Training entrepreneurial engineers

As an engineer who went to business training almost the minute I took my first job, I appreciate both the value and limitation of a business education for engineering professionals. Of course, I appreciate it even more now that I’ve started a copy, made tons of mistakes, got a formal business education and now teach at a business school.

Five elite US engineering schools got really nice press Tuesday in the Financial Times for their Master’s in Engineering Management program. With a little digging, it was clear they have a website and a “consortium.”

The FT article puts the best case forward:

Joseph Helble, dean of the Thayer School, says Mem programmes are “for engineering grads who know they don’t want to spend their entire careers in design or in a lab. They want to do broader, systems-based engineering, by identifying promising new product lines. They want to create a vision for the technology in the broadest business sense.”

As someone who once thought he would teach in engineering management, I’m all in favor of having more such programs.

Many engineering students have taken my technology strategy class, but without a business core, they get glimpses of insights, not the way to build upon a firm footing in accounting, finance, marketing and organizations. So an integrated master’s degree combining technical and business topics is a great way to address this.

However, when looking at the MEM consortium, I’m not quite clear what makes these five schools different. Do they have explicit standards? Is it the shared “MEM” brand? Or are they a members-only club? For example, the list excludes two of the top engineering schools in the country: Berkeley has a top-flight interdisciplinary Management of Technology program, while MIT has its System Design and Management program, jointly run by Engineering and the Sloan School.

And then there’s the question of how much any school prepares an engineer to be an entrepreneur. Plenty of engineers became entrepreneurs without formal preparation and did quite well. (Hewlett & Packard, Bose, Jacobs & Viterbi, and the list goes on...)

I don’t think a class or a business plan competition is going to help a 23-year-old engineering student create the next HP. Interning with a young company (as I did) would help, as would working for a top-flight company in the same industry. But nothing beats going to work in Silicon Valley, Boston or one of the other regions where you are immersed entrepreneurship, venture capital, startup infrastructure and a startup culture.

Georgia Tech’s TI:GER program

Last month, I was fortunate to be able to attend a workshop on technology management education that was held at Georgia Tech. The workshop emphasized the interdisciplinary nature of such education. Earlier I blogged about Harvard’s brand new technology commercialization program, instituted by Lee Fleming and his colleagues.

But with the press of work, I didn’t write up what was covered about our host’s program, the Georgia Tech TI:GER program. The program was initially funded by a National Science Foundation IGERT grant, but with the expiration of the grant is seeking replacement funding. Host Marie Thursby created the TI:GER program, based on her earlier program at Purdue.

Part of the importance of the program was transfer to other programs. One mechanism for that was the publication of a book of readings edited by Thursby and Gary Libecap. The chapters are among the readings used in the three semester-length core courses for the TI:GER students.

The TI:GER program is jointly sponsored by Georgia Tech and the Emory Law school. Each interdisciplinary team includes a Georgia Tech MBA student, two Emory law students, and a science or engineering PhD student (3rd or 4th year) from Georgia Tech. The learning goals for the team members are:

• S&E PhDs: become aware of business and legal issues, produce a dissertation of technical merit and market relevance and (perhaps) commercialize their own technology;
• MBAs, JDs: get experience in technical research setting; and
• All: communication/team skills

So far the program has included 190 students in six years. One of the teams — Syzygy Memory Plastics, with Ph.D. student Walter Voit explaining the potential of the technology to make objects that will spring into any shape.

Harvard’s Inventing Breakthroughs and Commercializing Science

At the Georgia Tech conference earlier this month, Lee Fleming of Harvard Business School described the program he created for technology commercialization.

The program he created is “Inventing Breakthroughs and Commercializing Science”. As the course explains its goals:

1. it gives you the managerial insights to increase the chances that your organization will invent a breakthrough.
2. it gives you an understanding of today's increasingly complex innovative landscape. …
3. the project will give you hands-on experience - as a member of a multi-disciplinary team - in the development of science-based technologies such as genomics, nanotechnology, information technology, and photonics.

As with the other programs discussed at the conference, the Harvard program has a strong interdisciplinary focus. In this case, the interdisciplinary nature is that of its students, who come not just from HBS, but also from science, engineering, medicine and other schools at Harvard. (Lee said a major issue is the divergence of class schedules, which Harvard plans to correct in Fall 2009).

The program (created with Vicki Sato and Kent Bown) has four modules: breakthrough innovation, opportunity analysis, analyzing prior patents, and developing cross-disciplinary teams.

As with most research schools, Lee is encouraged to bring his research into the classroom. The readings and cases (listed below) are largely based on his own work. In this day of Google, I won’t share his insight into the pedagogical purposes of each, but let instructors get that from the teaching notes.

I first learned of Lee from his paper with David Waguespack on open standards (which I cited in my own (co-authored) paper on open source communities). We met F2F when we served as discussants together for a panel at the 2007 Academy meeting, but I’m hoping we’ll be working together more in the future.

Lee also has a personal stake, in that his wife is CEO of a startup (with early stage funding) that is based on university licensed technology. So he’s living the technology commercialization life first hand.

Below is a bibliography of the materials presented by Lee.

Readings

• Lee Fleming, “Breakthroughs and the “Long Tail” of Innovation,” Sloan Management Reviews, 49, 1 (Fall 2007), pp 69-74.
• Lee Fleming and Matt Marx, “Managing Creativity in Small Worlds,” California Management Review, 48, 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 6-25

Cases
Here are the cases and the Harvard Business School Publishing case numbers.

