Satish Nambisan

From STEM to ESTEAM: Make Entrepreneurship a part of K-18 Education

In the past few years, the movement to add art to the traditional emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in K-18 education has burgeoned across the nation, i.e. STEM + art = STEAM (stemtosteam.org). It has been suggested that exposure to art will impart design thinking skills and promote creativity.

That might be so.

However, it still wouldn't address the key issue in STEM education: the inability of our students to connect their STEM knowledge with real-world problems (or to find and pursue opportunities by applying their knowledge in the world around them). For that, they will need a broader set of skills: entrepreneurial thinking skills.

Indeed, if we are serious about preparing our students — the future workforce — to be innovative and entrepreneurial in solving problems, it is time for us to make entrepreneurship part of the K-18 education, i.e. Entrepreneurship + STEAM = ESTEAM.

Let me explain why this would make sense.

First, entrepreneurship is a way of thinking — an approach toward discovering and pursuing opportunities (solving problems) in ways not constrained by the present — that find application in diverse contexts and institutions (new and old; public and private). It emphasizes imagining new possibilities in the face of high uncertainty, committing oneself to putting valuable ideas into practice and finding a broader meaning in one's ideas and actions.

It has relevance whether one pursues a career (and solves problems, big or small) in engineering, science, arts, health, architecture, business or government. Indeed, when it comes to succeeding in a complex world, entrepreneurial thinking skills may be as basic as reading and writing skills.

Second, entrepreneurial thinking skills complement and enhance the value of our knowledge in STEAM disciplines. It emphasizes cross-pollination of ideas from different fields and finding patterns in seemingly unrelated problems and solutions. As the complexity and the interdisciplinary nature of the problems that we face continue to increase — think climate change, energy, health care — entrepreneurial thinking skills become essential to integrate ideas and concepts from STEAM disciplines and to transform knowledge into value.

Third, entrepreneurship thinking skills can be acquiredand the earlier we do so the better. Studies show that the related cognitive skills can be enhanced and refined through frequent exposure to entrepreneurial experiences. All the more reason for us to expose our students — in schools and universities — to varied types of entrepreneurial experiences earlier in their lives.

In what ways can we develop entrepreneurial thinking skills among students?

In schools, this may involve offering diverse platforms (project-based courses, idea competitions, internships, summer camps, etc.) for students to experience entrepreneurship with different levels of complexity. Schools don't need to do this all on their own.

Several large universities across the nation — including where I teach, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — have launched entrepreneurship outreach and mentoring programs aimed at nurturing the entrepreneurial interests and skills among middle and high school students. Similarly, organizations such as the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship and the Kauffman Foundation offer rich sets of resources for teaching entrepreneurship in schools.

In universities, entrepreneurship programs and initiatives need to cater to students across the campus — not just to business school students — and engage with them from the time they join as freshmen, not wait until they are juniors or seniors. The experience of universities such as Stanford, Babson and Northeastern indicate that such a campuswide and a freshmen-level focus on entrepreneurship can help instill an entrepreneurial mind-set among students that they then can bring to their individual disciplines as well as to their interactions with peers in other disciplines.

As we transition toward a global innovation economy that demands in equal measures novelty and sustainability, affordability and effectiveness, our success will be marked by the entrepreneurial mind-set that we bring to apply the knowledge that we hold.

Clearly then, the training on STEAM disciplines will need to go hand in hand with an education in entrepreneurship. That education has to start in schools and calls for a shift to ESTEAM.

 

** An earlier version of this article was published as an Op-Ed article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/make-entrepreneurship-a-part-of-education-b99214666z1-247680431.html#ixzz2udLgAUmK

Engaging Citizens in Co-creation in Public Services

Can citizens be fruitfully engaged in solving civic problems?

Recent initiatives in cities such as Boston (Citizens Connect), Chicago (Smart Chicago Collaborative), San Francisco (ImproveSF) and New York (NYC BigApps) indicate that citizens can be involved in not just identifying and reporting civic problems but in conceptualizing, designing and developing, and implementing solutions as well.

