Tag: highered

  • Lessons from Boise: What colleges can teach us about fostering innovation

    Lessons from Boise: What colleges can teach us about fostering innovation

    A wheel design to eliminate road ruts for American farmers. A new reseller model bringing internet access to villages in rural Mexico. A radar device that allows first responders and military to see through walls before entering a building. These are just a few of the pitches from teams competing in the Idaho Entrepreneurship Challenge held at Boise State College of Innovation & Design. 63 talented students on 24 teams from five Idaho colleges participated in the final round, and met up with judges with deep and varied experience in tech innovation and product leadership.

    Students are natural idea generators. Exposed to new concepts, people, and settings, students are in a learning mindset and readily apply their minds to solving problems on campus, locally, and even globally. But how can campuses build on this natural inclination to help students take their ideas a step further? It takes work to create and nurture a culture that fosters student entrepreneurship, whether that’s toward commercial or social good. Reflecting on the entrepreneurship challenge in Boise, as well as my experience at Harvard University and Junior Achievement, I’ve observed consistent patterns — patterns that apply to corporate campuses as well as college ones.

    Build on the learning mindset — not just the educational one. Students attending university have been focused on concrete, measurable outcomes: final grades and university acceptances. And these milestones matter. But as entrepreneurs, students will find out that most ideas fail, and that learning to fail quickly, adapt their approach based on these mistakes, and start again with improved information is critical. As one young mechanical engineer explained to me, “We know how not to build it one million times. And we’re getting closer each time.” To encourage this thinking, campuses are developing labs settings, like Harvard’s Innovation Labs, and bringing in professors of practice to offer applied guidance. Sometimes these initiatives come with credit hours or other academic benefit.

    Organizations as diverse as Fidelity Investments and the New York Public Library are also adopting this tactic. While lean startup is a well-known principle in parts of the working world, to paraphrase William Gibson, this future is still not evenly distributed. Done right, a labs environment can provide a pathway to a new kind of learning. A critical part of this learning stems from transparency: organizations used to sweeping failed projects under the rug are now sharing them via processes like blameless post-mortems to capture lessons and encourage experimentation. Popular new books like Radical Candor and Principles emphasize the benefits of rapid and transparent feedback as a driver of a growth mindset.

    Green Mind demo. Photo credit Madison Park, Boise State University

    Encourage entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to start with what they know. The media covers innovation in selective ways: the latest dating app is going to get a lot more airtime than a transformative technology in the construction industry. But don’t let that drive you to chase the next media-friendly tool and dismiss the power of what you know. Pitches that stood out in Boise included phrases like, “Because I grew up on a farm, I know that …” and “As a father of six children under twelve, I identified the need …”

    How can this extend to your organization? Mine employee creativity with hackathons or challenges addressing topics specific to your organization or industry. And don’t let top-down lead: work with employees tackling these problems head on to generate that list of topics.

    Enable and reward cross-disciplinary learning. Media interest in formalized online learning, or “peak MOOC,” occurred in about 2012, and with it the mandate that everyone must learn to code. Today, the interpretation is more nuanced: Quantitative literacy and understanding how software works are vital skills, but not everyone will become a software developer. There’s a renewed appreciation for the liberal arts, especially now as we are confronted by the repercussions of our rapid transformation to a tech-enabled society. On campuses, academic leaders are facilitating multidisciplinary study through curriculum reform, and entrepreneurship centers are making a concerted effort to bring together students across disciplines to solve problems.

    Similarly, training across an organization can encourage horizontal thinking — employees prepared to tackle challenges in new ways, and think across silos. A product leadership approach can unite teams with different skill sets, limiting the Balkanization of disciplines like design and engineering. And organizations are increasingly supportive of all kinds of learning: a successful entrepreneur in the not-for-profit education industry once shared with me that when his organization was growing, it took him a while to understand why offering tuition reimbursement for French classes might matter to his SaaS business. In the end he concluded that these courses were well worth the investment — he reaped the reward of engaged employees in a more creative, learning mindset.

