Go Forth and Innovate!

Know Before You Owe!

2012-03-01T08:36:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

So how much does it really cost to go to college? Do you know? And what about all those headlines bemoaning the continuing – and some would say accelerating – growth in tuition at our institutions of higher education including community colleges? Are we rapidly making higher education accessible and available only to a privileged few? Are we truly cutting off and restricting the pipeline of talent and diversity needed to function as a nation in the 21^st century of global competition?

Like many of our national leaders, President Barack Obama has taken up the cudgels for the many students heavily burdened by the debt and savaged by the rising cost of a college education. In a speech on January 27, 2012, at the University of Michigan, Obama said, “We should push colleges to do better. We should hold them accountable if they don’t.” And following in the footsteps of Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Finance Protection Board, and the person who coined the phrase “know before you owe,” Obama then stated that “today I’m also calling for a new report card for colleges.” Obama proposed to tie some forms of federal student-aid assistance for colleges to performance-based funding. But, of course, such a plan would only affect those students most in need of financial aid. As always, the devil is in the details.

And not to be outdone by our political leaders, pundits and television-show hosts have also taken on the issue of the rising cost of a college education – most notably, Dylan Ratigan. For the record, I’m a fan of Ratigan and greatly enjoy the intelligent discourse in his daytime program, the quality of his guests, and the data-driven nature of his presentations. But on the issue of the rising cost of a college education, he gets a failing grade. He mostly rants with little factual basis and entertains guests who are clueless on the subject. One suspects it has to do with promoting the sale of his new book, Greedy Bastards – college administrators being one of his examples.

In a clever twist of programming subterfuge coupled to a book-signing tour, Ratigan created a 30 Million Jobs Tour for the purpose of visiting regional innovation ecosystems and gee-whiz universities in order to tie together a number of innovation threads including how to get to the magic 30 million new jobs mark and the effect of the horrible job market on college graduates. It was well-done and informative except for one thing. He bashed colleges and universities – almost in the same gleeful spirit as Rich Santorum who equates colleges with liberal indoctrination mills and those who advocate for a college education with snobs. Ratigan currently has two main points: (1) colleges should invest in modern technology as well as group learning and team-playing modalities in order to become more effective and efficient for the purpose of driving down costs, and (2) colleges should be transparent in how tuition dollars are spent.

Ratigan’s first point requires an article all to itself but suffice it to say here that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Most of the high technology experiments that the author is aware of including ones that he personally participated in have cost a great deal of money, have been very time consuming and burdensome for the instructors – who wants to receive lots of emails or texts in the middle of the night, have often not been the choice of the students, and have mostly led to marginal improvement in student performance. There are notable exceptions, but one should always be wary of true-believers. They are often wrong. In the final analysis, I support continued experimentation and the use of high technology in education but with the usual caveat of it actually making a difference.

So what about Obama’s “report card” (in other words, accountability) and Ratigan’s transparency? To the casual observer who listens to the two of them, you would think we have neither accountability nor transparency. And what about the students on Ratigan’s show who don’t how their tuition dollar is spent? Whose fault is that? Is the information lacking or are they just too lazy to find out? I’ll use my experience with The University of Texas System and its institutions to address these questions.

First, let’s deal with the specific issue of transparency in tuition and student input. At UT Austin, a student representative serves on the committee that sets changes in tuition while at UT System, a student regent serves on the Board of Regents. Furthermore, UT Austin hosts an information website on tuition including a link to how tuition is used and how it is coupled to the university budget. For inquiring minds who want the ultimate in detail, one need only download and peruse one of the Annual Financial Reports for the complete financial picture for the university.

With respect to accountability or the filing of a report card, UT System produces a massive annual accountability report as well as a more facile “Productivity Dashboard.” Both are available at the Info Center on the bottom of the home page of UT System and are loaded with data. And for those still not satisfied or sated with data, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board webpage has many links to a copious quantity of available data, especially as regards accountability.

Dylan! Are you satisfied yet that the data on tuition, university finances, and accountability reporting are easily available to everyone and anyone via the Internet? Are you satisfied that there is no secret cabal bent on keeping the facts from the commoners? Folks, let’s be clear here. Transparency and accountability reporting are not the issues. If anything, we have overkill and data overload. The issue is that nobody actually reads this material and nobody really wants to address the fundamental issue of investment and support of higher education in America.

Of course, students, parents, regents, legislators, and plenty of other people would like to see a simplistic display of all these data, but that’s hard to do and many have tried. Let’s face it. Universities are a complex enterprise with many sources of revenue, many diverse restrictions on how the income is spent, and multiple tortured pathways from an income chart to an expenditure report.

My response and challenge to Dylan Ratigan, President Obama, and others who want to take colleges and universities behind the wood shed for a paddling is this: do your homework first, get the facts right, and then invite guests to your show who actually know something about university finances and university accountability. Peter McPherson, head of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, comes to mind.

An affordable and accessible college education, whether at community colleges, four-year colleges, or research universities, is essential for America to maintain a quality workforce in the 21^st century and to remain globally competitive. As we collectively address the issue of the rising costs of a college education and its impact on our economy and our competitiveness, let’s deal from a deck stacked with the correct facts. As Cordray said, “know before you owe.”

Towards a Competitive Texas

2012-02-23T08:16:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

The recent decision by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to cut the number of undergraduate physics programs putatively underperforming with respect to the number of graduates is symbolic of the plight facing our State when one implements an ideology to achieve austerity under the guise of efficiency. Driven by the excessive use of one-dimensional, data-based accountability on steroids, it is symptomatic of balkanized bureaucracies that never communicate to obtain a balanced approach to governing and thereby collectively fail to achieve the greater good for Texas and its inhabitants.

And when such accountability is overlaid by a mishmash of rhetoric couched in language designed to obscure its true purpose while appealing to our baser instincts, such as that which emanates from the Texas Public Policy Foundation and its minions, we have a schizophrenic Texas that heralds the need for research universities as innovation engines through its emerging research university incentive programs, but closes part of the pipeline that feeds in new and diverse STEM talent – not to mention the continuing denigration of university faculty by some or the movement toward state-assisted rather than state-funded universities. It’s a failure to properly communicate and govern writ large!

Many such examples of the schizophrenic behavior pattern exist in Texas, the crassest epitome being the fact that the University of Texas in Austin and Texas A&M University are in separate football conferences. How crazy is that?

The potential to be “the best that we can be” is enormous in Texas and stems from our diversity in people, geography, communities that range from big city to rural crossroads, social networks, and natural resources – solar and wind energy being the most prominent for the future. But how do we harness all that potential, especially as regards our university, research, innovation, and entrepreneurial communities? It’s actually rather simple, but difficult to do in a polarized society: we communicate and work together in common cause. And what are some steps that Texas should take to achieve that goal? Here are five suggestions.

Intra- system research collaborations: We must first face the fact that even universities within a given Texas university system tend to compete rather than collaborate. The University of Texas System studied the problem and produced an excellent report entitled Research Collaboration Initiative on how to achieve research collaboration across multiple campuses in 2008. I defer to that report for system specific suggestions.
Texas university systems research working group: Texas needs to form immediately a working group of its chief research officers (CRO) at the university system level independent of political pressures as occurred during abortive efforts from the Innovate Texas Foundation directed by David Nance. Two meetings by the system CROs to form such a group were held at the University of Houston in February 2010 and at the University of North Texas in October 2010, but the continuation of the working group is currently in limbo.
National presence: Texas university systems both singularly and collectively need to create a much stronger national presence in Washington with respect to national research and innovation agendas. Compared to competitors such as the University of California System, the SUNY System, and the University of Maryland System, Texas is mostly missing in action and not a leader. We are too state centric – a notion explored fully in James A. Michener’s famous novel Texas. Initial discussions to form a national university-systems CRO working group under the aegis of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities were held in early 2010 but terminated following the restructuring of the research office at UT System.
University Energy Leadership Council: Beginning in the late fall of 2009 and continuing into the summer of 2010, UT System created an Energy Leadership Council comprised of the top energy researchers and administrators at the nine academic institutions. The council hosted an enormously successful meeting at UT Dallas in May of 2010 bringing together university researchers from across a broad spectrum of disciplines as well as entrepreneurs and community leaders in the energy sector. The intent of the council was to host subsequent meetings with the energy industry in Texas and to expand to include all university systems in Texas. Sad to say, that council died a quick death due to lack of follow-up leadership. It should be immediately reconstituted as a statewide entity. There is simply no excuse for Texas universities and university systems to plow the fertile ground of the energy sector using a mule to pull a nineteenth century plough. When are Texans going to learn to work together using 21^st century networking and stop working against each other? Furthermore, a successful statewide Energy Leadership Council will serve as the paradigm for attacking other sectors where Texas enjoys a potential competitive advantage including the defense-industry sector and the medical/health sector.
Research parks: So tell me again why many of the regional innovation ecosystems in Texas don’t have the very essential component of a research park? To date, only Houston with its nascent UT Research Park – Science for Life and San Antonio with its more established Texas Research Park have research parks. It’s particularly curious that the Austin community doesn’t have a research park. And why is that? Inquiring minds would like to know. The Texas Foundation for Innovative Communities has as one of its major goals the creation of a working group of leaders from each of our regional innovation ecosystems to press forward on the issue of research parks in Texas. I applaud that effort.

Cooperation through communication and working towards common goals is essential for Texas to be competitive in the global arena. These five suggestions and recommendations are only the beginning in proceeding along that pathway. We live in a complex world in which highly-organized, highly-evolved, multiply-connected, and multi-layered entities have the competitive advantage. Balkanized bureaucracies that shut down undergraduate physics programs to maximize a single metric, or disconnected university systems and institutions that compete against each other are not the answer for Texas.

An Innovation Decoder Ring

2012-02-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Everything has a beginning. For me, it began in the early 1950s as a young boy glued to that new fangled device called a television set and my favorite Saturday morning program, Captain Midnight. Sponsored by Ovaltine, the progenitor of powdered hot chocolate, Captain Midnight was an aviation serial containing fifteen episodes in which the intrepid hero continually saved the beautiful damsel in distress, Joyce, from the sinister scientist, Ivan Shark, while flying around in an airplane that looked like the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. The plots were predictable and the characters one dimensional, but it didn’t matter. The series had what I cherished most: secret messages and a secret decoder ring.

The complete history of decoder rings and the inventor will likely never be known, but suffice it to say that they became popular starting in 1934 when Ovaltine sponsored the radio program Little Orphan Annie. A year later, fan club members could obtain a membership badge containing a cipher disk that allowed one to decipher secret messages posted during the radio shows. And, of course, Captain Midnight continued the tradition on television! Urban legend claims that the secret messages often said: “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.” Hmm, maybe that explains my continuing addiction to hot chocolate!

But what have secret messages and decoder rings got to do with innovation in the Twenty-First Century? We fast forward to 2012 and a recent request from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Quoting from an Associated Press article in the CBC News, we find that “The U.S. government is seeking software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings.” That’s right! Our government is seeking the latest incarnation of a decoder ring to ferret out secret messages from all that gibberish in the social media. And don’t be surprised in the next year or so when a sudden spike occurs in the sales of Nestlé Nesquik at the FBI.

Seriously, is this for real? Can we actually extract “terrorist” truth statements from a data mining decoder? And more important, do we really want Big Brother watching over us? The latter question is best left to other venues for debate, but the answer to the first question is simple. Data mining is real and growing exponentially as a tool of the commercial marketplace through connectivity to the Internet. It works, pure and simple! And I have no doubt that the FBI can and will make use of the technique. But can it be spoofed?

The Associated Press article makes clear that spoofing, both accidental and intentional, is part of the game. Intentional spoofing can be done through bots or encryption codes and likely many other ingenious techniques. Furthermore, evolution and adaptation guarantees that “terrorists” (including hackers) using social media will eventually morph into smart terrorists (hackers). Wow! Talk about fertile ground for innovation!

And then we have accidental or, perhaps better said, built-in spoofing of the input data strings, whether textual or numerical. How does one distinguish a joke from a truth statement? And as we all know from our study of logic, truth statements, number theory, and formal logic systems, there are always truth statements that exist outside any formal system – not to mention such brain twisters as “this sentence is false” or “I know that I know nothing at all.” So how does one recognize or extract meaning from the logical equivalent of the proverbial dog chasing his own tail?

And, of course, data mining programs as decoder rings are nothing more than formal systems that churn out “theorems” or supposed truth statements from potentially “noisy” data input. In this regard, Stephen Wolfram in A New Kind of Science has taken the game to new levels and formalized the process of truth generation from initial data strings using cellular automata. He addresses quite emphatically the issue of pattern recognition and its reliability or lack thereof. Goodness! Who would have thought that Little Orphan Annie and Captain Midnight could have initiated so much trouble? Perhaps we’ve all been drinking too much Ovaltine.

But the story doesn’t and shouldn’t end with the FBI and their search for terrorists. I propose that we create the ultimate decoder ring – the true “holy grail” that adventurers have long sought to find. Here is my proposition; it’s one that I’ve proposed elsewhere. We begin with the statement that “everything to be known is already known.” No, it’s not another brain twister! It’s a simple fact and based on the assumption that all knowledge can be coded as a textual or numerical string. Of course, textual truth or knowledge can be suitably converted into a numerical string as is done by the “bits” in every computer. We conclude, therefore, that all knowledge is encapsulated in one form or another by numbers. And even though some numbers are not computable to infinite precision, we in principle know everything there is to be known since all numbers are potentially available to us. There’s just one itsy-bitsy problem. We don’t have the decoder ring! We don’t know how to convert numbers or a string of bits into meaningful knowledge.

My grand challenge to the world of inventors, mathematicians, and software geeks is simple. Invent a decoder program that takes numbers as input and converts them into meaningful knowledge. It’s the ultimate meta-challenge and transcends the plebian request of the FBI. Think of the innovations that will emerge from the revealed truth! Entrepreneurs will dazzle the world as did Sir Isaac Newton who kept his invention of the calculus secret and used it to obtain results which he then proved by the more conventional techniques of his time.

Face the truth: he who owns the decoder program will rule the innovation world. And even if one doesn’t get to the ultimate decoder program, consider the spin-offs along the way including making the FBI happy and the potential for lucrative national security contracts. It’s not fiction. It’s Captain Midnight writ large! And it comes with a cup of Ovaltine and a plastic decoder ring.

Reinventing Innovation in the Exploration of Space

2012-02-08T07:33:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

They called it “Tang” – a fruit-flavored breakfast drink popularized by astronauts in the 1960s for its use in the manned spaceflight program. While often touted as a creation of NASA, Tang was actually invented by William A. Mitchell at General Foods Corporation in 1957 and initially was just another unsuccessful attempt to market a new beverage. But for me, Tang became something else entirely different. After consuming vast quantities of Tang in the fall of 1982 and spring of 1983 in order to stay sufficiently hydrated during a Sabbatical year spent in the dry, high-altitude environment of Los Alamos, New Mexico, I returned to my home in South Carolina to experience on my first day back the most dreaded of all pains, a kidney stone. It wasn’t just any old stone, but a uric acid crystal created from my over-consumption of the Vitamin C in Tang. At least, that was the story from my urologist. And yes, during my several days spent in the hospital, I left my wife with the dual tasks of tending to two young sons and unpacking the moving boxes. Sometimes, Mother Nature has an amusing sense of timing, the ire of wives notwithstanding.

While Tang is just one of many examples of innovations either created or popularized by NASA that ultimately became commercially viable, the question of using space exploration as a platform for innovation continues as a major issue in America, especially as we emerge from our current economic and financial crisis. Newt Gingrich in particular exploited this debate for political gain recently in the Florida primaries when he stated on January 25 in Cocoa Beach that “By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.” How real is his pledge? Is it lunacy and a form of howling at the moon? Or is it the harbinger of a new American thrust in manned space exploration with colonization of the moon and the planets as the goal? And how about innovation? Is his pledge the most effective use of space exploration to achieve innovations that lead to successes in the commercial marketplace?

President John F. Kennedy inspired America in 1961 when he pledged to put a man on the moon. And Neil Armstrong’s “a giant leap for mankind” was just that – a historic moment with many implications including the purely political statement by America of being the leader of the world and the subsequent economic flow down from the new technologies and innovations needed to power the Space Race. But the exploration of space as practiced in the latter part of the twentieth century was but a moment in the expanse of history. Thanks for the memories, NASA, but it’s time for a new story.

For many the story of space exploration is one of high adventure with fictional heroes such as Buck Rogers, James Tiberius Kirk, Luke Skywalker, Jean Luc Picard, Worf and Mr. Spock taking on the aliens that most Americans believe actually exist in the real world and visit us in their Unidentified Flying Objects. But sadly that sense of high adventure on a new frontier has become jaded through saturation of our senses by the sci-fi genre, whether movie – I still like the campy black and white versions from the 1950s, TV series, or book.

And who really cares anymore if we have a moon colony or if a human being steps onto the surface of the planet Mars? Been there and done that – sort of. Let’s face it. Space exploration is a hard sell in America right now for many reasons. But whether the thrill is gone, the cost in resources and capital is too great, or we have more presenting needs right here on Planet Earth including reducing poverty or addressing America’s civil infrastructure, the exploration of space is one of those grand challenges that must be addressed by humankind. The issue for Americans is what course should we as a nation take? Indeed, is there a best path forward? I have a few observations in that regard.

Let’s begin with the question of manned versus unmanned spaceflight as a tool for exploration. The answer is simple. The human body didn’t evolve to endure the rigors of outer space. End of debate. I like drinking Tang, but there is a limit or I pay the price. Furthermore, the enormous cost of the support structure for maintaining the human body in outer space is out of all proportion to the benefit of having a sentient and observant person being present. And guess what! Computers will become sentient long before a human being ever sets foot on Mars. It’s a no-brainer. Space will be explored by an exponentially improving cadre of autonomous robotic devices capable of mimicking every human skill in exquisite detail including reasoning. Yes, let’s colonize the moon, not with humans, but with American robots. We’ll leave it to the Chinese to discover the futility of manning-up on the moon. Hmm, did someone just mention the term “cylon?”

Along with robotic exploration of our solar system – including the use of a variety of space-borne telescopes, observation platforms, and deep-space probes, America should focus on earth orbit. While vacations circling the earth from above will not be realistic for many decades – if ever, we must continue to explore and to exploit the commercial potential of earth orbit. And yes, that includes continued experiments with putting man into space and the effects on the human body. It also includes a major effort to develop a cost-effective launch vehicle to move lots of mass into orbit out of the gravity well surrounding our planet. That’s a very different proposition from attempting to develop an all-in-one launch vehicle suitable for any and all purposes. Surely we’ve learned our lessons from the program to create a joint strike fighter aircraft!

So who should do the earth-orbit deed – private industry or government? Many believe that the only reason we don’t already have a suitable, privately-financed vehicle to insert mass (or people) into orbit is the fact that NASA controls the space around our planet. Folks, it’s time to rewrite that story and to find a way for government to work with private industry and with entrepreneurs. Who knows? Maybe a space port in New Mexico is just the right answer. It’s time to find out.

For as long as I continue to live, I will never forget the morning of September 9, 2006, when the space shuttle Atlantis was launched at 11:44:55 EDT on the STS-115 “Return to Assembly” mission. Standing as a guest of NASA on the upper deck of OSB II, a building next to launch control and with the absolute best view of the launch, I vigorously waved a small American flag and cheered heartedly as the earth shook and the thunderous sound of the lift-off assaulted my hearing. Choked with emotion, I watched one of the greatest spectacles anyone has ever been privileged to see. But I knew then as I know now, it was the end of an era.

America must rewrite its plan for the exploration of space. And it must be done with ruthless efficiency using what we now know about space exploration and space science and how to optimize the benefits, not with the hubris of sending man into space – whatever the reason – or the emotions of the moment. The exploration of space continues to be one of the grand challenges of our time as well as a major source for innovation. Instead of opting for a moon colony simply to outrace the Chinese to the bottom, let’s pledge to optimally reset the equation and to enjoy once again the fruits of a well-conceived adventure in space. Just don’t plan on drinking too much Tang along the way.

The Candy Store

2012-02-01T08:29:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” With all due respect to Santayana, I submit that a twenty-first century version suitable for those who inhabit the nether world of right-wing extremism should read as follows: those who pay no attention to the past condemn the future. And the easiest version of paying no attention to the past is simply to make one up. Or as Al Pacino said, “I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.”

The best lie is one that sounds plausible, especially if it appeals to baser instincts. Here is one of my favorites: free markets produce innovation, not government planning. Really? In a recent article entitled A Tale of Two Energies, Josiah Neely of the Texas Public Policy Foundation made just that assertion. Fortunately, Robert Jensen presented a masterful refutation of this assertion in an article entitled The Plow and the iPhone: Conservative Fantasies About the Miracles of the Market.

But sadly, Santayana was right. We seem condemned to repeat the endless cycle of demonstrating that “trickle-down” innovation from accumulated wealth rarely occurs or that “expansionary austerity” – translated as small government – doesn’t enhance the R&D that underpins innovation. Perhaps Friedrich Schiller best described this cyclic conundrum as follows: “Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.” Personally, I prefer the wisdom often found in “rock and roll” lyrics. Billy Preston comes to mind: “Nothin from nothin’ leaves nothin’; you gotta have somethin’, if you want to be with me” And what is that “somethin’?” Who is the me?

The “somethin’” is basic research and knowledge accumulated through scholarly activity founded on the scientific method and proven facts that drive innovation and the innovation ecosystem leading to commercial products, services and other “things” of value including informed governmental decision-making. The “me” you want to be with is global competition in the marketplace. But why choose basic research? For those who have forgotten the past or for those who deign to ignore it, Dr. Vannevar Bush in his seminal 1945 report, Science – The Endless Frontier, said it best in an excerpt from the first paragraph of the report:

New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of laws of nature, and the application of that knowledge to practical purposes. … This essential, new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research.

Dr. Bush understood as have all successful leaders throughout the history of humankind that society through its government must build an innovation ecosystem in order to thrive. And at the core must be government funding. How did Dr. Bush come to these conclusions?

Prior to his report and World War II, basic research was funded mostly by gifts, endowments, foundations, and potentates as part of the job description for academicians. It was conducted by small groups and typically led by a single person, most often a male faculty member. Sometimes, research was a pastime or hobby for dilettantes. A systematic approach to the support of large-scale research did not exist and the flow-down of knowledge leading to innovations was often the province of “garage inventors.” World War II changed all that for American science and for American industry as the efficacy of technological advances and solutions became apparent to everyone, especially with the introduction of nuclear warfare. The need for a structured research and development enterprise to continue and to accelerate the wartime gains, principally for military applications, but also for the health of Americans, became a top priority. President Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned Dr. Bush to review the situation and prepare a plan for America. That plan created the superpower we have today.

Even after the passage of sixty-seven years, it is instructive to review some of the main points from the Bush report:

· The goals of the scientific and technological enterprise are national security, health, and the economy of the United States.

· “Many of the most important discoveries have come as a result of experiments undertaken with very different purposes in mind.”

· “The publicly and privately supported colleges, universities, and research institutes are the centers of basic research.”

· Government should aid in the development of scientific talent, “the real ceiling on our production of scientific knowledge.”

· “With some notable exceptions, most research in industry and Government involves application of existing scientific knowledge to practical problems.”

· “The Government is peculiarly fitted to perform certain functions, such as the coordination and support of broad programs on problems of great national importance.”

· The Government must conduct military research during peacetime directed by a “permanent, independent, civilian-controlled organization” funded by Congress.

· “In addition, ways should be found to cause the benefits of basic research to reach industries which do not utilize new scientific knowledge.”

· The Government should form a permanent Science Advisory Board.

· The Government should form a National Research Foundation to fund basic research.

With respect to trickle-down R&D or trickle-down innovations, Bush said the following:

Industry is generally inhibited by preconceived goals, by its own clearly defined standards, and by the constant pressure of commercial necessity. Satisfactory progress in basic science seldom occurs under conditions prevailing in the normal industrial laboratory.

