What is the role of the CEID in the innovation and entrepreneurship process at Yale?  “CEID is a place where we help people unlock a new threshold of knowledge,” is the answer to this question given to me by a staff member of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”).  I found this response profound.  He said that his statement was a paraphrase of a statement by Kahlil Gibran: “If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”  Indeed CEID has an aura of creativity and magic.  Magic, in the sense that a sculptor takes a block of granite and creates a magnificent sculpture, or an artist takes a blank canvas and creates a stunning visual image.  All acts of creativity raise the questions: Where does inspiration come from?  And what force or power is directing the hand of the sculptor or artist?

MENG 404, is an extraordinary collaboration between the Yale School of Medicine (“Med School”) and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. This course was situated in the CEID.  The student-led projects that were produced in MENG 404 are prima facie evidence that magic can be based in reality.  MENG 404 is officially described as a “design-based course where students tackle real-world clinical needs and conceptualize, ideate, and prototype devices to positively impact patients.”  The cool part is that Yale Med School faculty and a resident provided four design opportunities and acted as mentors throughout the term.  The unofficial description should be what a student said, “It was very cool to put our experiences to another level.”  Moreover, he commented, “Joe [Dr. Zinter] and Richard [Dr. Fan] met the students where they were and pushed them to new levels.”

This week, the culmination of 15 weeks of hard work, creativity and innovation was on display at the CEID.  Four end of term projects for MENG 404 were presented.  These presentations were a look into the future of medical technology.  Students created impactful solutions to real-world problems that help patients, said Dr. Roberts, one of the faculty mentors.  A common element of the devices is that they improve the quality of life for patients.  I was blown away, as usual, by the quality of student-led innovation and invention.  Also, kudos to Joe and Richard for their vision to design such a meaningful learning experience and for their execution in pulling off an innovative collaboration between the Med School and the Engineering Department.  Kudos to all of the people who had the foresight to understand the impact of what Joe and Richard were proposing, and the wisdom to approve offering MENG 404.

Proof of concept through prototyping is the basis of the course.  The four biomedical device prototypes are described here.

• A device that aids in the management of epilepsy by accurately counting seizures.  People afflicted with epilepsy are notoriously bad at recalling the number of seizures they experience.  This information is important in providing doctors with information in order to prescribe the appropriate medication and dosage.
• A surgical assist device for throat and neck surgery.  The device is deemed so innovative that it could be used as a stand-alone enhancing a surgeon’s ability to reach the throat cavity in a minimally invasive manner.  This approach would also reduce patient trauma and disfiguration of the patient’s face and head.  Also one of the med school professors suggested that the student-created device could be an add-on to the da Vinci surgical robot which cost $1.5 million.
• Keeping tissue alive and healthy is a critical issue for transplantation.  During the Q & A period, one of the transplantation experts working with the student team said that the student project device prototype moves transplantation in New Haven to a new level.
• A novel at-home drug delivery system for pediatric hemophilia patients.  The user-centered design approach as espoused by the staff of the CEID aided the students in designing a device that focused on usability for pediatric patients.  It is named the Power Pack; the pediatric patients are told that  the device will give them power.  One of the students commented that they were “Lucky to have the CEID as a resource to use; the 3D printer enabled the team to fabricate the prototype.”  She continued stating, “Such a project would have been difficult to fabricate if they had to use the traditional mode of machine fabrication.”

At CEID students used modern manufacturing methods to bring their designs to reality.  The four biomedical devices that were created during the semester in MENG 404 are exemplars of how CEID is a transformative space that empowers students to prototype what they can conceive and design. One of the lessons from my research is that by fostering an environment of creativity and collaboration between medicine and engineering, magical realism is possible for students.

Whether the biomedical devices discussed here will be overwhelmingly significant in improving patients’ lives, only time will tell. But we do know right now that magic is real.  Napoleon Hill, said “What the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

William Wordsworth

Harvard President Drew Faust, in her 2013 Commencement speech, commented that as she thought about her remarks, the lines of William Wordsworth’s well-known poem, “The world is too much with us,” echoed in her mind. The world is too much with us; late and soon,/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! She cited several extreme weather events, as well as the horrific Marathon bombings as instances that “challenged fundamental assumptions about life’s security, stability and predictability.”

