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1.: An "American Idol" of innovation From: Gea O.F. Parikesit

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1.: An "American Idol" of innovation

Posted by: "Gea O.F. Parikesit" geaofp@yahoo.com geaofp

Fri Oct 3, 2008 11:42 am (PDT)

Salam,

Copy-paste dari:
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2008_10_03/caredit.a0800145

Gea O.F. Parikesit
http://gea.ari.googlepages.com/home

--

Taken for Granted: A Big Idea about Fostering Innovation
By Beryl Lieff Benderly
October 03, 2008
Did you know that a cell phone camera can double as a microscope , instantly flashing images of slides made in jungle villages many
miles from the nearest microscope to health care professionals who can
use them to make diagnoses?
That replacing the Portland cement routinely used in making concrete with another binder could
substantially reduce the carbon dioxide now emitted in the
concrete-making process?
"There's a value to giving [young people] more autonomy early in their
career. There's a value to encouraging them to identify something that
they're passionate about." --Thomas Kalil
That the palm oil grown on just 2600 acres of land could supply biodiesel equal to 5% of the needs of the nation of Panama?
Me
neither. Those are only a few of the more than 100 original and useful
ideas brought to light by a program at the University of California,
Berkeley, that uses small amounts of money to unleash large amounts of
innovative brainpower. It could well be a much more widely applicable
model for how to spur and support scientific and technical originality
among students and postdocs.
With every science policy maven from Norman Augustine (the industrialist who chaired the influential U.S. National Academies Gathering Storm report)
to Elias Zerhouni (director of the National Institutes of Health)
worrying aloud about how the United States can foster innovation and
encourage young innovators, the program, known as Big Ideas @ Berkeley and run on a relative shoestring budget by the campus's special
assistant to the chancellor for science and technology, Thomas Kalil,
takes an unusual approach.
Kalil's brainchild is provocative
because in many ways it is the antithesis of the grant-driven,
rank-ridden academic system in which so many aspiring young researchers
find themselves mired and their originality stymied. The program
doesn't fret over status or seniority. It doesn't require specific
credentials. It doesn't cost a lot of money. It keeps bureaucratic
requirements to a minimum, and it aims not to bind would-be innovators
to institutional support, requirements, and schedules but to teach them
independence, self-reliance, and flexibility in bringing their
inspirations to fruition.
Risky business
The
Big Ideas philosophy is clear in the program's slogan, "Bears Breaking
Barriers," a reference to Berkeley's ursine mascot, the Golden Bear.
The program seeks out smart, innovative, and potentially high-impact
notions and then takes a chance that at least some of them can succeed.
The more interdisciplinary, insightful, and unexpected those ideas are,
the better. Since 2005, Kalil says, "I've provided some level of
assistance to over 130 projects."
He finds his protégés mainly by running what he calls an American Idol of innovation. Teams and individuals from across the campus compete in a cluster of contests in nanoscience, information technology, health, energy, the
environment, Third World development, and a few other areas. There's a
separate contest for new courses and curricula and another for
so-called idea labs , student-run organizations that bring people together from different
labs, departments, schools, and even campuses who are working on
similar problems. Annual prizes total nearly $200,000, and winners can
receive up to $10,000.
Funders with more money could, of course, award bigger prizes. National funding agencies and foundations, please take note.
The
rules are few and as simple as possible. At least one member of each
team entering must be a Berkeley student, graduate or undergraduate
(though Kalil says the concept could be just as applicable to postdocs,
and teams often include postdocs). Entrants have to describe their
project and the participants in 10 pages or less. Entries have to be
received by an announced deadline. Committees of experts select the
winners. Because of the rules' latitude, proposal styles and formats
often vividly reveal the writers' personalities.
The
contests accomplish more than awarding prizes to a limited number of
winners and runners-up, Kalil says. Through the competitions, "the most
ambitious and idealistic and energetic students self-identify." Doing
so gives winners and nonwinners alike access to two other resources
that Big Ideas offers. One is Marketplace , a Web site on which projects needing support can advertise and
through which would-be philanthropists seeking worthy causes, often
Berkeley alumni, can direct cash and in-kind donations.
The
other is Kalil's formidable network of contacts, built during his years