The Bush report is a marvelous and timeless document that set in motion a government plan and policy that has served America very well. And yes! It’s a government plan that led to our modern innovation system while making full use of the marketplace. And yes, it has been improved and made more relevant through new constructs such as use-driven research as proposed by Donald E. Stokes in his 1997 book Pasteur’s Quadrant and through Congressional studies such as Unlocking Our Future: Towards a New National Science Policy or the more recent National Academy report Rising Above the Gathering Storm. Only a fool would deny the enormous success of our American system. And if you want more proof, read Go Forth And Innovate!

But I’ve saved the best story for my ending. What is “The Candy Store?”

In the 1980s I had the pleasure of serving at one of America’s premier research and development institutions, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). During that decade and even today, the question of “why basic research at the labs” was under debate. For some the assault on basic research was memorialized by the change in name from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) to Los Alamos National Laboratory. LANL was consistent with the naming convention for other labs, while LASL and the term “scientific” implied that Los Alamos was somehow better than other labs and the best place to be, a charge of arrogance and cowboy behavior often hurled at Los Alamos personnel to this day.

In the opinion of many this purported behavior and resulting culture grew from having too many personnel spending too much time with sandbox science, a euphemism for basic research. Congress and the federal agencies funding research at national laboratories were loath to fun sandbox science and wanted programmatic funding. But recognizing the importance of keeping the best personnel on board while accepting that some basic research was essential, a compromise was struck through the creation of the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The LDRD program functions as a tax on other programs to create a pool of funds to be used to fund internally worthy research projects chosen by an internal merit review process. The notion is that sandbox science continues at our national laboratories, but in a more directed manner consistent with the various missions of the labs. It has been enormously successful.

Our group at LANL was at the interface of basic and applied research with subsequent advanced technology development and deployment of systems and we benefited from the LDRD program. We well understood the need for targeted basic research and had first hand knowledge of how basic research informs and provides knowledge for subsequent development and innovation. And we jokingly called this fully stocked and replenishing storehouse of basic research or scientific knowledge ready for use by innovators “The Candy Store!”

Visit www.theconfectionary.com for more on the picture.

Innovation Redux: The Prince House Story

2012-01-25T08:14:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

The crash of a dart board smacking into the wooden flooring rudely interrupted my deep pondering of the relationship between Brueckner and natural spinorbitals. It was the late 1960s at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and someone was obviously taking out their revenge on “Tricky Dick” whose image was prominently attached to the board. Having lost my train of thought and knowing that it was time to head home for dinner, I stood up from my personal desk, opened the door to my office, and crossed the hallway to the common room, making sure to stay out of the line of fire from the intrepid and sometimes erratic dart thrower. As I entered the room, I noted that a scorecard on the blackboard had new chalk marks indicating additional sightings of the ugly cat, presumably a possession of the old woman who lived in faculty housing next to the Prince House. The truth be known, I never saw the cat myself, but I accepted its existence as a fact given the presumptive sightings. What other choice did I have?

And at the large table which occupied much of the room, several of my fellow theoretical chemical physics graduate students and postdoctoral fellows – each one a showpiece of the hippie culture, were hotly engaged in an argument about the collapse of wave functions and the meaning of reality – the Schrödinger cat paradox or a Freudian analysis of their dreams notwithstanding. Sigma, a neurotic and psychologically challenged mixed breed male collie rescued from the local dog pound, sat at their feet. Only the day before, many of those same debaters had captured a female mutt in heat and attempted to instruct Sigma in the finer points of canine intercourse. It was one of those “you had to be there” funny moments, yet symbolic of life and the passage of time as an inhabitant of Prince House.

The Morton Prince House was a three-story frame house with a basement and was originally a faculty home located behind the Mallinckrodt Chemistry Building at Harvard University. Quoting from an article by George K. Sweetnam in The Harvard Crimson of 16 June 1977:

The 126-year-old structure has housed personalities ranging from the professor of Geology for whom Mt. Whitney was named to Timothy Leary, who is rumored to have conducted his early experiments with hallucinogens in the Prince House’s basement.

During the late 1960s, Prince House contained the main office for the biochemistry department as well as offices for most of the theoretical chemistry and chemical physics graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, approximately twenty in number at any given time. It was only fitting that such a diverse group of America’s best and brightest ranging from ultra-conservatives to left-wing liberals and arrogant SOBs to silent introverts should be thrown together to practice the art and science of theoretical chemistry in the historic Prince House. It was a grand adventure with high jinks galore including ugly cat sightings and with intense and liberating debates on any subject, no matter how mundane or profound. Did creativity and innovation occur in such an environment? You bet! Prince House in the 1960s and early 1970s was an accidental experiment in how best to provide a suitable environment to create, to innovate, and to learn. To its credit, Harvard attempted in the late 1970s to recreate the Prince House phenomenon with an “open design” facility when the original Prince House was moved and turned into an office building for functionary bureaucrats. It didn’t work.

The Prince House experience wasn’t just about scientific debate in open common rooms or collaborative research and study, nor was it just about quiet introspection and deep thought by private individuals into the scientific issues of the day. It was also about the shared experience of the hippie and anti-war culture and the social fabric of the time. It was the theatre of the absurd upon which creativity and innovation flourished. And it is a story that someone should tell and others should analyze as America strives to find the best formula for global competition through discovery and innovation.

In some measure, two recent articles in The New York Times capture the essence of the Prince House experience and reflect where America should be headed. The first article by Susan Cain and entitled The Rise of the New Groupthink pushes back on the notions of open innovation, brainstorming by teams, group learning, and the power of collaboration as the sole means for achieving creativity and innovation or as a means to learn new material. She re-establishes the primacy of solitude and freedom from interruption as key factors in producing quality discoveries, innovations, and learning. But it’s a lesson already learned … and forgotten. Indeed, Prince House demonstrated that it takes a freeform admixture of the private musing of the solo genius as well as social networking, whether through the modern Internet or the cultural imperatives of the 1960s, to achieve success.

The second article by Thomas Lin and entitled Cracking Open the Scientific Process extols the virtues and imperatives of transforming the scientific process into a 21^st Century enterprise making full use of instant worldwide communication and social networking. It pushes for the development of new assessment tools and metrics to measure the productivity of the individual scholar, researcher, and innovator in order to enable electronic brainstorming and individual contributions to collective problem solving while eliminating or greatly reducing peer pressure, peer-reviewed journals, and the handful of gatekeepers who throttle and often choke discovery and innovation. It’s the world of websites such as GalaxyZoo, MathOverflow, and ResearchGate – a form of Facebook for scientists to practice an enhanced form of social networking to create and to innovate. It’s a new world order for STEM that I’ve advocated for and supported elsewhere. But it’s also not new.

In a microcosm, Prince House in the 1960s already had all the essential ingredients of the new world order. For example, pecking order in Prince House, if I can call it that, wasn’t established by peer-reviewed journal articles, but by one’s contribution to the Prince House community either through debate, self-selected collaboration on scientific projects, or participation in learning circles and prepared seminars on subjects of interest, just to name a few of the “happenings” of that time including ugly cat sightings. It was unforced social networking on a local scale! And it worked!

But let’s be clear about one thing: the Prince House gang and the grand experiment didn’t solve all the scientific problems of the day nor were the gang members the only contributors to or the only nexus of scientific progress. Furthermore, the modern versions of groupthink and even the private musings of the solo genius have not solved one of the greatest challenges of our era: to create the theory of everything that explains our universe. It’s the oldest lesson of them all. Formation of the best of all possible structures and processes doesn’t always guarantee success or immediate gratification when it comes to discovery and innovation.

But in the final analysis, I vote for a 21^st Century version of the Prince House experiment, one that preserves the sanctity of the individual and the need for solitude and reflection without interruption coupled to a full-blown social network with a freeform spectrum of options and choices that recognizes the need for new and additional metrics of individual success and contributions to the whole while properly archiving the record for posterity. I vote for a global Prince House! Hmm, I wonder if I still have my bell-bottom jeans and tie-died shirts?

Predator-Prey Behavior: A Winning Strategy?

2012-01-18T07:34:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Somewhere in America ensconced in an ordinary university conference room replete with the typical trappings of government purchased furniture, a pot of coffee, a box of pastries, a plate of fruit for the calorie conscious, and a plentiful supply of bottled water, you will find on a daily basis a mixed team of researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, management, licensing agents, and university administrators preparing to sit down with those who possess the most precious resource of all needed to form a startup company: money!

On some days, the potential investors are simply friends and family members, curious about the proceedings and sometimes nervous about loosing their savings. On other days, it’s the turn of angel investors, often bedecked in their Stetson hats, bolo ties, and cowboy boots, but with a determined glint in their eyes and a clear intent of “getting to know” the people involved on a personal basis with the hope of a “hands-on” approach to investing. And then there are the venture capitalists who cover the spectrum from business casual to corporate pinstripe suits with power ties and almost always possessing an air of “been there, done this before.” Rarely, if ever, does one find public sector investors, although the Federal SBIR/STTR program is excellent and sometimes provides an appropriate funding mechanism for startup companies.

No one disputes that the formation of such startup companies is an essential component of an American strategy to compete globally and to maintain dominance in the commercial marketplace. And no one disputes the goal of American prosperity through capital formation and the creation of wealth and jobs. But what is the exit strategy for the investors in such startups? Will there be winners and losers?

With all due respect to Bain Capital, the presidential candidacy of Mitt Romney, his leadership at the company, and his reputed and alleged behavior as a “corporate raider,” extractionist, or “vulture capitalist” have brought to the forefront a renewed discussion of such predatory practices and whether indeed they are part and parcel of a capitalist economy. Of course, they exist and will continue to exist independent of whether one accepts as true to life the characterization of Gordon Gekko portrayed by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street. As a case in point, I have an acquaintance who vigorously rails against the “vulture capitalists” who extracted over $1 million from his Texas-sized wallet! But his experience begs the question: are such predatory practices ultimately healthy for the economy?

Mother Nature knows the answer! After several million years of testing and evolving an ever more complex and sustainable ecosystem in the biosphere of Planet Earth, the predator-prey model has been fully vetted. So what has been learned about such behavior. especially by the scientific community as they observe and come to understand the grand experiment of Mother Nature?

Let’s begin with the logistic map, a simple mathematical model of predator-prey behavior and well explained at wikipedia with accompanying graphics. As one cranks up the single control parameter, the dynamics of the model displays the phenomenon of “period doubling” or the existence of multiple meta-stable states. In simple terms, it’s equivalent to the “binge-purge” cycle found in anorexia bulimia or even the “boom-bust” cycles of the business world. Ultimately, the logistic map leads to the onset of chaotic dynamics. Is this the kind of behavior we want and expect from the American economy? It’s what we’ll get if a pure predator-prey form of capitalism is practiced.

But Mother Nature didn’t stop with such simple behavior! Nor did chaotic dynamics deter her as well. Instead, Mother Nature adapted and evolved to more complex systems with control and feedback loops built into the dynamics. Some of the best examples of such highly complex and nonlinear systems reside in our own bodies and include the beating of the human heart and the pattern of our breathing. Even more amazing, the human brain appears to function at the cusp or onset of chaos according to some reports. Indeed, many forms of epileptic seizure are believed to occur when the brain drops out of its normal state of chaotic onset and behaves in a linear fashion. Goodness! Could it be that the paralysis seizing the collective brain of Congress is the institutional realization of a corporate epileptic seizure?

In the modern world of high-performance computers, it is becoming a routine and straightforward exercise to model highly complex and nonlinear systems including economic and financial systems. And as discovered by Mother Nature, one learns quickly that a simple predator-prey model is far from the best. Optimal performance requires a capitalist economy tempered by some redistribution of resources (money) from those who accumulate the most (predators) to form social safety nets for those who accumulate the least (prey). Without such highly evolved networked and holistic dynamical systems, the world is doomed to an endless repetition of behavior and response at the low end of the evolutionary scale, a world of putative “winners” and “losers” where civilization as a whole becomes locked in a cycle with only marginal advancement.

Let’s be clear! Advanced capitalism as a highly complex dynamical system does not equate to, nor require, predator-prey behavior, although such behavior is possible and typically permissible. Furthermore, making a business decision to close plants or restructure a company, or even to plan an exit strategy from a startup company, is a normal activity and not one to be vilified. But carried to the extreme and practiced as a predatory strategy, such behavior to benefit the few at the expense of the total economy should be exposed and revealed as a sub-optimal form of capitalism and perhaps made illegal in some of its more destructive forms.

Mother Nature has proven that predator-prey behavior is not a winning strategy for America. We should listen to her!

The image was copied from an interesting webpage by Atlin Das describing the human brain and chaotic dynamics.

Stolen Once, Stolen Twice, Sold to the Highest Bidder!

2012-01-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Don’t tell anyone but Academe has a hidden secret that few talk about or admit, but one that every scholar and every researcher learns about early in their career through hushed whispers and their own experience. It’s a secret that affects and impacts daily behavior and the course of academic scholarly activity and research. And, of course, it’s a secret that transcends Academe and infects the business world as well. What is that secret? People steal! They steal not just pencils, paper, or other trivial resources found in the workplace but, most important to a proper functioning of the innovation ecosystem and specifically for R&D, they steal ideas and they steal knowledge, almost always for personal gain. And it’s a story with a long history.

Who invented the calculus? Was it Sir Isaac Newton or Gottried Wilhelm Leibnitz? How about the radio? History books claim Guglielmo Marconi as the inventor, but the U.S. Supreme Court after a lengthy court case supported the prior work of Nicola Tesla in 1943. And who can forget the more recent public and acrimonious dispute between Robert Gallo and the French as to the discovery of the HIV virus?

Is the theft of ideas a rare event trumpeted by headlines and mostly ignored by individuals as something that “can’t happen to me” or is it a common place event so ingrained that we have altered our behavior to account for it? I vote for the latter. It’s happened to me. Twice! After the first instance, I should have known better than to talk with anyone but the most trusted of friends about a new scientific idea, but I did it again and it cost me a research publication, credit for a new idea, and a new area for research since I didn’t have the resources at the time to compete. And I’m not the only one. Most of my closest friends in the science community have told me stories and proven beyond reasonable doubt to me that their ideas have been stolen.

Such thievery most definitely affects our behavior and ultimately innovation! How is that? Every researcher knows about the most common mechanism for theft of an idea. It’s called a research proposal for Federal funding. No matter the pledges taken by proposal reviewers or the care of Federal program managers – all done in good faith by all for the most part, the truth is that once an idea is out, it’s out! It’s a fact of life and a factor in the lack of truly transformative proposals. It’s a game where one completes research before proposing it. And in a similar manner, the same can be said for the world of scientific publications through the peer review of research papers.

But as annoying as the ordinary theft of ideas has been throughout the history of humankind, another more troubling pattern is beginning to emerge in American society as innovation through the creation of ideas assumes an ever more important value proposition for global competition. And it comes with the patina of a liberal and progressive concept otherwise known as open government and transparency.

For many decades, researchers and scholars in American universities presumed that they owned their research as manifested by logbooks, data files, strip charts, and all the other accoutrements necessary to maintain the record of their efforts. Many, like me, packed up and moved their ever increasing research baggage with them as they moved from job to job. But then, Federal bureaucracy encroached as everyone learned that ownership of federally funded research resided with the university, not the researcher. Indeed, the notion of “data retention” in such research and fidelity thereto became a grant condition to be monitored and reviewed. As a former university vice president of research, I can cite from experience specific research programs whose records were reviewed and where audit findings were reported on the quality of the data management. Sadly, the time-honored presumption that “my research is mine” has been booted into the trashcan of the past.

And then “climategate” occurred in November of 2009 with the posting of hacked emails showing that scientists can sometimes behave like ordinary and even venal people. But that wasn’t the real message. The real message was that emails between and among researchers and others are part and parcel of the record of a research program and are accessible to the public through either the Federal or state Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA).

In 2011 the American Tradition Institute (ATI), a group dismissive of human-caused climate change, issued just such a request against the University of Virginia and the emails of a former professor, Michael E. Mann, an international authority on global climate change currently employed by Penn State University. The FOIA request followed on the heels of an attempt by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II to obtain the research records and proposal documents of Professor Mann using a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) under the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. That CID was eventually denied in a court action. For those interested in the details, the Mann case has its own wikipedia page where one can access a plethora of documents and read all the pros and cons of exposing the working records of research in progress to the public eye.

Despite the political trappings of the Mann case and the hoopla surrounding it, the case is of profound importance to our American system of performing research and how we protect our laboratories from the prying eye, not only from the eye of those with a political agenda, but from the eye of those who would steal our ideas and our research. Even worse, have we inadvertently awakened a new threat: the research troll?

Let’s suppose for a moment that you are one of two entities, either a large and very competitive corporation (think the IT sector) or a foreign nation such as China eager to gather information about early-stage research to obtain a competitive advantage. Why not secretly fund “research trolls” or entities that gather and collect early-stage research through FOIA requests, the use of “bots” to datamine faculty webpages, and other such legal, but ultimately nefarious endeavors, not to mention hacking. Bundled together such knowledge packages would have value.

We already have ample proof that various nation states send “graduate students” – people who already possess a doctorate degree – to America to gather information in our university laboratories. Why not add the mechanism of FOIA requests to the arsenal? In fact, for those with a short memory, such FOIA tactics have been around for some time and used by serial FOIA requesters such as the infamous Sunshine Project.

The time has come for America to create the bright line between transparency and open government and our need to carry out research and create new ideas in a protective environment, free from harassment and abuse by our current FOIA laws, free from disruption of the scientific process including dialogue through emails, and free from the ultimate theft of our ideas. Whatever one’s views are on where the bright line should be – and there are many points of view including the impact on academic freedom, this debate must be had. The problem is not going away and it is likely to metastasize into the appearance of research trolls, if they don’t already exist, selling our nation’s ideas to the highest bidders.

Expect the Unexpected in 2012!

2012-01-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Tired of watching football bowl games? How about all those missed field goals? And for sure, we all wait with unchallenged anticipation for the replay of Alabama versus LSU for the BCS National Championship. Hey, I once worked for Alabama. Roll Tide!

And if watching bowl games is not enough to sate your desire to perform absolutely nothing of value during the holidays, there is always the annual pastime of making resolutions for the new year while prognosticating on how great the year will be … or not. Of course, for those with an addiction to politics as a contact sport, this year will provide the best fix of all. We get to watch an extended replay of the game between the Grand Old Party versus the Democrats … or is it Obama versus Congress?

Certainly Obama scored the first touchdown of the year by a recess appointment of Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency with Congress supposedly in recess, but actually not. Hmm, is it possible the game clock hit 00.00 too soon? I can hardly wait to hear the verdict from the replay booth after the Republicans challenge the call on the field. Analysts in the MSNBC and Fox News booths are already busy showing the scoring play from every angle.

What about the most important game of all? For those not paying attention to world events, that would be the game of global competition and the American strategy of out-innovating. Is the strategy working? Or are we watching the game clock and warming up our field goal kicker? And, of course, with nothing better to do as we endure the halftime and wait for the second half to begin, it’s important that we perform the necessary and obligatory act of announcing a list of desirable American innovation resolutions for the new year and of making our predictions as to what one might expect for the year.

Recognizing that the innovation ecosystem is coupled to other systems such as the economy, government, and the policies and law of the land, here is my list of American innovation resolutions for 2012. America should resolve to:

Implement fully the Obama Innovation Plan.
Identify grand challenges of high priority and fund networked and distributed innovation hubs or “lablets” ala the U.S. Department of Energy model to attack the challenges and build communities of innovation around them. Building an entrepreneurial culture including students as part of these communities is absolutely essential. Consideration should also be given to including various forms of funding for “proof of concept” research.
Expand and enhance alternative energy incentives – particularly for solar and wind energy – to build momentum for innovation in energy and to eventually achieve the goal of energy independence.
Increase the Federal R&D budget to 3% of GDP.
Expand and simplify a permanent R&D tax credit for industry.
End foolish restrictions, unnecessary bureaucracy, and silly quotas on green cards and permanent residency for the best and brightest from the international talent pool.
Create a coherent national manufacturing policy and program founded on the best aspects of NACFAM’s “Top 3” Manufacturing Policy Priorities, ITIF’s Charter for Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and similar such plans. Our problem is not a lack of quality ideas for manufacturing, but a failure to implement and take action. As others have emphasized, it’s all about the four T’s: Technology, Trade, Tax, and Talent!
Bring export control rules and regulations into the 21^st-century.

And not to be outdone by others and to complete the obligatory resolution-prediction exercise before the next kickoff, here are my predictions for 2012:

Congressional dysfunction continues unabated and even intensified until at least the presidential election, unnecessarily slowing the economy and impairing innovation.
The focus on the deficit and excessive budget cutting to the point of starvation, both literally and figuratively, as opposed to an investment or “customer” focus that includes the growth of jobs, an end to most home foreclosures, a tax payroll cut extension for the full year, and other such devices to keep a thriving middle class of business customers continues despite rhetoric to the contrary.
The end of stimulus (ARRA) R&D funding produces a strong negative effect on the university research community.
Freedom of Information requests and other such “transparency requirements” on research notes, or data, or information negatively impacts commercialization of university research and potentially opens the gates for “research trolls” – those who would gather, package, and sell such information on the international market. [Note: I’ll have more to say on this topic in a subsequent article.]
The unintended consequences of the American Invents Act – the new “patent law” – begin to emerge, especially at universities. It will be interesting to see how smart people “game” the law since they most certainly will.
The middle-class (99%) will revolt against Congress in the voting booth.
The cybersecurity threat and “hacking” of all varieties including state-sponsored hacking will explode into an international crisis with potentially dire effects on the world economy.
The struggle to achieve accountability through innovation metrics will continue and accelerate but it won’t matter materially since researchers, innovators, and entrepreneurs will ignore and blow past such distractions as they always do.
The “God particle” (alias Higgs Boson) will be discovered to the chagrin of the religious community who believe in revealed truth.
President Obama will be elected by a landslide.

Yikes! And all I wanted for Christmas was a touchscreen, voice-activated, iPadish-style laptop including keyboard with free wireless and superspeed connectivity to the Internet. Some of us still use computers for something other than a source for content! So Apple, when do I get my wish?

Mayan predictions aside and Nostradamus notwithstanding, the year 2012 should be a most interesting year with many countervailing forces coming into alignment. I’m certain of one thing. Expect the unexpected!

The Innovation Grinch

2011-12-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Tis the season of good tidings and great joy as Americans take time to enjoy the holidays and ignore the doom and gloom of economic pundits, the gyrations and tepid growth of their 401-k accounts, the wacky and zany Republican presidential selection process, and our dysfunctional Congress that continues to kick someone’s can down the road. And whose can is it that they are kicking? Could it be the middle class and the 99%? Hmm! I must have missed the latest software release of the “kick the can” game.

And with every yuletide season, we have the inevitable villain – the grinch who steals Christmas. This year’s villain comes gift-wrapped and tied with a bow, just in time to put under the Christmas tree. What was stolen? The payroll tax cut extension! Who stole it? Congress! Yes, once again, Congress puts a lump of coal in our Christmas stocking and removes over $1000 in disposable money per wage earner for nearly 160 million Americans. But wait! Maybe there is still time to save Christmas. We’ll skip a vote in the House of Representatives and send the issue to a conference committee. That should get the job done. (I would attach an LOL at this point, but I’m still not completely sure what that acronym stands for.)

Newt Gingrich has it almost right, but he chose the wrong branch of government. Instead of federal judges and members of the Supreme Court, we should send out the federal marshals to arrest the members of Congress and put them in stocks along the federal mall for common citizens to walk past and express their displeasure. A brand on their foreheads would be even better! The original framers of the Constitution would certainly applaud and understand such old-fashioned treatment knowing full well that it was unconstitutional.

But is such scorn of our Congress and its members justified? Even worse, should we replace the Christmas Grinch with an Innovation Grinch? Let’s revisit three key issues of interest to the innovation community to determine the need for this new creature: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) commonly known as the stimulus bill, the 2012 Omnibus bill, and the potential for sequestration of federal funding.

