As a fan of good product design, I have to quickly recommend Jason Amendolara’s site. It’s a great example of fun design, creative ideas, and wonderful execution. One of my favorites: the self-shaking salt shakers…

A bias for action is contagious. I wrote an earlier post about one of the student teams in the Center for Entrepreneurship‘s Business Development Program, who in the course of the program designed and built a new business around bringing traditional, tasty, and nutritious drinks from indigenous cultures to the American market. They were one of a half dozen teams this year who made significant progress in turning their ideas into reality.

Indeed, this year seems to have proved out one of the basic tenets of the Center for Entrepreneurship’s programs: that innovation depends as much on the value of your actions as of your ideas. The teams drove hard to prove (or disprove) the value of their ideas by taking concrete actions.

One team took an idea coming out of our newly-created Western Cooling Efficiency Center, and that retrofits commercial rooftop air-conditioning units to save 5-10% on energy costs. Working with its inventors, the team oversaw the engineering, built a prototype, secured the intellectual property, began discussions with several major utilities to explore adoption incentives and, before the term was even out, reached agreements with Wal-Mart and Target to run initial pilot tests on their stores.

With a payback of less than a year (without incentives), this technology–as an idea–has considerable promise for reducing energy demand. With prototypes, letters of intent, and pilot-tests underway, the business of installing these retrofits is equally promising. It’s one thing to read about building a supply chain and initiating negotiations with customers, it’s another thing to learn by doing it.

Another team had developed a new great-tasting set of salad dressings (don’t mention that they are also low-calorie) and, in the course of the Spring began selling this dressing, with vegetables, in the student lounge; built a strong advisory board; worked with a copacker to identify which combination of market niche, ingredients, and process would work best; and with a designer created their labels, branding, and point-of-purchase displays. They also taught the class a valuable lesson on the role that good design can play.

As I said, a bias for action is contagious. These teams, like others in the program, witnessed first-hand each other’s actions and accomplishments and set their own expectations higher as a result.

The more experience they had getting out of the classroom and engaging with suppliers, customers, and others the market, the more they learned about what it took to act on their ideas. These lessons are among the most valuable they will take away from their education.

Edison may have said innovation was 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration but he didn’t explain just what the perspiring was all about.

Anything can be hard work if you let it: running in circles can take just as much time and energy as moving forward. And in this way, most perspiration in innovation is misplaced–spent perfecting what inventors and entrepreneurs are already comfortable working on. If they’re engineers, that means perfecting the mousetrap; if they’re managers, it means more planning. Hard work, but not necessarily the right work for turning a new idea into a new business.

One of the core principles in the Business Development Programs at the Center for Entrepreneurship is to instill in our science, engineering, and business students a bias for action. That means, first and foremost, identifying the right actions: the activities that will move a new venture forward rather than run it in circles.
Put in the right context, our PhD and postdoctoral fellows embrace this bias.  It is, after all, built on the scientific method.

That’s because the most valuable actions an entrepreneur can take in the first year are essentially experiments, activities that test hypotheses about the idea and the business around it.  For example:

Hypothesis 1: It will work outside the laboratory

Hypothesis 2: Customers will understand and value the solution

Hypothesis 3: We are the right people to build this solution

Whatever the outcome, the results of each experiment move you forward by reducing the uncertainties surrounding your venture.

And so it’s always exciting to see some of most educated people around get out of their labs, roll up their sleeves, and take action. This time, it was one PhD in computer science and two postdoctoral fellows in the life sciences manufacturing and test marketing a line of traditional, nutritious, and very tasty drinks from Africa.

Why? Because they had developed this idea for a business and needed to know how the market would respond.
In two days spent at the local farmer’s market, they sold over $600 worth of the drinks.  And in getting there, they had to find a co-packer willing to front them the bottles and another who would work with them on the formulation; forge an agreement with a Ugandan women’s coperative to supply the ginger, hibiscus, and other ingredients; and spend hours in a commercial kitchen actually cooking up the first batches.