• “Aptekar’s Unlikely Spin; Commercializing an MRI Breakthrough from Atomic Clocks and Quantum Computing,” (N1-608-064). (Teaching Note: 5-608-078)
• “Epodia: Demise of the HBS case-writing Monopoly?” (9-605-077) and “Linux, Supplement to Epodia,” (9-606-067). (Teaching Note: 5-607-104)
• “HP Nanotech: Partnership with CNSI,” (9-606-045). (Teaching Note: N5-607-105)
• “Infovision (A): Technology Transfer at Georgia Tech,” (9-605-064) and “Infovision (B): TI:GER Program Assessment,” (9-605-065). (Teaching Note: N5-607-102)
• “Photovoltaic Breakthrough,” (9-604-034). (Teaching Note: 5-606-085)
• “Barry Ricemen at NetD” (A) (9-606-090) and (B) (9-606-151). (Teaching Note: 5-607-107)
• “SpudSpy,” (9-605-059). (Teaching Note: 5-607-103)

Teaching Notes without Cases

• Module Note: “Key Concepts in a Module on Managing Invention of Breakthroughs,” March 19, 2007, (5-607-109).
• Teaching Note: “The Process of Scientific Discovery”, (5-607-126).

Interdisciplinary tech management education

Last Thursday and Friday, I was fortunate to be invited (due to a last minute cancellation) to attend a workshop at Georgia Tech on “Graduate Education in Technology Commercialization.” The annual workshop is funded by the Kauffman Foundation and hosted by Tech’s TI:GER program.

The major theme of the 24 hours was interdispclinary (or multidiscplinary) cooperation on campuses for delivering technology management education. One of the Thursday dinner dinner speakers were Mark Allen, Senior Vice Provost for Research and Innovation at Tech. Like Allen, I really liked the idea of combining research (generating new knowledge) and innovation (in this case, commercializing knowledge) under one vice provost.

The other dinner speaker was Andrew Comrie, who lists among is various titles “Director of Graduate Interdiscplinary Programs” at Arizona. He argued that the central mission of universities — knowledge creation and knowledge transfer — require creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. Multidisiplinary programs allow creating new knowledge. One example is the professional science master’s, such as the combined biotech/business degree offered by UA and SJSU. The PSM — once a pet project of the Sloan Foundation — is inherently interdisciplinary, often including a business component to better prepare scientists for industry careers.

The discussion of the two specific curricula — at Georgia Tech and Harvard — were also clearly interdisciplinary in both the teachers and the students. (I hope to post more later).

An important point made by host Marie Thursby was that universities are organized around discplinary lines, but companies (and real world problems) are not. At some schools crossing disciplinary silos is harder than others. In my experience, it tends to be a double whammy — an overriding loyalty to disciplinary identity also crowds out an interest in solving real (often interdisciplinary) problems, as the Sidney Harris cartoon suggests.

The program continued with a panel discussion of the interdisciplinary technology management centers at various universities, starting with Ikhlaq Sidhu and Ted Schielman of Berkeley. The panel continued with Sherry Hoskinson (of Arizona’s McGuire Center) and Jay Kesan, who talked about their Certificate in Entrepreneurship and Management at Illinois.

Clearly much of the progress here is due to Kauffman funding teaching initiatives and transfer of best practices. But it also depends on the willingness of various faculty and universities to take a risk — going beyond the conventional disciplinary silos, norms and rewards systems — in search of programs that will best prepare students for work in a multi-disiplinary world.

Five business lessons for engineers

At this year's TI:GER workshop, the most directly relevant talk was that by Ikhlaq Sidhu of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Dr. Sidhu is an adjunct professor in the industrial engineering department and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.

Like most of the speakers, he talked about what his school has done in technology management education — in this case, 900 students taking 9 courses and/or involved in the VentureLab program. (The previous speaker, Ted Sichelman of the Berkeley law school, had enumerated the various interdisciplinary technology efforts across seven colleges at Cal).

As Sidhu explained his program, one figure jumped out at me — the supporting cast of 600 Silicon Valley professionals that get involved in the center’s programs. With names like Judy Estrin (former CTO of Cisco), such a supply would be impossible to find (let alone engage) anywhere outside Berkeley or Stanford (or maybe MIT or Harvard).

However, what I found most remarkable (i.e. worth remarking on) in his talk was a recap from the presentation he developed for last year’s workshop. Specifically, he identified five skills that today’s engineers need:

1. To know what problem is worth solving
2. To know how to acquire resources
3. To be able to communicate
4. To know how to work within and build global virtual teams
5. To be leaders in a global economy — not commoditized contributors.

This list is now driving Berkeley’s vision of how it trains engineers.

I personally found the list compelling for three reasons. First, all five relate directly or indirectly to business issues, not the technical side of engineering. That these are hard problems is exactly why I became a business professor (rather than taking the shorter path into C.S.)

Second, the list resonates with my 15 years at Palomar Software. While global teams are recent (and a bit of a fad), the other four are the issues that my cofounder and I — two engineers in a garage — confronted when running our software company 20 years ago. Neil and I were both above average communicators, but the accuracy, precision and completeness of communication by our staff was an ongoing challenge. While Palomar eventually found problems worth solving (that were not commoditized until 2001), during the first 7 years our choices were severely constrained by lack of resources.

(In 2000-2002, when we were working with HP and its other onshore and offshore printer driver development partners, we had to confront the global teams issue, complete with 8 p.m. PST teleconferences to Bangalore).

Finally, commoditization is an issue that’s been a central theme of my Silicon Valley-oriented blog. If technology is a commodity, it will be done in India, China, or wherever the cheapest location is this year: the only economic reason to train and employ American engineers is to create value that can’t be created elsewhere.