According to the ARRA website www.recovery.gov, the stimulus bill has paid out $734.4 billion with $218.6 billion going to Contracts, Grants & Loans, of which $11.3 billion was expended on R&D/Science. An explicit breakdown by federal agency shows that the National Science Foundation, for example, reported $1.41 billion as being paid out. The website www.scienceworksforus.org contains a map where the total number of stimulus research grants and related stimulus funding per state can be accessed for review. No matter the specific amounts or the distribution around the United States, suffice it to say that billions of one-time stimulus dollars have been and are being spent to stimulate research and development for the purpose of further priming the American innovation engine. But they are one-time dollars and therein lies the problem. Soon, if not already, universities will cut graduate student support, cut the number of postdoctoral fellows, and reduce the R&D staff by a very significant amount. That can’t be good for the economy or for innovation. Will the funds be made up through the normal appropriation process?

Two and a half months late and a few dollars short, Congress finally passed the 2012 Omnibus bill for this fiscal year’s federal budget. And just how many dollars short is it? While the NSF budget is up 3% and the Department of Energy E-ARPA program grows by 2.5%, the R&D budget for the Department of Defense was cut by $2.5 billion and the science and technology directorate of the Department of Homeland Security was cut by $140 million. All in all, the 2012 federal budget is not good news for innovation or for sustaining any momentum generated by ARRA stimulus funding.

How about future prospects for federal support of R&D and the innovation pipeline? A “Membership Advisory” email to me from the Director of Public Affairs at the American Physical Society tells the story and I quote:

Potential funding cuts will be triggered a year from now in the form of automatic across-the-board reductions – technically called sequestrations – mandated by the 2011 amendments to the Budget Control Act (BCA) of 1985. According to the amended BCA, the recent failure of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to come to an agreement on a debt reduction plan, will initiate $1.2 trillion in sequestrations over nine years, beginning with Fiscal Year 2013. The effect on science funding is not yet known, since the sequestrations will apply to appropriations bills that have yet to be written.

And it’s not just a simple accounting of dollars and cents that matters! Congress seems bent on the destruction of the United States Postal Service and the removal of mail service on the last mile. What happened to the justification for rural electrification and even the Internet on the last mile as a competitive advantage? Doesn’t the same argument hold for the mail? Furthermore, how does blaming the messengers – civil engineers – help overcome the impending collapse of America’s civil infrastructure? And why continue to support the barrier of export control regulations as an old-fashioned Chinese wall when history teaches that fixed fortifications never keep the enemy out, especially against the modern onslaught of Chinese and Russian hackers?

It’s a game of uncertainty practiced for political and ideological reasons. It’s a rhetorical flourish designed to achieve a besting of one’s opponents. And it’s a dangerous and cynical exercise bereft of factual content sure to dampen innovation and further stall the American economy.

Yes, Virginia, there is an Innovation Grinch! And his name is Congress.

NSF Walks the Innovation Talk

2011-12-14T14:43:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

On 20 July 1969, Astronaut Neil Armstrong announced to an enthralled America:

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” His pronouncement of humankind conquering the moon in many ways ended the Space Race and brought about an era of space exploration and research unparalleled in history, although recent budget cuts to NASA and confused vacillations in America’s strategic plan for space potentially signal an end to our leadership.

Today, America faces the Innovation Race – the race to out-innovate our global competitors and continue our dominance in the global marketplace in the face of emerging nations and economies. While many lament the putative decline in America’s competitive advantage, especially as regards the condition of our innovation ecosystem, the National Science Foundation (NSF) potentially has taken “one small step” that will result in “one giant leap” for innovation in America. While others talk the talk, NSF has begun to walk the walk on innovation.

Responding to our national innovation angst and based on input from many sources including the Request-For-Information call from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, NSF recently reconfigured its “Partnerships for Innovation” program into a more nuanced umbrella program containing two components: Building Innovation Capacity (BIC) and Accelerating Innovation Research (AIR). The goal is to build innovation capacity through early support of the partnering of academic institutions with the small business sector and to accelerate innovation research by supporting existing NSF grantees that collaborate with third parties in order to move innovations to market.

BIC is an early-stage program in the discovery to marketplace pipeline designed to “stimulate the transformation of knowledge” obtained through discovery into “market-accepted innovations” via the “re-creation of single research platform” using connectivity to small businesses with the hope that researchers will become “agile in adapting their research for use in new applications” and that the transformed knowledge will serve diverse problem spaces of interest to the business world. The game is to create self-sustaining “research platforms” or “enabling infrastructure” that builds innovation capacity. At the core of BIC is a knowledge-enhancing-partnership (KEP) group that serves as a forum to churn ideas from all elements of the discovery-to-marketplace pipeline. Recognizing the all important need to manage intellectual property claims and rights, NSF requires an upfront Cooperative Research Agreement (CRA) by participants as part of any award.

AIR is a later-stage program designed to “spur the translation to transfer of fundamental research discoveries towards economic and/or societal impact” through commercialization into the marketplace while developing the entrepreneurial culture and strengthening America’s innovation ecosystem. The game is to bring together existing NSF-funded research alliances and expand connectivity to a broader community including business, venture capital, and other such entities. In many ways it embodies the “community of innovation” concept espoused by the Association of University Research Parks (AURP) and others while playing to the need to solve societal grand challenges and build regional innovation ecosystems.

All in all, it’s a worthy first step for NSF and one that I support, although one needs graphics and pictures, such as the one displayed in our byline, to sort through the complexities of the new programs. And therein resides the story of these new programs. Are they so laden with innovation jargon and government-speak that no one knows what the other person is talking about? What the heck is a “research platform” for goodness sake? Is it akin in spirit to the “weapons platform” lingo of the Department of Defense?

And more fundamental is the underlying theory of an innovation or commercialization ecosystem that underpins the call for proposals under these new programs. Exactly what are the feds at NSF thinking? What are their assumptions and the premises upon which they have structured their programs? A working guidebook to their theories and conceptual framework would be a useful addition and permit enlightened debate. America needs that debate.

But to be fair to the professionals at NSF, their proposal announcement does contain some glimpses into their underlying thinking. For example, recognizing that rapid product development is a reality, especially for the information technology sector, they note that discovery must be closely coupled to economic development and hence the creation of BIC. Their assumption (unstated) in some measure is that more connectivity and communication across the commercialization pipeline equals more innovation and more startup companies. Although it would appear to be self-evident as an assumption, it needs to be tested.

And then there is the assumption that more connectivity equals more collaboration. But exactly how do people connect and how do they communicate? I suppose such details are the essence of the “research platform” and the expanded structure of the research alliances.

But let’s be clear! These new NSF programs are a wonderful experiment to test and develop the efficacy of such assumptions. They are a fertile ground to posit, experiment, and understand one’s ideas of the functioning of an advanced American innovation ecosystem and to determine what really works in the early stages. And just how likely is it that NSF will succeed?

The current Request for Proposal states that 22 awards will be made for a total of $15 million total in both programs. Hmm. While a big step for the usually cautious NSF, by any other measure, it’s a tepid one causing one to wonder if there is a hidden politically-correct agenda at work. It would be easy to argue that NSF doesn’t really have a legal or mandated obligation to foster innovation, especially as relates to commercialization or economic development. And who will “win” the awards from such a small pool of funding? It will be existing converged infrastructures. Folks, that’s not a prescription for testing new ideas or a means to learning something new!

And let’s be frank! The concept of “capacity building” is not new at NSF or in the federal agencies. Been there and done that! It’s called EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) – a program having a nearly thirty-year history whose purpose was and is to build research capacity at universities in states and territories that don’t receive their fair share of the federal research funding pie. It’s a rich history with many lessons learned and many successes and failures, even for the commercialization of university research. And that history should be a guide as we embark on BIC and AIR.

For example, as the former Director of the Alabama EPSCoR program, I can assure NSF that a two-year funding window for BIC and AIR grants is …, well, it’s a joke. Nothing really meaningful will be done in that period, although certainly money will be spent, advances will be made, and reports will be filed in a hurry-up manner. It takes five years! That’s a lesson learned from such programs.

But talking the talk had to end and taking a risky step had to begin. NSF has taken that step, albeit a small one. Could it be a giant leap for America in the Innovation Race? Will concept and talk become reality? It’s a gamble that must be undertaken. I applaud NSF for taking on the challenge.

The graphical image on the header of this article was obtained from slide 8 of an NSF Powerpoint presentation available on the Internet.

Regulation is a Four-Letter Word!

2011-12-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Are you one of those people who insist on driving over the posted speed limit, no matter the circumstances? How do you feel about regulations prohibiting cell-phone use while driving – not to mention the obnoxious restaurant patron blathering away in a loud voice next to you about the inconsequential trivia of his life? And then we have Rick Perry and the Republican presidential candidates, all “fed up” and bothered by “regulations” they claim restrict the growth of business and the formation of startup companies. Has the American enterprise system indeed become so constipated by regulations that innovation is squelched and only a dose of Ex-Lax or “deregulation” will cure the problem? Since when did “regulation” become a four-letter word!

And how about our universities, the ultimate innovation engines of America? Have they also become choked by rules and regulations? A simple, but true story from my own experience as a vice president for research at The University of Alabama reveals the truth. Believe me, even Snoopy in his effort to write the ultimate heroic novel couldn’t make this stuff up any better!

It was a Wednesday morning at the president’s staff meeting before the Alabama homecoming football game when the announcement was made that a fraternity planned to host several elephants as part of their weekend activities. Of course, elephants are the Alabama mascot. My heart stopped! Do we have a protocol I whispered? “No! What’s a protocol,” was the reply. I panicked and announced we had to have an IACUC-approved protocol for the display of animals. “Make it happen” became the order of the day.

With the help of Dr. Marianne Woods, we contacted Washington to determine the best protocol for elephants knowing full well that PETA had launched a national effort to protest the treatment of confined elephants. No one in Washington had a clue as to the proper care and feeding of elephants. And how could we possibly pull together the membership of the IACUC (animal use) committee? It couldn’t be done by the weekend we informed the president that afternoon.

But then Alabama football supporters intervened overnight and we were back in business on Thursday morning. Suffice it to say that IACUC met that afternoon and reluctantly approved a protocol submitted by the fraternity. Finding a veterinarian to co-sign the protocol on Friday morning (both our regular veterinarians were out-of-town) was an adventure unto itself. Of course, we got our pound of flesh from the fraternity. On Friday afternoon at 5 pm, all the fraternity members and their dates, decked out in their ballroom finery, were subjected to a short lecture by a scruffy biology faculty member on the proper treatment of elephants.

But it didn’t end there. During photo-ops with the elephants on Saturday morning (if you don’t believe my story, see attached photo of myself and Dr. Woods with one of the elephants), a distinguished and prominent elderly alumnus of Alabama was knocked down and received scratches when a fraternity genius insisted on having pictures taken with the elephant holding a football by his curled up trunk. The football escaped and the elephant tried valiantly to “catch” the ball, thereby knocking down the alumnus. Arriving at the President’s Box with a torn shirt sleeve and bloodstained arm, the alumnus subsequently refused to participate in the required inquiry. All in all, Alabama personnel spent over two years bringing the case to a resolution with all parties including the federal government.

It’s a funny story. Hey, I was worried that the female elephants might charge the football stadium when the famous trumpeting of the male mating call at the start of the game echoed from the stadium! But it’s a story that displays in the microcosm what universities experience every day, every hour, every minute, and every second. I often claim that universities are the most regulated enterprises in America. You don’t believe me? Then test your knowledge against the following abbreviated list of regulatory activities and acronyms: IRB, IBC, HIPPA, TAL, ETRAC, conflict of interest monitoring, radiation safety committee, adverse lab events reporting, data and records retention, time and effort, trafficking in persons, export controls and dual-use technology, controlled substances and CFATS, MSDS, secondary chemical labeling, responsible conduct of research, misconduct in science, facilities security officer, … , and the list goes on. For every item in the list, I have funny stories to tell including the glacial acetic acid gift that kept on taking instead of giving, Babe the goldfish, and Ralph the turtle. But, unfortunately, it’s not a joke or a funny story. Regulations are an integral part of academe. And they affect research, discovery, and the ultimate goal of innovation.

First of all, compliance with regulations consumes an enormous amount of time. Witness the two years spent dealing with the Alabama elephant issue. Imagine how much time it takes for newly minted faculty members to come up-to-speed with the daunting list of regulatory activities presented above – not to mention the amount of time actually engaged in satisfying the regulations. Literally hundreds, if not over a thousand, IACUC and IRB protocols are reviewed every year on most campuses.

Second, compliance with regulations leads to bureaucracy and what many consider administrative bloat at universities as the price tag for tuition outpaces salary growth and inflation to pay for the costs. Every university these days has a Compliance Office and officer. But as Representative Barney Frank likes to say, it’s not fat in the form of gristle on the edge of our steaks that can easily be cut off, but more like marbling, firmly intertwined in the process of doing business. So how do you like your steaks?

Third, the regulatory environment has continued to morph and evolve into a set of regulations so hyper-technical that universities must hire content specialists to deal with them, often one for every major area such as human subjects versus animal care versus export controls. Does the federal government really believe that carrying the newest laptop with the latest software to China on university business is a violation, especially when the computer parts were likely made in China and the software development was out-sourced to foreign nations? Or must we prove and establish for audit purposes that no federal grant dollars on any federal grant were used for trafficking in people, usually for the sex trade market?

So, let’s cut to the chase! Should government, whether federal, state or local, regulate our activities and are we as a society, including universities, over-regulated to the point of stifling innovation, job, and business growth? It’s a great question for America and one that should not become politicized and made a slogan as it is in danger of becoming in our current dysfunctional environment. In the macro-sense, it’s easy to debase regulations and bemoan their impact, elephant stories notwithstanding. But in the micro-sense when a specific family of regulations is examined in detail – such as “informed consent” for “experiments” on human subjects or even the care and feeding of elephants, one faces the old “wait-a-minute” moment – that moment when we face the reality of the need for regulations for our own protection and the protection of society as a whole. Yes, we need regulatory reform, but not the wholesale purging suggested by some. Regulation is a difficult issue that will require the best of us, but it’s not a four-letter word – at least, not yet.

Innovation Waits for No One!

2011-11-30T07:13:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

“Now is not the time!” Have you ever been given that line? Even better, did you know that the classical concept of “now” that we all live by was forever destroyed by Einstein in 1905? That’s right! Two events that are simultaneous or occur at the same time in your personal reference frame occur at different times for someone who is speeding by you in their car. Wow! Talk about getting a person to church on time as famously crooned and celebrated in My Fair Lady. Obviously, the incremental difference in “now” is so tiny that we don’t notice it – unless, of course, you’ve purchased for a Christmas present the latest in a near “light speed” automobile.

But then “time waits for no one.” Or does it? Can we slow down time by speeding away toward a distant galaxy? Well yes – relative to the reference frame of Earth, but it won’t change your personal perspective on the “passage of time.” And then there are those folks who race through life, hoping to slow down time and catch a few more moments. Good luck on that approach!

What about innovation? Does it wait for us to “find the time” or does it wait for no one? I think the latter. And therein lies a problem for America. We’ve created an innovation ecosystem with moving parts or processes that waste time checking for conformity to accepted norms or established patterns of behavior. It’s an authoritarian-gatekeeper system guaranteed for the most part to replicate the norm and produce “me too” research and incremental innovation. We like to pretend that it is an “open system” where discoveries and innovations constantly bubble up to the surface of our conscious “now” – a system where the best and the brightest quickly reach the frontiers of the creative mind through independent research and innovation. But the reality is often different. And at the heart of the problem on the discovery end of the creation pipeline is one of society’s and academe’s oldest control mechanisms: peer review.

What is “peer review” and how does it affect the innovation ecosystem? “Peer review” is a simple concept. The notion is that one’s performance, whether as an individual or a collection of individuals, should be evaluated by one’s peers. It’s a practice carried out routinely in our legal system using a jury of “peers.” In academe, the practice takes many forms including principally the following activities:

Refereed publications
Grantsmanship
Tenure and promotion
Post-tenure review
Program review

To the consternation of many of our best researchers, these activities have grown over the past decade or two to the point that they have pushed aside the time needed to think creatively and be innovative. As Daniel J. Meyer stated succinctly in an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “It’s getting impossible to produce my own work I’m spending so much time assessing others!” He further states that “I have many comrades (not ‘in arms’ yet, but it is coming) who are experiencing an unbearable overload of review duties. … Draconian measures, you say? Perhaps. But maybe this is a Drago we should embrace. If not, we are going (to) [sic] take an ailing peer-review system and kill it outright.”

These are strong sentiments and they are shared by many including the author. But can we document the reality in the hope of finding a remedy? It’s tough to do. For example, let’s examine post-tenure review.

Post-tenure review came into vogue in the late 1990s as an accountability or audit tool to satisfy politicians and legislators that someone was looking over the shoulder of tenured faculty members to make sure they continued to be productive following tenure. Typically, on a timescale of five to eight years, tenured faculty members prepare a massive dossier documenting their performance including student teaching evaluations. Often, external letters are solicited. Depending on the review, corrective actions might be taken including a change in teaching load, a reduction in research space, or a host of other such actions. It’s the tenure process redux. And in most institutions, the data gathering is now formalized through the maintenance of a yearly faculty activity report. Woe unto the faculty member who doesn’t login and update his or her data profile in a timely manner!

The demand for such performance data and accountability has become a battle cry for some elements of the right-wing conservative movement in America. The O’Donnell brouhaha in Texas comes to mind in that regard. But let’s be clear. While I support post-tenure review and the use of the faculty annual report, they represent a new element for the innovation ecosystem and they consume time – lot’s of it.

And then there are program reviews. Once again, the accountability and audit mentality dictated that university programs should be reviewed on a regular basis with a cycle time of five to eight years. Massive reports are created and external reviewers are conscripted – usually with the bribe of a stipend – to pass judgment on a program or department. Based on such data analysis, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has determined that a number of “underperforming” physics programs should be shut down in Texas. Hmm, that should be a real motivator for poor and disadvantaged STEM students in those affected areas! Have we just turned off the next Michael Dell? Has their concept of “now” turned into “yesterday”?

Aside from the recent appearance of post-tenure review and program review, we’ve had in place since before World War II the process of reviewing research and scholarly manuscripts as a means to generate “refereed” publications. I’ve spoken to that issue previously. But what are the hard numbers? In Figure 1, I display the growth in the number of science and engineering publications using recently published data from the National Science Foundation. Over the twenty-year period from 1988 to 2008, the number of such publications nearly doubled and likely has now passed the one million mark per year. That’s a lot of papers to review for the science and engineering community!

Figure 1

With respect to grantsmanship and the peer review of proposals, the data appear to show some measure of saturation over the past decade. Using data taken from the annual Merit Review Reports to the National Science Board, I display in Figure 2 the number of externally reviewed proposals along with the number of distinct reviewers per year. Interestingly, the two numbers are approximately the same – one proposal per reviewer! One might argue that the past decade has shown a crossover in number of proposals versus number of distinct reviewers, but it will take another decade to prove this assertion, if true.

Figure 2

The number of distinct reviews for the same time period is shown in Figure 3. Again, not much growth has occurred and there are fluctuations.

Figure 3

A detailed examination of the NSB reports seems to indicate that there is a small trend toward fewer reviews per proposal. Based on these hard data, one cannot conclude that peer review of proposals has significantly increased as a burden over the past decade. Instead, it appears to be a saturated situation. But it still consumes time and is based on proposed research, not performance. I’ve addressed that issue and its effect on innovation elsewhere.

While peer review is firmly ingrained in the American innovation ecosystem, it’s time to understand how we use it and whether it truly is the wisest course of action as we enter the era of global competition. Now is the time for America to come to terms with peer review, lest our competitors move faster and push our “now” into their “yesterday.” Innovation waits for no one.

EXCUSE ME! Your Microscope Is Out of Focus

2011-11-15T11:42:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

So how many hours a day do you spend on social networking? Do you tweet, text, or use email services? How many computers, tablets, cellphones, and other wireless devices do you own? Have you recently updated your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles or added new “friends” and connections? Let’s face it folks. Social networking in all its various forms is an exploding new phenomenon, rapidly penetrating all levels of society and creating new channels of rapid communication. Does anyone doubt that the movement “Occupy Wall Street” or the occurrence of “flash mobs” would exist without social networking?

But is “social networking” something that should be studied, researched, and understood through funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF)? Or should such research be assigned a “low priority” having little or no benefit for society and America. How about understanding terrorist crowdsourcing and other cyber threats to national security played out using social networking? Are they not important subjects to be understood?

And then there is the ever present fruit fly – a real irritant to social conservatives and those who see waste in the federal funding of research. Does anyone really care whether the design of fruit fly genitalia affects their ability to “hook up” and copulate? Of course, it’s not a topic that keeps me awake at night, absent a fruit fly infestation in my home. But I respect the judgment of experts in the field that such research is important. As Forrest Gump said about a box of chocolates: “You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Let’s be clear. Picking winners or losers in advance in the game of discovery and innovation is mostly a waste of time. It’s not an issue of defunding “whimsical” research, whatever that is. And who determines the winners in advance? What are the criteria? Would you have picked social networking as a multi-billion dollar industry before the fact?

Unfortunately, some people in America choose to take legitimate concerns about what research should be funded, what metrics should be used, whether the processes currently used are appropriate and sufficient, whether waste and fraud are rampant or not, and what is America’s strategic endgame and attempt to use the scientific illiteracy of many Americans coupled with extreme and often counterfactual social conservatism to achieve political gains at the expense of discovery and innovation in America. Such an exercise was recently conducted by Senator Tom A. Coburn in his report of April 2011 entitled The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope.

Americans including me support a balanced budget. But is doing “more with less” to the point of starvation a realistic and appropriate goal for our country, especially in the era of global competition? Let’s examine the facts and the history that led to the Coburn Report.

Recognizing that America gives every indication of falling behind in the game of competition in the global marketplace including the loss of jobs, Congress passed the America COMPETES Act (Public Law 110-69) calling for a doubling of NSF funding over seven years. Passage of the Act was the culmination of many studies including Rising Above the Gathering Storm and a clarion call from leadership in nearly all segments of American society. But according to the Coburn Report, the “dramatic increase in spending passed with little debate or dissent.”

The report further challenges whether increasing the NSF budget “to bolster our economy” is a magic bullet. Instead, the report purports to document widespread fraud, waste and abuse of the taxpayer dollar through funding of wasteful and controversial projects of limited scientific benefit, excessive amounts of expired funds, inadequate contracting practices, lack of accountability metrics, excessive funding of conference and related travel, duplicative funding with other government agencies, inappropriate behaviors, and lack of transformative research, to name some of the report’s assertions. These are serious charges and they must be taken seriously and dealt with appropriately independent of one’s political persuasion or the underlying belief system and principles that support the characterization and interpretation of the facts in the Coburn Report.

While I applaud Senator Coburn for engaging the debate, I strongly and emphatically disagree with the both the specifics and the intent of the report’s recommendations. Implementation of the recommendations as structured will play only at the margins and will assuredly dampen both discovery and innovation in America. But we have some common ground! From my perspective, Coburn and his staff put the NSF under a microscope that was out of focus. So let’s review the recommendations of the Coburn Report and bring those recommendations properly into focus.

Establish Clear Guidelines for What Constitutes “Transformative” and “Potentially Transformative” Science: Good luck with such guidelines! Picking winners before the fact of becoming transformative is a useless exercise. I repeat: would you have chosen social networking as a winner? I put little stock in those who say they know it when they see it before the actual outcome. Discovery and innovation are mostly serendipitous exercises where the accumulation of sweat equity through the funding of putative non-transformative research and even “whimsical” research is essential. Making this argument is not to say that we should not have targeted research. Grand challenge research must be an essential part of the portfolio of funding and our Nation’s discovery and innovation strategic plan. But we should not eliminate or throttle exploratory research and innovation based on political or personal bias. Furthermore, the implied threat to be transformative, creative, innovative, or ELSE never works. The user-friendly mantra of Go Forth and Innovate! is the appropriate strategy.

