale graduates and placed them in local start-ups or early-stage companies?  What measurable impacts would result from such an initiative?  Would these Fellows be more likely to stay in New Haven as employees or founders of their own companies?  Would this initiative create jobs in New Haven?

“Leadership is in the institutional DNA at Yale,” is a comment that I have heard often during the course of my fieldwork.  Yet whenever I asked where I can locate a description of Yale’s approach to teaching leadership and course syllabi, the familiar refrain is “There is no formal written leadership manual nor are there any undergraduate courses on leadership.  It is something that just happens here.”  In examining the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale, my research will analyze the way leadership is structured, exercised, and experienced.

Recently I located a good description of how Yale cultivates leaders by Jeffrey Brenzel ’75, Master of Timothy Dwight College and former Dean of Yale College Admissions:

In undergraduate admissions, however, we must also keep before us Yale’s longstanding aspiration to cultivate responsible citizens and leaders, graduates who will achieve prominence in the founding or management of enterprises, in public service and public office, in the professions, or in the realms of religion, the arts, and education.  By “leaders” I do not mean individuals who succeed merely in achieving high status or high income.  To develop leaders means to nurture individuals with superb skills for collaboration, an orientation to service, high levels of creative energy, and the aspirations and character required to make substantive contributions to the common good.  Our mandate is to send talented, courageous, and far-sighted people into the global endeavors, organizations, and communities that sorely need them.

Leadership roles shape student’s consciousness in decisive ways.  Confidence is built because student leaders have to learn how to navigate the Yale bureaucracy to obtain funding or to obtain permission to use certain spaces on campus.  Student leaders also have to manage their groups to meet periodic deadlines.  And significantly, succession planning, and its implementation is one the biggest tasks a student leader faces: the Yale News, Yale Entrepreneur and Yale Entrepreneurial Society, for example, rotate their leadership roles annually in order to provide an opportunity for many students to experience a leadership role.  Among other things, a leadership role creates subtle measures of prestige and fosters an intense competition among group members to demonstrate commitment by working hard to fulfill the group’s or organization’s mission and purpose.  The hardest workers are usually rewarded with the role they desire.

I attended a leadership training session at Yale recently; I thought that I was merely attending a class segment about designing appropriate technologies for the developing world.  MENG 491 “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World” is a collaboration between the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (“Jackson Institute”). This course is being co-taught by Joe Zinter, Assistant Director of Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) and Robert (Bo) Hopkins, Lecturer Jackson Institute.  The class exceeded my expectations because leadership training was embedded in the instructional process. Students ideate about the problem through developing the right questions, then design an appropriate solution through “building on the board,” a phrase coined by one of the professors.  This approach involves mapping the concepts by writing notes on post-its then physically placing them on CEID’s large white boards in the class room area.

In this session students in MENG 491 were taught how to formulate questions in what one of the professors calls “target rich spaces” to solve the challenge of delivering vaccines along a cold chain in developing countries.  This problem impacts 1.5 billion people.  The professors designed the big question: How can you deliver vaccines along a cold chain in developing countries?  But their approach is to allow the students to do research and discover the appropriate technology to solve the problem.  A prototype of the technology is the end of term capstone project.

The multi-disciplinary group of students (engineering, architecture business, public health, and econ) were admonished to seek opportunities that resonate with them.  This exhortation is in the spirit of Dean Brenzel’s characterization of leadership development at Yale when he stated that the university nurtures individuals to empower them to “make substantive contributions for the common good.”  Students in MENG 491 are honing their collaboration and team building skills in the context of tackling a real-world challenge of how to deliver vaccines in a manner that reduces spoilage and heightens the probability that persons in need of these vaccines will actually take them.

What if Yale produces leaders that are capable of tackling the 21st century domestic and global challenges through innovation and entrepreneurship?  Will Yale provide leadership training across all academic disciplines in order to scale the number of leaders produced each year?