Sure, they could have worked on their science-based ideas about network security, alzheimers, or nutrition; or they could have spent the time re-running the numbers on their business plan from here through 2012, revising their marketing plans, or allocating equity amongst themselves. But they chose to work on this business because it was hands-on. In one quarter, they might not have learned so much about their potential business, or how to build new businesses, as they did making real juice and talking to real customers.

If and when
they go into industry R&D when they graduate, that business experience will provide them with an invaluable understanding of what it really takes to drive innovation.

Amory Lovins to Present Keynote Address at Second Annual UC Davis Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy

Program Agenda and Key Faculty Also Announced

DAVIS, CA–(Marketwire – April 22, 2008) – The University of California at Davis (UC Davis)
Center for Entrepreneurship announced today that Amory Lovins, co-founder,
chairman, and chief scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute, will be the
keynote speaker at the second annual Green Technology Entrepreneurship
Academy, to be held July 7-11, 2008, at the Tahoe Center for Environmental
Sciences in Incline Village, Nev. The Center also announced that the
Academy’s faculty will include experts from the nation’s top venture
capital firms, law firms, and research institutions. The Academy’s agenda
will include sessions covering the first critical steps of
entrepreneurship, such as intellectual property, incorporation, building a
team, and market validation, teaching students how to move their research
on sustainable technologies out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.

Lovins, who will speak on the evening of July 9, is a world-renowned energy
consultant and physicist, as well as an author, speaker, and MacArthur
Fellow. In 1979, he co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute, an independent,
market-oriented, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, nonpartisan “think-and-do
tank” that focuses its research on advanced resource productivity and
innovative business strategies that lead to “abundance by design.” Lovins
is also a member of the Board of Advisors for UC Davis’ Energy Efficiency
Center.

The Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy is in its second year. It
provides doctoral students, post-docs, and research faculty in science and
engineering with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to move
their ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. Applications
for participation in the Academy are currently available at
http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green/apply.html. The deadline for
applications has been extended to May 16. All admitted students will
receive scholarships from the Kauffman Foundation to cover the program’s
room, board, and tuition. PG&E has agreed to sponsor two fellowships to
provide both room, board, and tuition and travel for doctoral candidates,
post-docs or research faculty working on research in sustainable
technologies.

The five-day program will cover the basics of entrepreneurship, with
sessions focusing on networking, intellectual property, market validation,
elevator pitches, development strategies, business plan presentations, and
the logistics of building a team and establishing an organization. Time
will also be set aside for networking and mentoring sessions with faculty,
lectures from entrepreneurs about their own experiences, group
presentations, and social hours. Further details about the program can be
found at http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green/schedule.html.

The Academy’s faculty will be drawn from the venture capital community,
including venture capitalists from American River Ventures, CalCEF Clean
Energy Angel Fund, DFJ Frontier, MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures, Nth Power,
Physic Ventures, and Sierra Angels; the legal community, including
attorneys from Morrison|Foerster; and the research community, including
representatives from National Instruments, San Diego Gas & Electric, and
the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center.

“I expect Amory Lovins to be a top draw for students and faculty alike,”
said Associate Professor Andy Hargadon, director, UC Davis Center for
Entrepreneurship. “We’re lucky to have outstanding faculty and partners
dedicated to this summer’s Academy, and I hope the students’ plans will
reflect the valuable input they receive from their mentors.”

About the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship

The UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship serves as a nexus for
entrepreneurship education and research — and as a springboard for
entrepreneurial initiatives on the UC Davis campus.

To accomplish this, the Center brings science, engineering and business
students and faculty together with experienced entrepreneurs, investors and
corporate leaders in a highly collaborative environment that blends
effective theory with hands-on participation and solution-driven
innovation. The Center is a Center of Excellence within the Graduate School
of Management.