Set Clear Metrics to Measure Success and Standards to Ensure Accountability: The STAR METRICS program is a worthy federal attempt to achieve this desired outcome and is supported by the Coburn Report and by the university community. Accountability has always been an integral part of the federal funding process. But one must remember that discoveries and innovations are not part of a programmed assembly line easily amenable to accounting and audit in the traditional sense. The debate as to what constitutes appropriate metrics for both research and innovation is ongoing and lively. It is by no means a settled matter as emphasis on the commercialization of university research and the need for a growth in American jobs dominates the discussion.

Eliminate NSF’s Social, Behavorial, and Economics (SBE) Directorate: Simple response: emphatically NO! We live in a world dominated by convergence and network science where What Is Easy Has Been Done. Transformative discovery and innovation will occur at the boundaries and overlap of the physical, biological, and social dimensions of our universe. Enough said on this recommendation!

Consolidate the Directorate for Education & Human Resources: With at least 100 STEM education programs and maybe as many as 200 spread across numerous federal agencies, we have a problem that needs immediate attention. I defer the reader to Go Forth and Innovate! for a full and complete discussion of this recommendation from my perspective. Suffice it to say that I agree with the Coburn Report that we must come to terms with which federal agency should take the lead in funding the STEM education agenda for America.

Use it or Lose It: NSF Should Better Manage Resources It Can No Longer Spend or Does Not Need and Immediately Return $1.7 Billion of Unspent, Expired Funds It Currently Holds: The Coburn Report represents that “[a]pproximately 47 percent of the 151,000 final and annual project reports required in the past 5 years were submitted late or not at all.” Furthermore, “The agency’s record of failing to place an emphasis on closing out expired grants and returning unused funds to the United States Treasury raises question [sic] about the overall fiscal management of the agency.” The Coburn Report concludes that “grant oversight remains as an ongoing management challenge at NSF.” I agree! There is no excuse for failing to file a final report and reprobates and their institutions should be punished in some manner. But to adopt the rather simplistic characterization of this issue as taken by the Coburn Report is not the answer. As one who has managed multi-million dollar grants, I can assure the public that fiscal management of grant dollars is a challenge complicated by personnel timeline management, academic schedules and a plethora of other complex factors such as on time delivery of needed and purchased equipment and the effect on completing the research project. NSF must have the ability to be flexible in this regard and to carry over unspent funds. The notion that NSF has $1.7 billion in available funds is naïve at best.

Reduce Duplication: Develop a Strategic Plan to Streamline Federal Research and Development: I agree in principle. We need a national debate about how we fund R&D and innovation in order to form a better strategic plan. However, duplication in and off itself is chump change in the larger arena and should not be the dominant factor.

Provide the NSF Inspector General Additional Resources and Place a Greater Emphasis on the Office of Inspector General’s Findings: From my experience, NSF and academe place a great deal of emphasis on the OIG’s findings. Some would argue we place an obsessive emphasis on them. Indeed, over the past decade or two, a vast bureaucracy has grown up to deal with the growth of federal rules and regulations and their interpretation. It has become a hyper-technical world where subtle nuances of the meaning of words make a difference. Do we really want further government intrusion into the business of federal funding of research? At some point, a proper cost-benefit balance must be struck. I submit we’ve already reached and perhaps surpassed that point. Further growth in the “accountability culture” will only stifle discovery and innovation and not achieve the desired end result. In that sense, I support the “deregulation” platform propounded in the political arena. But if more “resources” are to be poured into the OIG, I have a simple request. Hire the best and the brightest at a competitive salary. Far too often, university professionals sit across the table from OIG auditors and inspectors who would do well auditing Walmart but know almost nothing about the complexities of the federal funding of research.

Senator Coburn, sharpen the focus on your microscope and take out the fuzziness caused by political and personal bias. Starving discovery and innovation in America because of perceived and even real issues at the National Science Foundation are not the answer. Nor is highlighting and listing research programs that don’t fit your worldview. It’s time to move past an obsession and annoyance with fruit fly research and join with those of all persuasions to forge and craft a new strategic plan for R&D and innovation in America.

Are We Too Pooped To Pop?

2011-11-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

By Keith McDowell

Do you need one of the modern energy pick-me-up concoctions to make it through the day? Do rolling power outages from a record number of days with temperatures over 100 degrees interrupt your lifestyle? How about the drain on your cellphone battery from too much texting, tweating, emailing, and gaming? Is the high price of gasoline driving you to consider purchase of a hybrid or an electric car? How about global warming? Are you one of the many people suffering adverse consequences from the effects of severe weather events? If so, join the crowd! It’s a world gone crazy as we find ourselves “too pooped to pop” and “too old to stroll” as Chuck Berry famously crooned.

But wait! Are we really running out of readily available energy or does it just seem that way at times? Have we become so dependent on rapid access to energy through our high-technology gadgets and our American lifestyle that the slightest interruption portends an energy crisis? Are the lights really dimming in America, the incandescent bulb controversy notwithstanding?

Like many, I thought for many years that we had a looming energy crisis, both in the production of electricity as available electrons and the production of fuels in the form of gasoline, home heating oil, and natural gas. I was certain America was in trouble, not because of dysfunctional government, energy policy, or lack of political will, but from fundamental scientific issues and some basic facts.

To begin with, fossil fuels have a limited lifetime of perhaps a century – quibbling about the exact time frame is a stupid exercise, although fracking and other new discoveries and techniques help to extend their contribution as an energy source. But the book Out of Gas by David Goodstein and the existence of Hubbert’s Peak convinced me that the rate of fossil fuel consumption would eventually pass its rate of production. And the issues of human-driven global warming and adverse climate change as by-products of the use of fossil fuels along with the concomitant increase in carbon dioxide emissions were real show-stoppers for me. America needed to find a way to slow the use of fossil fuels.

The short-term solution appeared to be nuclear power, although three-mile island, Chernobyl, and now the Fukushima incidents demonstrate that real and long-term issues exist for the industry – Mother Nature being the strongest protagonist through earthquakes, tsunamis, and the gradual leakage of toxic and radioactive wastes into the biosphere. But as a physicist, I accepted these risks and knew that they could be mitigated.

Hydropower, geothermal, and biomass alternatives didn’t compute in either the short- or the long-term for me for many reasons including scale and basic economic considerations. Although wind power continues to demonstrate its efficacy as an alternative source for electrons, it will never answer the full projected demand curve for electrons nor solve the need for fuels. It’s not the ultimate or even the short-term solution.

The long-term solution seemed simple to me, but scientifically and technologically challenging. We needed fusion power! We needed sexy, high-technology physics projects like the National Ignition Facility to unlock the secrets of Mother Nature and to turn on the Sun right here on Planet Earth. Advancing our understanding of fusion power would culminate in a limitless energy source to do almost anything we wanted to do. And it would push forward the frontiers of science to boot! The scientist in me was thrilled at the prospects of yet another triumph of humankind over nature. But then I had my epiphany! That moment when you realize how stupid you’ve been and that the solution has been in front of you all along. It’s called solar energy!

My personal journey to the realization that solar energy is the solution began in the period of 1979 and 1980. After reading the 1979 American Physical Society study entitled Solar Photovoltaic Energy Conversion by H. Ehrenreich – I’m one of the select few who actually read the document from cover to cover – and listening to the discourse at the time about photovoltaics, I became convinced that environmental issues surrounding the large-scale mining of the exotic metals needed to produce photovoltaic devices, the exorbitant costs, and the “low technology” flavor of solar panels mitigated against solar energy as a solution.

But then I read the wonderful article by George Johnson in the National Geographic for September 2009 entitled Plugging into the Sun that summarizes the current status of the solar-power industry around the world. Two important factors finally dawned on me. First, the flux of solar photons onto the Planet Earth is enormous. Depending on one’s favorite metaphor, the Earth receives “more energy in one hour than the world used in one year” in 2002. [Wikipedia] Translation: We already have a fusion source of energy that provides a nearly unlimited supply of free, convertible photons. Second, the technology needed to convert photons into electrons or electricity already exists and the market forces are rapidly making the production and sale of solar panels for homes or buildings cost competitive. Furthermore, we already know how to construct and utilize giant solar power plants. Translation: solar power is not a scientific or technological challenge.

But this begs the question: why is America not jumping with both feet onto the solar energy bandwagon? We want energy independence. Why not solar, especially given that it is a “solved” solution? Thomas L. Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded has opined more broadly on the issue advocating for market forces to drive innovation across the spectrum on possible energy sources including solar. Even as I write this article, an email has arrived in my inbox with a Paul Krugman editorial entitled Here Comes the Sun in support of solar energy and pointing out the rapid acceleration of the sector off most people’s radar screens – the Solyndra story notwithstanding. So what are the pitfalls for solar energy and what about other alternative energy sources both for the production of electricity and for fuels?

One unspoken issue is that we might converge too quickly onto a specific solar energy industry using inferior technology. It’s both the “low tech” issue and, more importantly, the sunk cost issue that plagues the nuclear power industry. Many believe that the prevalent reactor design was chosen too quickly and is sub-optimal. Is the same thing happening to the solar industry?

And then there are all the usual technological and economic issues including the location and viability of American transmission lines – we need a smart grid, energy storage during off hours, distributed generation using local solar panels versus large-scale solar collection plants, and the associated costs of building out the infrastructure. But these are old issues and we have to deal with them independent of choosing solar energy. Indeed, we do that every day. They are not show-stoppers for solar energy.

How about environmental issues? No one should be fooled. There is no such thing as “clean” or “green” energy, alternative or not! Every source of energy carries a burden whether in the production of the materials – think mining – used for the infrastructure or the process itself – consider the environmental issues of solar plants in a pristine desert. Even algae, a potential source for fuels and carbon feedstock, must be “fed” by phosphate salts – or the equivalent – taken from the earth. In the end, it is a trade-off.

And what about the issue of solar energy only producing electrons, not fuels? In my opinion, this is the true insertion point for innovation. What would we do with a large excess of electrons? Would we “flare” them off as we often do with natural gas? Or would we design ancillary systems to absorb and use them in creative ways? With enough electrons, one can convert lots of different materials into fuels. If we no longer need coal to produce electricity, we can extend its lifetime as a feedstock for fuels using electrons as the energy source for the conversion. Even better, we can invent new technologies for converting biomass into feedstock for the chemical and plastics industry instead of the ultimately futile game of converting biomass into fuel. And we can slow down the use of fossil fuels, thereby improving our biosphere and reducing global warming. Yes, we need more innovation through research and development including even studies on fusion energy.

But do we have an energy crisis founded on scientific issues or basic natural facts as I originally thought? Are we “too pooped to pop?” Emphatically, NO! What we have is the lack of societal and political will to use and turn the levers and knobs available to us to effect the transformation to a solar economy. Mercifully, as suggested by Krugman and others, there are positive signs that change is afoot. I’m not an expert on the subject, but federal loan guarantees seem to be working in California. Tax incentives for the installation of home solar panels are essential. We should pursue any and all avenues to stimulate the solar transformation. In short, what we need is a well-constructed “Solar Electrification Program” similar in spirit to the original Rural Electrification program used during the Great Depression. We need to support the Solar Energy Industries Association as a counterpoint to government. We need to understand that solar equals jobs and jobs now! With a clear understanding of where we are at in the space of solar power and the bigger space of the energy crunch, we can innovate and replace the current growth in short-term solar installation and construction jobs with longer-term high technology jobs.

Are we too pooped to pop? I think not. It’s time for America to “pop” and go solar.

Free Agency: It's a Bad Idea!

2011-11-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness released an interim report in October entitled Taking Action, Building Confidence. The recommendations and actions proposed in the report comport with conventional wisdom as to what the Nation needs to be doing to accelerate the growth of jobs in America, especially through innovation and the creation of small startup companies. And due diligence is given to the role played by the commercialization of university research through entrepreneurship and technology transfer and the need to enhance such activities. All would be well with the report from my perspective in terms of the recommendations for universities except for one thing: they got it wrong!

I suppose “getting it wrong” can be rationalized given the makeup of the Council. There is not a single representative from academe other than the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT and no one knowledgeable in the practical aspects of the commercialization of university research serves on the Council.

So what is it that they got wrong? In Initiative 2: Nurture the High-Growth Enterprises That Create New Jobs, one of their recommendations on page 22 is to “allow university faculty to shop discoveries to any technology transfer office.” It’s also referred to on page 21 as an “open-source” approach. Originally proposed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation as the “Free-Agent” or sometimes the “Free-Choice” model, it has been strongly, emphatically, and universally rejected by the university community as a very bad idea with many flaws that will not improve the commercialization of university research, but have the opposite effect: slow it down! At a seminal meeting in February of 2010 hosted by the Council on Governmental Relations in Washington, I presented the arguments against the “Free Choice” model and my speech and powerpoint presentation are available. The Association of University Technology Managers and others have taken equally strong positions against this model.

But what could possibly be wrong with “open sourcing,” “free agency,” or “free choice?” It sounds like motherhood, apple pie, and the American way. Absent other information, it is easy to become trapped in these rhetorical flourishes and trapped by the claims of the Kauffman Foundation and their supporters at the Department of Commerce that they have “studies” demonstrating the need for such a model. Here’s the reality: there are no such credible studies! Show me the credible studies and I’ll happily review them. What we have are only collected hearsay and the whisperings of disgruntled innovators and entrepreneurs who had their bad experience. No credence is taken of the vast majority of commercialization activities successfully conducted every day by competent people all across the spectrum of American universities. No credence is taken of the input and rejection of this model by university experts with decades of experience. No credence is given to the rapid expansion and transformation underway at universities in the commercialization of their research.

But let’s be specific for a moment and list some of the principal arguments against the “free agent” model. Additional information and further clarification can be found in the COGR material.

The concept didn’t work before Bayh-Dole.
The concept hasn’t worked internationally.
The concept hasn’t worked well in joint university experiments and some have dropped combined operations.
The approach will significantly slow down commercialization due to a) the complexity of multiple inventors and technologies, b) the complexity of funding sources for most research, 3) the complexity of having multiple managers across different universities, 4) the balkanization of faculty IP, and 5) the tangled legal obligations with concomitant legal and financial liabilities.
Faculty conflict of interest through financial interest in license and startups.
Emphasis on personal benefit to faculty members over societal benefit
Lack of practical experience in commercialization by faculty and their lack of available time to pursue a long-distance relationship.
Problems with faculty conflict of commitment with respect to outside agencies.
The concept ignores the investment of a faculty member’s university in the inventions.
There is no mechanism to bear the cost of free-agent commercialization – inventors don’t have the money and the home institution isn’t going to pay someone else the full cost.
Home institutions will be reluctant to risk money on IP managed by another institution.
Potential emergence of third party licensing entities requiring profit or sustainability, thereby driving up the costs.
“Cherry picking” of IP.
Problems with one university committing incredibly tight resources to another – not going to happen!
State law: Texas requires fair value for IP.
No evidence the model would improve more “modest” operations.
Technology transfer offices (TTO) believe it to be an inappropriate allocation of their resources and an inappropriate relationship.
Harm to the faculty-TTO relationship.

And these arguments are just the start of the problems for the free-agent model! In short, pursuing this model will waste a lot of valuable time and resources trying to “fix” all the problems with it. And guess what! Even if it is made to work, it will have a minimum to negligible effect on the speed or quality of the commercialization of university research to the marketplace. There will not be an explosion of discoveries or inventions suddenly being brought forth. There will be no explosion of new jobs! Do we really want to do this to ourselves?

Even at its best, the commercialization of university research is a “contact sport” requiring the building of relationships among many stakeholders. Those relationships take time and don’t work well as a long-distance marriage. Disputes and disagreements within such relationships should not become fodder for promoting a concept that is doomed to failure from the outset.

But most insidious to me in the “free-agent” model is its failure to understand, promote, and accelerate the single most important step that we need to take in America: the creation of communities of innovation. We should not be running to MIT, Stanford, or some other presumed bastion of the all mighty to enhance commercialization – my apologies to my good friends at MIT and Stanford. We should be building regional innovation ecosystems similar to the ones springing up all around America using best practices from our peers such as MIT or Stanford. That means doing the hard work of improving our local university technology transfer and commercialization infrastructure as I’ve advocated throughout my articles and as other leaders, such as the Association of University Research Parks and AUTM, have advocated. There are many extant great ideas for improving commercialization such as “proof-of-concept” funding and innovation centers. Free-agency as recommended in the Council’s interim report is a bad idea and a waste of time and resources. I strongly urge the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness to remove this recommendation and replace it with ones that will have the desired outcome: jobs and prosperity for Americans.

What Is Easy Has Been Done

2011-10-25T08:59:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

It used to be so easy. The “lone wolf” researcher observed natural phenomena and collected data using homemade equipment. Or perhaps those with a theoretical bent puzzled over data and speculated on a new theory using only pencil, paper and their native intellect. Einstein became the poster child for the iconoclastic scientist with his unkempt appearance and penetrating, but friendly, eyes. Rarely did a polymath appear able to leap over discipline boundaries ala Superman. Such nimble gymnastics mostly weren’t needed.

But then the Twentieth Century arrived with an exponential explosion of science, engineering, and technology. Disciplinary research boundaries collapsed as interdisciplinary became the buzzword of the middle part of the century followed by multidisciplinary and now transdisciplinary in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century. The “lone wolf” or individual researcher was overrun by teams, research centers and institutes, national laboratories, industrial R&D laboratories, and now “lablets,” innovation hubs, and innovation centers. The century of the physical sciences was replaced by a spurt in the life sciences.

The structure of funding for research moved from potentates and personal donors to industry and government while the nature of the funding shifted from pure basic research with scientific significance as the principal measure for funding to use-directed research with “broader impact” – often under the umbrella of grand challenges – as a significant metric. Of course, what constitutes “broad impact” or “relevance” as it is sometimes known is mostly in the eye of the beholder. Some would even argue that the skill of grantsmanship supercedes the natural research ability of researchers when it comes to promotion or tenure. Certainly one’s record of grantsmanship is equally as important as one’s publication record, almost independent of the quality of the research.

And then we have the phenomenon of “relevance” and “broad impact” being overtaken and encompassed by the newest trend: the commercialization of university research and the desire to include innovation, commercialization, and entrepreneurial metrics as measures of faculty productivity. Even teaching with the advent of a multiplicity of “learning styles” and the concomitant introduction of many new advanced technologies for delivering content has not been immune to transformational change – not to mention the rapid expansion of the knowledge frontier and the race to keep up in lecture content and textbooks.

From another perspective, the collapse at the end of the Twentieth Century of the meso-scale or nano-scale barrier that bridges atoms and molecules to the micro-scale along with the parallel growth and ability to attack biological systems brought about a new research concept or paradigm: convergence. Convergence was celebrated by a new acronym “nbic” which stands for nano-bio-info-cogno. Later, the letter “e” was added at the end to include “eco.” Personally, I prefer to rearrange the letters of the acronym to “bnice.” Somehow, the phrase “be nice” sounds better than the geek speak “nbice.”

Coupled to the concept of convergence was the equally important, if not more important, concept of “complexity.” Complexity is in some sense a measure of the connectivity of knowledge or networks. Together, convergence and complexity along with other related events led to the creation of network science, an approach to parsing phenomena into three categories: physical, biological, and social. Network science entails a systems view of the world with layered architectures as the dominant structure and “emergent phenomena” occurring in the higher-tiered layers. Life itself is considered an emergent process in the macroworld which itself is built upon the micro-, nano-, and atomic and molecular layers. Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, postulated in his book, The Singularity is Near, that the complexity of computers is poised to surpass that of the human brain and that computers will soon become “self-aware” as an emergent phenomenon. What will happen to humankind as such self-aware computers become exponentially brilliant and able to assess all known knowledge at nearly the speed of light?

Will scientific research ever get a pink slip? John Horgan in his book The End of Science would make us believe so. Convergence, network science, and complexity theory might lead us to think so as we pull together all branches of science into the final grand frontier. It is an interesting debate, best left for now to the coffee klatch and student debate. It certainly is the case that full access to the nanoscale and BNICE convergence have brought about the social phenomena of self-assembly of STEM and health personnel into teams taking on societal problems. Furthermore, global competition and the resulting explosion in the commercialization of university research have taken us to the transdisciplinary age with STEM and health teams joining forces with business and legal teams as well as those who understand the social dimensions to ensure prosperity for Americans. As I like to tell my colleagues in all fields of endeavor, what is easy has been done! Get used to it!

What are the implications for this massive paradigm shift in how we do research, keeping in mind that the scientific method per se has not changed? Indeed, ARE there any implications, especially for the innovation ecosystem? Certainly, we must at a minimum be aware that a transformation has occurred however one chooses to characterize it. In my experience, far too many people simply don’t get it and merely view what is happening as a treadmill dialed to a faster speed. While that is true, it is only a fraction of the real story.

In other articles and in Go Forth and Innovate, I’ve addressed in my opinion some of the changes that need to occur in grantsmanship, publication of research, peer review, research compliance, and a retuning of academe to replace the service function with a community engagement function that includes all aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship. Each of these areas and many more deserve a detailed review. But it is important that such reviews and the subsequent changes that are made be understood within the broader context of how the scientific endeavor has changed. It is important for all to understand that what is easy has been done.

Who's in Charge?

2011-10-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

Admit it! You always wanted to be a rock star belting out tunes while adoring fans groveled in the mosh pit. Or maybe it was a movie star surrounded by great actors and with an Oscar to boot. Of course, the svelte look of a fashion model always danced before your eyes as you stared at your reflection in a mirror. And then there were those of you who aspired to be top dog in the commercialization of university research … we pause to reflect on this dissonant chord and to paraphrase a hit tune by Nancy Sinatra: were those boots really made for walking?

No one grows up wanting to lead a university office of technology commercialization – well, maybe there are a few hardy souls out there with vision. Indeed, such a career path didn’t even exist in my youth! But exist it does and it’s one of the top new professions in America demanding the highest of skills. Unfortunately for universities, it’s a profession that has grown up so quickly that we face a dearth of top-quality people to fill the rapid growth in positions. How did we get to this situation and what does it mean to be a leader of technology commercialization at a university?

The story begins with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The act permitted universities to elect to pursue ownership of an invention developed from federal research grants in preference to the government and to actively commercialize the invention. Prior to Bayh-Dole, few universities engaged in the transfer of technology to industry and the process was limited principally to a licensing function. The offices responsible for that function became known as technology transfer offices (TTO) and the staff as technology managers. There were exceptions such as the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, created in 1926, that presaged the future.

Following Bayh-Dole, most universities were rather slow to respond and their focus was almost exclusively on technology transfer, not commercialization. Technology managers, typically lawyers, were hired or untrained staff were coerced into that role. Organizations such as the Licensing Executive Society (LES and founded in 1965) and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM and founded in 1974) grew in prominence and a new and important professional career path opened up in universities with a specific focus on technology transfer as opposed to commercialization.

TTOs in many universities at the end of the Twentieth Century were back offices reporting up the channel to vice presidents for research and often consisting of a very small staff. Their functions included the following activities:

Invention disclosure
Valuation
Protection as intellectual property (IP)
Formation of business plan
Marketing
Licensing
Asset/portfolio management

The director of a typical TTO dealt mainly with faculty, the USPTO, and with licensees of their IP. It was an important job with definable activities that encompassed a reasonable skill set.

Several emergent forces upset the TTO applecart. First was the growing need for university incubators to house start-up companies created by faculty and subsequently by more complex alliances of people. University incubators demanded leaders and directors with skill sets appropriate to their management and with the vision to function in an ever changing landscape. Even the putatively simple act of forming a university incubator is not straightforward.

Second was the push for regional economic development or “eco-devo” as some called it. The eco-devo push was often ill-defined and was thrust upon vice presidents for research to manage and to make sense of. No longer was an appearance at dog and pony shows designed to attract leading industry to a community sufficient. Demands grew for universities to engage with regional communities to help them grow their own economies. If Silicon Valley could do it, so could main-street America. The theme was endlessly repeated without a clue as to what should be done. And who at a university was going to do whatever it was that needed to be done?