In the speech, inaugurating the 2013-2014 academic year, President Faust discussed new challenges to the “fundamental assumptions undergirding American higher education and the foundations of our nation’s research enterprise.”  Faust challenged the Harvard community to rethink today’s higher education model when she posed several provocative questions: “How can we best use time in the classroom? How can we connect people and intellectual resources beyond the classroom to enhance what happens inside it? How can education get students on track to land their first job?”

The outside world is impinging on the academy is unprecedented ways: federal budgets cuts for basic research and technology are giving rise to new educational models.  Employers also are increasingly raising their collective voices to comment on the preparedness, or lack of preparedness of prospective employees for the challenges of the 21st century global economy.  Let us be clear though, employers whether in technology, or other industries are asking for prospective employees 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.

In an e-mail regarding last week’s post “Staying In Your Lane” it was remarked that faculty, administrators and staff, must address the important questions concerning what employers will use as hiring criteria.  While educators are rethinking educational models, employers need  to rethink recruiting and hiring models. Once company recruiters and managements have settled on the appropriate skill set they want their employees to possess then the hard work of selecting people who will thrive and be successful in a particular organization begins.  My research relating to recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees has led me to conclude that organizational culture fit is as important as having the appropriate academic background and experience.  The issue that has been raised here is how to recruit, hire and retain the ideal employee while lessening the cost, time and risk in the process.  In essence the goal is to solve the conundrum of over-reliance on gut instinct on the part of both employer and employee when making a decision about whether to make an offer of employment and whether to accept an offer of employment.  The goal is to create a system to improve the probability that organizations and individuals will make better decisions.

Organizational culture fit is important for all organizations, regardless of their stage of development; it is especially important for start-ups.  Because every new hire in a start-up is performing a critical function the importance of getting early hires right is heightened.  For Millennials “fit” also is an opportunity to create an engaged matchup of talent and opportunity.  It is not just about the applicant fitting into the organizational culture; it is about the organization offering the employee meaningful work and a reason to get up in the morning besides cash.

The secret sauce is how to use organizational culture fit in the recruiting and hiring process in a modern and inclusive way as a constructive criterion rather than in an antiquated and limiting way as a destructive criterion.  This approach repositions organizational culture as a compelling driver of organizational success.  The desire is to improve management’s decision-making about potential personnel.  This assessment platform is a data-driven predictor of whether the organizational culture coupled with the work environment is one where the candidate will choose to be motivated, contributing and happy, and build a sense of employee ownership in the organization.  Also this platform would measure whether the potential employee has the ability to adapt to the evolving requirements of the organization’s internal and external environments, and its ecosystem.  This data-driven approach creates a “virtual try-on” or “virtual try-out” then makes an over-all assessment of the probability that the relationship will be successful, given the participants’ reasonable expectations, goals and hoped for outcomes.

Why should you care about the type of assessment platform discussed here?  The answer lies in the statement that the organization that uses the best system to put the best talent on the field wins.

Regions and local communities, including colleges and universities have no choice but to “cultivate their own” entrepreneurship ecosystem explained Daniel Isenberg, Executive Director, Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project.  He further stated, “You cannot become Silicon Valley and should not even try; Silicon Valley could not even become itself today if it wanted to.”  Focusing on your community’s unique strengths and assets is critical to the idea of staying in your lane.  Policy makers should think deeply about their unique situation and available resources and develop a course of action that is feasible within their resource constraints.

An e-mail concerning last week’s post inspired this post.  That e-mail, in part, asserted that the issue of balancing Yale’s core purposes of teaching and research, and how the administration handles integrating the university with the new economy will be a part of the fundamental transformation of education in the 21st century.  This issue has reshaped the central question of my research.  Initially, my central question was “What does it mean to have a job or to work in the 21^st century global knowledge economy?  This central question has been revised based on my ethnographic work.  The central question now is “What does it mean to prepare for a job or to prepare to work in the 21^st century global knowledge economy?”  Along these lines, several questions were raised in the email referenced earlier: What evidence will employers accept for proficiency and indicators of future performance?  What importance will “class rank” have and does that concept have meaning anymore?  What is adequate knowledge in dynamic industries, and does it matter how it is acquired?  Massive on-line open courses (“MOOC’s”) are another approach to acquiring knowledge in the 21st century.  While this approach is revolutionizing higher education, an intriguing question is raised: Will MOOC’s close or further widen educational attainment disparities?