Under the direction of Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon, the Center
provides researchers and MBA students with the necessary skills, resources
and network support to turn their ideas into action. Whether for profit or
for social benefit — or both — the Center’s programs enable students to
envision a better world and make it a reality.

For more information, please contact Nicole Starsinic, assistant director,
at nstarsinic@ucdavis.edu or visit http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/.

Malcolm Gladwell has a wonderful article in the New Yorker, In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare? that explores the genius phenomenon in innovation.  His main point: genius is often overrated, in that the ideas most geniuses credited with having were already out there.  And, corollary to that, it’s relatively easy to have a good idea if you just take smart people with diverse backgrounds and set them loose on an field or problem that few have focused on before:

Ideas weren’t precious. They were everywhere, which suggested that maybe
the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for
invention—genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany—wasn’t necessary at
all.

He illustrates this point with beautiful stories about Nathan Myhrvold’s dinosaur hunts, Bell and Gray’s coinciding patents for the telephone, and an old but timeless study by Ogburn and Thomas of 148 scientific discoveries that were arrived at by multiple people at around the same time.

In the end, Gladwell’s point is that the individual genius may not be the source of novelty–others were thinking the same thoughts–but that the individual genius is a concentrating force that brings these ideas together more frequently and effectively than ordinary smart people. So a genius can have the same ten ideas that it took ten other people to have one at a time…so it’s better to hire the genius than the other ten:

A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do;
he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The
genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient
source of insight.

But Gladwell of all people should appreciate that there’s more to an innovation than the idea.  ITNS: It’s the network… Most of the “great” ideas, whether the telephone, the electric light, or mass production, were around in various forms before Bell, Edison, or Ford got to them.  The same can be said for today’s geniuses: Gates, Jobs, Kamen, Page & Brin.  Ford had it right when he argued against his own ideas:

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. . . .  Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

What gives one person credit for the same ideas others also came up with is not the novelty of the ideas, but rather the ability of the “inventors” to execute–to create a lasting difference based on the unique set of connections they are able to build around that idea.  Ford invented nothing new, but nobody connected, so effectively, those existing ideas into a system of mass production that was as effective and (as important) influential in changing others.

So little of the conversation on innovation looks at the ability of “inventors” to execute.  To take actions that build on their ideas–whether that’s starting a company, attracting investors, hiring smart people, selling to customers.  There is a strange aversion, in writing on creativity and innovation, to these more blue-collar aspects of building great ideas. That’s a shame because there’s a lot of work being done backstage that nobody’s getting credit for.

There is a joke about George W. Bush–“he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple”–that applies to the study of genius as well.  Genius is often given credit for coming up with more ideas than others.  Missing from this description is the changes that take place around the genius after the first idea or two.  After that, they have often built themselves a very effective network for moving ideas from the margins and into the mainstream.  After a while, people began sending Yogi Berra his quotes.

Bob Sutton and I wrote innovation at IDEO Product Development as a process of brokering–of taking ideas from where they’re known and moving them to where they’re not.  IDEO’s diverse clients and broad-minded designers made the company extremely effective at seeing how ideas in one industry can be used in another.  While IDEO’s culture and creative designers are able to generate many It insights, it’s IDEO’s network–their access to new clients–that enables them to have the effect they do.

Not to put too tautological a spin on it, but a genius is someone who gets credit for having the ideas (much like Gladwell’s Tipping Point is credited with many of the ideas that 50 years of social network research developed).  There there is validity and value to this definition.  A famous mathematician was once chided for having gotten credit for a discovery others had made.  His response:

“Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered.”

Given how many people can have ideas, we should be less interested in what it takes to have an idea and more curious about how make a idea “stay discovered.”

Putting our money (and time and energy) where my mouth is, the Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Davis has created a program intended to foster the entrepreneurial interests and skills of university researchers.  Our central premise is that what’s missing in bringing great science- and technology-based businesses out of the nation’s university labs and into the marketplace is not financial but rather intellectual and social capital.