The arms race in academia for top students and faculty recently got more intense.  The President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“MIT”), L. Rafael Reif, on October 17, 2013 issued the “Presidential Charge to the Committee to Form an MIT Innovative Initiative.” The proposed elements of the Innovative Initiative include maker spaces, education, research, and action through engaging with key stakeholders.  While MIT is one of the undisputed leading educational institutions in the fields of science, engineering, economics and entrepreneurialism, President Reif has thrown down the gauntlet; he is challenging other institutions to step up their game.  His reasoning for this initiative is:

Innovation now rules in realms from the most centralized, complex and capital-intensive – a multibillion dollar plant for fabricating nano-devices – to the radically distributed and democratized: a remote village FabLab inspiring solutions to local challenges. To seize global opportunities and solve global problems, the Innovation Initiative at MIT will focus and amplify MIT’s natural strength in innovation to span the spectrum of need, in service to the world. We define innovation broadly; we embrace the virtual as well as the “real” – tangible products and processes that make life better in big, important ways.

President Reif stated further:

We aim to develop innovators skilled at continuously re-imagining what can be made, how and where new products are built, and what vehicle will best amplify their impact – a start up or not-for-profit, working in partnership with large corporations or governments, and so forth.   The Innovation Initiative will amplify the MIT community’s powers of innovation and our passion for progress. By focusing on innovations, not simply ideas, and by emphasizing the importance of impact and the challenge of delivering at scale, we will expose our students [emphasis added] to demanding, inspiring activities all along the innovation chain, in contexts from the developing world to industry. In the spirit of making, we say, ‘If you want to change the world, you have to Do It Yourself!’[1]

President Reif’s comments are an example of creative disruption: where a market leader should disrupt its own business or academic model before a competitor destroys it.  My blog posts usually do not contain such lengthy quotes by one person; but I thought the power of President Reif’s words and his seriousness of purpose would be conveyed best in his own words.  His intentions could not be clearer: maintain MIT’s leadership in innovation, expand its reach globally, enhancing the learning environment, and ensure that MIT trained engineers and scientists are as skilled in business principles and entrepreneurship as they are in engineering.

Yale’s Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) is a center piece of its academic arsenal to attract students, faculty and alumni donors. CEID is a microcosm of the new learning environment that is being fostered at Yale.  I have read several detailed descriptions of the architectural design and physical layout of the CEID during the course of my ethnographic work.  Also, I have had conversations with people who were intimately involved in the design and build out of this space.  Yet as an ethnographer I never felt quite satisfied that a description of the physical space and how work flowed within it met my need to understand why and how students use the Center to prepare themselves as 21^st century knowledge workers.

Interestingly, two MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andres McAfee recently published The Second Machine Age: Work Progress, and Prosperity In a Time of Brilliant Technologies (2014) wherein they wrote “Our recommendations about how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication instead of just the three Rs.  Further they opined, “And whenever possible, take advantage of self-organizing learning environments, which have a track record of developing these skills in people.”

Self-organizing learning environment (“SOLE”)  is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside says Sugata Mitra, educational researcher and winner of the 2013 TED prize.  He uses ethnographic methods to gather data about how self-learning is happening in communities in rural India.  For Mitra, SOLEs always show emergence.  “The system starts to do things that it was not designed to do.”  SOLEs facilitate “learning as the product of educational self-organization.  If you allow the educational process to self-organize then learning emerges.  It is about making learning happen, it is about letting it happen.  The teacher sets the process in motion then stands back in awe.”  Mitra’s description of a SOLE and how learning occurs is an apt description of CEID: students learn in a self-paced, peer-to-peer instructional environment where collaboration is normative; learning occurs in a nurturing, encouraging, and supportive environment.

HackYale which is run out of CEID is an example of self-organizing learning occurring within a SOLE.  HackYale provides student-run lectures in web development, introductory programming, and design. All classes and workshops are presented free-of-charge through their partnerships with the Yale College Council and the CEID.

Logo of Connecticut Innovations

Jim Collins wrote in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t that the “flywheel effect” is one of the enduring principles that enables good companies to become great ones and how great companies maintain sustainability.  He continues, “Tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results.  Point to tangible accomplishments – however incremental at first-and show how these steps fit into the context of an overall concept that will.  When you do this in such a way that people see and feel the buildup of momentum, they line up with enthusiasm.”  His conclusion is that, “Each piece of the system reinforces the other parts of the system to form an integrated whole that is much more powerful than the sum of the parts.  It is only through consistency over time, through multiple generations that you get maximum results.”