The availability of new technologies (e.g. social media) has radically lowered the cost of collaboration and the "distance" between government agencies and the citizens they serve. Further involving citizens — who are often closest to and possess unique knowledge about the problems they face — makes a lot of sense given the increasing complexity of the problems that need to be addressed.

A recent research report that I wrote for the IBM Center for the Business of Government highlights four distinct roles that citizens can play in civic innovation and problem-solving.

As explorer, citizens can identify and report emerging and existing civic problems. For example, Boston's Citizen Connect initiative enables citizens to use specially built smartphone apps to report minor and major civic problems (from potholes and graffiti to water/air pollution). Closer to home, both Wisconsin and Minnesota have engaged thousands of citizen volunteers in collecting data on the quality of water in their neighborhood streams, lakes and rivers (the data thus gathered are analyzed by the state pollution control agency). Citizens also can be engaged in data analysis. The N.Y.-based Datakind initiative involves citizen volunteers using their data analysis skills to mine public data in health, education, environment, etc., to identify important civic issues and problems.

As "ideator,"citizens can conceptualize novel solutions to well-defined problems in public services. For example, the federal government's Challenge.gov initiative employs online contests and competitions to solicit innovative ideas from citizens to solve important civic problems. Such "crowdsourcing" initiatives also have been launched at the county, city and state levels (e.g. Prize2theFuture competition in Birmingham, Ala.; ImproveSF in San Francisco).

As designer, citizens can design and/or develop implementable solutions to well-defined civic problems. For example, as part of initiatives such as NYC Big Apps and Apps for California, citizens have designed mobile apps to address specific issues such as public parking availability, public transport delays, etc. Similarly, the City Repair project in Portland, Ore., focuses on engaging citizens in co-designing and creatively transforming public places into sustainable community-oriented urban spaces.

As diffuser,citizens can play the role of a change agent and directly support the widespread adoption of civic innovations and solutions. For example, in recent years, physicians interacting with peer physicians in dedicated online communities have assisted federal and state government agencies in diffusing health technology innovations such as electronic medical record systems (EMRs).

In the private sector, companies across industries have benefited much from engaging with their customers in innovation. Evidence so far suggests that the benefits from citizen engagement in civic problem-solving are equally tangible, valuable and varied. However, the challenges associated with organizing such citizen co-creation initiatives are also many and imply the need for government agencies to adopt an intentional, well-thought-out approach.

While technology is an important enabler of citizen engagement in civic innovation, technology by itself should not be the reason for instituting citizen co-creation initiatives. Instead, the motivating objective should be to help the government get a deeper personal connection with its citizens and their problems and issues. And, in the process, we can foresee a shift in citizens' roles in public services — from that of a passive service beneficiary to that of an active informed partner or co-creator in civic innovation and problem-solving.

To paraphrase George Packer in the New Yorker: Is the government a vending machine with bureaucrats dispensing services or a platform — like Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone — where citizens can build their own apps, interact with one another and come up with their own solutions? Increasingly, it seems to be the latter.

Note: An earlier version of this opinion article was published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Read my report on citizen innovation at www.businessofgovernment.org/report/engaging-citizens-co-creation-public-services.

Innovation in the Emerging Markets

A couple of weeks back I had gone to Sao Paulo, Brazil to give the keynote address at an innovation conference organized by the Harvard Business Review (here is a link to the video of my talk). While in Brazil, I had a chance to discuss with the conference attendees (who were managers in a wide range of organizations—from the likes of P&G and Fiat to small tech ventures to nonprofits and government agencies) about the state of innovation and its practice in Brazil.

One of the key insights that I got from my discussions was how the lack of well-developed external innovation infrastructure (particularly, innovation intermediaries) may be dampening the flow of innovative ideas and technologies in Brazil. Clearly, the pace of innovation in Brazil has increased considerably in the last 5-6 years or so. There are more and more innovative ideas being generated - both within organizations as well as by independent inventors. And, more broadly, there is much greater extent of participation (by people from all walks of life) in innovation initiatives (the Fiat Mio project is an excellent example of this). At the same time, it is also becoming evident that many of the innovative ideas coming from independent inventors are not getting transformed into new products and services. What is holding back many of these innovations?   