How, what, when, where, and why Millennials acquire knowledge and skills is critical to their future success.  This notion seems to have been understood by the various Yale administrations over the past two decades.  The Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”), the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”) and InnovateHealth are prominent examples of how they have balanced teaching, one of its two core purposes (research is the other core principle), and integrating the university with the new economy.  These student-focused examples have the attributes of interstitial organizations under the academic capitalism regime.

“A number of new organizations emerged from the interstices of established college and universities to manage new activities related to generation of external revenues,” stated Slaughter and Rhoades (2004), authors of the theory of academic capitalism.  Many of these organizations, in their opinion, are intended to bring universities, corporations, and the state closer together.  They refer to these entities as interstitial organizations.  Examples are technology licensing offices equipped to manage intellectual property (Yale Office of Cooperative Research), economic development offices which link university research strengths to efforts by the state to build its economy (Yale’s West Campus and Office of New Haven & State Affairs) and certain fund raising officials.

In their seminal work Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (2004), Slaughter and Rhoades viewed students primarily as educational consumers rather than as active actors in the academic capitalism regime.  Therefore their examples of interstitial organizations excluded student-focused organizations.  This view about the role of students was seemingly updated in a paper published in 2008, “The State-Sponsored Student Entrepreneur,” which Slaughter and Rhoades co-authored with Matthew Mars.  Therein the authors sought to “refine and recast [their] reading of the effects of academic capitalism on students.”  They discussed student entrepreneurship as an emerging phenomenon characterized, like faculty entrepreneurship, by opportunities for market activity, particularly in science and technology fields that are close to the knowledge economy.

While acknowledging that these opportunities are embedded in expanding institutional infrastructure for commercialization of faculty research, the authors did not refine and recast their definition of interstitial organization to include student-focused organizations.  Since students are active actors under academic capitalism, I am expanding the definition of interstitial organization to include student-focused organizations that center around experiential education and preparing students to participate in the new economy through market and market-like activities.  Expansion of the term interstitial organization will facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of how students leverage the academic capitalist infrastructure to innovate in the atoms, bits and social entrepreneurial spaces.

Yale President Peter Salovey, on October 21, 2013 sent out one of his periodic Notes from Woodridge Hall, “Basking in Reflected Glory.”  “For the past two weeks, he wrote, I have been BIRGing. This term, from my field of social psychology, is based on the acronym for ‘basking in reflected glory.’  And such glory we have had:  a community-wide celebration of Yale during the inauguration week …; two Nobel prize winners among our own faculty, Bob Shiller and Jim Rothman; the largest gift in Yale’s history, $250 million given by Yale alumnus Charles Johnson…

Furthermore, he commented, “Through our varied connections with Yale, we share in her achievements.  This collective sense of accomplishment lifts our spirits and our aspirations. As we bask in the reflected glory of the excellence that we experience at Yale, we all become better people, unified in celebrating this grand institution.”

Then, as now, I have tried to make the connection between the individual accomplishments of members of the Yale community, and the environment such accomplishments occur in.  I am interested, in addition, in how students and faculty are encouraged and motivated in an innovative milieu  and the significance or meaning that these accomplishments have for my research on the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale.

This week I ran into a law school classmate.  When I mentioned that I was undertaking research at Yale regarding the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship he asked whether the administration desires to keep these activities under wraps.  The reality is quite the contrary.  Rather than trying to keep these activities below the radar screen the administration throughout the university has been celebratory of the entrepreneurial spirit.  Efforts to make information regarding innovation and entrepreneurship more accessible have been undertaken. For example, the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”) website has been upgraded; and because of the repeated requests for information YEI recently published a handbook, Entrepreneurship at Yale! which sets forth many of the entrepreneurship related activities and organizations on campus.  Also, YEI opened a new location on central campus at 254 Elm Street, 3rd floor (above Gant).