    Set the stage for formal and informal mentor networks. Formal networks are offered by many career services departments: students should not overlook the ability to trade on alumni loyalty for a conversation. But in a hyper-networked world, formal programs should not prevent students from reaching out directly to someone they admire, whether that’s a recent grad or an established leader. As fellow judge Peter Boyce observed, there’s tremendous power in a carefully crafted message sent from an .edu email address — an otherwise overcommitted exec will sometimes make time for students.

    Organizations can provide formal mentor pairings or brown-bag lunches, and reverse-mentoring programs around digital capabilities encourage bi-directional learning. But there’s also benefit in teaching employees how to build their informal networks, to reach out beyond organizational walls to experts and colleagues within and beyond their industry.

    Lumineye demo. Photo credit: Madison Park, Boise State University

    Recognize that entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. We all know what a smart tech entrepreneur looks like, right? Hollywood and innumerable stock art images have taught us that it’s a young white guy in a hoodie, usually writing an inscrutable formula on a piece of glass. Great ideas don’t discriminate, so encourage others who may be dissuaded from the conversation based on that image to up your organization’s innovation IQ. In an academic or a workplace setting, providing coaching on how to tell your story about your idea is invaluable. I’ve seen both pull and push initiatives work: for the former, providing data-driven evidence on the performance of diverse teams; for the latter, consider what your organization’s version of an inclusion rider might be.

    Gordon Jones, the dean of the Boise State College of Innovation & Design and founding managing director of the Harvard Innovation Lab, convened the Idaho entrepreneurship challenge. Several times, Jones referenced “blue turf thinking” — a term associated with the creativity of the Boise State athletics department, home of the famous blue turf. I’d argue that the term is also useful in framing innovation efforts more broadly: successful innovation is about both thinking different and staying true to your roots.

    We’re in an environment where we all need to keep learning — agility and adaptation are the critical skills needed for 21st century knowledge workers. As education expands from episodic and location-based to lifelong and virtual, we need to value both sustained scholarship and lean learning approaches. Learning cultures enabling creative execution through transparency and cross-boundary thinking are the new competitive advantage.

    Originally published April 1, 2018 on Medium.

  • Friday 5 — 12.12.2014

    Friday 5 — 12.12.2014

    Facebook mobile

    1. Facebook is surging ahead on mobile revenue as well as mobile market share. Facebook now accounts for about one-fifth of all data used on mobile phones, and owns four out of the top ten apps in the Apple iOS store and Google Play. More over at Quartz.
    2. Dark social is a term introduced by Alexis Madrigal two years ago to define the kinds of social sharing  (email, instant messaging, texting, etc.) that were not clearly attributed in analytics. Here he updates his hypothesis of dark social with the discovery that a good deal of this traffic is now trackable and attributable to Facebook sharing on mobile devices — which may be so prevalent now that it is eroding other ways of sharing.
    3. Does the internet help you learn new things? 87% of Americans believe that it does. Also interesting: 72% say that the internet allows them to share their ideas and creations with others, a significant rise since 2006. This increase aligns with the mass adoption of social networking tools, and the ease of instantaneous publishing of text, images, and video through these platforms.
    4. Whether you are paralyzed by choice in music discovery, or merely lazy enough to outsource all your listening habits to cooler friends, Spotify has got you covered. Try out “Top Tracks in Your Network” for a personalized, updated playlist based on what friends you follow are listening to.
    5. Machine intelligence, defined here as what becomes possible as computers develop and scale abilities previously limited to humans, is poised to transform industries and create entirely new ones. Here’s a great chart of the landscape, and enumeration of relevant trends and opportunities.

    Weekend fun: Deadspin may call my favorite team a “Godless Abomination,” but all basketball fans will enjoy Buckets, a quantitative approach to viewing shooting across all NBA teams and players.

    buckets

     

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • Setting the Stage for Digital Engagement: A Five-Step Approach

    Setting the Stage for Digital Engagement: A Five-Step Approach

    Today, people don’t simply replicate offline activities online; rather, they create and engage in new mobile and social behaviors.

    This article was originally published in EDUCAUSE Review, a bi-monthly magazine on current developments and trends in information technology, how they may affect the university as an institution, and what these mean for higher education and society.