I believe a key factor is the lack of a mature innovation infrastructure that could help transform ill-developed but innovative ideas from independent inventors into promising products and services. In particular, there is a paucity of innovation intermediaries such as the innovation capitalist who can play a valuable role in identifying promising ideas and making the right connections with companies so that those ideas find a home within existing organizations. True, intermediaries such as Innocentive operate on a global basis and cater to the Brazilian market too. But that is no substitute for more local or regional innovation intermediaries – who would have a better understanding of the Brazilian marketplace and the network connections with companies large and small. In fact, this is an issue that is relevant in some of the other emerging markets too, particularly in India.

While there has been considerable democratization of innovation in countries such as Brazil and India, the institutional infrastructure (read: intermediaries) needed to shepherd the process of innovation often lacks maturity (or is missing) and as a result many of the truly innovative ideas do not see the light of the day. The true scope and the extent of innovation in the emerging markets will be realized only when such institutional voids are filled in the innovation marketplace.      

Lessons from an Innovation Capitalist ...

A few years back, in my work on open innovation, I had identified a new innovation intermediary role – an Innovation Capitalist.

An Innovation Capitalist is a company that seeks out promising new ideas from independent inventors and other sources, invests in those ideas to transform them into market-ready concepts, and sells (or licenses) the related intellectual property to large client firms. Thus, an innovation capitalist goes beyond traditional innovation brokers by seeking out and evaluating innovative technology and product concepts from the inventor community and other external sources and then developing and prototyping those ideas to a stage where their market potential is validated.

In the last 2-3 years, the number of such innovation capitalist firms has increased considerably, particularly in the technology sector. What makes an innovation capitalist successful?

To better understand this, I recently conducted an in-depth study of the practices of one such firm, IP2Biz LLC. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, IP2Biz focuses on facilitating the commercialization of innovative ideas and technologies developed by research universities and national laboratories. It pursues projects in the technology sector (including chemicals, material science, energy, and medical devices) and invests anywhere from $25,000 to $400,000 in individual projects (in prototyping and developing market-ready ideas).

Here are some of the key lessons learned from IP2Biz’s experience in these projects:

• An Innovation Capitalist has to serve as an extension of the client firms’ internal innovation infrastructure (incorporate flexibility in processes and activities to accommodate and complement unique aspects of the client’s internal innovation processes and capabilities).
• An Innovation Capitalist has to complement the capabilities of university Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) (focus on building and deploying the critical capabilities and competences that TTOs often lack)
• An Innovation Capitalist has to establish a trust-based relationship with university researchers (offer assistance to researchers beyond the immediate project - for example, help in connecting with large companies - to establish long-term relationships.
• An Innovation Capitalist has to minimize the time and risk profiles of the client (utilize an iterative process structure that minimizes time demands on the client firm and helps reveal the different types of innovation risks).

These and other lessons are discussed in more detail in our article "The Role of the Innovation Capitalist in Open Innovation" published recently in Research-Technology Management.

 

On “Entrepreneurial Thinking”

Entrepreneurship, for better or worse, has often been associated with new ventures, particularly in the popular media (i.e. the act of entrepreneurship is supposed to lead to or involve creating new firms). But entrepreneurship need not always lead to new ventures; it may instead lead to the creation of new “things” (products/services, business models, etc.) in existing organizations–large or small, for-profit or non-profit (for example, a recent HBR article considers the emerging opportunity for entrepreneurs in large corporations – The New Corporate Garage).

As I often tell my students (and this note is largely intended for them), instead of focusing on entrepreneurship, we should focus on entrepreneurial thinking, the broader cognitive processes (or skills) that are innate to the act of entrepreneurship. Such a focus on entrepreneurial thinking may help us to not only understand the diverse contexts for practicing entrepreneurship (including in one’s own personal life) but also view it as a set of cognitive processes or skills that can be ‘learned’ or ‘acquired’ (i.e. all of us can engage in entrepreneurial thinking, albeit in different contexts).