This conversation with my law school classmate prompted me to think about my narrative about the members of the Yale community that will be the subjects of my ethnography.  How will they be portrayed?  Are they heroes, capable of invigorating a great institution, and keeping it from becoming quaint in the 21^st century?  Or are they anti-heroes, tearing down a tradition-bound institution?  The perspective I want to take is to look at Yale in a fresh way, as a story of revitalization.

Given the administration’s apparent interest in integrating the university with the new economy, the question is what is the impact of this decision on the social fabric, norms and values of the university?  Because values are attached to organizational forms and policies, my research will examine how the decision to embrace academic capitalism causes a shift in how resources are allocated: which departments are privileged over others, which students segments are privileged over others and which faculty members are privileged over others.

A central question is how will the Yale administration maintain the university’s fundamental purposes while efficiently and effectively integrating the university with the new economy?

Sherlock Holmes by artbyangel19

“We have to ask questions that go beyond our ability to understand,” asserted Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium.  In an interview with the Wall Street Journal he stated further that our search for knowledge must be “Beyond comfort.  That’s what science does ….  And the moment we stop pushing forward like that is the moment we start sliding back into the cave, which is where we’re headed.”   Dr. Tyson is espousing a view that knowledge is good because it advances humankind.  Yet I think he overstates the case when he suggests that as a society we are backsliding regarding our thirst for knowledge and understanding.

Curiosity and informed questioning are the catalysts behind creating new circuits of knowledge in the 21^st century global knowledge economy.  But the very process of knowledge creation has an accompanying potential to change or reorder social relations.  As students are mastering new technologies the knowledge they acquire may not necessarily be derived from the traditional hierarchical learning structure where students are passive recipients of information conveyed by professors or teaching assistants.  This change in how college and university students acquire knowledge, from an anthropological perspective, is interesting because it challenges our understanding of how students and educational experts interact.

I have asked the question whether the activity I see at Yale, through the lens of an ethnographer, surrounding innovation and entrepreneurship is part of a moment or movement.  This week, as a follow-up to my post about Y-Hack I had lunch with several of the organizers to inquire further about their post-event intentions.  They stated unequivocally that they were interested in being a part of a movement at Yale to create a community of like-minded people who were interested in innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.  One of the unique things about innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale is that whether you are a hacker, a maker or a designer of social initiatives there is a place at the table for you.

All of the disparate organizations and activities relating to innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale reflect a common purpose: to fulfill the curiosity and enthusiasm for learning of its members.  If you are curious about how to solve global health-related problems, InnovateHealth Yale is the organization for you.  If you are curious about computer coding, HackYale is the organization for you.  And at Yale, as a dean once told me, if there is not an organization that exists that fulfills her curiosity, then a student will start one.

Throughout American society there is a lot of hand wringing about the usefulness or value of a liberal arts degree or a degree in science, technology, engineering or math.  My ethnographic work, and reading about creativity, design thinking and the pursuit of innovation and invention has led me to conclude that curiosity driven by a love for learning is more important than a student’s particular college major.  The 21^st century knowledge worker will have to be flexible and adaptive.  Given the pace of change, largely due to technology, learning will have to be viewed as a life-long pursuit, and not something that ends once you graduate from college or a professional school.  This worldview about life-long learning is embedded in the Yale culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

The mechanism for spreading enthusiasm for learning was on display at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) this week.  A group of students from Scarsdale High School, an affluent Westchester County suburb of New York City made the pilgrimage to Yale to meet with some of the coding masters that are members of HackYale.  Jerry Crisci, Director of Technology for Scarsdale Public Schools told me that the Scarsdale Public School District was interested in creating a smaller version of CEID at Scarsdale High School.  The impact that this pilgrimage will have on the lives of these inquisitive high school students probably will not be known until some time into the future.  I suspect that this visit will have a lasting impact on how these high school students approach learning, and how they satisfy their curiosity about technology and innovation.

*”Eli” is a term sometimes used to refer to a current or former Yale student.  It is a shortened version of Elihu Yale, the first major benefactor of the then Collegiate School.  Brooks Mather Kelley, author of Yale: A History (1974) wrote that “Probably the trustees [in 1718] intended to call only the structure Yale College, but it was almost inevitable when there was only one college building that its name should have become that of the institution.”

