Non-Disruptive Innovation: Part 2

Experiment Fund launch.

The aptly named Experiment Fund launched a week ago at Harvard.

With Facebook gearing up for its grand IPO, the timing was poetic.

The Fund, the brainchild of triple alum Patrick Chung from NEA, aims to encourage students to stay on campus and in Cambridge by providing early seed funding for innovations to help them through the "valley of death."

The founders of Tivli, a student (now alumni)-based start-up that aims to re-invent television, were the case study darlings at the launch.

Describing how they decked out their dorm room with tin foil and wiring, the scruffy duo seemed like a latter day version of the two Steves (Wozniak and Jobs, the founders of Apple). 

Zach Hamed, Nicholas Krasey, Ho Tuan, and you-know-who.

Tivli's Nicholas Krasney '09 and Ho Tuan '09 may hope to score the next billion dollar IPO, but you could tell from the way they spoke that the problem ('hey, wouldn't it be great if we could...') was the thing that drove them.

More than the money, the Fund is about cultivating risk, fostering the "Hacker Way" Mark Zuckerberg has been espousing, and making good-intentioned screw ups "okay" at an institution that finds it difficult to talk about failure.

In a thought-provoking op-ed in The Crimson Benjamin T. Hand ’12 wrote (a mere three days after the Experiment Fund launch) about failure:

What struck me most about all of this was the difficulty in talking about it with people at Harvard—even close friends. I don’t mean that I felt uncomfortable sharing it, about exposing my own ineptitude or disappointment: in fact, I almost always feel more comfortable sharing my failures than I do sharing my successes. Instead, I found that people at Harvard have difficulty holding a serious discussion about failure in the lives of our friends and classmates.

Dissecting this dichotomy (making failure safe/ensuring success) is at the heart of the future of this, and all, academic institutions.

Risk adverse education may be the real threat.

Cutting through the ivy, academic Neal Gabler (who knows Harvard first hand, as he served as a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School), provided an ironic take on the "one percent" that perpetuates the struggle many students face.

More, 1 percent education may make students risk-averse. Though educators are fond of saying you learn from failure, with today’s stakes, the best students know you cannot really afford to fail. You can’t even afford minor missteps. That is one of the lessons of 1 percent education: 1 percenters must always succeed.

As a Freshman adviser busy signing study cards in January, I had my own personal experience with the fear that students hold close. An undergraduate believed he would put himself at extreme risk by taking a course that appeared light or "not useful" (in this case, one on Japanese culture and anime).

He felt that future graduate programs and employers would view such an indulgence as a black mark on his record. I told him that if that ever were to happen to have the interested party call me and I would have it out with them.

Gabler had similar, more troubling moments at Harvard:

One of my student assistants at the Kennedy School, where I served a fellowship last semester, confessed to me that he and his classmates were constantly being told that they were the best of the best, which pressures them to prove it by pursuing the sorts of activities and research that wins honors. It is not only narcissism we have to worry about; it is solipsism ... In the end, 1 percent education is as much a vision of life as it is a standard of academic achievement — a recrudescence of social Darwinism disguised as meritocracy.

Is it realistic to propose countering such heady forces? A culture shift of a culture that has developed over nearly 400 years? As I mentioned in my last post, I think communications may play a large role in helping to promote a "third way." I also think this third way may also counter the gloom-and-doom predictions about the future of higher education. 

1. Institutions, especially those like Harvard, must own up to their own failures---and be open about experimentation. In annual reports, state-of-the-school speeches, and and in every day hallway conversations, say what's working, what's not working, and what could be better.

In an engineering school that is overhauling its curriculum, carving out every available space for new teaching labs, and growing with growing pains, this does happen. Not perhaps as much as it should---but it does happen.

Our dean routinely tells audiences that we need to do better in terms of advising and that along the way, we have made choices that have not always worked out. The eyes, however, always remain on the prize: putting students and teaching first.

2. Taking inspiration from student innovators, institutions must allow faculty and staff to experiment as well and launch things in a beta-state (and report on them!). Grand experiments like redesigning General Education are important, but are so massive and mission critical that when they are finally introduced they seem neutered rather than nuanced.

Harry Lewis gave a speech describing this Harvard's onerous process to launch the new General Education program:

We have taken too many decisions piecemeal. In the process we have inadequately disciplined our ambitions. We have also spent too much time securing our self-interests. It’s a shame, since the Task Force gave us a way of thinking about General Education that should have produced wonderful results for our students. Instead, we are going to relieve the pressure on ourselves to make hard choices by transferring that pressure to our students.

High fashion and high design at SEAS.

Contrast this to short-courses and programs during Wintersession, which are, to borrow a phrase from earlier, experiments. Students know this going in---and are okay with it!

They see, first hand, faculty taking risks and admitting that they do not know whether something will work. For communications professionals, this is a gold mine for stories.

At SEAS, we ...