So what cognitive processes or skills constitute entrepreneurial thinking?

Start with a simple definition: Entrepreneurship involves identifying (or creating/devising) and/or pursuing an opportunity without regard to the resources currently controlled. Based on such a conceptualization, here are two important cognitive processes that make up a big part of entrepreneurial thinking:

Thinking beyond one’s immediate context: Most of us are strongly tied to the ‘immediate’ – the ‘now’ and the ‘present’ of our work/organization/life/etc. To identify or devise new opportunities, we need to have the ability to get beyond or to ‘forget’ the immediate and to populate our mind with ‘ideas’ that are not the ‘usual suspects’—ideas that may conflict with our view of the world or those that may not make sense at the outset. Such a cognitive or thinking skill is critical for both identifying (or devising) opportunities as well as marshaling requisite resources to pursue those opportunities.

Knowing what one knows (and doesn’t know): Metacognition is ‘cognition about cognition’ and a key dimension of metacognition is metacognitive knowledge. Metacognitive knowledge relates to one’s awareness of what one, personally, knows and do not know, as well as the understanding of one’s own capacity to perform various tasks. A higher level of metacognitive knowledge enables us to make the right decisions on what paths to choose and what paths to avoid as we navigate the opportunity landscape. It allows us to be more effective and efficient as we pursue complex opportunities. It helps us to stick to ‘things that excite us’ and to temper our goals with ‘what is achievable’—and, thereby pursue opportunities that we are likely to be motivated and capable enough to complete.     

Obviously, these are not the only cognitive processes or skills involved in entrepreneurial thinking; but those are, in my opinion, the two really important ones, and as I noted previously, both can be acquired.

So if you are interested in engaging in entrepreneurial thinking (in your work or your personal life), ask yourself the following two questions:

(a) How easily can I ‘shed’ my immediate world and entertain other ideas/thoughts?

(b) How well am I aware of my own knowledge (and capability) boundaries?     

C K Prahalad - A Giant Among Management Thinkers

Renowned management scholar and thinker C K Prahalad passed away last weekend. The untimely death of any active scholar is always shocking—particularly so in the case of CK as he was just 68 and still full of energy and ideas (at the time of his death he was working on a new HBS Press book on innovative management practices from emerging markets).

CK was one of my role models—an innovative and visionary thinker with the ability to communicate with (and more importantly influence) both practicing managers and the academic community world-wide. His ideas were fertile enough for others to conduct research for years (his work on core competence and strategic intent generated distinct research streams in strategic management; his work on the Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid launched a separate field of practice and inquiry).

As my friend and mentor VG (Prof. Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School) so eloquently noted in a recent article in the Economic Times: “There are two types of academics. Vast majority of academics try to catch fish in a well understood pond. There are very few academics who point us in the direction of a new pond where we can go and start the process of catching fish all over again—this is CK’s forte. He has opened up so many new research paths. One of the hallmarks of CK is that he never published two articles on the same topic—his style is to create a new line of inquiry, leave the space for ‘mere mortals’ and move on to the next.”

I am particularly indebted to CK for encouraging me to conduct research in the area of customer co-innovation and value co-creation. It was an article that he co-wrote on this topic in 2000 in Information Week that got me interested in this area. Over the next ten years or so, as I continued my work on customer co-creation, I kept in touch with him (and his continuously evolving ideas on this topic).

The last time I met CK was in 2008 at a conference at Wharton—I was presenting my work on network-centric innovation and CK was the keynote speaker. As usual, his keynote was insightful yet intuitive, thought-provoking yet simple, and passionate yet humorous. After his speech (and despite his obviously busy schedule), he took some time to talk with me, commended me on my recent book, and encouraged me to delve deeper into the area of collaborative innovation. I came away both humbled and highly energized.