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, on November 8, 2013 titled, “#Freedom”, the editors wrote that “Twitter’s IPO offers a reassuring message on U.S. innovation.”  The editorial stated further that Silicon Valley, in particular, continues to produce exciting new companies and leads the world in meeting the needs of digital consumers.  The Editorial Board failed to acknowledge that U.S. colleges and universities are the training grounds of the talent pool that produces the Twitters of the world.  Moreover, these institutions are the birthplace of many start-ups, including Twitter, Google and Facebook.  President Obama made this point in a speech in 2010 at Penn State University when he stated that “The key to our success … will be to compete in developing new products by generating new industries by maintaining our role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation.  It’s absolutely essential to our future.”

Entrepreneurial colleges and universities provide the laboratories, classrooms, design spaces and overall experiential learning environment for budding 21^st century innovators and entrepreneurs.  This point was one of the findings of the U.S Department of Commerce report titled “The Innovative and Entrepreneurial University: Higher Education, Innovation & Entrepreneurship.”  “America’s innovative and entrepreneurial culture is often regarded as one of this country’s national advantages in an increasingly competitive world.  This innovation infrastructure includes a large number of universities and colleges … all across the United States.”  Research universities, in particular, like Yale, are creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship which fosters and promotes the ambitions of students and faculty.

On November 8-9, 2013 Yale hosted a hackathon called Y-Hack.  (A hackathon is an event which computer programmers and others in the field of software development collaborate intensively on soft-ware-related projects.) The numbers associated with Y-Hack are as follows: approximately 1,000 participants from 80 schools; $20,000 in prizes; approximately 35 company sponsors (including Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg LP, Bridgewater, Amazon Web Services, and Panorama Education). Y-Hack is an instance where students are active agents of academic capitalism because they are leveraging elements of Yale’s academic capitalist infrastructure to contemplate, design and create potential market ventures.

Yale President Salovey’s Inaugural address: Our Educational Mission, stressed a need for entrepreneurship at Yale. He wants to see the growth of student ventures: “We will also do more to nurture student entrepreneurs from every school and department.”  We think Y-Hack is very aligned with President Salovey’s view for Yale, stated one of the Y-Hack organizers.  He continued, “With our hackathon, we want to inspire students to pursue these paths and to allow the already inspired students to create ventures. We challenge them to push each other and make the best products they can, and get rewarded for it. It’s rare to have so many intelligent and motivated minds from both the industrial and educational worlds together in one place with no other goal than to make something cool. It’s a pretty powerful atmosphere.”

What is the larger meaning for Yale of hosting such an event?  The organizers believe that Y-Hack will be an annual event. “It will be around after we graduate and continue to grow each year after that.  With Y-Hack, students across the country have come to see Yale as an innovator in the technology, computer science, and engineering fields.  And we are attempting to push [ourselves] further onto the world stage. We want to make sure that Yale students are actively contributing and making a positive impact to the world by sharing their talents, creating value, and giving back to the community.  It’s hard to predict how much impact Y-Hack could have, but we know for sure that it’s a move in the right direction.”

Matt Hicks, the keynote speaker at Saturday night’s closing ceremony, started his talk quoting Marc Andeerssen, “Software is eating the world.”  Hicks said, “Your company can be on either the good side or the bad side of software.”  His point is that software is changing the world, and every industry and every company must figure out the impact of software on their business models.  He exclaimed that given the drive and educational training that the Y-Hack participants possess history will reward them. Innovation is occurring at hackathons.  Then he boldly asserted, “There is no better time to be where you are.”

Remember the scene at a nightclub in The Social Network when Sean Parker boldly announces to Mark Zuckerberg, “This is our time.”  Whether you belong to the Bits tribe, the Atoms tribe, or the SE (social entrepreneurs) tribe this is your time, Millennnials. Seize it!

* Tagline of Y-Hack.

In Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and  Gary Porras, coined the phrase “BHAG” which stands for a big, hairy, audacious, goal. A BHAG is a mechanism to stimulate progress; to be impactful.  It is a way to galvanize an organization and focus its attention.  This week I attended the beginning of a BHAG movement, the inaugural meeting of InnovateHealth at Yale: a program in social impact and entrepreneurship.  InnovateHealth is the culmination of two years of planning at the Yale School of Public Health to create a platform focused on using the principles of entrepreneurship and innovation to promote health and prevent disease.