My ethnography about innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale is an examination and description of the pieces of the buildup-to-breakthrough flywheel pattern.  These pieces comprise a story that represents one way to portray the modern Yale.  The overall framework as theorized under the theory of academic capitalism and the cultural system of creative confidence signifies that many factors work together to create this flywheel pattern, and each component produces a push on the flywheel.

An informant, in the early stage of my ethnographic work, told me that academy silos were impenetrable and virtually indestructible. The Global Health Hackathon that InnovateHelath Yale held at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (CEID”) demonstrated that academy silos can be demolished, to the benefit of all.  CEID, InnovateHealth, and the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”), the three major interstitial organizations that sponsor and foster student-led innovation and entrepreneurship collaborated to make this event an incremental step in pushing the innovation and entrepreneurship flywheel at Yale.  (This event was sponsored by Connecticut Innovations. Tagline: Creative Connections. Empowering ideas.)

This event was not the typical hackathon where computer programmers and others in the field of software development collaborate intensively on soft-ware-related projects.  Rather this was an event where budding social entrepreneurs came together to ideate about solutions to global health issues such as childhood obesity, maternal mortality, and child mortality among others.  In some respects, this event was a lead-in to the upcoming Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health.  There are three key dates for the Thorne Prize: Stage #1 Letter of Intent, due by midnight February 23^rd, Stage #2 Written Application, due by midnight, March 30^th, and Stage #3 Live Presentations, April 26, 2014.

The magic of the momentum at Yale during the past 24 months surrounding innovation and entrepreneurship is awesome.  Some examples include CEID opening, YEI significantly expanding its programs, and InnovateHealth launching after two year’s planning. The Yale Net Impact Undergraduate Chapter was started to expose Yale students to social entrepreneurship, and to show them how to use their interest in business for social change.  Yale President Peter Salovey has reaffirmed the university’s commitment to student-led innovation and entrepreneurship. Y-Hack put Yale on the map with the ubiquitous hacker community.  And after several years of dormancy, the Yale Entrepreneur Magazine re-launched as both an on-line and a hard-copy publication.

As an ethnographer, it is striking to me that many members of the three creative tribes (Atoms, Bits and SE’s) at Yale are often unaware of the magnitude of the transformation that is occurring. I hope to play a small part in interpreting this cultural transformation and articulating its significance to people inside Yale, as well as those outside Yale that have an interest in understanding how this iconic institution is sustaining itself through adaptation and reinvention.

Jeff Koons – The Tulips

This week I received an e-mail recommending a blog post “Entrepreneurs and Astronauts” at the blog Just Visiting authored by John Warner, a creative writing instructor.  The e-mail stated:   “A take on the “shiny object syndrome” (i.e. people gravitate to the shiny object…. Which presents a new challenge of making objects stay shiny…).” The writer of this e-mail knows my strong belief that innovation and entrepreneurship are core to preparing 21^st knowledge workers for the global economy.  I welcome the opportunity to be a part of a public dialogue about whether innovation and entrepreneurship for Millennials are shiny objects that distract them from traditional career paths. 

Warner wrote, “Apparently the Millennials want to be entrepreneurs, they believe their educators should help foster this desire.”  He acknowledges that Millennials might be pursuing entrepreneurship because of the experience that Boomers had with lay-offs and corporate downsizings.  “In a lot of ways,” he continues, “there’s little difference between Millennials wanting to be entrepreneurs and Boomers wanting to be astronauts. It looks like the coolest thing out there.” There is a more profound reason behind their interest: they want to control their future.  They want to understand how they can use their intellectual capital to create meaningful jobs for themselves and others, as well as make a contribution to a better world by solving real-world- problems through innovation and entrepreneurship. My research also informs me that while many Millenials believe entrepreneurs are cool, every activity that appears to be entrepreneurship is not necessarily so. The activity could merely be an act of creativity with only a desire to satisfy an intellectual curiosity.  (See my posts “Seeding the Future” and “The Quest.”)  For Yale students, innovation and entrepreneurship are a way to challenge, rethink and reimagine the expectations, hopes and aspirations that inform the traditional career path of students who attend an elite university.