There is no doubt that CK’s books and ideas will continue to influence all of us for years to come. But much more than his ideas, it is his passion for innovative thinking, his steadfast focus on practical relevance, and most importantly, his fearlessness to pursue big ideas that will continue to inspire me.    

Consumer Value Co-Creation in Health Care

Health care has become the front and the center topic in our national dialog in the last couple of years or so. As the politicians, lobbyists, and policy experts hotly debate how to reform health care, it is becoming increasingly evident that true healthcare reform is unlikely to originate from Washington D.C. Indeed, such reform will have to come from all of us, as individual consumers – as we take greater responsibility for and participate more actively in managing our own health.

Importantly, recent trends indicate that consumer participation in health care doesn’t need to be limited to such personal healthcare management. Consumers can also participate in innovation and value creation in varied areas of the healthcare industry, and thereby contribute to reducing healthcare costs and enhancing the overall quality of health care. A critical enabler of such consumer value co-creation is new information and communication technologies such as online health communities and Web 2.0 (social media) technologies.

Recently I co-authored an article on this topic – "Models of Consumer Value Co-creation in Health Care" – which was published in the October/December 2009 issue of the Health Care Management Review. Here is a link to the article (subscription required).

In this article, we identify four alternate models of consumer value co-creation - the partnership model, the open-source model, the support-group model, and the diffusion model. Our objective was to develop a better understanding of how consumers can co-create value in health care and also offer guidance to healthcare organizations (HCOs) in adopting appropriate strategies and practices to embrace consumers as partners in the development and delivery of innovative health care products and services.

Platforms for Collaborative Social Innovation

It is quite evident that to address some of the key social challenges that we currently face (in health care, public school education, national security, environment, energy, etc) organizations across the three sectors – public, private, and non-profit – will need to come together and collaborate extensively. However, the infrastructure or platforms to promote and facilitate such cross-sector collaborative social innovation do not exist or are not well developed at all.

Lack of such collaboration platforms could seriously hamper our efforts at developing and implementing innovative solutions to important social problems even if individual organizations have creative ideas, practices, and technologies.

My research over the past couple of years indicates the need for three types of collaboration platforms:

• Exploration platforms to jointly formulate or define problems and identify preliminary solutions;
• Experimentation platforms to test or evaluate alternate solutions in "near real-world" contexts; and
• Execution platforms to develop and diffuse solution templates.

In an article titled “Platforms for Collaboration”, published in the Summer 2009 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, I describe these three types of collaboration platforms for social innovation and identify some of the capabilities that participating organizations would need to acquire (Note: SSIR is a subscription-based journal, however, many of the articles are available for free and it is likely that this article too would be made available free of charge in the near future).

Update: Here is a link to the full article: http://www.ssireview.org/images/articles/2009SU_Feature_Nambisan.pdf

Agenda for President Obama's Office of Social Innovation

As has been reported recently, President Obama has established a new Office of Social Innovation (OSI) at the White House. While the goals, structure and other details of this new entity are yet to be announced, the very fact that such an office was created indicates the considerable importance the new administration has assigned to social innovation.

Two questions are likely to arise when one hears this news. First, should the Federal government play a role in social innovation, and if so, what should that role be? Second, is there a danger that such a White House -based government office would make social innovation initiatives more bureaucratic (and, possibly less effective)?

I think these are two important, valid, and related questions and the answers to these questions should help shape the agenda of this new office.

I believe the federal government has a critical role to play in promoting and facilitating social innovation, but not in directing social innovation initiatives. More importantly, if the government plays the right role, then it would also minimize the potential risks associated with introducing bureaucracy into the social innovation process.

Social innovation has become more important now than at any other time in the past as we face a host of complex social issues in areas ranging from public school education and health care to disaster management, energy, and environment. At the same time, it is also quite evident that the solutions to most of these social issues are unlikely to come from the government (or the nonprofits or the private sector) acting alone. Instead, organizations in all three sectors would need to collaborate in identifying, evaluating, and implementing potential solutions. And, the Federal government may have a key role to play in promoting and facilitating such collaborative social innovation.