There are four components of this social entrepreneurship initiative.  First, nurture innovation through the Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health: $25,000 cash prize to the best student led venture focused on social innovation in health.  Second, teach innovation through offering a class in health innovation to be co-taught by the Yale School of Public Health and the School of Management beginning in spring 2015.  Third, learn innovation through a summer internship program related to social entrepreneurship in health.  Fourth, foster innovation through bringing social innovators to campus to lecture, host workshops, and be in-residence for a designated time period.

What is the definition of social entrepreneurship?  J. Gregory Dees, who many consider the father of social entrepreneurship, in “The Meaning of ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ ” provides the following definition:  “Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector: adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value); recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission; engaging in a process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning; acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand; and exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.”  Dees says that “social entrepreneurs are one species of the genus entrepreneur.”  They are entrepreneurs with a social mission.  For social entrepreneurs, the social mission is explicit and central.  This mission focus affects how social entrepreneurs perceive and assess opportunities.  Mission-related impact becomes the central criterion, not wealth creation.  Social impact is the gauge of value creation.

Social entrepreneurship at Yale is an instance where students use academic capitalist infrastructure to create social value through sustainable mission-driven enterprises.  Some purists regarding student activism argue that social entrepreneurialism and student interest in creating wealth are distractions to student involvement and leadership in social and political movements.  My view is different: student entrepreneurs whether driven by a social or wealth agenda can produce social or political change.  Even a wealth creation agenda could result in having a social impact on others, if an entrepreneur uses a portion of her wealth for public good.

Entrepreneurship describes a mind-set and a kind of behavior.  The theory of academic capitalism acts as a unifying theory of mission-related impact social entrepreneurialism and economic-driven entrepreneurialism. Both species of entrepreneur is creating new circuits of knowledge that integrates with the new economy.  Each one is using market-like behaviors and market ethos to achieve albeit different ends.

Based on my observations, social entrepreneurship is alive and well, and thriving at Yale.  “What Stanford is to classic tech entrepreneurship, Yale is becoming to social entrepreneurship”, was asserted in a recently published article, “Women of Yale: New Haven’s Social Mavens.”  The article focused on social entrepreneurs who started their organizations in the fertile soil of Yale.  InnovateHealth appears to be raising social entrepreneurship to a new level.  This initiative seeks to be impactful domestically, as well as globally.  InnovateHealth “is the result of an evolving partnership between the School of Public Health at Yale working towards the common goal of helping Yale students change the world through innovation and entrepreneurship.”  InnovateHealth’s mission statement states that it is committed to one concept: change.

During the course of my fieldwork I have had meetings with persons involved with social entrepreneurship activities at Yale.  And I have attended the Sabin Sustainable Venture Prize competition, which is sponsored by the Yale Center for Business and the Environment.  (The Sabin Prize is awarded to “the best Yale student and/or faculty ideas for a product, service, project or program that advances a more sustainable way of life.”)  Other examples are Design for America, Think Social and Engineers Without Borders.

Throughout my ongoing fieldwork the following question will be kept in mind: Are social entrepreneurs another tribe at Yale, or they embedded in the Atoms and Bits tribes?

Jack Nicklaus by Sidney Maurer

“Nicklaus plays a game with which I am not familiar”, exclaimed Bobby Jones (one of the greatest golfers of all time) about Jack Nicklaus, arguably the greatest golfer of all time.  This point about actors performing in the same arena, yet on significantly different levels is relevant when thinking about Yale students and the resources they have access to.  A recent e-mail admonishes me to acknowledge, from time to time, that Yale students are participating in the global economy in a very unique manner, and are coming from a very unique starting point.  This point is accepted and acknowledged.

The quality of the intellectual and physical resources readily available to Yale students allows them to train their minds and have learning experiences at a level that is not familiar to most college or university students.  This resource disparity is a proximate cause of what Christine Matthews, Specialist in Science and Technology Policy for the Congressional Research Service calls the “economic opportunity divide” (Matthews 2011 and 2012).