In other words, we’ve created a set of programs designed to provide the particular knowledge and networks that enable scientists and engineers to effectively move their research into the markets–where it can make a difference.

The Kauffman Foundation has funded us to open this program nationally (and now internationally), specifically for advancing the commercialization of green technology research, and we are excited to announce the 2nd annual program in July, 2008.

UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship Announces Second Annual Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy

Kauffman Foundation Named Founding Sponsor;
Applications Now Available Online

DAVIS, Calif., Feb. 5, 2008 – The University of California at Davis (UC Davis) Center for Entrepreneurship today announced the details of the second annual Green Technology Entrepreneurship Academy.  The Academy will be held from July 7-11, 2008, at the Tahoe Center for Environmental Sciences in Incline Village, Nev.  The Academy provides doctoral students, post-docs, and research faculty in science and engineering with the knowledge and skills that will enable them to move their research on sustainable technologies out of the laboratory and into the marketplace.  UC Davis is currently accepting applications for this exclusive event.  Applications are available at http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/green/apply.html.  All accepted students will receive scholarships to cover the program’s tuition and lodging.

The Founding Sponsor of this year’s Academy is the Kauffman Foundation, which strives to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation.  Additional sponsors include the Superfund Basic Research Program, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, the Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization, Prequent, Inc., and the Sierra Angels.

“At the Kauffman Foundation, we are committed to helping universities move their technologies to the marketplace,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president, Advancing Innovation, the Kauffman Foundation.  “UC Davis’ Center for Entrepreneurship is a great partner in educating innovators in science and engineering about the steps between the university lab and a business that has real impact on our society and our environment.”

The Academy’s five-day immersion program includes modules covering technology validation, market and financial strategies, and successful communication skills.  Participants will interact with faculty, investors, entrepreneurs, and industry executives to gain an understanding of the path from the university lab to the market and the resources that are available along the way.  Attendees will gain the knowledge and skills needed to recognize, develop, and communicate potential commercial opportunities arising from their research and the ability to tap the social networks linking them to the entrepreneurial community.

“After the success of the first Academy last year, we’re looking forward to bringing together another excellent group of students, faculty, and private-sector mentors this summer,” said Associate Professor Andy Hargadon, director, UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship.  “The Academy’s focus on commercializing green technology research will hopefully attract top researchers in this growing field.  The Academy will give them the tools they need to make a lasting environmental and economic impact with their research.”

About the UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship The UC Davis Center for Entrepreneurship serves as a nexus for entrepreneurship education and research — and as a springboard for entrepreneurial initiatives on the UC Davis campus.

To accomplish this, the Center brings science, engineering and business students and faculty together with experienced entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders in a highly collaborative environment that blends effective theory with hands-on participation and solution-driven innovation.  The Center is a Center of Excellence within the Graduate School of Management.

Under the direction of Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon, the Center provides researchers and MBA students with the necessary skills, resources and network support to turn their ideas into action.  Whether for profit or for social benefit — or both — the Center’s programs enable students to envision a better world and make it a reality.

For more information, please contact Nicole Starsinic, assistant director, at nstarsinic@ucdavis.edu or visit http://entrepreneurship.ucdavis.edu/

Adam Lashinsky wrote a must-read article on this week's Fortune (Google's biggest threat? Itself, 5/26) for students of innovation. A must-read because it provides a timely and necessary antidote to the causality-challenged study and writing about innovation. 

Since Google's IPO–the requisite proof positive of Google's genius–there have been countless articles dissecting the search companies innovative techniques for managing innovation (see for example, BW's How Google Fuels Its Idea Factory, 4/29).  Everything from the small groups free to develop (and launch) new applications to the free haute-cuisine to the 20% time programmers are expected to devote to their own pet projects. To anyone who has been around the valley for over a decade, these techniques should sound vaguely familiar.   