Next was the realization that we live in a globally competitive world with other nations seemingly racing faster than America to create ecosystems supportive of startup company formation at the frontiers of research and development and supportive of the commercialization of new IP. Accelerating the commercialization of university research became a new goal for universities. Pressure was put on TTOs to “perform” and metrics were perused. Critics and many pundits interpreted the data as demonstrating underperformance and the need for a new paradigm. The notion of “proof of concept” funding emerged as a tool to achieve acceleration as well as a tool to realize the commercialization potential of otherwise dead or undeveloped IP. But who should manage and distribute such funds? Was this a new function for TTOs?

But processing of ideas, discoveries, inventions, and the eventual IP faster and better into the commercial marketplace isn’t the final answer or the end of the story. America also recognized that we must innovate faster and better than everyone else. I’ve long advocated for the creation of innovation centers at universities fully engaged with a regional community of innovation. And that system of innovation at universities must be tightly coupled to all the processing and commercialization functions alluded to above. But who’s in charge? Who manages such a diverse portfolio of functions? Ultimately, it resides with the vice president for research, but it also requires an ancillary high-level professional skilled in the multi-faceted aspects of innovation and the commercialization of university research.

Initially, TTOs responded to the transformational paradigm shift by the oldest of tricks. They added a commercialization function to their office and changed their name to office of technology commercialization (OTC). Recognizing the need for professional certification, a Certified Licensing Professional (CFP) program began in 2008 under the initiative of LES. Such endeavors are worthy and must be done, but are they enough? Do they truly recognize the transformational change that is underway? Do they recognize the need to have an integrated response to technology transfer, technology commercialization, regional economic development, innovation, or any other buzz word you want to add to the list? Are we doing what needs to be done?

The emergence of the commercialization of university research under the umbrella of an innovation ecosystem is a fascinating story and one that I’ve only briefly reviewed. It is a phenomenon that is in a state of flux as we leap up the transformation S-shaped curve and head for the next plateau. Exactly what will emerge systemically is up for debate, but one thing is clear. Someone must be in charge! And that someone will need to be a professional with a variety of non-overlapping skill sets and strong interpersonal skills to navigate around faculty, university administrators, lawyers of all stripes, entrepreneurs, investors, politicians, and even the world of critics and pundits. I don’t claim to have the answers as to how such a profession should be structured or even as to how universities should approach dealing with the diverse functionalities that would require such leaders. But I do believe that universities and those who speak for innovation in America need to address this issue immediately. Someone who knows what they are doing needs to be in charge of the overall innovation system at a university. Defaulting to an untrained vice president for research or to a siloed structure is not the answer.

What is Leadership?

2011-09-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

The recent televised debates by candidates for the Republican presidential nomination bring to mind expressions from a bygone era such as “gadzooks” and “ye gods!” “Holy Toledo, Batman” is much too modern. Who would have thought that a return to the nineteenth century would be embraced with such fervor by those who want to lead the nation, especially in the current environment of global competition? No taxes, no regulations, no EPA, no infrastructure investment, no social nets, no health coverage – in short, no federal government. It’s every man for himself with government restricted to local communities and states. Oops, this sounds more like a feudal society. Maybe the nineteenth century is also much too modern for the candidates. And, shucks, I’m told those folks in the nineteenth century actually invested in public financed infrastructure!

Of course, we have the latest anointed white knight in shining armor destined to save the Republican party, Governor Chris Christie. Unfortunately for most of us, his management style on the surface appears to be that of the school yard bully. It’s “in-your-face” and “none-of-your-business” on steroids. I’m sure that style will work well for a president on the international scene, especially for those who believe in the George W. Bush “bring-it-on” Texas version of being a bully around the globe. The New Jersey version should be even better – cement boots instead of cowboy boots.

For those of us who enjoy political satire ala Saturday Night Live, the current crop of Republican candidates and the behavior of the supporting cast – otherwise known as an audience, couldn’t possibly get any better … unless, of course, Donald Trump and Sarah Palin decide to joint the fray. But as humorous as the political spoofing can be, the performance of most of the candidates is deeply troubling, not to mention some of the crazy notions they espouse. Do any of these candidates really posses the necessary leadership skills and the basic understanding of how the modern competitive world functions to serve as president?

The concept of leadership has always been difficult to define and characterize. What works? What doesn’t? Is it dependent on the time and the circumstances? Is it situational? Does it depend on the desired outcomes and the metrics used to measure the outcomes? Can it be learned or does it reside in one’s genes? There are many questions to be asked and many points of view.

Like many who have served in positions of responsibility, I’ve been asked on a number of occasions to address the issue of leadership, often at leadership academies or training programs for rising managers and administrators. Over time, I’ve thought about my own particular brand, especially as regards the all important activity of making decisions. Three decades of management experience, both at universities and a national laboratory, have taught me that there are four basic principles to be obeyed that cover just about all scenarios. These principles are as follows:

Be number one, otherwise you won’t be – or more explicitly, always function with the highest level of professionalism using the highest possible standards.
Get it right to start with; it takes less time.
You get there one step at a time.
You have to spend money to get money.

Simple? Yes! Effective? These principles worked for me.

Leadership can also be dissected by revealing lessons learned. Here are mine.

People get things done, not plans, processes and technology, and people make mistakes – stand behind your people.
Never admonish/discipline/criticize an employee in public.
Find out what the rest of the story is.
Deal immediately with personnel problems – the hardest part is telling people news or evaluations they don’t want to hear. Saying no is hard.
Deal immediately and professionally with a problem. Auditors love it.
It is better not to pass your personnel problems along to someone else by moving an employee.
Activity is not the same thing as productivity.
Let the people who work for you do their jobs and constantly congratulate and thank them when they do.
Be informed, but don’t micromanage.
Keep your stories simple, straightforward, and honest – you rapidly become too busy to keep up with different versions of the story.
Decisions: do your homework, get the best synthesis from staff and others, but make the decision in a timely manner recognizing you often won’t have all the data needed.
Encourage open and frank debate in your staff meetings. Use a better idea than yours when someone gives it to you.
Pick a target, get moving toward it, and do mid-course corrections as needed – but avoid ready, fire, aim.
Email rage is real.
Periodically assess your accomplishments.
“Go to where the future is going to be, not where it is now.” (Revision of Wayne Gretzky and the hockey puck aphorism.)
Have fun!

Ultimately, leadership is all about moving an organization or nation forward while avoiding unnecessary collateral damage. It’s about maximizing the greater good while protecting the individual. And for the economy, it’s about saving the middle class in order to protect the consumer base. Business and industry without customers is a certain path to decline and decay in America.

Leadership at the federal level also means investment in building an innovation ecosystem and infrastructure second to none. Just say no – the mantra of the Tea Party movement – is not acceptable. We can debate the specifics of the ecosystem, but failure to build one or strengthen our current one is not an option unless we plan to concede defeat in the global marketplace. So, why is the United States moving forward at a snail’s pace – other than blaming our dysfunctional Congress? My answer has remained the same for well over a decade. The only thing holding us back is ourselves.

Anatomy of a University Incubator

2011-09-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Keith McDowell

University incubators for startup companies are popping up all around the United States with many pundits and bloggers suggesting that we have unsustainable bubbles, both in number of incubators and number of companies being incubated. We’ve saturated the market goes the litany. Maybe so, but I doubt it.

More relevant to many in the commercialization of university research community is the issue of how one creates a university incubator. What are the steps and, in particular, how much does it cost and how does one pay for it? Having personally created two such incubators and having watched the creation of numerous others, I have a simple message to relay: there is no bottom line and no single formula for creation, let alone success. Indeed, even teasing out the costs of forming and sustaining an incubator is difficult and often inextricably tied to other activities. Two examples prove my case.

The University of Texas at Brownsville paid approximately $3 million for a defunct 600,000 square-foot shopping mall and converted part of that space into an incubator. Obviously, the mall was purchased to expand university space, not to build an incubator. On the other hand, The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) worked with the Arlington Chamber of Commerce and obtained a grant for approximately $1.8 million from the Economic Development Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce to purchase a building next to the campus specifically to be used as a university incubator. The university provided matching funds of several hundred thousand dollars as part of the grant fully expecting to move the Office of Sponsored Projects from expensive rental space into the facility, thereby converting a recurring cost into a one-time cost and a long-term cost savings. So how much was spent in these two cases on the incubator and over what time period? Only an accountant wearing a green eyeshade and using a sharpened pencil would attempt to answer that question.

Having dispelled the notion of a simple formula, I hasten to point out that there are key factors that play into the creation and maintenance of university incubators. Such factors are best understood not in the aggregate, but by appeal to case studies of individual incubators and how these studies can inform both the general practice of university incubation and the specific instance of creating an incubator. In that spirit, I review in this article the anatomy of a single incubator: the Bama Technology Incubator.

The story begins with Robert E. Witt, former President of UTA and currently President of The University of Alabama (UA). Visionary in his leadership, Witt recognized in the late 1990s the need for a new model on how universities engaged economic development in their local communities. The incubator at UTA was a direct result. Upon assuming the presidency of UA in the spring of 2003, Witt determined that a similar effort was required in Alabama and I happily joined his transformational team in November of 2003 as the first vice president for research at UA.

The situation at UA in 2003 was similar to many universities at the time. There was an associate vice provost for research and a sponsored projects office with a director reporting to him. Grant accounting reported to the business office. Technology transfer was sporadic and commercialization of university research mostly didn’t exist. No one was to blame. Such activity simply wasn’t a part of the general culture of academe at the time, although the commercialization tsunami was rapidly taking hold and about to burst onto the American scene. Witt took the most important step needed to transform UA. He created a new budget line of approximately $2 million for my office and challenged everyone to get the job done to the highest standards. Second best was unacceptable to Witt.

We needed a team of the very best people who understood the integrated and symbiotic nature of research, research administration, technology transfer, commercialization of university research, and – yes! – innovation. Dr. Marianne Woods, a national leader in research administration and subsequently a member of the COGR Board, was the first onboard in the spring of 2004 as an associate vice president for research. Under her leadership, grant accounting was brought into the Office of Sponsored Programs under a new director, Cindy Hope. Cindy is nationally known for her knowledge and training programs in grant accounting through NCURA. In today’s marketplace, such seasoned leadership requires a minimum salary of $200,000 while going as high as $250,000 or more in some cases.

With respect to the creation of an incubator, UA had a most unusual advantage in 2004. It was called the AIME building. A 50,000-square-foot facility completed in the year 2000 and paid for by a $9.3 million grant from the Department of Energy, AIME housed the Alabama Institute for Manufacturing Excellence. The building was multi-purpose with space and utilities for wet labs (several labs not yet built out), a large high-bay facility, a giant projection screen capability, state-of-the-art IT infrastructure, classrooms, conference rooms, and an administrative wing. It was the perfect facility for an incubator. And, furthermore, the original AIME program had died away quickly leaving the facility with no identifiable occupant in 2004 other than general usage by various colleges. Witt rectified that situation and permitted its use as an incubator.

But there was much more to the equation than merely creating an incubator in the AIME building. After much brainstorming, the concept for an innovation center coupled to the incubator emerged. Although “proof of concept” was an essential ingredient of such a center, the UA team recognized that the full panoply of functionality for the commercialization of university research would be required in order to take UA research from the lab to the marketplace, particularly as a startup company. We would need a UA Office for Techology Transfer, the Bama Technology Incubator, and the new innovation center, all reporting to the Office of Research.

As part of the brainstorming, we listed all possible functions and activities that might be required across the spectrum including entrepreneurship and the engagement of students, both for training as entrepreneurs and as innovators. The new innovation center was named the Alabama Innovation and Mentoring of Entrepreneurs (AIME) Center. [As a humorous side note, we chose to keep the acronym AIME. What can I say? The letters were chiseled in stone on the front of the building!] Rather than enumerate herein all the functionalities reviewed and exactly how they were broken out among the four entities, I defer to two annual reports at the end of the creation period for the details – OTT 2007 Annual Report and AIME annual report for 2007 – and the websites hyperlinked above for the four offices. An Alabama news release also contains useful information. I’ve also addressed the issue of innovation centers in a previous article.

With respect to staffing levels for the new UA infrastructure, the Office of Technology Transfer has a director, a licensing specialist, and an administrative assistant. AIME has a director, a staff research engineer, a staff research scientist, and an administrative assistant. Postdoctoral fellowships are also offered by AIME. The AIME director serves as the director of BTI since AIME and BTI are integrated into the AIME building. Although AIME sponsors and pays for “proof of concept,” developmental, and innovative research directed toward university intellectual property (IP), partially with revenue return from all university IP, a principal source of funding is direct industrial funding with support from a number of international companies. Such funding requires flexible IP policies and a willingness to negotiate and build trust relationships with industry. Startup companies located in BTI also pay a rental fee, although as always with university incubators, the deal structure can be very complex and involve equity in the company.

An important ingredient in forming the UA model and in coalescing the team dynamics was the incorporation of one of the UA attorneys onto the team by paying for one-half of their salary. The attorney was involved at all times in the decision-making and made a real member of the “commercialization team.”

The UA model didn’t stop with people and infrastructure. Activities such as the formation of an online research magazine and the creation of the Alabama Launchpad in collaboration with the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama took place. Alabama venture capital and angel investors were brought on board. Every conceivable function or activity that could be used to accelerate the commercialization of university research was reviewed and added as appropriate.

In summary, the Bama Technology Incubator was created as part of an integrated whole built from existing infrastructure and facilities. How much did it cost to create it? How much does it cost to maintain it? These questions are not easily answered when one understands the full commercialization structure at UA or the history of the program. For example, how does one separate out the cost of AIME from BTI? Should one divide the energy costs for the AIME building among all the users including the colleges that use the classrooms? When student entrepreneurs work with the startup companies in BTI, is that a cost for BTI or part of the general education budget? These are all difficult questions, but ones that must addressed by a university when forming an incubator. Of course, each case is different and that’s my essential point. How many universities have an AIME building sitting and waiting to be used as an incubator?

But there are some lessons to be drawn from the BTI story. First, visionary leadership at the top from people such as President Robert E. Witt is critical. Second, always shoot for the highest standards and always hire the best people, no matter the costs. The return on that investment is almost incalculable. Third, it helps to have a budget line, but more important is to have a flexible budget line. Fourth, rigid IP policies and, more broadly, rigid policies to manage the incubator are problematic in the modern age of reduced funding for universities. One can’t engage industry easily with such policies. And fifth, university incubators divorced from the bigger picture of innovation are dead on arrival from my perspective.

The anatomy of BTI is only one story and likely not one widely realized in other situations. But it is one of many stories that need to be told as we attempt as a society to understand the role of university incubators in the age of global competition.

Ignorance: the Bane of Innovation

2011-09-10T07:57:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

EVACUATE! The dreaded message popped up on the computer screen only moments before the power went out, forcing my son to grab a computer gone dead and head for his car. The computer marked the final item in our attempts on the 4^th of September to take valued possessions with us as we fled the firestorm growing by the second and rampaging near the entrance to the Steiner Ranch subdivision in Austin, Texas. We had no choice but to obey the order. Being trapped by a raging wildfire potentially blocking the only way out, other than a swim across Lake Austin, wasn’t the most innovative idea on how to spend a Labor Day weekend. Ultimately, Mother Nature did her worst as winds gusting at better than forty miles per hour drove the flames to destroy 23 homes and seriously damage 3 others. We were lucky. Many were not.

Fire has always played a major role in the daily lives of people – both as a source of energy and as a destroyer of property. Coupled with earth, air, and water, it served for centuries as one of the four elements comprising a theory of the universe. Yet, one has to wonder if early caveman thought of the concept of fire as “just a theory” as he watched wildfires consume the savannah that provided his essential needs.

Even today, the power of the four mystical elements captures our attention in movies and books such as The Fifth Element and Angels and Demons. Dan Brown in particular drove home the classic struggle between reason and faith as the Illuminati plotted against the Catholic Church. Of course, obeisance to such ancient thinking is all in jest since humankind has long since left the 15^th century behind and passed through the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. We now live in the information age with science, technology, engineering, and math coupled to data-driven analysis from economics, sociology, history, psychology and many other fields paving the path for an era of innovation and enlightened leadership as America competes in a rational global society … or do we?

Global warming driven by human factors is “just a theory” according to Texas Governor Rick Perry, the current leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination. Facts and data don’t matter to him. After all, they’ve been manipulated by scientists to attract research grants. The fact that June, July, and August in Texas were the hottest months ever for any state in the United States with respect to average temperature as well as breaking records for the most days hotter than a hundred degrees is just an inconvenient fluctuation. The fact that Texas is on fire with a land mass larger than the State of Connecticut having been burned this year is just an aberration. The fact that the drought in Texas has cost farmers more than $5 billion is simply an act of God and one that we should pray about at a mass meeting in Houston. Yes, we all understand that local weather is not the same as climate change, but they are linked and Texas as well as the rest of the Nation is clearly displaying this year the pattern of large-scale weather deviations predicted by global warming. And then we have evolution – also “just a theory” according to Perry.

But Perry is not alone in his anti-science stance and views. Indeed, according to Paul Krugman in his article Republicans Against Science from The New York Times, such anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-knowledge views are pervasive in the core right wing of the GOP – a core made up of cold-war warriors and neo-conservatives still searching for “commies” on every corner including our research universities, evangelicals confused and misled about faith versus reason, pro-life advocates who support selective government intervention matching up to their particular religious beliefs, tea-party members supporting no taxes and no government, and right-wing pundits who claim to be Americans but actually support anarchy and “just say no” to anything progressive. When and why did it become so fashionable for “deniers” of science or data-driven knowledge to take center stage?

John Atcheson is his excellent review entitled A Review of the Must-Read “Inquisition of Climate Science provides us with one answer speaking specifically about global warming: “the reason deniers rail against the science is because they hate the solution: government intervention in the marketplace.” Personally, I believe the answer is much more deep-seated and much more than one driven by economics. It’s a visceral dislike of those “uppity” intellectuals – likely to be liberals, socialists, atheists, and non-believers according to the mantra – and a dislike of new ideas and change – hence, the anti-intellectual and anti-knowledge flavor of the denier movement. While sometimes rooted in religion, the denier movement is not fundamentally a battle between faith and reason. Instead, it is exploitation of religion and people of faith by the deniers for political and economic gain. President Jimmy Carter in his book Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis spoke eloquently to this point.

But just as surely as the biosphere of Planet Earth including humankind will continue to evolve and just as surely as the effects of global warming will be manifested in more dramatic weather events – including firestorms and drought in Texas, the inexorable march of scientific observation, experiment, and data collection as well as scholarly activity in other fields will reveal new truth and new knowledge. As James Lawrence Powell stated in his book, The Inquisition of Climate Science:

Most professions can be no better than their individual practitioners, but Science is far better than scientists. It is the best system we have for getting beyond human frailty and folly to the truth.

Sadly, the “deniers” haven’t stopped with simple denial of truth or proven knowledge through claims of it’s “just a theory” and other such gimmicks. They’ve adapted the trappings of science and created “scientific theories” such as “intelligent design” as a counterpoint to the theory of evolution. Governor Perry takes great pride in claiming that intelligent design is taught to students in Texas in just this manner. [His claim is false!] Don’t get me wrong! If anyone wants to believe that God (the intelligent designer) created the universe as a matter of faith, so bit it. But, it’s not science and it’s not proven truth. Even one of the most conservative of religions and the slowest to change, Catholicism, doesn’t normally advocate denial of scientific knowledge and facts discovered in the modern world.

Of course, when bogus or easily disproved theories don’t win the day, “deniers” take the ultimate step. They attack our educational institutions and our teachers and researchers. Quoting from an article entitled Attacks on Science Education Intensify by Chris Mooney, they “accuse ‘liberal’ teachers of forcing ‘beliefs’ upon a captive audience of impressionable children.” The Mooney article is a summary of a report appearing in Science magazine “on the state of affairs out there in this place called America, and it’s ugly.” How ugly? He’s what Jeffrey Barke says about our classroom teachers and global warming:

Most teachers are left to center, and if we leave it to teachers to impose their liberal views, then it would make for an unbalanced lesson. Some people believe that global warming is a crock of crap, and others are zealots.

Is this an enlightened America ripe for innovation? And how about the Americans for Prosperity Foundation who want to end “frivolous” research projects at our modern research universities? Of course, they’ll use their own version of common sense and a gut feeling to decide what is frivolous.

As Mooney points out in his article, the deniers want to educate – and I use this word with tongue in cheek – a new generation of politically dysfunctional citizens unable to compromise or find a real solution for America with respect to global competition. The “whatever” generation is about to be replaced by the “don’t think; just shout!” generation.

Do we really want to return to the Dark Ages in America and dim the light bulb of innovation? Are we really prepared to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? As Atcheson states in his article:

If we don’t reassert the primacy of the scientific method and the knowledge that it creates, we will soon be a country with the best 15^th century alchemists and healers – and the kind of economy that implies.

When I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s, we had a word to describe the behavior of “deniers” and the state of affairs that we now find ourselves embroiled in. It was the one thing that all parents tried to overcome in their children through education. It was the other “i” word. It was called ignorance.

Research Development as an Innovation Tool

2011-08-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

Do you know the identity of the next emergent industry sector or technology? Or is that information of little value as you plan investment strategies? How about emergent science or research frontiers? There are plenty of “gee whiz” science articles meant to stoke our interest – fear of black holes at CERN notwithstanding. If only we had time to read them all!

Does it matter where and how government, industry, or foundation dollars will be spent on research? Should it be driven by the whim of researchers as they prepare unsolicited proposals, or should it be driven by STEM (science-technology-engineering-mathematics) gatekeepers who dictate new initiatives? And who keeps up with all of this? Yes, there are people who pay attention to such matters! And they are called “research development (RD) professionals” – not to be confused with R&D professionals or university development and advancement officers who seek gifts and donations.

Keeping up with our neighbors is not a new phenomena in America as we decide whether it’s time to move from a station wagon to a minivan and ultimately to an electric car. Or maybe it’s the move from vinyl records to cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 files and the currently ubiquitous iPod or iPhone. As a society, we are constantly bombarded by commercials, consumer’s reports, and word-of-mouth as to the latest fad. In many ways, it’s information and product overload. And it’s all done for us with no effort on our part. We only need to absorb what we want to hear, make a choice, and then spend our money

So what about advances in science and technology and our attempts to prepare for the next research funding initiative or to ride along on the crest of the latest innovation wave? What choices do we have and how should we invest our time, resources, and money? Of course, research administrators at universities, inventors, investors, and innovation gurus have always played the game of searching out the next “new new” thing. But it’s getting harder to do. “What is easy has already been done!” is my favorite mantra.

Today, it’s all about inter-, multi-, and now trans-disciplinary activity with STEM being only a part of the equation. Complexity and convergence networked as systems of systems rule the day coupled to the integration of broader goals including ones focused on education, diversity, commercialization of university research, and engagement of universities in communities of innovation, to name a few. It’s the era of big everything including team science and even the science of team science. It’s universities and some industry sectors greatly expanding their R&D capacity through the construction of new laboratories and the attempt to transform local universities into research powerhouses to fuel regional innovation ecosystems. In short, it’s an explosion on all fronts to achieve a competitive advantage, whether local, national, or global.

But there are limits to the explosion as the amount of federal R&D dollars grows at a slower pace and the number of competitors increases. The American economy remains stagnant following what might be described as a lost decade. The Tea Party and others of the same ilk want no government and no spending. Science is no longer respected by many as the ultimate arbiter of what is real as global warming scientists are accused of “manipulating data” and evolution is debunked as “just a theory.” How does one compete in such an environment as we push harder on the proverbial accelerator pedal only to find our racecar trapped by an ever-growing tangle of vines?

One potential solution – or at least a tool to be used in the space of research institutions – is the RD professional. Unheralded and unsung, the RD profession has slowly grown from being an unwanted but acquired skill by central research administrators to a true profession. Its practitioners have banded together to form the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP) and even have a Wikipedia page. According to last count, there are 243 such professionals in 120 institutions covering a wide range of entities and not limited to universities. In The University of Texas System, for example, two such individuals are easily identified: one at UT Dallas and one at UT San Antonio.

