Category: education
What would you do if you were the university official in charge of company research partnerships and a Fortune 100 tech company offered to fund a research center at your university to the tune of $2.5 million dollars a year? If it were me, in these tough financial times, I’d say “great, tell me more,” visions of a nice press release dancing in my head. But wait, there’s A Catch: the company has made it a condition that in order to receive the millions, your university must open source any resulting software and inventions that come out of this research funding. Yes, open source. Your university cannot stake claim to any patents. There will be no intellectual property clauses, no negotiations, no… nonsense. This situation is not hypothetical. Since January, four U.S. universities have agreed to host Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTCs) that will be funded at the rate … Continue reading
The failure of Solyndra last week – a United States solar energy venture backed by $535 million in federal loan guarantees drew the ire of many people concerned with the state of the federal budget deficit and the growing national debt. But was the federal government wrong to offer loan guarantees to Solyndra? This is the question many people are asking this week, and I would be interested to hear what you think. In a previous article I stated some of my thoughts on the role the federal government should play in the overall innovation ecosystem in the United States, and I stand by what I said in that article – An Open Letter on Innovation to President Obama. To quote the relevant part for today’s discussion: We need to take a step back and define what the role of government is in our overall innovation efforts as a country: … Continue reading
Where we start to engage across society is through the power of ideas that can touch many people’s lives. Through innovation we should always attempt to do this. Social innovation is no different. Eventually through witnessing a change a person sees as valuable in their values, as they want to interpret it a powerful incentive to change. It is a slow process but it has a higher chance of lasting success than forcing something onto someone really reluctantly, that is sometimes sensing alienated by the majority that lie outside their immediate group. For social innovation to work we need to make innovation socially personal. Continue reading
Tom Vander Ark’s 18 Low Tech Learning Innovations in this week’s Huffington Post, was written for educators and school systems, but is just as relevant to the workplace and employees. Just substitute “employee” for student and “CEO” for principal and you’ll get the idea. Over 20 years of working on innovation projects inside of companies have shown me that “permssion to learn” and easy access to knowledge are often the gating factors to successful outcomes. Here are a couple of my favorites: Improve motivational systems….there is still big opportunity to organize learning in small chunks and celebrate progress. Give every (student) access to advanced courses. Every (U.S. high school student) should have access to every Advanced Placement and upper division STEM courses, and… Learning everywhere. While visiting Google this week, educators noticed that there are even learning resources in the bathroom — it’s truly a learning everywhere-all-the-time environment. Perhaps … Continue reading
I did a workshop last week with a group working on improving innovation within the Australian school system. I played my normal role of grenade-thrower, errr, thought-provoker on the topic of innovation, while working with eight other people that all have backgrounds in education. As the day went on, I noticed something interesting. In sessions like this, people always pick up on different points that I make. This is one of the reasons that I try to make a wide variety of points – I never know for sure which ones will stick! On this day, one of the points that I made is that any time you have a gap between where you currently are and where you want to be, you have to innovate. You can’t bridge these gaps by simply doing more of what you’re currently doing. This is a really important point when thinking about public … Continue reading
Teens, Engineering Education and 3D Printing A vibrant innovation-oriented economy needs technically savvy inventors and entrepreneurs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of technology-oriented jobs continues to increase. Yet the number of trained and qualified engineers continues to decline and the U.S. is not doing a great job attracting youngsters to engineering-related careers. How can universities, parents and corporate employers convince teens, particularly girls and under-represented minorities, that technology-oriented careers are creative, good for humankind, and entrepreneurial? Teens need a reason to study engineering and technology-related subjects. If teens think that engineering is only about abstract theory and math-based problem solving, they likely will gravitate towards another career choice. What if it were possible to introduce teens to the joys of product design by enabling them to experience, first-hand, an entire product design cycle in less than a week? Recently, I participated …