My research focuses on the manner and means through which Yale is preparing its students for the challenges and opportunities represented by the rising potential for applied sciences and engineering, and for technologically enabled enterprises (Arthur 2011).  The theory of academic capitalism is embedded in my ethnographic work.  For example, regarding the Bits tribe, I am analyzing how programs sponsored and promoted by the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (the Technology Commercialization Program, the Venture Creation Program, Start Something and the Summer Fellowship) are integrating Yale with the new economy.  This type of market-like behavior which is becoming incorporated into the academic ethos of Yale is of concern to scholars such as Michael Sandel, a professor of Government at Harvard University.

In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2012) Sandel asserts that the most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was the expansion of markets, and market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.  The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by non-market norms is one of the most significant developments of our time.  He argues that we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society.  He explains this point: “A market economy is a tool for organizing productive activity.  A market society is a way of life in which market values seep into every aspect of human endeavor.  It’s a place where social relations are made over in the image of the market.”  Sandel’s premise is in contradistinction to the theory of academic capitalism.

Sandel would argue that when knowledge is treated as a commodity that can be bought and sold, we decide, at least implicitly, that it is an instrument of profit and loss.  For him, this “market triumphalism” produces a society in which everything is for sale.  In his opinion this leads to inequality, among other things.  He says in a society where everything is for sale life is harder for those of modest means.  “The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters.”

Yale’s resource rich environment should be recognized for providing its student and faculty opportunities to innovate, invent, design, and, in some instances, monetize their intellectual capital.  Notwithstanding Sandel’s concern about crowding out of non-market norms and values, my ethnographic study of the culture of innovation at Yale will bring forth propositions and implications that are relevant for other colleges and universities that are interested in fostering a culture of innovation.  In thinking about what it means to prepare for a job or to work, in the 21st century global knowledge economy a lot can be learned by studying how educational elites at Yale, a global center of knowledge production are integrating with the new economy.  Through conducting ethnography at Yale we will enhance our knowledge of how the new economy works.

michael-corleone-cynthia-campbell

An e-mail I received concerning last week’s post about the theory of academic capitalism brought to mind a quote by Michael Corleone in the Godfather trilogy: “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.”  Until now I have meticulously avoided the topic of class in my posts.  This avoidance was due to my concern that this blog might be perceived as a polemic about race and class in America.  In many respects technology and the new economy democratizes opportunity.  The essence of the e-mail I received is as follows: It looks like you are focusing on cosmopolitan entrepreneurialism.  That emergent constellation privileges intellectual power and nimbleness. This area of inquiry has the advantage of being relatively more agnostic about racial and cultural differences.  The concern I have is that you may end up with an ethnography that takes a group of high flyers at Yale, and raise them to the level of exemplars of their generation.  They are not.     

In The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006), Richard Sennet, a sociologist, stated “The moral privilege of cutting-edge labor is a talisman of success which is hard for people, below elite levels, to practice as a life project.”  In thinking about career options Sennet articulates that class counts for everything.  He writes: “A child of privilege can afford strategic confusion, a child of the masses cannot.  Chance opportunities are likely to come to the child of privilege because of family background and educational networks; privilege diminishes the need to strategize.”

On the other hand, Edmund Phelps, Nobel Laureate in economics, in his engaging book Mass Flourishing (2013) wrote about the culture of innovation which can refer to an entrepreneurial mind-set in the new economy.  He discussed the role of education and the accumulation of knowledge in the innovation process.  For Phelps, education is crucial for widespread innovation; ultimately innovation is about empowering smart people to be change agents.  Smart people can be anywhere in society.  What makes a place like Yale an exciting research site is that smart people are everywhere.

While my research is couched as the study of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial culture it is really about the culture of innovation in an academic setting.  During a recent conversation about the innovation culture at Yale a staff member described the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) as “the physical space where we help people unlock a new threshold of understanding.”  CEID, admittedly, is a unique design space, and Yale, admittedly has a unique set of financial and intellectual resources (world class libraries, faculty and facilities). While it is true that this unique situation is not representative of a generation, useful insights can be gained from an examination of the processes by which Yale integrates with the new economy.