So what exactly is RD? I quote from the NORDP literature:

Research development is a set of strategic, proactive, catalytic, and capacity-building activities designed to facilitate individual faculty, teams of researchers, and central research administrations in attracting extramural research funding, creating relationships, and developing and implementing strategies that increase institutional competitiveness.

A brief list of the activities of RD professionals includes the following:

Identification and targeting of funding opportunities,
Proposal development including preparation of budgets and forms, review, and submission,
Formation of institutional strategic initiatives,
Team building within and across institutions and stakeholders through partnerships and alliances,
Interaction with agencies and stakeholders,
Coordination,
Outreach and training, and
Research on the growing field of RD as a discipline.

The NORDP website and the Wikipedia site have expanded discussions of the definition and activities of RD.

Network theory, as a tool in the social sciences, has played a major role and become an accelerant in the growth of RD as mappings of words, phrases, interactions, publications, and other conceivable packets are datamined to search for emergent groupings or to advance the concept of “group theory.” Websites such as Vivoweb and Elsevier’s Scival promote the growth and the use of such tools.

I applaud those industrious people who have created the RD profession. It is a needed addition to the innovation enterprise and one that all should become familiar with. But I believe there is a bigger story to be told and a bigger role for the RD concept. RD serves as the facilitator of the feedback loop between how and where we spend our R&D dollars and the creation of emergent STEM areas. A similar concept informs entrepreneurs, venture capital, and angels as they invest money and time on inventions, innovators, and innovations that create emergent industries. In mathematical terminology, both activities are homologous. Computer jocks would call them different instantiations of the same object.

What’s missing? Missing is a national innovation policy that melds the two together to form a comprehensive and competitive American innovation ecosystem and enterprise. Grand challenges to solve the pressing problems of our global society could be one element to such a policy. And there are plenty of other worthy ideas. But ultimately what’s missing is the will to create, adequately fund, and carry out a national innovation policy – the Obama innovation plan and his activities notwithstanding. The word “no” must be replaced by “yes we can.”

The mapping image was downloaded (Fig. 5) from the Plos One article Clickstream Data Yields High Resolution Maps of Science by Bollen, et al. The article is an excellent example of mapping and datamining as an RD activity.

To Be or Not To Be: University Incubators

2011-08-18T07:45:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

From a whimper to a shout out! Such is the history of university business incubators over the past decade. From the existence of a countable few before the year 2000, universities, colleges, and even community colleges have “manned up” on the issue of creating incubators at every crossroad and in every community. It’s all about community engagement and prosperity through innovation and economic development. And as might be expected, the “incubators” come in so many varieties that they are no longer countable. Is it an incubator or an accelerator, virtual space or leased real estate, profitable or subsidized? It’s certainly a career path for those people who enjoy definitions and taxonomy!

For the moment, let’s pretend that we know what we mean by the term “university incubator” while using the adjective “university” to include any and all forms of educational institutions and the noun “incubator” to include business accelerators, but not the classic small business development centers at universities funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Should universities create, own, and operate an incubator? That is one of the most important questions to be addressed and answered by American universities in the era of global competition.

Some would argue that the explosive growth of university incubators over the past decade proves that the question has already been answered in the affirmative. I have one foot in that camp, but claim the situation is more fluid and complicated. The fact that most incubators are not profit centers at universities and often exist in name only doesn’t augur well for their future existence as cost containment continues to remain the byword at universities and will likely do so for the next decade. But before we probe further and deconstruct what we mean by a university incubator and whether they should or should not exist, let’s quickly review the situation in Texas and, specifically, The University of Texas System.

The University of Texas System is comprised of nine academic institutions and six health institutions spanning the spectrum of size and location. In many ways, it is a microcosm and representative cross section of American public universities and their treatment of incubators. Thirteen of the institutions host “incubators” in one form or another. The list is provided below with hyperlinks to the appropriate webpage for the incubator.

The University of Texas at Arlington

The University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Brownsville

The University of Texas at Dallas

The University of Texas at El Paso

The University of Texas at Pan American

The University of Texas at Permian Basin

The University of Texas at San Antonio

The University of Texas Health Science Center Houston

The University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas

M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston

For those interested, the State of Texas provides a directory of its business incubators including non-university ones. Unfortunately, it does not include all of the university incubators in Texas due to their rapid emergence.

The commercialization of university research and specifically the notion that universities should participate in the formation of startup companies as well as their incubation represents a dramatic change for most in Academe over the past decade, especially vice presidents for research. I still remember my first days in 2001 at UT Arlington as a newly minted vice president for research. One of the units reporting to me was technology transfer. Like most faculty members and university administrators at that time, technology transfer was something one understood mostly in the abstract. The broader concept of commercialization was unheard of and not part of the vernacular. Instead, such notions and concepts were swept into the basket known as classic economic development and housed under university vice presidents for community relations and other such titles.

In even more of a surprise, President Robert E. Witt informed me that I was supposed to work with the City of Arlington and the Chamber of Commerce to help bring in funding for an incubator project and get it up and running. I knew next to nothing about business incubation, much less did I have a clue about working with community leaders. But such has become the fate of university vice presidents for research in recent times. Subsequently, the incubator associated with UT Arlington was formed and has continued for nearly a decade. Witt later became President of The University of Alabama and together we created the Bama Technology Incubator. As Bob Dylan famously informed us, “the times they are a changin’.” Commercialization of research through the formation of local communities of innovation and the requisite engagement of universities in the communities is the mantra of our times. And at the heart of the innovation community is an incubator or accelerator, often owned and operated by a university.

So, what are the characteristics of university incubators? What defines the functions, resources, and services they provide? Here is my list keeping in mind that no one incubator has them all and incubators are regional phenomena having a variety of forms and structures. The list is not in rank order since ranking of the characteristics is a pointless exercise, nor is the list all inclusive.

Rental Space: Typically at below-market lease rates, the space can be part of a dedicated facility such as the Austin Technology Incubator or “virtual space” on the campus temporarily assigned as workspace for the company and often part of the laboratory of the inventor of the licensed intellectual property (IP).

Administrative and Infrastructure Resources: The possibilities are limitless including pooled clerical and secretarial support, common business facilities such as conference rooms, human resources and personnel management, and information technology services.

Mentoring: Professional staff members and a variety of university centers provide help to startup companies in activities such as the paperwork of company formation, hiring of a management team, creation of a business plan, evaluation of product(s) and market analysis, and marketing.

Outreach: Incubators serve to bridge the gap to public and private investors as well as grants (SBIR, for example) by serving as matchmakers.

Access: Universities provide access to high technology laboratory space – such as wet labs or a BSL-3 lab – and sophisticated equipment and technologies, engineering support, and experts across the spectrum of disciplines.

Relational Networking: Startup companies require innovation through the exchange of ideas among their peers in an incubator.

Potential Employees: Students and postdoctoral fellows, especially those serving as interns or those from an inventor’s laboratory, are an excellent source for employees.

Training: Entrepreneur “boot camps” and programs such as “Ideas on Fire” championed by Cathy Swain in El Paso, Texas, are key to accelerating startup growth and success.

One unexpected characteristic of university incubators in The University of Texas System deserves special attention. Over 80% of the startups housed in these incubators do not derive from IP of the associated university! For example, over 70 companies at the UT Brownsville incubator have been started since 2003, but none of them derive from university IP and none of them are reported in AUTM statistics. They don’t fit the tight AUTM definition of a university startup, even though the university clearly invested indirectly in their formation and mentoring. Furthermore, the companies are not high technology, so they don’t register on the innovation sex appeal meter.

So, why should universities own and operate incubators, especially if most of the companies don’t derive from their own IP and the incubators usually don’t have a positive balance sheet? There are many reasons and here are some of the most important ones:

Twenty-First century universities must engage their local community as engines of innovation and partners in a regional innovation ecosystem.
Universities have many unique resources required to sustain a startup environment.
Commercialization of university research has become part of the mission space of universities and is expected by faculty.
Incubators are a source of revenue both immediate and long-term including rental income, equity in the companies, partial ownership of new IP, royalty from successful companies, monetization of IP, downstream gifts, and many other mechanisms both direct and indirect.
Practice-oriented education in the launch of startup companies – including early-stage student companies – and innovation must be a part of the modern university, similar in spirit to the vaunted hands-on research experience.
Incubators are an increasingly important mechanism for knowledge transfer and dissemination from universities to industry. They serve to bridge the gap in the misalignment of cultures between Academe and industry.

Universities should approach business incubators with great care and planning recognizing that they are not sustainable under a real estate model and must be subsidized to achieve the larger mission of the university. But the risks and costs involved in managing an incubator or in supporting startup companies do not have to be borne solely by a university. For example, the incubators at UT Arlington and UT El Paso are joint ventures with the local community. In short, there is no one-size-fits-all best business model for a university incubator.

And there are other hidden issues that confront and confound university incubators. They include conflict of interest in the use of university laboratories as workspace for companies, conflict of interest and commitment for faculty entrepreneurs, abuse and mistreatment of students and postdoctoral fellows as de facto company employees, commitment of the company founders, selection process for companies entering the incubator and their length of stay, leasing of state property at a fair-market rental price in conformity to state law, research compliance, and stress on under-resourced offices of technology commercialization. These are but a few of the difficulties facing university incubators.

But the “times they are a changin’” as Academe jumps on the innovation bandwagon through startup company formation and incubation. Are we headed for an incubator bubble as recently suggested? Personally, I think American universities are in the midst of an exciting and important transformational phase in which incubators are being tested as a practical learning experience for students, as an instrument for the commercialization of university research, as a means to accelerate the successful formation and growth of startup companies, and as a tool for the broad engagement of universities in communities of innovation. Not everything happens on the East and West coasts of America. Maybe they’ve got a bubble; the rest of us don’t.

Search for the Elusive Universal Licensing Agreement

2011-08-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

In an unheralded and mostly unreported event in the spring of 2010, a team of technology transfer licensing experts from across the wide spectrum of institutions of higher education in The University of Texas System including small, mostly undergraduate universities, the flagship University of Texas at Austin, five health science centers, and the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center achieved a success that many thought was impossible or, at least, extremely difficult to do. They created two patent licensing agreement templates suitable for most deal structures – one for the physical sciences and one for the life sciences.

The history of such attempts likely goes back many years and even centuries. The story of Hans Lipperhey and his failure to obtain a patent for the telescope in the early seventeenth century from the Netherlands and the subsequent production of telescopes certainly reveals that technology transfer management has been around for a long time. One wonders what old Hans would have said about his failure and the process had he been interviewed by a reporter?

Many, including the author, view the deal-making process as situational management where one listens to the “customer” or potential licensee and pulls from the shelf a deal structure in the form of an agreement template that best meets the particular “sweet spot” for that deal. Unfortunately, the shelf is filled with many such “sweet spots,” although only a few dominate most of the action.

In some measure the concept of many sweet spots and situational management condensed into the modality known as the “menu” or “drop-in phrase and clause” agreement template, driven principally by the advent of advanced information technology computer or web forms and the ability to click one’s way to the desired deal structure and licensing agreement in language pre-approved by the legal office. The best-known computer programming effort in this regard is TurboNegotiator. Its’ usage is supported by the University-Industry Demonstration Project.

In Texas, the story over the past decade unfolded in a somewhat different manner. Some people in leadership roles, including those at the Texas Emerging Technology Fund – a State agency that invests in startup companies associated with universities, came to believe that the speed of deal-making was the critical factor and that speed could only be obtained by a fixed deal structure and a one-size-fits-all license agreement. Although such fixed agreements have their place and sometimes achieve their putative goal (see, for example, the Carolina Express License), university technology transfer managers in Texas balked at the idea of a statewide one-size-fits-all agreement.

Recognizing that even the multitude of “sweet spot” templates required some negotiation – hence the appellation “template,” the question was raised in 2008 as to whether a single “template” could be constructed as a reasonable step toward satisfying the demand for a “one-size-fits-all” agreement, whether enhanced speed of deal-making was achieved or not. Most answered that question in the negative, including the author. But a team was formed in the spring of 2009 to make the attempt. I’m happy to say that I was proven wrong.

Immediately, the team recognized that there truly were two classes of deal structures: those associated with intellectual property from the physical sciences and those associated with intellectual property from the life sciences. But amazingly over time, a consensus emerged that it was indeed possible to create a separate template for each of the two classes. In a tour-de-force effort by the team that consumed the better part of a year and involved discussions with many experts in Texas outside The University of Texas System, such templates were created and were announced in the spring of 2010.

Conceptually sound, balanced, and readable, these templates are a testament to both the genius and the hard work of the team members. Two versions of each template were created: one in a traditional agreement format and a second in a two-part format in which the business terms that change from deal-to-deal are included in a cover document and the standard legal/operational matters are isolated in Exhibit A (Terms and Conditions). For the benefit of the general technology transfer community and given that their existence is not widely known, I have posted copies of these templates for download and use by the general community as follows:

Life Sciences: traditional format [word version or pdf version]

Life Sciences: two-part format [word version or pdf version]

Physical Sciences: traditional format [word version or pdf version]

Physical Sciences: two-part format [word version or pdf version]

My hat goes off to the members of the team. They demonstrated that universities are able to take on difficult technology transfer issues and achieve success. Despite claims to the contrary, technology transfer and the broader arena of the commercialization of university research are transforming themselves at universities to meet the needs and demands of the twenty-first century. The search for the elusive universal licensing agreement format and the improvement in deal-making will continue at universities, but for now, we celebrate a major step forward along that path.

Innovation Drought in Texas

2011-08-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

You gotta luv Texas! Only in the midst of a record drought would the Texas Tea Party movement find a new use for divining rods. And this time the mysterious new water source is guaranteed to bring an end to our troubles. It’s all so simple say the dowsers. All we have to do is drink from the fountain – just don’t bother to check the purity of the water.

Folks, we’re not talking about the lack of rain or the parched farm and grazing land in Texas – a true crisis for the State. We’re talking about the latest version of the Texas two-step: a new dance routine designed to reinvent research universities in Texas. The stage for the dance was set by Governor Rick Perry in 2008 when he supported and requested the adoption by university-system regents of “seven breakthrough solutions” advocated by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) – a plan hopefully being slowly cooked to death on the hot Texas asphalt. That endeavor was soon followed by a new brainstorm from Perry – the $10,000 university diploma. We’ll blame that one on Perry for spending too much time in the Texas sun enhancing his tan.

More recently, the water witches have been at work fabricating a new bogeyman to be cured by their divining rods. Yep! Believe it or not, we have a drought in faculty productivity at American research universities. Or so say Rick O’Donnell, Richard Vedder, and others associated with TPPF and related organizations in recent reports deconstructing data provided by the university systems of Texas. Let me be clear! They have a right in America to publish such reports and to hold whatever views they want, no matter how distorted or ill-advised. But the rest of us have to get out of the Texas heat, cool down, review the reports, and weigh the consequences for our State and our Nation.

So what constitutes faculty productivity according to O’Donnell and Vedder? It’s a mixture of teaching and research. Okay, that makes sense. But teaching is measured by the number of credit hours taught by a given faculty member – or some refinement of that number. And research is measured by the external grant dollars procured by a given faculty member. In a simple two-dimensional plot of such data, “stars” are the high performance faculty in terms of productivity with lots of grant money and lots of credit hours taught. “Dodgers” on the other hand teach few students and bring in no grant dollars. And there are other categories of performer on the so-called productivity grid.

“Sherpas” carry the heavy teaching load but bring in no grant dollars. “Pioneers” blaze the research trail with lots of grant money, but a low credit-hour count – guilty according to some of opting out of teaching by buying “release time.” And then there are the great unwashed – did I mention it’s a drought – “coasters” who teach slightly over a hundred students a year and average several hundred thousand dollars in external funding per year. For the record, I was a “coaster,” even though I worked long hours, published many research articles, was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and was honored with a Chancellor’s Council Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000. But then, theoretical chemical physics just wasn’t a hot spot for grant dollars.

How accurate is O’Donnell’s deconstruction of faculty productivity? I’ll make it easy for you. It is pure phony baloney laced with amusing titles for the faculty groupings and spiced up by the appearance of being data driven. But sadly, a great deal of valuable time and effort is being spent and is going to be spent as the discussion degrades into a Texas style pissing contest to refine the data definitions of the productivity grid and to recast the faculty characterizations that are so wrong and so completely misleading.

Others responsible for the safekeeping of the American research university will take on the task of refuting O’Donnell as the difference between inputs, outputs, and outcomes rule the day. But as a retired faculty member from UT Arlington and a former vice chancellor at UT System, I’m compelled to digress for a moment and comment briefly on two important hidden assumptions that underpin O’Donnell’s productivity deconstruction as examples of how irresponsible O’Donnell’s deconstruction truly is and how easily refuted. Unfortunately, a full explanation of each point would far outstrip the confines of this article.

Credit hours are fungible: On the contrary, credit hours come in “chunks” and cannot be easily redistributed to achieve O’Donnell’s notion of efficiency. For example, each year at UT Arlington, I taught a one-semester graduate course on the thermodynamics of materials. In a given year there was always a cohort of ten to fifteen graduate students ready to take the course – no more, no less. It was a number that could not be changed to make me more “productive.” The same is also true for freshman undergraduates! I regularly taught the honors freshman chemistry course at UT Arlington. Although the course was not capped in terms of the number of students, it attracted about thirty students on average. Most students simply didn’t want to undertake the extra workload to obtain honors credit. Again, it was a “chunk” of indivisible credit hours for a program absolutely essential to a first-rate university.

Dollars are fungible: The notion that research grant dollars are fungible and count toward the average cost to teach one student is complete nonsense. As with many other sources of revenue at universities, grant dollars are restricted in their use and are audited to insure such compliance.

Enough said on the specific details of O’Donnell’s grid and his claim to a productivity drought. What’s the real motivation behind this furor? What is it that drives people to produce such seriously flawed reports? I call it the Texas two-step: an old fashioned jostling where a dance routine provides the flash that covers up the deadly bang. The flash whirls and twirls around the putative goal of saving money for taxpayers and the parents of college students through tea-party driven efficiency. It’s the smokescreen of embracing the protestant work ethic and pretending to rid the world of those faceless and feckless bureaucrats and administrators who consume our dollars while producing little of value – no matter that teachers, firemen, union workers, and other members of the middle-class get swept aside in the cause of “more for less.” It’s the creed of personal greed trumping the common good.

And then we have the deadly bang! The hidden goal of shutting down the imagined nesting and breeding place of liberal and left-wing America: the great American research university. Folks! That’s what it’s really all about. Let’s call it for what it is. Sadly, a small but extremely vocal group of Americans backed by enormous wealth have chosen for various reasons to eliminate the American research university. Appeals to reason or thoughtful and correct analysis are to no avail. It’s not about truth and the advancement of America. It’s about a political agenda coupled to an extremist ideology. And for the record, I’m a moderate independent who balances being a social liberal with being an economic conservative.

Will we pay a price for the Texas two-step? The congressional farce masquerading as a debate on raising the debt limit demonstrates what we can expect. Bringing an end to research universities as we know them will destroy the American engines of innovation. It will cripple, if not defeat, efforts to built and accelerate regional innovation ecosystems and communities of innovation. Entrepreneurs searching for ideas to nucleate new startup companies and create jobs will find only a desert filled with efficient automatons who teach large sections of students at the lowest possible unit price and grant writers who excel at attracting the lowest-common-denominator dollar far from the risky frontier. It won’t be the putative liberal who disappears from our universities, but our best and brightest who no longer find academe to be an attractive career. In short, Texas will have an innovation drought!

The path advocated by O’Donnell and others, such as it is, is manifestly in the wrong direction. Productivity in our universities – a concept that I wholeheartedly support and believe should be and is being measured – is not about the efficient manufacture of student widgets. It’s not about the simplistic breaking apart of teaching and research into budget categories to achieve some perceived one-dimensional cost containment. Instead, university productivity is about bringing teaching, research, and service together in a holistic manner through the engagement of students in both the research and the entrepreneurial frontiers of our Nation. It’s about the engagement of the research university across the full spectrum of activities in a community of innovation. Therein lies our true future.

Am I angry? You bet! We as a Nation must stand up to those extremists who would waste our time on crazy notions of turning our research universities into cheap diploma mills where degrees are bought and sold as a commodity and consumer product with no measure of quality through standards, or to those extremists who would convert the great American engine of innovation into a mere research assembly line geared to procure the most grant dollars while eradicating the great scholarly activity that has made us who we are. We the people are better than such silliness. Our children deserve our best, not our worst. It’s time to invest in America, not bring the Nation down by base appeals to rank and intolerant ideology or appeals to personal greed through no taxes and no government. I believe in responsible government and balanced budgets. And like many, I have hope that comity and clear thinking enlivened by responsible debate will once again rule the land. If not, global competition will overtake our great Nation and the droughts that we are now enduring in Texas will leave behind only a dried-up wasteland. We can do better. We must do better!

Universities and the Innovation Marketplace

2011-07-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

“Where’s the beef?” The angry, irascible cry of actress Clara Peller in 1984 – 1985 commercials for Wendy’s burger chain became an iconic slogan of the 1980’s and even penetrated into the Democratic primaries as Vice President Walter Mondale challenged Senator Gary Hart with the same cry. In many ways it established the power of commercials to affect a competitive advantage, although most people fail to recall that Wendy’s burgers were the product. Americans have a love-hate relationship with commercials. Many watch the Super Bowl, not for the football, but to be entertained by the real contest: who will win the commercial shootout?

The commercial marketplace is a phenomenon that we all experience with commercials, obnoxious or not, used as a marketing tool to achieve sales and wealth creation through the buying and selling of products and services. Innovation drives a significant portion of the economy created by that marketplace and is often called the innovation economy. But innovations drive not only the commercial marketplace, but are bought and sold in a marketplace known as the innovation marketplace.

While in many ways an old and established enterprise, the innovation marketplace has undergone a significant transformation in the past decade as a result of many factors including the advent of the information technology age, global competition coupled with Friedman’s “flat earth” hypothesis, and the availability of investment dollars. It is not my intent herein to examine this transformation, but to accept its existence and to examine the role to be played by universities and to focus my analysis from that perspective.

What is the innovation marketplace? In very simplistic terms and as a starting definition, it’s the enterprise of buying and selling innovations packaged as intellectual property (IP) in order to provide a competitive advantage to the buyer and assurance of a return on investment for the seller. In other words, the buyer owns the rights to commercialize the IP, makes money from using those rights, and pays the seller through a number of vehicles including stock in the company, royalty payments, up-front buyouts or monetization, and many other mechanisms. Ultimately, of course, the commercial marketplace is the real source of the dollars that create value and increase wealth.

Who are the sellers? Who are the buyers? For the most part the sellers include universities, federal laboratories, FFRDCs, industry, non-profits, and independent garage inventors. Although industry expends 72.71% of the R&D dollars in the United States as of FY2008 and likely generates the bulk of the innovations, most such innovations are proprietary and not sold in the innovation marketplace. The buyers include angel investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, management teams, industry – especially startup companies, and government. Sometimes faculty members acting as independent agents are buyers. Unfortunately, patent trolls who buy up and bundle patents or attempt to control specific sectors have also emerged as a significant issue.