     
    To get a sense of what’s new in digital, blink twice: helpful, innovative products are cropping up everywhere. But to build an institutional structure for digital engagement that will stand the test of time, organize once—smartly and creatively.

    Change is now our norm. The last decade has produced a rapid and stunning transformation in digital behavior. Students arriving on college and university campuses in the fall of 2014 were born in 1996; back then, college students visited a physical location—a computer with a modem on a desk—to connect to the Internet and their new electronic-mail accounts. By the time today’s freshmen were in kindergarten, 62 percent of U.S. adults had mobile phones. Once the students reached middle school, iPhones were everywhere. This generation has grown up during the seismic shift from computing as a discrete activity to living with a ubiquitous Internet.

    Today, people don’t simply replicate offline activities online; rather, they create and engage in new mobile and social behaviors. Our very language has changed. The graduating class of 2014 Instagrammed their selfies and Snapchatted their campus farewells before Ubering to the airport. Today, more than 90 percent of U.S. adults own mobile phones, 65 percent have smartphones, and 74 percent participate in social networks. The explosion of the mobile and social Internet thus extends far beyond the student body to the rest of the campus environment. Because of these deep-seated and rapid-fire changes, current digital engagement and expectations require fresh approaches to forging and maintaining connections with students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

    Over the past five years, Harvard University has developed a strategy to advance digital communications and engagement. One key takeaway for us was simply this: why, how, and where an institution builds a state-of-the-art digital system is as important as, if not more important than, the technologies an institution ultimately chooses for building the system. That’s because if the first part is done right, the system will work far better, with both internal and external audiences vested in its success. In this process, strategic and audience-driven thinking trumps 3.0 tech.

    Strong partnerships spanning campus communications and IT organizations, various schools, and the university’s central administration—as well as the core belief that we are co-developing these solutions with, and not simply for, our audiences—have buttressed our approach. Although there is no one simple roadmap for all higher education institutions, we laid out five steps that can ensure a solid foundation on which to build:

    1. Understand the environment
    2. Position the institution for digital success
    3. Develop a product management mindset and approach
    4. Champion user experience
    5. Prepare for the next wave of digital and social engagement

    Read the full article at EDUCAUSE Review.
     
     

  • Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

    Friday 5 — 10.18.2013

    1. ngram social network wildcardGoogle Ngram Viewer allows you to search and plot words appearing in books from 1800-2008 — and has just rolled out some new features. The new wildcard feature allows you to find which words appear alongside others. Above, I’ve plotted which noun appears most frequently after “social network.” From about 1990 on, the answer is “analysis” as mapping social connections becomes more an established internet-era discipline.
    2. Facebook announced that teens 13-17 will have the ability to share posts publicly, as they do on platforms like Twitter. Unlike Twitter, Facebook has a real names policy that may result in more real world consequences for teens.
    3. Lots of high stakes digital project failures in the media this week, from the heavily covered healthcare.gov to the buggy first release of the college admissions Common App. These projects are complex, with data and system integration challenges, multiple stakeholders, and large, public constituencies.
    4. When do Americans use mobile apps? News app usage peaks around 7am, while entertainment and games get big at 9 pm. And it turns out we’re surprisingly heavy consumers of mobile apps throughout the weekend.
    5. As the world goes mobile, so does YouTube. Mobile on Youtube is now 40% of all video views from 25%  in 2012 and 6% in 2011. Starting in November, an upcoming YouTube mobile release will allow users to save and watch videos offline.

    Weekend fun: Conquer your acrophobia and bring Peg Man down to Earth by playing Map Dive.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