My ongoing research in this area has revealed the importance of and the need for establishing different types of platforms to facilitate collaborative social innovation. In an article forthcoming in the Summer 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, I describe three types of collaboration platforms for social innovation (more on this in a future blog).

If the new Office of Social Innovation focuses on establishing the right conditions (and the infrastructure) for public sector organizations, private companies, and nonprofits to come together and pursue collaborative social innovation, then it would be making a big step in the right direction. On the other hand, if the OSI intrudes upon the collaborative innovation process and inhibits nonprofits and private companies from deploying their own unique capabilities and perspectives, then it is not likely to advance the cause of social innovation.

We will need to wait and see as the agenda for this new Office of Social Innovation unfolds over the coming months!

Social Innovation and the Coming Age of Volunteerism

It is said that we are at the dawn of a great, new age of Volunteerism in America. In the last couple of years, there has been any number of articles written about citizen innovators and volunteers engaging in grassroots-level social innovation initiatives—in areas ranging from public school education and disaster recovery to environment and green energy.

Two distinct sets (or generations) of volunteers have emerged: the first set includes members of the baby boomer generation who have retired recently and are looking for “meaningful civic engagement roles”; the second set includes young adults of the (Obama-inspired?) Millennium generation who increasingly consider volunteering for nonprofits as a way of life.

There is no better indicator of this volunteer fever in America than the number of young graduates from top universities who regularly sign up with the Teach for America (TFR) program. TFR is a nonprofit organization that recruits and places fresh graduates in challenging urban and rural teaching jobs throughout the country. Strictly speaking it is not a volunteer task – participants in TFR (called ‘corps members’) do get paid an annual salary, typically around $35,000. However, given that most of these graduates from top-tier universities could have pursued much more remunerative job opportunities elsewhere, it is as good as volunteerism. The program has become so successful that for the 2009 academic year the acceptance rate for new recruits is close to 15% (lower than that of most top-tier Wall Street firms!).

While these and other examples lend proof to the large influx of potential volunteers showing up at the doorsteps of the nation’s numerous nonprofit organizations, the critical question remains: How well prepared are the nonprofit organizations to engage with all these volunteers? Or, do the nonprofits have the ability to tap into and channel the creativity and expertise of this emerging volunteer workforce, to solve key social problems?

Based on my own ongoing research on social innovation, the answer, unfortunately, is No. 

Nonprofit organizations’ challenge of involving citizen volunteers in social innovation initiatives is not much unlike that of business organizations in partnering with customers in innovation and value creation. Customers act largely as volunteer innovators in the private sector; most often, they do not derive any monetary gains from their activities. As research shows, companies that are successful in engaging their customers in innovation activities are those that create “valuable experiences” for customer innovators and bring a lot of clarity and transparency to the innovation process. These and other lessons from the private sector imply three key issues for consideration for nonprofits confronted with the ‘volunteer challenge’:

• Does the nonprofit organization have a strategic approach towards engaging volunteers in its activities? (Identifying the organization’s expertise/skill gap, mapping out the roles that the volunteers will play to fill those gaps; etc.)

• Is the nonprofit organization structured to truly embrace volunteers as partners in its activities? (Establishing communication channels between volunteers and paid-staff; offering orientation and training programs for volunteers; implementing processes to integrate the inputs from the volunteers; etc.)
  

• Can the nonprofit organization offer “meaningful experiences” for its volunteers? (Assigning tasks that are aligned with the individual volunteer’s skills and interests; enhancing the transparency of the activities so that impact of the volunteer’s contributions is clarified; etc.)
  

Teach for America is a good example of a nonprofit that has been successful in addressing all of the above three issues. Hopefully, other nonprofit organizations can learn from TFR and prepare themselves to leverage the coming wave of volunteers.

If they do, then we will likely see a revolution in social innovation—one that is truly grassroots-driven and with enduring social impact!