So here in lies the rub.  The problem of causality plagues a lot of variance-driven research.  Causality is, as it sounds, an attempt to clarify whether one action actually causes another.  How scientists study this causal relationship is by looking at how variation in one action (the independent variable) causes variation in another (the dependent variable).  Sounds simple. Until you want to study something interesting, like people. That's because you can't really tell whether the causal relationship goes in one direction or the other. 

Take, for example, teams, morale, and productivity.  You can find that happy teams are productive teams, and conclude that happy people create productive teams because they work better together.  This leads to one set of managerial recommendations around making your people happy.  Or you can find conclude (often more accurately) that productive teams create happy people because people like to do things they do well.  Now you get a completely different set of recommendations around managing people in teams.  Of course, because people aren't dumb, the causal relationship goes both ways many hot teams are caught in the positive feedback of doing well, feeling good, working harder, and doing better.

But back to Google. The company becomes wildly profitable. As they do, they begin to implement a series of management practices that they read or saw that makes people innovative: free food, massages, 20% free time.  Then someone comes along and sees these practices and concludes, naturally, that they are the source of all that innovation.  We all read the same things about Yahoo, Silicon Graphics, and Apple (3M made the 20% rule famous, though in practice when you work 60 hrs a week, 20% is more like your Saturday).

So are these practices really the answer to creating an innovative workplace?
Lashinsky was actually writing about how entrepreneurs were leaving Google to start their own companies because working weekends to create a new application for a search company that has money to burn and applications to spare may not be the best recipe for innovation. 

In other words, no matter what the scientists, journalists, and pundits say about their "innovative" management style, the entrepreneurial rats at Google who are leaving the ship see something else.  Something that is missing from the new and successful Google. Something they would like to return to in order to be successful themselves.

And think about it–did the haute cuisine dining room precede or follow Google's rise to dominance in search?  If it did, we would be seeing more VCs insist their first $1M in goes to building the four-star cafeteria.

I worked at Apple in the early 1990's. When I got there we were at 55% gross margins and when I left we were at 15%.  Was I the cause?  I hope not.  Either way, I got to see how Apple's "innovative" management decisions in the 1980's came back to haunt them in the form of impossibly-high manufacturing costs, impossibly-scalable perks (Friday beer busts, morning bagels, massages, first class travel and accomodations), and impossibly-complex product proliferation.  Three years later, I wandered the halls of Silicon Graphics and saw the same decisions waiting to bring them down. 

The next time someone points out an organization's innovative innovation practices, think hard about whether those practices were there when the real innovation took place.  Then think about where you've seen them before, and what happened to those companies.   

One of the hallmarks of histories of innovation is how quickly the origins of new technologies are lost, and how easily radical changes slip into longstanding customs. How quickly, in other words, we forget. 

It’s surprising to my students that the internet (as we know it) is only 14 years old–counting, as I do, by the emergence of Netscape, which triggered the rapid diffusion of servers and users. More surprising to us professors is that some of those students are younger than Microsoft Word. So quickly we forget what life was like before these changes.

It’s with this perspective somewhere in the back of my mind that I watched as the Stanford Women’s basketball team defeated top-seeded University of Connecticut, 82-73, to reach the NCAA finals. It was a great game played by two great teams. It was made meaningful (bloggable) by a couple of emails I received during the game but didn’t read, of course, until the final buzzer.

The second note was a blog post by Mariah Burton Nelson which described her early days playing basketball at Stanford in the from 1975-1979: Escaping from Roble.  An elite high-school athlete, she started playing at Stanford when the team had no uniforms and played in the student gym.  The men, of course, had Maples Pavilion.  It was during her tenure, and through her commitment as well as others, that they took the first steps forward. Now look at them–two national championships and on their way to the finals again.

30 years ago, women were just getting the chance to play the game (as we know it). By contrast, Dean Smith was in his 15th year of coaching at UNC.  Now look at them.  Which brings me to the first note I got, A good jest from a colleague that drove home how far they’ve come:
"Stanford, where the men are men and the women are champions."

Go Cards!