  • Friday 5 — 08.23.2013

    Friday 5 — 08.23.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Yahoo may be back on top: Comscore names Yahoo #1 in U.S. unique visitors, and that’s without counting Tumblr’s 133 million blogs. A little early for Marissa Mayer to proclaim, “How do you like me now?” — but I sure hope she’s thinking it.
    2. Have you checked out Whisper? This mobile app for sharing secrets is getting 2.5 billion page views a month. Some terrific UX work and an interesting network structure where users aren’t featured — each post rests on its own merits.
    3. Some good data on teens, mobile apps, and privacy from Pew and the Berkman Center. Teens may be getting savvier about their online footprint: those who seek advice about managing privacy online are more likely to disable the location feature.
    4. What’s your 14-year-old doing on the internet? In September, she could be networking on LinkedIn as it opens its doors to teens and enables University pages.
    5. From teens to seniors: Y Combinator demo day showcased a number of promising startups, but I agree with TechCrunch that TrueLink is a big idea. It’s a credit card that enables families to help their seniors stay financially independent but avoid scams — huge market opportunity there.
  • Friday 5 — 07.12.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. What would reddit be without GIFs? Buzzfeed asks if imgur is not-so-stealthily taking over reddit from the inside.
    2. Coursera brought in $43 million in an allegedly oversubscribed round — raising their total VC funding to $66 million. Goals are to grow team, expand into mobile, and improve third party integration.
    3. The Washington Post reports on new research on women leaders and the Goldilocks syndrome. Still a double bind between being assertive and acquiescent, but some progress in perception of the assertive.
    4. For those of you obsessed with productivity hacks, IFTTT goes mobile with an iPhone app. Who knew back in sixth grade math that if-then statements would be an important part of daily life?
    5. Hard to believe that it was only five years ago that Apple’s app store opened its virtual doors. Here’s a recap of some of the significant advances during that half-decade, like the creation of a $10 billion new industry, and impact of a mobile workforce on enterprise IT practices.
  • College decision day

    stick figure thinkingIt’s May 1 — international workers’ day in many parts of the world — but for some anxious teens here in the U.S. it’s the day to decide where to go to college. And everyone, it seems, from family to college counselors to teachers to friends is eager to help them make the right decision. Even the boldface font of the New York Times blog on admissions sends a message: The Choice is a big deal, and you’d better make the right one.

    Of course, there are better and worse choices. Students with a well-defined passion for Aramaic or a unique flavor of epidemiology will need to find the right scholars and research opportunities for their intellectual pursuits. And funding is an important factor to consider for nearly everyone (here are some harrowing charts on the student borrowing bubble).

    But there are many students with general liberal arts interests who are seeking one definitive, correct answer: an answer that will lead to the right Sliding Doors style sequence of events. For these students, there are a frustrating number of good choices. A proliferation of PhDs means there are terrific faculty across the country (and of course, around the globe). The internet opens up access to library and museum materials previously segregated by geography and institution. And the precipitous rise of MOOCs means that anyone so inclined can expand their knowledge for no or relatively low cost.

    This year, I’ve spoken to a number of students in the throes of the decision. Some are weighing two-year community college to state options; some are choosing among Ivies; most fall somewhere in between in terms of selective options. There are in every case tradeoffs, but no bad options — but the anxiety-provoking paradox of choice is in full effect for these teens.

    When pressed for the right choice, I tell them that the best decision that they can make is to bet on themselves. Study hard. Challenge yourself. Get some quantitative skills. Make the most of wherever you go. The people who are struggling with their careers in their 20s and 30s don’t break down neatly along college selectivity lines or Fiske Guide entries. The common element is people who didn’t invest in the knowledge, skills, networks, or adaptive learning approach for today’s market ( this Tom Friedman column captures the shift precisely). And while there are better and worse college fits, there are remarkable number of excellent institutions where you can find all of the above.

    So, congratulations to the Class of 2017. Whatever box you checked today —  if you’ve committed yourself to learning, you’ve made the right choice.

  • What does a $3 million dollar wikipedia bio look like?

    Breakthrough winners

    The Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences was awarded this week to eleven scientists  “who think big, take risks and have made a significant impact on our lives.” The size of the gift is intended to drive leading research, but also to advance the public presence of people who are changing the world through life sciences.

    From the eleven winners’ wikipedia pages, I selected the copy in the header, background education, and research sections (the very different page metadata was also interesting), and created a wordle to see what the picture looked like. Only one of the two female winners had a wikipedia page (making the case to Lean In?), so I lifted a few paragraphs from her university bio.

    This illustration is highly unscientific, showing only word frequency in self- or third-party reported accounts of the prizewinners’ lives. Two observations: much of this life sciences work still takes place in university settings, and there are a lot of smart minds working specifically on cancer.

  • edX is here

    edX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. edX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone. More.