• hosted a jDesign course with IDEO; 

• offered an introduction to aviation (something not taught here since the early 20th century);

• and provided an intensive look at sustainable biomaterials.

Design Preceptor Joe Zinter, who helped with the jDesign course, said it best:

For an engineering program, jDesign was pretty progressive. SEAS is pushing hard against the conventional engineering paradigm, and that's pretty rad.

One of the great things about Harvard's new middle term was that for the first two years, it was underfunded due to budget constraints. This put far less pressure on those wanting to create programs, and such an attitude has continued even as internal grants to create and support activities have increased.

For a winter project grand and, um, expensive, like Harvard Business School's field program that sent 900 MBA students around the world, it was still viewed as risky, experimental, and fluid.

The trips were also an experiment in HBS’s logistical capabilities. Sending 1,000 students, faculty, and support staff around the globe took the coordinated efforts of HBS Executive Education, external relations, legal and other administrators, and the School’s global research centers. While HBS prides itself on a robust alumni network, the task of finding enough global partners to help create 150 team trips required HBS to reach out and work with alumni on an unprecedented scale, Moon said. “We’ve had to use muscles we’ve never really had to use before,” she said. “In the process, we’re developing some different kinds of flexibility we’re just beginning to tap into. We’re inspired.”

3. In the age where sharing everything is the norm, institutions should be okay with crowdsourcing "raw" and direct assessments---via blogs, videos, etc.---and not over-varnishing everything.

Institutions fight hard to maintain their brands, especially when threats are on the horizon (online learning, for-profit higher education, and even calls by the current President to control skyrocketing tuition costs).

The Harvard brand flies above it all.

In turn, communications professionals, while well intentioned, often over edit to appease various audiences and stakeholders and provide institutional messages.

(You can always tell when you read those 'said a spokesperson' quotes how often they have been through the wash cycle.)

Given that even companies like Google and Facebook (both of which encourage their employees to be honest and unfiltered to speed innovation) spend money on internal and external communications to project a unified image, we cannot expect communications to be done solely by the crowd.

There is a middle ground. We can step back a lot more. First, make sure to highlight content that comes directly from students, faculty, and staff.

• BostonInno has run a fantastic series on student-innovation, written by students at Harvard.
• HBS, with its site redesign, is pushing out faculty blogs in a big way.
• Two students created a rap (note: foul language) dedicated to a professor.

Further, when producing and editing content, go for a light touch.

• Watch the jDesign video. While roduced by the SEAS Communications Office (the voice of the school), the piece is focused on letting the students/faculty tell the story.

It may be unrealistic to expect that by being more open with communications on risks, experiments, and failures that institutional culture change will ensue, but it is a start.

Doing nothing or remaining too scared to talk about truth with a little 't' may leave an institution, in the words of Richard DeMillo so "trapped by tradition and culture that they are unable to act to save themselves from economic and political forces that are reshaping other institutions."

In our case, one of the best pieces of publicity we have had in many years was from a student interviewed by the Boston Globe.

“It’s really a different environment from when Zuckerberg was here," Hamed said. “He was working with his roommates in his dorm room; I’ve been able to work with an innovation lab. I’ve talked to venture capitalists; I’ve looked at term sheets. I have office space and people to work with. “If Zuckerberg were here today, I bet he would have stayed a little longer,’’ he said.

One could see this as a "diss" about how Harvard used to be. As alumni like to point out "there was nothing wrong with my education, so why must you always insist on saying that it needs to be transformed!" Point taken.

Instead, I think Hamed's quip should be seen as a testament to the University's willingness to embrace change---and change led from the bottom up, by students---while still remaining Crimson at its core.

Even Harvard's E.O.Wilson has an iPad with his book on it.

After all, I think any higher education institution would be okay with being seen as "gutsy", "bold", or "daring" --- if it was all about improving its rock-steady commitment to education and research.

Deep down, everyone harbors a secret desire to be seen like Apple. Ever-entrepreneurial and super cool.

Such soul searching in higher education could bring on an existential crisis. Let's change everything! We are under attack!

Yet, not all innovation has to be completely disruptive, simply thoughtful and honest---and shared.

Naader “Naad” Banki and Steven Gagliano, seniors at the University of Southern California, wrote an editorial for the Washington Post that everyone with a connection to higher ed should heed.

Today’s university culture places too much of a premium on accomplishments over true understanding. What fosters “true understanding”? To some extent, it requires awareness of oneself. But it also demands the ability to appreciate the ways in which one’s upbringing influenced and continues to contribute to the development of one’s identity. The mark of a true leader is the ability to employ a system of self-reflection, in order to learn from both successes and failures without feeling anchored by a sense of incompetence. As students in the modern sphere of academia, we are piloted by the necessity to know rather than the invitation to think and engage in introspective dialogue.

In the words of another innovator, the audience is indeed listening. We just need to make sure to put our heads to the ground before we speak.