Growing up at a time when astronauts were perceived to be superheroes instilled in Boomers a sense that anything was possible.  Dream it and you can make it happen.  The dream to land a man on the Moon or to land an unmanned aircraft on Mars, for example, were founded in someone’s vision about what is possible, rather than a distraction by a shiny object.

Interest in innovation and entrepreneurship is not a shiny object that will dull in time.  Rather, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in how the educational elite prepare to become 21^st knowledge workers.  Several decades ago there was a fundamental shift in the relationship between capital and labor.  In its early stage this shift mainly impacted blue-collar workers.  In the latter stage of this shift white-collar workers were also negatively impacted as lay-offs, downsizings and technological advances changed the character of work.   In some respects, interest in entrepreneurialism is a reaction to the changed relationship between capital and labor.

The author of the e-mail that inspired this post stated that the challenge is to make shiny things stay shiny.  Warner acknowledges that “The other question of whether or not colleges and universities should do more to teach entrepreneurship is outside [his] expertise and well above [his] pay grade.” Yet he goes on to give his opinion; his sentiments lead him to conclude that “entrepreneurship isn’t something that can be taught.” For him “It may be akin to teaching creative writing. There’s a set of skills that instructors can attempt to convey, but ultimately, success hinges on things like drive and inspiration. These may also be skills, but their development relies on self-motivation.”

In a post titled, “Are Entrepreneurs Born Or Made” I wrote that entrepreneurship can be learned. Whether it can be taught is a larger question: Are there enough qualified people to teach this subject matter?  There is a school of thought that believes entrepreneurialism is an innate trait or instinct, and merely needs to be activated. There is another school of thought that believes entrepreneurialism can be taught and learned.  Lean startup movement adherents believe entrepreneurs can be made.  Eric Ries the titular head of this movement and author of The Lean Startup stated “Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time.  Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.”

T.H. Huxley stated this notion well: “The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.  Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land.”

Thomas L. Friedman

“The merger of globalization and the information technology revolution has shrunk the basis of the old middle class – the high wage, middle-skilled job,” wrote Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and author.  He stated further, “Increasingly, there are only high-wage, high-skilled jobs.  This merger of globalization and I.T. has put capitalism – and its core engine of creative destruction – on steroids.”  Downward mobility or blocked entry into the work force is what Friedman is alluding to.  Innovation and creative destruction are like waves that roll over society; you can either get on like a surfer and ride it, or sit passively and have it roll over you.  While the options are clear, it is less clear whether American workers have the wherewithal to ride this wave of technological change.

During the initial stage of my research the goal was to make a contribution to a line of anthropological literature on downward mobility and the dispossessed middle-class.  My intent was to examine entrepreneurialism at an elite research institution as a means for Millennials to avoid the fate of many Baby Boomers who had relied on their employers to their detriment.  My belief is that Millennials should investigate ways to control their own labor, as well as the means of production.  Along the way I discovered that while work was the unit of analysis, the real interesting stuff related to how Millennials were preparing themselves to work in the 21st century knowledge economy.  Even if they are contemplating taking a traditional job after graduation they realize that they can no longer rely on an employer to look after their interests.  It is interesting to observe how they go about preparing themselves for the 21^st century work force.  They are, at least, thinking about how innovation and entrepreneurship fit into career planning.

As I begin to write my dissertation, an ethnography focused on the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale, I am searching for answers to several questions that I have thought about throughout my fieldwork: Why is my research important?   And why should anyone care about my research topic?  Here is a four part answer to these questions:

• The world has changed in such a way that research universities are the new centers of innovation and invention.  They are the places where young people are being trained both formally and informally to solve the new challenges of the technology-driven global economy.  Universities are at the intersection of knowledge creation, technological innovation and disruption, and the potential application of technology through entrepreneurship (Roberts 2009). “We know that knowledge is becoming more and more vital to our societies, and that our economic prosperity depends as never before on discoveries born in institutions such as [Harvard and Yale],” stated Drew Faust, President of Harvard University (Faust 2012). She believes that the tough job for university leaders is balancing change with tradition.  Given the societal role of universities, they play a vital role in defining aspirations and possibilities for the long term.
• Yale is an iconic world-class university, so leaders in business, government, education and the not-for-profit sector have an interest in understanding how students at this university are being trained to assume their leadership roles in the global economy.
• My research chronicles the great untold story of a special environment for innovation and entrepreneurship where students are on the cutting edge of solving real-world problems.
• An understanding of the processes, manners and ways Yale students are learning how to experiment, innovate and invent might be informative for K-12 educators and policy makers. For educators and policy makers this information would help create and nurture an environment and cultural system that fosters innovation and produces students that have the mind-set and skill-set of innovators.

Perhaps what I am suggesting for K-12 is beyond the scope of what is expected.  If so, then perhaps a new set of expectations need to be encouraged in order to raise the level of preparedness of American students and to maintain America’s competitiveness in the world.  Tom Friedman is fond of saying that in a flat world that is Internet connected Johnny and Susie are no longer just competing with the kid next door for a job; they are competing with kids in India and China as well.

Julia Kaganskiy

“I think there’s a new kind of creative class that’s emerging with the digital age.  They are developing new ideas that have commercial potential, but maybe that isn’t their first and foremost objective,” said Julia Kaganskiy, director of the New Museum’s new incubator for designers, artists and technologists.  She made this statement during an interview with the Wall Street Journal.  She further stated, that these projects “don’t necessarily have a clear market proposition.  They are driven from some sort of creative inquiry rather than from a desire to scale up.”  These comments seem to summarize the cohorts and activities I have observed during the course of my fieldwork at Yale, and in particular at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”).

The modern Yale institutionally is fostering a world-class environment that enables the emergence of a new creative class.  At Yale, people are linked through an ethos that can be characterized as “creative confidence.”  The term “creative confidence” was coined by Tom and David Kelley[1] in Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.  They wrote “At its core, creative confidence is about believing in your ability to create change in the world around you.  It is the conviction that you can achieve what you set out to do.  We think this self-assurance, this belief in your creative capacity, lies at the heart of innovation.”  I believe at Yale creative confidence is embodied in the enactments of intellectual curiosity, imagination, creative ability, inventiveness, and other qualities that empower Elis to discover, unlock, and reach their full creative potential.  This concept is given great force in the social context of Yale, because it captures, in part, how Yale serves to link people to the thought world of this institution; creative confidence is a part of the university’s cultural system.

A recent article in the New York Times “Solving Problems for Real World, Using Design,” about the d. school at Stanford University gave me a deeper understanding of the comment by a senior CEID staff member that a part of his job is “to get students comfortable with being uncomfortable.”   (The official name of the d. School is the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University.)  This article highlighted that creative confidence is an important element of the d. School’s approach to teaching real-world problem solving.  Although I have not heard the senior CEID staff member use the term creative confidence, he is nonetheless a proponent of teaching students how to develop human-centered solutions to real-world challenges.  He is an adherent of the pedagogy of the design thinking process.

In Creative Confidence the authors wrote, “Design thinking is a way of finding human needs and creating new solutions using the tools and mindsets of design practioners.”  For the Kelleys, “design thinking approach means more than aesthetics or developing physical products.  Design thinking is a methodology.”  On the d. School’s website it is stated that the goal of the design thinking process is to make the lives of the people they’re designing for better.  Furthermore, the d. School focuses on the design process because they seek to equip their students with a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field.  And the real focus is on “creating innovators rather than any particular innovation.”   

Design thinking is a way to connect engineering and science to society.   A sample of examples of design thinking that I am aware of at Yale include, the 109 Design team’s design of a bio-medical device to increase compliance by wearers of braces to correct scoliosis; a team designed a device to run electric appliances on human sourced power; a team is studying the New Haven school system in order to design school reforms.  I would not be surprised to learn in the future that once InnovateHealth at Yale is up and running that design thinking process is incorporated into every aspects of how they conceptualize and implement solutions to global health challenges.

Creative confidence is like a muscle that is strengthened through rigorous exercise and use.  Yale institutionally is fostering a world-class environment that enables a steady stream of innovators to be produced in any field, and perhaps many great innovations also.