I hope my research will make a contribution to the dialogue about work and preparing for a job in the 21st century global knowledge economy.  My goal is to discuss a potential solution rather than merely describe the problem of underemployment and unemployment.  Understanding a success model might provide insight into how to apply certain principles of the innovation process to create a new model for job creation.  My research suggests that the new economy is requiring even the educationally privileged to change how they think about work and how they use their intellectual capital.  Their access to uncommon resources enables them to be on the leading edge of design and innovation.

The Office of Cooperative Research, the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, as well as the myriad student organizations are empowering students to create a new paradigm in relation to capital.  In the old paradigm capital controlled labor; in the new paradigm intellectual property has attributes similar to monetary capital.  Capital is not a thing but a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money (Harvey 2010).  Intellectual property can also flow effortlessly across markets and borders.  Whereas labor has historically been less flexible because it is subject to “bounded markets,” markets bounded by geography and proximity to consumers.  Many Millennials are at the early stage of their careers.  They are not invested in the status quo.  They can break the stranglehold of the tired systems that betrayed many Baby Boomers.

As Phelps said the modern values of creativity, curiosity  and vitality are not limited resources.  “People possess the imagination to create new things and the judgment to think for themselves.”

We are engaged in the generation of new knowledge, and this core activity will inevitably produce new opportunities for as yet unimagined innovations in education and research (Levin 2003). Colleges and universities are the 21st century production centers in the new global knowledge economy.  They are the laboratories and “factories” for producing knowledge that leads to the production of ideas and things.  Knowledge is raw material that is converted into products, processes, services, or ideas, innovations, inventions.  This is the reason why my field work site is a major research university.

My research focuses on the social and culture implications of Yale’s transition to a more strategic or pragmatic stance on the production and use of knowledge.  Yale is capturing the value created from faculty research through an infrastructure that promotes, sponsors, and facilitates student and faculty entrepreneurship.

Throughout my ethnographic field work and the related literature review I have been searching for a theoretical model within which to analyze my ethnographic findings.  One theoretical model, in anthropology, is “corporatization.”  The body of literature dealing with corporatization is labeled corporate-effects research.  Corporations from this perspective are seen as a tool of capitalism.  The ethnography of corporations-effects focuses on effects on workers, the displacement of people and disruption of social life due to corporate expansion, consumer damages attributable to the products sold by corporations, effects on local communities, and effects on labor unions.  Corporations, in this body of research, are studied as a cultural form that is a corrosive force, destroying or massively altering traditional social and cultural norms.  The literature examines what is being done to a cohort, or how traditional values and norms are being subverted by external forces.

Corporatization of the university is seen as altering the traditional forms of distributed power: faculty: administrators, faculty: students, administrators: students, academic professional: business professionals.  What is at issue here is the proper alignment of a university’s mission. Essentially this methodology would lead to the conclusion that entrepreneurship is part of a new corporate logic, traditionally foreign to the academy, which is affecting and for some infecting the ways in which academic institutions are run (Duranti 2013).

After reading some of the corporate-effects literature my view is that this theoretical framework is not the appropriate analytical framework within which to analyze entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurship at Yale.  Academic capitalism, in my opinion, is a better theoretical framework to analyze what is going on at Yale.  In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (2004), the seminal book on academic capitalism, Slaugher and Rhoades, set forth the theory of academic capitalism.  They assert that this theory explains the processes by which universities and colleges integrate with the new economy.  It captures the many ways and means through which market and market-like behaviors as well as a market ethos and ideology have been incorporated in postsecondary education.

Academic capitalism involves the pursuit of market and market-like activities to generate external revenues; thus blurring the boundaries between markets and higher education.  Colleges and universities are actors initiating academic capitalism, not just players being corporatized.

What is the difference between academic capitalism and corporatization?

Academic capitalism would enable me to theorize about what Yale is doing to engage with the new economy, rather than what is being done to the university, or how it is being undermined by the corporate form.  Corporatization of the university usually implies the application of capitalist ideals, principles, and logics (Welker, et al. 2011).  In my view, the infrastructure associated with academic capitalism enables Yale to monetize the value of the new knowledge created by faculty and students.  And it is empowers students to innovate for the new economy, and if they chose, create their own jobs and control the means of production.

Scott Adams, creator of the cartoon Dilbert, recently wrote: “Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them.  The market rewards execution, not ideas.”