as President Bill Clinton's deputy assistant for technology and
economic policy and deputy director of the White House National
Economic Council, and before that, in the Washington, D.C., office of a
major law firm. He regularly activates his network to plug in young
idea entrepreneurs, whom he then tells, "You need to talk to this
person, and they're likely to fund your project." He aims to teach his
young originators to "not accept the status quo as a given but as
something that they can have an impact on by moving forward with their
idea, and then by creating a virtuous circle between results that
they're able to generate and our ability to mobilize additional
resources to support their work as they make progress."
Powerful contacts
As
if to illustrate the process, Big Ideas is itself the serendipitous
outgrowth of a student brainstorm. Among the responsibilities of
Kalil's main job is campuswide coordination of nanoscale science and
engineering projects. One day, a pair of students, an engineer and an
aspiring MBA, shared their plans to start a nanotechnology club. He
arranged some funding "from one of the National Science Foundation
centers [because] this was a legitimate education and outreach
activity," he says. The club they started, now several hundred members strong and the prototype of
"idea lab," sponsors activities including an annual forum with big-name
speakers and hundreds of participants, as well as its own annual
competitions. The group itself has won prizes and further funding in
competitions for successful business plans.
"I was telling
this to a friend of mine," Kalil recalls. As it happened, that friend
was Stewart Brand, the innovation and self-reliance guru best known for
his Whole Earth Catalog , the
once vastly influential bible of the 1960s counterculture. Pierre
Omidyar, the founder of eBay, had recently asked Brand to find ways of
investing $200,000 from the Omidyar Network , a self-described "philanthropic investment firm ... committed to
creating and fostering opportunity for people around the world," in
worthy causes.
The tale of the students' bright idea so
impressed Brand, Kalil says, that Brand "ended up giving me an
unrestricted grant of $20,000 ... to see if I could have the same kind
of impact ... in other areas." Kalil put out the word that he was
looking for innovative projects and "started getting so many
high-quality proposals from all over the campus" that he decided to
start a competition to award the money. Proposed projects continued to
pour in, and "eventually Stewart signed over almost all of the funding
that he'd been given" to support the young innovators Kalil was
finding. Additional funds also came from the Berkeley student
government and some other sponsors. "It just started to take off from
there," Kalil says.
Teaching self-reliance
Raising
money for the program is a big part of Kalil's work for Big Ideas. But
once the seeds have been planted, Kalil eagerly sends his protégés out
into the world. Once a team has "accomplished something, ... I can
[often] go to a specific individual or foundation or company and say,
'These people are really on the ball. This is what they've managed to
accomplish, this is what they want to do next, and this is how much it
will cost.' Then people are willing to support a specific project as
opposed to giving me some money [so that] I will empower Cal students
to change the world."
Kalil's young innovators are certainly
changing at least small parts of it. They are making water purification
cheaper for Third World communities; perfecting low-cost solar heaters;
building networks of communication and collaborating with scientists
across the university, and, in some cases, the entire Bay area;
building mobile digital devices that improve literacy education in
Third World countries (a project that has more than $300,000 in
additional funding, including $238,000 from the MacArthur Foundation);
and much more.
Beyond innovations, Big Ideas is about
developing what Kalil calls an "ecosystem" of innovation to help bright
young people get from idea to reality by looking, if necessary, beyond
obvious sources of help to find something that works for their project.
"There's a value to giving [young people] more autonomy early in their
career. There's a value to encouraging them to identify something that
they're passionate about," Kalil says. "What gives me confidence to do
it is the track record of the students that I've worked with and the
fact that I'm placing small enough bets on them [that] they don't all
need to succeed." With Americans so worried about the future of
innovation and so many scientifically and technically trained young
people frustrated by the current structure of research, Kalil's program
seems like an idea that deserves the close attention of funders, both
public and private, from institutions and organizations across the
nation.
Images. Top: Kelly Krause
Beryl Lieff Benderly writes from Washington, D.C.
10.1126/science.caredit.a0800145

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