Thank you for your support.

Thank you for your comments.

Thank you for reading this blog.

Thank you for making this a wonderful journey.

Have a happy, successful, and prosperous New Year!

“If this does not blow your mind, you have no emotion,” exclaimed Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, in his 2011 TED talk, when demonstrating a mathematics formula.   Bill Gates joined him on stage, and said, “It is amazing.  I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education.”  Sal is not formally trained as an educator; before Khan Academy he was an analyst at a hedge fund in Boston.  Yet he has disrupted the education industry through his innovative approach to teaching and learning: “flipping the classroom.”  The mission of Khan Academy is to “Provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” The Academy provides students video lectures which are viewed at home, and “homework” which is done in the classroom with the teacher available to help, along with assistance provided by a student’s peers.  This approach personalizes instruction for every student by rethinking the role of teachers by moving them up the food chain.

Sal challenges top postsecondary educational institutions to get away from passive lectures and free up the classroom for deeper learning.  His view is that passive lectures are dehumanizing.  He espouses giving a student agency over her own work.  (See The One World School House: Education Reimagined for a full discussion of his views on education.)  This is similar to the approach to teaching and learning that I have seen at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (CEID”) in MENG 404, as well MENG 489 – Mechanical Design: Process and Implementation which is the capstone course for senior Mechanical Engineering majors.  The radical idea to respect the learner is the basis for how teaching and learning occur at CEID.

An understanding of how certain Yale professors are revolutionizing teaching a cohort of 21st century knowledge workers opens a window onto the formal learning experience on an elite college campus.  How do these learning experiences enhance student knowledge and skills acquisition?  This is the type of question I will be thinking about as I begin to write my dissertation.  A pragmatic question here is: Can my research be used by companies, in the global war for talent, to facilitate workforce talent assessment and training?  My emphatic answer is that my research enables me to assist employers in workforce talent assessment and training.

Start-ups[1] are especially in need of workforce talent assessment and training tools to minimize problematic hiring decisions.  For an early-stage company each new hire could be a critical decision.  Given the global competition for talent companies of all sizes need to mine all known avenues for talent.  Yet while this is the case they also need to have appropriate assessment tools to determine the knowledge and skills competency “fit”, and organizational culture “fit” of their prospective hires.  As Sal Khan and the Yale professors teaching in the CEID have reimagined education, companies need to reimagine the hiring process.  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal “Startups Are Quick to Fire: New Hires Who Don’t Measure Up Can Be Gone in Days or Weeks” made this point abundantly clear.  The focus of the article was the hiring and firing practices of some start-ups.  Some of the companies were so clueless about hiring that on occasion a new hire might be fired within days, weeks or several months of being hired.  My thought in reading this article was the people who were doing the hiring should be relieved of those responsibilities: they did not know what they were doing and they were costing their companies hard money and reputational capital.

Moneyball, the term popularized by Michael Lewis’ 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game and a 2011 movie based on the book starring Brad Pitt, is an analytical evidence-based approach to evaluating talent and to uncovering the true indices of success for individual baseball players. In the book and movie, the main character Billy Beane, the General Manger of the Oakland Athletics, demonstrated how a team that did not have the financial resources of teams such as the New York Yankees could resort to a David and Goliath strategy to put a winning team on the field.  Rather than playing by the conventional rules of being the highest bidder for a baseball player, Billy Beane used evidence-based statistics to uncover hidden talent.  The principle of moneyball is applicable to the non-athletic workplace as well.

In David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell, the popular New Yorker writer, wrote essays about “Davids,” the under-resourced little guy or outsiders who used unconventional strategies to beat the perennial favorites, or Goliaths. The lesson here for start-ups is that a company has to create relevant matrices to optimize its talent pool based on the fact that its resources are constrained.  How can companies give credit for what a prospective hire knows regardless of how she acquired the knowledge or skill?  The war for talent is not limited to start-ups: established companies are battling for talent also.

In order to achieve a different result, an innovative result, we must heed the words of Steve Jobs: “Think Different!”

[1] Steve Blank defines a start-up as a temporary organization designed to search for a business model that is scalable and sustainable.