The innovation marketplace is a vital and growing global enterprise enhanced by the Internet and fueled by experimentation with a number of new tools. For example, the past decade has seen the introduction of IP web hosts, both private and public sponsored. IP web hosts post available IP and serve as a clearinghouse. Some of the most prominent private ones with their web links are as follows:

· Flintbox, www.flintbox.com

· Foliodirect, http://foliodirect.net

· iBridge, www.ibridgenetwork.org

· Inngot, www.inngot.com

· Innovaro, www.innovaro.com

· Knowledge Express, www.knowledgeexpress.com

· Pharma-Transfer, www.pharma-transfer.com

· Pharmalicensing.com, http://pharmalicensing.com

· Proir IP http://www.prior-ip.com/

· Tech Transfer Online, www.techtransferonline.com

· Technology Market (APCTT), www.technology4sme.net

· Tynax, www.tynax.com

· Yet2.com, www.yet2.com

Government at all levels has also begun to set up such Internet IP clearinghouses. For example, the State of New Jersey has created the Patent Bank “to help new technologies find their way to commercial market.” At the Federal level, the U.S. Department of Commerce through NIST has created the USA National Innovation Marketplace. The U.S. Department of Energy sponsors the Energy Innovation Portal. Sadly, only one of these web clearinghouses, private or public, reported any statistics on their usage or success rates. The NIST site claims that “1 in 5 innovations on the USA National Innovation Marketplace get a serious meeting with a buyer or investor.”

Universities have also joined the fray by creating Internet catalogues to hawk their IP, available technologies, or expertise. Here are a few examples with URLs:

· Available technologies, The University of Texas at Austin, www.otc.utexas.edu/ATindex.jsp

· The Collaborative Partnership, The University of Texas at Arlington, www.uta.edu/research/collaborate/

· Available technologies, University of California Technology Transfer, http://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu

· MIT Technology Licensing Office, http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/index.html

· University of Maryland, www.otc.umd.edu

· University of North Carolina, http://otd.unc.edu/technologies.php

Purdue University, Indiana University, Ball State University, and the University of Notre Dame have combined forces in a project called The Indiana Database of Research of University Expertise (INDURE) as an example of an expertise site.

Another venue for the innovation marketplace equivalent to trade shows is the technology showcase. Prominent examples include the annual Worlds Best Technologies Showcase and the annual Bio International Convention. Local events are too numerous to enumerate.

For universities, the central player in the innovation marketplace is the technology transfer office (TTO), often now called the office of technology commercialization (OTC) to encompass the expansion of its role over the past decade. It’s a simple fact that most of the transfer of university IP or technology, especially for the quality IP, occurs as a result of the TTO engaging in direct marketing of its IP or available technology, often to local entrepreneurs or startup companies. In that sense, it’s a relational-network driven marketplace.

Universities are also experimenting with outsourcing some, if not all, of their “sales” through companies such as Intellectual Ventures and Allied Minds. In the past, the Alfred Mann Foundation has created Alfred E. Mann Institutes on university campuses to foster, mentor, and carry out transfer of biotechnology innovations from the laboratory to the commercial marketplace.

Do universities engage in marketing and have a marketing strategy? The simple answer is yes. Even without an articulated strategy, universities transfer (sell) IP to other entities (buyers). I’ve addressed licensing strategies for TTOs elsewhere. Here I’m referring to a “market” strategy. For example, universities host booths at the Bio International Convention where both their intellectual property and their innovation capacity and capability are on display. Slogans adorn the booths with the intent of branding. Computers show glitzy video productions on demand. Branded trinkets are handed out. It’s marketing, pure and simple. But do they have a strategy? Should they use one of the IP web host such as iBridge? Surprisingly, marketing is one of the most important functions of TTOs, but probably the function least developed at universities and often not well understood. Certainly marketing in the innovation marketplace is a fact of life and one to be addressed.

Do normal market rules apply in the innovation marketplace? Tough question! Others will have to decide, but I think we don’t yet understand the innovation marketplace sufficiently to fully answer the question. We need better data. We need more analysis. One thing is certain; the innovation marketplace is real and rapidly expanding. Any university or TTO that doesn’t engage marketing and develop a brand is going to miss out on a major happening. Most important, the innovation marketplace and its economy are essential for America to maintain its dominance in global competition, especially through the formation of regional innovation ecosystems. Our national policies must be cognizant of this important marketplace.

Does any of this new activity in the historical innovation marketplace actually work to accelerate discovery to deployment in the commercial marketplace? I think the jury is still out. For example, there are indications that posting intellectual property on the web, no matter the specific mechanism, doesn’t really work. It’s the Maytag repairman sitting and waiting for the phone to ring. Krisztina Holly surveyed the venture capital community and reported that “In our research, the opinion was unanimous among VCs that their preferred source of deals is a trusted person in the network – not showcases, over-the-transom business plans, or bulletins.” Zusha Elinson in a story of 17 June 2009 reports that “observers say the dot-com-esque rise and fall of the Ocean Tomo auction business – selling for less than its 2008 revenue – is a sign, in part, of a business model that may have run its course.”

The innovation marketplace and the economy it produces in the commercial marketplace have always been with us and are not going away. But the transformation of and changes to the innovation marketplace of the past decade are still in the shakeout phase and some patience is required as it morphs into a globally competitive marketplace. That requires a complete unmasking of what is and what is not and a healthy dose of innovation in the marketplace itself. Such analysis and such experiments are underway. Let the fun continue!

Do You Know Where Your R&D Dollars Are?

2011-07-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

Parenting in the twenty-first century is a formidable challenge symbolized in many ways by the familiar phrase “Do you know where your children are?” Threats from Internet predators or the foolish use of smartphones for sexting have replaced the omnipresent drug culture of the previous century as the latest cause de jour. What’s a parent to do in the face of an ever expanding universe of possible teenage pitfalls and traps?

In a similar vein, but certainly far less dramatic or significant to a family, we ask a similar question of those who posture themselves as keepers or “parents” of the American innovation enterprise: do you know where your R&D dollars are? Surprisingly, many who expound on innovation, set innovation policy, manage innovation, or engage directly as innovators have little or no knowledge of either the source of research and development (R&D) funding or who performs the R&D. Of course, one could argue that R&D dollars don’t equate to innovation, but their source and distribution to performers is definitely an input metric for the innovation ecosystem and worthy of review at a macro-scale.

Fortunately, the National Science Foundation compiles the necessary data each year as part of its Science and Engineering Indicators. Sadly, the data are two years old since it takes time to collect the data and produce the tables and analysis. The most recent data are from Fiscal Year 2008.

Table I. Source of R&D Dollars – FY 2008.

Source	$ millions	Per Cent
Business	267,847	67.36
Federal Government	103,696	26.08
Other Nonprofits	12,020	3.02
Universities & Colleges	10,600	2.67
Nonfederal Government	3,453	0.87
TOTAL	397,616	100.00

Let’s begin with the source of R&D dollars as shown in Table I. The source categories are straightforward except, perhaps, for “other nonprofits” which includes a hodge-podge of foundations, private investors, and other such entities. The source category “universities & colleges” also represents a complex funding source since institutions of higher education pull their funding from many sources other than tuition and endowments. Given that the rules for colorizing such monies are often arcane, it’s best to accept “universities & colleges” as mostly a derivative source of funds, but nonetheless important as a filter and funnel for funding.

As expected, business or industry is the principal source at 67.36% with the federal government coming in at 26.08%. Given the constant publicity about federal spending and federal involvement in research, the roughly 3 to 1 ratio for business to federal government might seem unusual to some, but has been rather constant over time. In summary, American business or industry continues to be the overwhelming leader in R&D funding.

Although the remaining three sources provide only 6.56% of the funding, these dollars are often the most important to the innovation enterprise since they tend to fund the high risk R&D and are generally the most fungible and available for rapid redistribution toward a breakthrough. We need more such funding, especially as “proof of concept” dollars.

Table II. Expenditure of R&D Dollars – FY 2008.

Performer	$ millions	Per Cent
Business	289,105	72.71
Universities & Colleges	51,163	12.87
Federal Internal	27,000	6.79
Other Nonprofits	15,606	3.92
FFRDC	14,741	3.71
TOTAL	397,616	100.00

Who performs R&D in the United States and at what level? Table II presents the data. Again, the categories require some explanation with the first two being straightforward. The category “federal internal” includes a large and varied mixture of federal agencies such as NASA and facilities – often military – such as Groom Lake, Naval Research Laboratory, Redstone Arsenal, and Eglin Air Force Base. The category “other nonprofits” also includes a rich and varied mixture of performers including Battelle, Beckman Institute, RAND Corporation, Santa Fe Institute, Scripps Research Institute, Southwest Research Institute, SRI International, and many more.

The final category of FFRDC includes the “federally funded research and development centers.” According to the hyperlinked reference, FFRDCs “are unique independent nonprofit entities sponsored and funded by the U.S. government to meet specific long-term technical needs that cannot be met by any other single organization.” The list includes Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lincoln Laboratory, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as examples. FFRDCs are managed in three ways: by federal agencies, by nonprofits, or by universities.

The bulk of American R&D is performed by business at 72.71%. Interestingly, business or industry spends $21.3 billion more on R&D than it funds. In second place are universities and colleges at 12.87% or $51.2 billion. Of that amount, $10.6 billion or 20.72% come from internal sources. This commitment of resources by institutions of higher education is the most striking feature of all the data and challenges one’s notions of how R&D is funded. One can debate whether cash-starved educational institutions should be so heavily engaged. Certainly that debate in the context of separating research from teaching is currently underway in Texas and has embroiled university systems, regents, and the Governor in a contentious battle – one that will likely spread to other states as the economic slowdown continues and tea party advocates push for “more from less.”

Innovation requires R&D funding! And that means all involved in the innovation ecosystem must understand and be aware at the macro-level of both the source of the R&D funding and those who perform the R&D. As never before, the answer to the question “do you know where your R&D dollars are?” is essential as America engages in the game of global competition.

My Turn!

2011-07-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

Representative Barney Frank uttered the iconic phrase of the healthcare debate “Who would like to yell next?” in an effort to handle a raucous town hall meeting in August of 2009. The question punctuated the intensity of feelings and strength of conviction of those confronting the issue. But the healthcare debate isn’t the only concern facing our citizenry. We are also faced with global competition in the form of jobs lost and the perception by many that America is falling behind in the innovation race. While the innovation debate is not as heated as the healthcare debate, the intensity is equivalent and resolution of the issue is just as important for the future of our Nation. So in response to Franks’ question, the answer is me!

In particular, I want to take my turn and push back on industry, venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, pundits, and others who find fault with how universities commercialize their research. A specific list of such faults or gripes collected by the author has been previously presented. My strategy herein is to present a list of issues or concerns that constantly pop up – both in deal making and as general problems – and impede the progress of technology transfer or technology commercialization from the perspective of those who manage the commercialization of university research. Some will appear trivial, but it is nonetheless amazing how often they occur and what a nuisance they are.

For example, consider the seemingly trivial case of state sovereignty, my first issue. Officials from one state are not going to sign a contract making them subject to the laws of another state. What is that lawyers don’t get about this point? Is this a failure of our law schools or just a test to see if technology transfer offices are paying attention to the details of a deal structure? Why do public universities have to waste so much time getting sovereignty clauses removed from contracts? I concede; it’s a trivial issue. But do we really want to keep wasting resources and slowing down the process on this issue?

With that frame of reference to provide context to the issues and concerns, here is my list. A more detailed presentation of each can be found in Go Forth and Innovate! The list is unranked and not prioritized.

State sovereignty. State institutions of higher education will not sign contracts making them subject to the laws of another state.

State indemnity. State institutions of higher education will not indemnify anything or sign a clause to that effect since it’s illegal for them to do so in most states.

Background IP. Universities are not going to sign away all background IP rights.

Business decisions vs. “lawyering.” Technology transfer is fundamentally a business process that should be driven by business decisions, not legal red ink.

Too many dollars and too few deals. Contrary to purported conventional wisdom, making technology transfer deals isn’t the problem. Finding quality innovations is.

Exit strategy. Trust relationships, especially during the formation of startup companies, are significantly enhanced when deal negotiators and participants on all sides fully communicate and understand the entire commercialization package and strategy for specific intellectual properties.

Overhyping of technology. Hyped innovation waves such as superconductivity, molecular drugs, genetic medicine, biotechnology, and nanotechnology produce serious problems with managing expectations and their failure to deliver has led to rather bizarre notions about innovation and how it works, especially as regards the innovation time line.

Patent Reform Legislation. I support the position of the American Association of Universities and their collaborative efforts with other university associations.

USPTO backlog on patents. Congress continues to get a failing grade on its report card for this aspect of American innovation.

Costs of patents and foreign filings. Universities have yet to find a satisfactory mechanism to deal with the costs of protecting all potential intellectual property.

Export Controls. The fuzziness and moving target that constitutes America’s current export control environment is a serious drag on innovation. It’s a nightmare compliance issue for universities.

Technology commercialization is an “unfunded mandate” for universities. Global competition and the demands for a supercharged innovation ecosystem require that universities, as the basic research feeder for the commercialization pipeline, have a robust technology commercialization apparatus. Sadly, they are under-resourced.

Lack of trained and experienced technology commercialization professionals. We need professionals who understand technology transfer, marketing, commercialization, investment, startup company formation, incubation of startups, and development of regional innovation ecosystems. These leaders must work with university faculty and administration, venture capital, angel investors, entrepreneurs, startup management, industry, and politicians. It’s a formidable job description.

Industry sectors. Activities and strategies for the commercialization of university research must recognize the differentiation in structure and needs across the spectrum of industry sectors with biotechnology and information technology being polar opposites.

Proof of concept (POC) funding. The United States has a serious lack of funding sources for research and development to show that a potential commercialization concept derived from discovery-based research is viable.

Innovation centers. Universities need to create R&D innovation centers where discoveries, technologies, or inventions generated from normal university research programs are further processed using research and development strategies to add commercial value.

Inclusion or integration of professional schools. A modern 21^st century “technology commercialization” program at a university requires a full spectrum approach including integration of the professional schools and involving students.

Sponsored programs and technology commercialization are separate shops. Combining these functions is a bad idea. Instead, mechanisms must be created for these offices to work together to build networked relationships with sponsors to enhance the flow of information in the innovation ecosystem.

Language and communication skills. Few in academe are able to communicate outside their specialty with the general populace, or even the educated populace, and that skill is required to commercialize university research. Training in “making the pitch” and “closing the deal” is needed.

Intellectual property revenue is not a significant source of income. Failure to understand this basic fact leads to exaggerated expectations and inappropriate strategies for commercializing university research, both internal and external to universities.

Branding. The innovation marketplace is like any other market; it pays to have a quality brand. But what form should branding take?

University ownership and management of incubators. Yes, universities should own and operate them, but not under the illusion that they will be a profit center.

University startup venture funds. I don’t see a good reason for universities to get into the venture capital business, but I’m willing to reserve judgment. Instead, we should partner with the venture capital industry. Whatever venture funding activities universities undertake, care should be exercised to avoid conflict of interest through structures independent of technology transfer offices and university administration.

Each of these issues and concerns deserve a fair hearing and a discussion to find optimal strategies for dealing with them or, even better, a remedy. By presenting them in the format of a list, my intention is to bring them to the attention of those engaged in the innovation debate and to help frame that debate in the specific domain of the commercialization of university research.

Progress in improving the competitive advantage for America in the innovation game will come from many directions and will be both incremental and disruptive. But one thing is certain, without an appropriate identification of our issues and concerns from all participants, progress will not be a likely outcome.

Gotcha! Technology Transfer Complaints

2011-06-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

The game of Gotcha! presents a challenge to many politicians and public figures when it comes to simple facts about geography or American history – the former Governor of Alaska being the most notable. But the Gotcha! game is not the only one being regularly practiced in America today. Among many such games, we also have the “gate” game, the blame game, the whining complaint game, and my favorite, the THEM game of science fiction origin. No matter the game, it’s always someone else’s fault when reality doesn’t match false expectations or doesn’t match cleverly invented altered realities. Of course, facts don’t matter! Even worse, facts become contextualized and interpreted to form the altered reality.

Society thrives on this primordial need to invent THEM, the nether world of beings and entities, whether mythical or real. It’s an evolutionary behavior pattern built into the collective psyche of humankind to win the competitive advantage. It’s the will to survive!

But believe it or not, one of the favorite targets of such behavior in the modern innovation age is the university technology transfer office (TTO) or office of technology commercialization. It’s so easy to target university TTOs. They don’t have the time or resources to respond. They are a bureaucracy populated by amorphous and faceless people. And it makes for good blood-sport and good press in the modern age of undoing enlightenment.

Whether of evolutionary origin or not – and at a more mundane level, complaining is a fact of life and it behooves those who are the target of the complaints to understand what drives the complaints and whether some form of action is required. Whether valid or not, complaints inform the perceptions that many people hold toward university TTOs to the point that they are now affecting American policy and legislation. President Obama continues to focus with laser precision on the role played by universities in innovation – the recent manufacturing initiative being notable.

There are many university leaders who choose to ignore the complaints and adopt the strategy of waiting for the tempest to dissipate. Or at best, they repeat scripted mantras and expect that somebody, somewhere, will “fix the problem.” I personally believe both responses to be bad strategy and not reflective of leadership in an era of global competition and the need for innovation. But to be fair, most of our nation’s university leadership is so busy fighting the budget battle that technology transfer is always number eleven on their top ten list of things to be dealt with. Furthermore, it’s difficult to address an issue without even a proper accounting or list of the complaints.

So, at the risk of furthering the Gotcha! game, here is a list of the top complaints unranked and not prioritized that I’ve collected over the past decade. A more complete discussion can be found in Go Forth and Innovate! It’s a long list so don’t give up!

Universities are too slow in processing deals.
No one is empowered at the university to make the final decision and approve a deal.
The negotiating skill of university dealmakers is poor.
University IP is overvalued and the royalty rates are too high.
Public universities should give away IP since they are funded by taxes.
We paid for the research, so why should we pay for the IP?
What do you mean we can’t pre-value the IP from sponsored research?
Marketing of available IP is not adequate.
Patenting of university inventions hurts society as faculty are restricted in their ability to publish.
Scouts should “walk the halls” for us to find all the undiscovered commercializable technologies.
Stop throwing early technology “over the transom.”
We want “One Stop Shopping.”
Bundling of university patents helps patent trolls.
Universities themselves are patent trolls.
University greed upfront chokes startups.
Universities don’t share in the risk of startups.
Universities should use a single-template deal structure.
The nightmare scenario of sponsored research going to a competitor happens.
Universities don’t think globally.
Work with us, or we offshore our research!
University research facilities should be made readily available to businesses.
Universities need to act more like a business.
Universities are too bureaucratic.
Licensing revenues are not commensurate with the level of research expenditures, so someone is mismanaging the university IP.
Bayh-Dole is bad for the commercialization of university research.
Publication of innovations by faculty before IP protection creates problems downstream.
Publications are wasteful.

Did you find your favorite complaint on the list? Unraveling the truth or falsity of these complaints and putting them into their proper context is a significant and worthy task – one that many have undertaken including AUTM and the present author. Constructive criticism, even if cast as a complaint, is a healthy exercise and part of how society functions. But we must remember that the commercialization of university research is in a transformational phase with everyone rapidly adjusting and adapting. The reality is that technology transfer and the commercialization of university research happens every day at universities with little fanfare and almost no angst other than that present with any deal-making experience. I salute those who toil at such tasks as we celebrate the Fourth of July. They are not THEM!

Brother, Can You Spare Me a Dime?

2011-06-23T06:12:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

The bane of all individual independent researchers is the moment when one must put pen to paper to frame the next grant proposal from an ill-formed idea. Independent of the quality of idea – whether innovative, transformational, or really dumb, the first step for the researcher is always the same: send money! We’re all familiar with this terse communication from our children away at college. Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, one of our nation’s leading experts in nanotechnology before his untimely death, was also fond of pitching this message at the end of his energy talks. He, of course, provided his lab address as the location to “send money.”

But why is the message “send money” the next step when a new idea emerges? No one doubts the aphorism that innovation through research and development requires funding. And no one doubts that grantsmanship by faculty members is the key determinant for tenure and promotion, often independent of the quality of the research or its relevance for the American innovation ecosystem. But why is “new” money needed to pursue a “new” idea. Why not use “old” money already in the system? The answer is surprisingly simple. The American system for funding R&D in our universities has become so accountability laden and so driven by a defined format that innovation through transformational and frontier research has been choked almost out of existence. You can’t use “old” money on a “new” idea.

While an excellent case can be made that the present system of funding R&D served America well in the Twentieth Century, there are a growing list of problems equally as important as “old versus new money.” The time to re-examine that system has arrived, especially with regard to STEM university researchers. The argument that it is the best because it’s the best and we shouldn’t change it is a tautology and isn’t sufficient for the Twenty-First Century. But what form should a new system of funding take? Who should be funded and by what process? Should it be use-directed research founded on societal challenges or sandbox science?

Taking pen to paper, I have a proposal to offer to those unafraid of change. The core principle is that individual university researchers must be enabled through base-level, but minimal funding to explore essentially random or self-determined pathways or research directions – whether basic research, applied research, or development – in an independent manner without pre-approval. Such activity is at the heart of transformational research and disruptive innovations. In some small measure we currently satisfy this principle by providing new faculty hires with startup funding. But that funding rapidly gets spent and is not replaced by additional sandbox funding. I would greatly expand upon this beginning with a total revamping of individual investigator funding in the United States and base the structure on people, not specific research ideas.

To accomplish that end, my system would function in the following manner – beginning with a newly minted doctoral graduate. A university announces an opening for a tenure-track position at the rank of assistant professor and the hiring process follows the normal course of business including a description of the intended research focus. The hiring process serves not only to vet candidates for the faculty position, but to vet the candidates for funding. The new hire receives research funding from a startup package as well as a federal individual investigator grant or IIG. In other words, if they made it to the point of being hired, you fund them!

The IIG would likely be funded by a block grant to the university obtained by a competitive process or some other process that achieved an appropriate distribution of IIG funds across all universities. Geographic distribution is both politically wise and essential for the growth of regional innovation ecosystems. The new hire would be guaranteed IIG funding for a specified period – likely five to seven years – with an annual rate of say, $150,000, including summer salary support. The funds could be restricted from hiring graduate students who would be funded by a separate federal or local fellowship program – an additional mechanism to spur independent thought and the training of independent investigators. Graduate students would also be funded by larger-scale grants such as center grants or lablet projects.

At the conclusion of the specified time period, the faculty member would undergo evaluation for tenure and/or promotion using the normal process with the added feature that renewal of the IIG award for another specified period of time would also be considered. Thus, at both the initiation of the IIG and its renewal, a peer review process is used. For the renewal of the IIG award, it would be a peer post-review of the accomplishments from the first award. It is a performance-based system.

The IIG funding with an appropriate cycle time and peer post-review process would continue throughout the career of the faculty member. Change of university, retirement, and other such issues are easily worked out. It would also make sense for superstars to get additional IIG funding, but only as part of the peer post-review process. Keep in mind that IIG functions as part of a larger funding system including center grants.

So, what are the benefits of my IIG funding system? Here is an unranked list.

· The game of “science by proxy” is significantly reduced. Faculty return to performing research instead of being consumed by grant writing.

· Independent investigator driven research is supported that permits immediate funding of new pathways.

· Both young and old investigators with a new idea receive base-level funding without an approval process. The Establishment and “me too” thinking doesn’t rule the day.

· Performance as a researcher instead of the ability to write successful proposals would drive base-level research funding.

· Potentially innovative and disruptive research receives funding.

· Peer review is appropriately maintained, but as a post-review, performance-based exercise. You are rewarded for what you do instead of what you say you are going to do. Performance-based peer review is much more of a merit-based system than one based on the merit of proposed research ideas – especially ideas chosen to satisfy the Establishment!

· The massive and exponentially growing process of individual investigator (or small team) proposal review is replaced by a process that merges base-level grantsmanship with the tenure and promotion process. It would require some modification of the tenure and promotion process to factor in the cycle time of the IIG. Changing to this system of reviewing people instead of proposals would significantly increase the time spent in the laboratory instead of time spent on peer review and the funding bureaucracy.

· Peer review would be placed where it belongs – principally in the hands of fellow faculty members and with input from external reviewers. Fidelity of the process could be assured through federal audit of the records since federal funding is involved.

· The combined peer post-review process would increase the likelihood that fellow faculty members would become more familiar with their local peers. This would also be abetted by my open publication system.

· The base-level funding would cover basic, applied, and developmental research – especially if faculty members are rewarded for commercialization of their research in the tenure and promotion process. This goal would be enhanced by the structure of the other parts of the overall grants system.

