Beyond startups: Barriers to entrepreneurship in academia can be surmounted
University researchers do not often bring new products and services directly to the marketplace, but a key part of their job is same as that of entrepreneurs, according one panelist at a Nov. 8 workshop on entrepreneurship.
"We find ways of doing things that weren't done before and find things out about the world that weren't known before," said Ed Felten, a Princeton professor of computer science and director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. "That's our core job."
The panel discussion on "Entrepreneurship in Higher Education" was the fourth in a series of five workshops on applying the principles of entrepreneurship in settings other than start-up companies. Other topics in the series, led by visiting professor Julian Lange, included government, economic development, non-profits and large corporations.
While intellectual entrepreneurship is the bread and butter of faculty research, Felten said, organizational entrepreneurship within institutions of higher education is a different matter and happens less often. His co-panelists, Nancy Malkiel, Princeton's dean of the college, and David Botstein, a geneticist and director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, told the audience about their own efforts to bring about change within the teaching and administrative structure of Princeton.
"I have no ability to make change happen unless I can persuade a significant fraction of some 800-plus faculty members that it makes sense," Malkiel said. "Unlike someone in the corporate world, I can't say: Do this. I have to rely on persuasion and analysis and a variety of other efforts that might be described as soft, rather than hard power."
Malkiel described two projects she led: one to curb grade inflation at Princeton and the other to encourage students to choose majors in a greater variety of departments and more evenly redistribute students among departments. The first grew out of a request by the University's Committee on Examinations and Standing, while the second was Malkiel's own initiative.
Combating grade inflation required collaboration between the committee members and department chairs to draft a University-wide policy that was eventually voted into effect at an all-faculty meeting in April 2004. "That, in and of itself, did not make change happen," Malkiel said. "This is not easy work. Individual faculty members -- one by one -- individual departments -- one by one -- determine whether change happens ... You have to apply constant attention, constant vigilance, reminders, exhortations, praise, encouragement, and confrontation about lack of progress in order to sustain the change."
Today, Princeton is widely regarded as a rare example of a university that has made significant progress in reversing the trend toward higher and higher grades.
Botstein prefaced his remarks by questioning whether the words "academic entrepreneurship" go together and said the slow pace of change at universities is one reason behind a central concern of his: How to make scientific education more engaging for students. The conventional academic structure requires science students to absorb several semesters of lecture-style courses in math, physics and biology without an opportunity to put them all to use in pursuing actual research.
"All the factors that cause this to be so are well documented and agreed upon but no one can make it change," Botstein said.
To address the problem, Botstein created an innovative science course that integrates mathematics, physics, biology and computer science along with hands-on labs that closely resemble the kind of work actual scientists do.
The key, he said, was for the initiative to come from the Lewis-Sigler Institute, which is outside the structure of any particular department. Also, the course was not an attempt to change the way these subjects had been taught for many generations in their regular departments.
"We weren't going to play a zero-sum game. We did this as an experiment to the side of the existing curriculum," Botstein said. "It's a demonstration -- an 'existence proof,' if you will -- that there is a better way to do this."
Ideas from the course have now begun to influence the conventional curricula, he said. (The engineering school subsequently created an integrated course series that combines engineering, math and physics.)
The panelists agreed that one difference between business entrepreneurs and faculty members trying to bring change to their institutions is the level of risk they are exposed to. While entrepreneurs often put themselves at financial risk, Botstein said, academics have the protection of tenure, which is designed to encourage innovative thinking.
"I never felt I was risking my reputation," Botstein said. "I'm a scientist. We do experiments. Some experiments fail."
"One factor in all of these cases, is having a different evaluation of how risky something is than other people do," said Felten, who described how he changed the course of his research and headed into computer security and technology policy at times when those were not mainstream fields. "If you are really convinced that something is less risky than it seems from the outside, then it's a lot easier to do it."