· The financial burden on universities for startup grants would likely be reduced, although universities could still use startup grants for competitive advantage in hiring as an add-on to the IIG.

· The development of regional innovation ecosystems could be enhanced depending on the distribution algorithm for IIG awards to universities.

How radical is my performance-based IIG? It’s not a jobs program – as some have described the present grants system – but a performance-based program to spur innovations with a sustainable, predictable funding model that puts researchers back to work doing independent, exploratory research – not bureaucracy. If you truly want to see a radical program, consider the proposal by Robert J. Birgeneau and Frank D. Yeary from The Washington Post of 27 September 2009 entitled A New Model to Help Finance Higher Education Birgeneau and Yeary, chancellor and vice chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, propose that “great public research and teaching universities receive basic operating support from the federal government and their respective state governments.” Their scheme would be “a 21^st-century version of the Morrill Act.” They further state “As with any daring scheme, the devil is in the details. … Yet such problems are solvable, if there is a will. … Simply put, no matter what the form, we must take some radical steps if we are to preserve the public character of America’s great public universities.”

The IIG system is potentially a simple version or small piece of the Birgeneau-Yeary model, but with real and positive consequences for the innovation enterprise. University researchers and innovators with a new idea should not be reduced to depression-era beggars chanting “brother, can you spare me a dime?”

Innovation Thwarted: The Publication Bottleneck

2011-06-17T08:29:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

Are you one of those Americans who believe that healing in a specific individual can occur through intervention by the prayers of a large body of people intent on that fixed goal? Many believe in the power of mass prayer, but most consider it a matter of faith and “not science.” And if you were the fictional character, Katherine Solomon, in Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, where and how would you publish your earth-shattering new discoveries in noetic science, whether real or imagined?

But let’s be more specific. Do you believe that a positive personal attitude and a strong desire to live can overcome cancer or put it into remission – a variant of the placebo effect? How about other diseases or bodily ailments? And if you believe this, how would you prove it and could you get your findings published? Are we still in the realm of “not science?”

Even more specific, do you believe in reprogramming the human brain by making use of brain plasticity to overcome bodily ailments? Oops, wait a minute! Brain plasticity is “real” science and a proven fact. The brain can be rewired. But how far and to what purpose? Where is the dividing line between “science” and “not science?” Even more important for innovation, who decides what and how “scientific” discoveries and new knowledge are published. Who gets access to that published knowledge – no matter how important or funky in the eyes of the beholder?

Amazingly, most people believe that the American research and development (R&D) publication system is perfectly fine, although innovation pundits often bemoan the putative decline recently in the percentage of publications by American authors. Indeed, why would people think otherwise? By all accounts and measures the publication system has been enormously successful in making America the world R&D leader and the center of innovation for decades.

But the reality in my opinion and that of many others is that the American R&D publication system so successful in the twentieth century is a dinosaur that is ponderously slow, built on a business model from the era of vinyl records, very expensive to the point of breaking the budgets of university libraries, mostly inaccessible to anyone not a paying member of the R&D club, and an enormous waste of time and effort for researchers. In short, it sucks and it chokes innovation! But how did we get to this state and what can we do about it? And is there a new paradigm available to us for the twenty-first century?

First, a comment about digital electronic media versus the print medium is in order. No one doubts that society as we know it has been transformed in the past few decades to a new digital and information age. No one doubts that the print medium is rapidly fading into a niche market with newspapers going online and ebooks outselling hard-cover books. Although slow to embrace the change, the research publication system also “went digital” with online journals and CDs arriving periodically in the snail mail. In essence the same business model was used, but in a digital format.

Of course, cracks appeared in the model as experiments such as ArXiv at Cornell were undertaken. The biggest crack came from various attempts to create systems of “open access” to research publications such as the PLOS family of journals or the requirement by Congress that publications based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health be posted and freely available following an embargo period. The notion is that federally-funded research should be accessible to anyone, not just those who can afford to pay the heavy price for journals or who have access to journals as a member of a club, taken to mean universities or businesses.

All such endeavors to reform the publication system are worthy, but are effectively incremental in nature – not transformative. They speak mostly to the issue of access in the digital age. But to approach a true transformation of the publication system, one must understand the full scope of how the publication system works. And we begin by asking the question: why do we have research journals? Here are my thoughts with some analysis as to how each feature plays out in the digital age.

Communication: It goes without saying that researchers and scholars want to “publish” their work and print journals were historically the principal method, although books also played a major role as well as newspapers. Today, we have blogs, tweets, social media, cable TV, “open laboratory notebooks,” and a growing list of means to communicate.

Community: Historically, print journals permitted the formation of discipline-driven communities or tribes and indirectly produced a de facto partitioned search process to find specific material. If a scholar wanted to understand the “physics” of a particular process, you searched “physics journals” for relevant information. Unfortunately, the explosion of research publications and the breakdown of silos driven by convergence and trans-disciplinary modern research have made the concept of a “journal” problematic.

Claim: You can’t win the Nobel Prize or win the intellectual property (IP) royalty sweepstakes without staking a claim to your discoveries, findings, or data. Publication is the essential method of choice, taking account of the requirements of the patent process. Of course, there are issues with who owns the IP – taken broadly to include ideas and discoveries – as well as proprietary issues, trade secret issues, national security or classified material issues, and so forth.

Standards: Quality is an essential factor, whether in the scientific methodologies used or the presentation of the material.

Prestige: Journals pride themselves on being the best of breed, no matter that the “rules” for establishing the pecking order are arcane. Authors crow about having their articles published in the “best of the best.” Tenure and promotion committees make a fetish out of counting articles in prestige journals. So what has all this chest beating and hoopla have to do with the publication system? In my opinion, it’s at the core of why we haven’t transformed the publication system. It’s a final vestige of power by the good ole boy network of “clubs.”

Archive: The print medium cataloged by journal has been the longstanding method of archiving publications over the span of generations and even centuries. But in the past few decades, the sheer volume of journal space has overwhelmed libraries and led to the creation of tightly compacted, offsite storage centers.

Authentication: Ultimately, journals through the process of peer review of articles or at the whim of the editor serve as gatekeepers to keep “not science” or “bad science” from being published. Similar arguments are made in the liberal arts and other non-science fields with the qualifiers “not scholarly” or “bad scholarship.” Realistically, the peer-review system only weakly accomplishes these goals and instead has become an enormous sinkhole of time and effort by researchers taking precious time away from being innovators.

Evaluation: Quite frankly, the journal peer review system has become a major tool for evaluating the performance of researchers and scholars – particularly in the university tenure and promotion system. It’s a surrogate system permitting tenure and promotion committee members to default to the judgment of journal peer reviewers and thereby avoid the task of actually reading their colleagues scholarly works. Who can blame them given the job description for the modern faculty member?

Armed with this background on the current journal-driven publication system, we ask: must we use the centuries-old publisher model because the print medium was traditionally the only way and they have the resources to do it? Of course not! And I’m not talking about simply “going digital.” I’m talking about a radical transformation. Here is my proposal for an “open publication and access system” taken from the perspective of an author. I use herein the phrase “online journal” lightly recognizing that the concept is most likely going to disappear in the future and be replaced by an “online publishing service.” I also ignore the cost issue for the moment.

Credentialing and authentication of author(s) and reviewer(s): All people desiring to publish articles in an online journal or serve as reviewers should go through a credentialing process. There are many ways that credentialing can be accomplished similar to what we already do on the Internet to figure out whether someone is who they say they are. Professional societies or universities could easily set up a credentialing process. I don’t envision a system with any real differences from the one we already have in place that permits someone to publish in a journal. Once credentialed with an online journal, the author or reviewer would be provided with an authentication system that permits login to the journal.

Prepare electronic article: The essential issue for the manuscript is quality through conformity to style and format. Universities and scholarly societies should get together our best minds on style, punctuation, and whatever else we need – including figures, tables, and graphics – and set the rules for the format of all research articles, allowing for several possible styles. There is no need to persecute authors with over 2,000 varieties of endnote styles just so each proprietary journal can have its own “feel.”

Validate standard format: Once we produce a set of standards for style and format, universities – meaning their faculty members – agree to abide by the standards and demand that all publishing adopt the standards. We don’t have to play by someone else’s rules. Guess what! New startup businesses could emerge such as internet “editing” companies that check conformity to the standard for a small fee. Quality, as measured by conformity to simple publishing standards, will be protected.

Post “draft” to open access, online journal: The credentialed author would next post the electronic draft of the manuscript to the online journal. All articles would be formatted in a manner to permit search engines to find them, including lists of keywords and other such attributes. At this point, no peer review has occurred and only two criteria have been met: a credentialed author and a standard format.

Open peer review of a draft article: Once an article is posted on the online journal, credentialed users of the journal would comment on the article using a comment-type system as found in blogs, but with full disclosure of the identity of the reviewer. Reviewers could also contact authors directly with comments or suggestions. Reviewing would be a voluntary, self-selecting, participatory process. Researchers would only read and comment on the articles that interest them. The online journal would maintain statistics on all the hits, downloads, and other activity related to the draft article. After a period of time, probably six months, the author(s) would prepare a final version of the article.

Revise and post “final” version: Following the review period, the author(s) would post the final version of the article. Commentary or blogging on the article would continue.

The “open publication – open access” system that I propose has several issues that need to be addressed. First is the question of who manages the online, open access journal or service? I don’t think it matters whether it’s done by private business, professional societies, or universities. The journal is simply a gateway not unlike other social media and should be managed in that manner. The author is responsible for the content.

Second is the question of who serves as the archivist? In my opinion universities must regain the upper hand as archivists for the research publications of their employees, mainly faculty members. We can debate whether and how the copyrights to research publications should remain the intellectual property of the university or the author(s), but it should remain with one or the other with the condition that the university is permitted to post the article on the web and is responsible for archiving the article. Again, I foresee the growth of startup internet companies whose role is to service the needs of university libraries to store and archive articles. Archiving is a major issue for the whole of the digital age. I have no doubt that solutions will emerge. Transformation of the publication system should not be held hostage to the problem.

Finally, who pays! Somebody pays. No publication system can sustain itself without someone paying for editors who validate format, for server farms that host the online journal, or for the required staffing at the Internet gateway. Personally, I see opportunities for entrepreneurs to move into this arena. Facebook, YouTube, and Google already have the resources and expertise to make the system function.

The true success of a research publication is not whether it passes through numerous gatekeepers or conforms to accepted standards. Success directly correlates with the content of the publication and the ability to replicate or authenticate the content. Success correlates with the impact of the content, even if wrong. Bad ideas often lead to the right ideas. Certainly bad science will get published, but have you read the research journals lately? The bright line between science and not-science is in no danger from my proposal. And so what if some junk science slips in? Bad ideas and crazy research will die of their own weight as they always have. We are in no danger here. We don’t need a gatekeeper, authoritarian system to weed it out through the massive review system that we currently have. That system is too expensive and takes too much time and effort with very little to show for it.

What about proper evaluation of faculty performance? Is it really necessary for us to have the current peer review publication system to serve as a surrogate for the functioning of tenure and promotion committees? If we free up the escalating time spent reviewing articles for publication that we’re not very interested in, we might actually have time to take a look at the publications of our fellow faculty members! That would be a good thing.

So, let’s agree that my system or some modification will satisfy the basic requirements of a publication system. What are its advantages? There are many. It removes unnecessary gatekeeping and vastly speeds up the “time to market” of research. It provides much needed open access. Ultimately, I believe it will reduce the enormous cost of journal subscriptions for university libraries. The world has changed and publishing is not the same anymore. Universities and their faculty need to take back that which is important to them – control of the dissemination of their research. The electronic information age provides us the means to do it – if only we give a little and rethink the gatekeeper mentality through open peer review. When we get used to the system, it will provide the same level of bright line for science versus not-science and about the same level of quality in content. We are the responsible party. We can and must make this transformation.

How will these changes affect the innovation ecosystem? They will reduce the workload of faculty and increase time spent on education of the workforce and on research. Open access to research speaks for itself as an accelerator of innovation. New startup internet companies will emerge to carry out the functional tasks of servicing the new publication system. As mentioned, I foresee “editing” companies and various forms of “cloud computing” through provision of servers and hardware. Credentialing and authentication systems will emerge. In essence we will disassemble the current publication system and put it back together through functionality as opposed to a single provider.

Will this open publication and open access R&D publication system work? Emphatically yes! It’s inevitable and it’s time to the transformation.

The Missing Link: Lablets as Innovation Hubs

2011-06-09T11:33:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

Richard Dawkins in his wonderful book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution presents a compelling and overwhelming scientific and logical case for the theory of evolution. One of his major points is that the standard vernacular phrase used to encapsulate evolution, “man descended from the apes,” is not correct. The correct phase should be something like “man and the modern ape are descendants of a common ancestor, each representing different evolutionary branches from that ancestor.” I suspect that disbelievers will not be mollified by such a correction or change their minds. Nonetheless, scientists continue the search for all of our differentiated ancestors along the evolutionary tree, whether they link to apes or not. Unfortunately, to the chagrin of the science community, the search for the common ancestor became know as the search for “the missing link.”

Another aspect of evolution or systems that grow from genetic-like algorithms is the expectation that all available niches in the ecosystem will be filled after a sufficient passage of time. And if not, then the ecosystem can be forced or driven to fill a niche – much in the way that animals and specific crop varieties have been “bred” by human manipulation. The concept of “directed evolution” has even been applied to social systems and, more specifically, to innovation. As an example, Ideation International Inc. provides an entire suite of business services built on “directed evolution” as a tool to obtain a competitive edge.

Humankind’s quest to understand the dynamics of systems, no matter their character or nature, is a worthy and ongoing endeavor. Indeed, the very essence of innovation is the emergence of something new from a system, whether done by man for commercial purposes or by Mother Nature to invent the superbug that is resistant to all drugs. And specifically as a society, it behooves us to study and understand that which we call “the American innovation ecosystem.” It is an ecosystem created and driven by human manipulation through government rules and regulations and many other factors. But have we created the best of breed? Or have we driven ourselves to an evolutionary dead end?

Specifically, I posit the following question as one of many that we need to answer for ourselves. Does the American innovation ecosystem have all available niches filled? Or, to twist the tail of the phrase “the missing link,” are we “missing a link?” Do we need to evolve a new breed of dog? My answer is emphatically yes!

In fact, it is quite easy to see that we are “missing a link” by observing the scale and scope of the R&D enterprise from individual investigators to large projects on the order of the Apollo Program or the Manhattan Project, both with respect to the number of people directly involved and the level of funding. At the present time there is a continuum in these two metrics from individuals to centers to large centers – the largest being the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program of the National Institutes of Health. The CTSA program had made 46 awards as of October 2009 with an expectation of growing to 60. Typical awards ranged from $5 million to $10 million per year for five years. The common vision of CTSA consortium members is “to reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients, to engage communities in clinical research efforts and to train clinical and translational researchers.”

As we move along the axis defined by a combination of the two metrics, people and funding, we find a dip nearly to zero before we encounter national laboratories and large scale projects on the order of a thousand people and a billion dollars. It’s the missing link – an unfilled niche in the innovation ecosystem.

Some would argue that industrial R&D laboratories fill the niche and they do to some extent, although many have argued for the demise of basic research within such industrial labs.

Even more interesting, although difficult to prove easily, many of our societal grand challenges require a scale and scope perfectly matched to the “missing link.” And we wonder why America is falling behind in the innovation game!

But there is a solution vector to fill the niche caused by the “missing link.” It’s a new entity or, if you like, breed of dog called by some “lablets” and by others “innovation hubs.” I personally prefer “lablets” because “innovation hub” is a separate and equally important concept requiring a name. Indeed, lablets would be part of an innovation hub.

The concept of “lablets” is not new and has been under discussion and development for the past decade. For example, a 2005 draft report from the National Academy of Engineering entitled Assessing the Capacity of the U.S. Engineering Research Enterprise addressed many of the features of a lablet. More recently, the U.S. Department of Energy introduced the notion of energy innovation hubs and funded several across the United States.

So, what is a lablet? A lablet is an entity competitively funded at a scale of $25 million per year, for a five-year term, with additional start-up funding of $10 million for space renovation, equipment, and instrumentation. The entity would directly fund approximately 100 researchers. As I see it, the basic purpose and essential features of a lablet encompass the following goals:

· Create discovery-to-innovation institutes melding interdisciplinary research, education, outreach, and practice.

· Engage in transformational, use-driven R&D targeted to address or solve a specific, identified, and vetted societal challenge structured to avoid “me too” research.

· Form crosscutting “dream teams” of outstanding scientific leadership that can recruit and nurture extraordinary talent and instill high expectations.

· Manage by “best practice” project management with oversight from an external advisory board.

· Pursue “open innovation” emphasizing “gateways” rather than “gatekeepers.”

· Form public-private partnerships composed of all innovation entities with each contributing resources, but with the federal government being the principal financial supporter.

· Generate connectivity across universities, national laboratories, industry, research institutes, and other players in the innovation ecosystem with due consideration of differentiated missions and cultures. Such connectivity with the “lablet” as a hub promotes and accelerates commercialization.

· Focus on trans-disciplinary challenges requiring transformational engineering to affect “the global, knowledge-driven society of the twenty-first century.”

· Disperse geographically the institutes to make use of all resources and consequently enhance all elements of America.

· Provide experiential learning for undergraduate and graduate students from “engineering, management, medicine, law and social sciences.”

Lablets provide the ultimate in flexibility and adaptability as the entities from which they are formed self-assemble into new lablets when societal grand challenges are solved and new ones are found. They are not fixed organizations that outlast their utility or serve as an ossified jobs program.

In the final analysis, support for lablets is all about culture and what we value. Do we want incentive systems that attract all the players because of access to a profoundly fun network that is funded and sustainable? Do we want communication and connectivity across all the players that increase the complexity index of the innovation ecosystem as an organism? Do we want a layered structure that allows investigators to function on multiple planes? Do we want societal grand challenges attacked in a manner that can get the job done and thereby enrich our lives? Do we want innovations that lead to commerce and economic prosperity? Do we want the jobs that will result from such activity? Of course we do! Government can affect these improvements by stepping in where others will not tread. Government – namely, you and I – must fund the innovation ecosystem. And I believe that the lablet concept is an essential new feature of that ecosystem. It’s the link that’s missing from our American innovation ecosystem.

Gone ... Or Not?

2011-05-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

By Keith McDowell

“The Greatest Generation” left us with more than victory in World War II and the passing of the Great Depression. They created an era of prosperity and the advent of a large middle class. Even more, they brought us an era founded on innovation driven by corporate research laboratories such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC and many others. And they built a nationwide infrastructure of national laboratories and the world’s greatest research universities, all working together to make America the leader of the World.

But as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, many question the American model and whether it is relevant and sufficiently adaptive to the new global competition and Friedman’s mantra of “the world is flat.” President Obama in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences on 27 April 2009 best captured the spirit and mood permeating the past decade. It is worth repeating his comments:

A half century ago, this nation made a commitment to lead the world in scientific and technological innovation; to invest in education, in research, in engineering; to set a goal of reaching space and engaging every citizen in that historic mission. That was the high water mark of America's investment in research and development. And since then our investments have steadily declined as a share of our national income. As a result, other countries are now beginning to pull ahead in the pursuit of this generation's great discoveries.

I believe it is not in our character, the American character, to follow. It's our character to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again. So I'm here today to set this goal: We will devote more than 3 percent of our GDP to research and development. We will not just meet, but we will exceed the level achieved at the height of the space race, through policies that invest in basic and applied research, create new incentives for private innovation, promote breakthroughs in energy and medicine, and improve education in math and science.

Few would disagree with his analysis or fail to support his promise of devoting 3 percent of GDP to research and development. It’s the heart, soul, and core of any long-term innovation strategy. But do we have the R&D capacity to absorb and effectively spend such an investment, especially in the industrial sector? Indeed, many believe that the industrial R&D laboratories such as Bell Labs are “missing in action” and a creature of the twentieth century.

In the cover letter of 20 November 2008 to President Bush for the PCAST report entitled University-Private Sector Research Partnerships in the Innovation Ecosystem, the second paragraph states that “Additionally, we have observed a decrease in the number and size of industrial basic research laboratories.” That’s the prevailing view of America’s science leadership!

On the business side, Adrian Slywotsky in a Business Week article of 27 August 2009 entitled Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? states that “Our growth engine has run out of a key source of fuel – critical mass, basic scientific research.” As his title suggests, he is referring specifically to the putative demise of industrial basic research laboratories. But he offers a solution and one that I agree with: “Today’s challenges require the government to unleash a series of highly focused, aggressively managed projects supported by a growing research investment in a dozen or more leading companies that in the aggregate reproduce the cumulative impact of Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC, and others.” He further argues that “We need them. Soon.”

Notwithstanding the demise of Bell Labs as an innovative force, this begs the question of whether American industry is truly reducing its commitment to R&D, especially basic research. Is America experiencing “a decrease in the number and size of industrial basic research laboratories?” So far, I’ve been unable to find a source of hard data that validates this claim, other than anecdotal stories. For example, the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics undertook in 2003 “a five-year study of the history of physicists in industry” and reported results in the July 2009 issue of Physics Today in a story by R. J. Anderson and O. R. Butler entitled Industrial R&D in Transition. While the results are skewed toward industries in which physicists play major roles, they are nonetheless informative. Here is a short version of the findings related to industrial research:

Management is “Struggling to find the best mix of longer-term research and short-term development.”
Radical R&D funding and organizational changes are endangering centralized labs.
Management is looking to “external sources … for innovative technology” following successes in the Asian or early Japanese model.
There are no standards for preservation of records and America is losing precious “know how.”

Confirming the notion that industrial basic research is declining, the Physics Today article states that “interviewees at all the laboratories we visited described a sharp transition over the past two decades toward shorter-term projects and more control by the business side of operations.”

In a similar vein Marguerite Reardon in a CNET news article describing industrial research laboratories such as AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and IBM’s Watson Research Center stated that “The labs are still around, but some experts say the labs conduct basic research on a much smaller scale than they used to.”

The message from conventional wisdom is clear and consistent. There is a decline underway for industrial basic research laboratories. But lacking hard data for the number, size, description and funding of industrial basic research laboratories, are we merely looking at a phenomenon associated with the physical sciences, the domain of the twentieth century giants, or does it cross all sectors of science and technology?

I decided to examine the question on the basis of industry basic research expenditures relative to the GDP of the United States. Using the yearly industry basic research expenditure data available from the NSF S&E Indicators report and taking fourth quarter GDP data available at the website forecasts.org/data/data/GDP.htm, I computed the percentage of the yearly industry basic research expenditure to the fourth quarter annual GDP (for example, the fourth quarter of 1953 would be dated as 1954-01-01 in the GDP table). Each annual percentage was then compared to the 1953 percentage such that a value of 1.00 represents an industry basic research expenditure percentage against GDP equivalent to that of 1953. The resulting curve is given in the following plot.

As we can see from the plot, industry expenditures on basic research as a percentage of GDP have moved around over time and become somewhat erratic over the past decade. We don’t see a recent pattern of less money being spent on basic research as a percentage of GDP. Instead, the ratios are commensurate with the previous highs. These data do not indicate the decrease that might be expected from the letter to President Bush or the conventional wisdom. Of course, this doesn’t tell us whether there are fewer or more industrial basic research laboratories. Is conventional wisdom being driven by a maturation of the tradition physics-based laboratories? Or do the traditional laboratories need a new beginning? Perhaps the “lablets” model advocated by Slywotsky and others including the author is the way to go.

“The Times They Are A Changin’,” as Bob Dylan prophesied. And the changes augur well for industrial basic research. Witness the recent endeavors by Google in the arena of wind power and their investment of $100 million in the world’s largest wind farm. As Katie Fehrenbacher says in her article, Google Invests $100M in (Another!) Wind Farm, “Google has put more than $350 million (a jaw-dropping amount for an Internet company) into clean power.” Maybe the Cassandra’s of conventional wisdom are looking in the wrong places.