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Making the Transition: Leveraging MSU’s Legacy in the 21st Century

1. A Legacy Poised for the Future

MSU pioneered a model of academic research and development in 1855­—the land grant college—that catalyzed a new model of research and innovation, and brought unprecedented opportunity to the American middle class.

As we enter a new century, MSU’s legacy is rich with the necessary values and intention that are critical for addressing the complex and systemic challenges that we face as a global community.

MSU’s challenge, like other leading research universities, is to transform its organization and leverage its unique knowledge assets in order to meet the challenging knowledge and problem-solving needs of an interconnected, global society.

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A World of Systemic and Interdependent Challenges The most pressing problems we face as a society indicate that we inhabit a more interconnected and systemic problem space than in the past.

Challenges such as food and water security, sustainable energy, rapid urbanization, pandemic diseases, emerging economy development, and severe global inequities span systems, geographies, and societal domains.

Among many forces of change, two converging trajectories are significant in shaping our emerging challenges.

Global Infrastructure Shifts The development of a new digital infrastructure and public policy changes enabling mobility of talent, capital, and knowledge around the world is “fundamentally reordering the way we live, learn, socialize, play and work.” i Authors Hagel, Brown and Davison refer to this as the “Big Shift” and document how it redefines success at individual, organizational and societal levels. The “Big Shift” transforms the power of the periphery relative to the core. With more fluid interconnection and exchange of people, ideas, and capital, the center loses its dominance in innovation, creativity, and value generation. Institutions that remain aligned to the power of the core will lose relevance and effectiveness in the future.

Global Resource Ceilings Energy, water, and climate change are three time bombs affecting global sustainability. ii According to Jared Diamond, our increasing global interconnectedness and diffusion of consumption practices may in fact lead us to global collapse. These time bomb issues will play out in some form over the next 50 years, whether they are shaped by human intervention or not, creating significant consequences for the planet. They create a global imperative for innovation and creative response at the individual, organizational and societal levels. Exacerbating the impacts of resource ceilings is the rigid mindset anchored in the past that ignores externalities, the increasing fluidity of borders, and a growing gap between needs for and capabilities of governance.

These converging trajectories of change create societal challenges that are highly unpredictable, systemically interdependent, and lacking clear cause and effect relationships. Successful responses to these strategies require MSU to develop connected knowledge, breakthrough thinking, and problem solving practices that include experimentation, rapid prototyping, and locally relevant applications.

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1. A Legacy Poised for the Future

MSU Faces a Landscape of Systemic Challenges Increasing global interconnection in a world of resource ceilings is likely to drive the number and diversity of cross impacts that may trigger “black swans” and “wicked problems” related to food, sustainability, safety & security, health, economic, and political domains. Individual actions and externalities can now have far reaching multiplier effects as they cascade across tightly interconnected systems, creating catastrophic impacts at mass levels.

Black Swans: The disastrous explosion that caused the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010 was deemed highly unlikely. There had been few spills of this magnitude in decades.

The broad Gulf region faces serious agricultural, economic, and natural resource damage as an estimated 12.2 million gallons of oil (or 210,000 gallons per day) permeated the Gulf waters and coastline. The impacts will effect generations to come. Popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan events exist beyond the realm of what is imaginable and are highly rationalized in hindsight. Because it is hard to anticipate Black Swan events, flexible response and damage mitigation are often more effective and efficient solution strategies than planning and prevention efforts. Black Swan events may be positive or negative, yet either way they create massive disruption and ripple effects across sectors and systems of society.

Wicked Problems: Childhood obesity, food safety, food fraud, food security, carbon labeling, pandemic influenza, and an AIDS epidemic are looming societal issues with widespread impacts across social groups and institutional levels. These are persistent challenges characterized by enormous systemic complexity and interdependencies, changing or contradictory problem requirements, and nested problems that are difficult to identify.

What makes wicked problems contentious is that solutions depend on how the problems are framed, which is often contradictory across stakeholders, and there are no known, definitive solutions. One solution may even lead to another wicked problem. iii

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Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory

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2. Creating Value: From Specialized to Connected Knowledge

Knowledge in a world of globally systemic and interdependent challenges requires a flexible interface in order to create sustainable value. With accelerated movement of people, ideas, and capital, value emerges from flows of knowledge across diverse boundaries. Protecting stocks of specialized knowledge, whether it is intellectual IP in the form of a blueprint, patent, or scientific journal article, is not a viable strategy for sustaining economic and social value. In fact, specialized knowledge will have diminishing value and relevance if it cannot be more directly connected to problem solvers, decision-makers, and innovators. It needs an interface beyond the peer reviewed journal article.

Knowledge creation by itself is not sufficient for sustaining value. Knowledge creation plus flexible interfaces to diverse disciplines, contexts and applications are necessary.

Focusing on cultivating connected knowledge—knowledge stocks, flows, and interfaces for connectivity—is a key source of value in a world of globally interconnected and systemic challenges. MSU’s research and departmental units need to become more porous to enable knowledge flows.

If silos are not connected through a variety of interface mechanisms and strategies for exchange, knowledge capital will remain highly underleveraged. Inefficient use and leverage of knowledge capital will risk MSU’s strategic position in the future to attract talent, partners, and resources.

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2. Creating Value: From Specialized to Connected Knowledge

An Interface for Connected Knowledge at Stanford’s d.school In 2005 Stanford University created The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design as a way to use design thinking as “the glue that binds people together.”

Known as the d.school, it has become a hub for graduate students, faculty, industry, and community to come together and collectively solve big problems in a human centered way. iv The d.school uses design thinking values, processes and frameworks to create an interface that connects knowledge from various disciplines and groups at Stanford. Students from every school on campus— engineering, business, medicine, law, humanities and sciences, education and earth sciences—work in diverse teams to integrate insight across diverse disciplines and pioneer design-based solutions.

Faculty teams intentionally mix disciplines like computer science with philosophy, and CEOs with biologists and elementary school policy-makers.

The culture of collaboration values mutual support, defers judgmental thinking, and enables teams to move quickly beyond obvious ideas. Emphasis is placed on how to explore difference and create opportunities at the intersection of rich connections.

This allows diverse teams to take on bold initiatives and projects.

The d.school’s processes for collaboration create a culture of innovation that catalyzes multiple types of projects and initiatives. At any one moment, there are hundreds of projects underway. They range from impromptu challenges that last just an hour or two, to 10-week class projects, to student teams that continue on to deploy their solutions and start companies. As networks grow and students develop interests in new directions, d.school initiatives continue to form and develop around them, broadening their knowledge and network capital.

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3. Leveraging Organizational Assets: From Pipelines to Platforms

MSU faces a strategic opportunity to achieve sustainable value and societal impact in the future by redesigning its organizational structures to support the growth of connected knowledge. This does not suggest dismantling research and academic departments or refraining from deepening knowledge expertise. It does, however, suggest building more networked structures and dynamic relationships to connect knowledge and stimulate flows. This means decoupling university organizational structures—its processes, information flows, incentives, and sources of creative inspiration—from its funding model and transitioning to a networked collaboration platform. Centralized funding pipelines have encouraged compartmentalized, narrow expert knowledge and rigid disciplinary thinking, while constraining opportunities to expand diverse relationships, make connections across disciplines, experiment with new incentives, and open up new channels of intellectual inspiration.

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3. Leveraging Organizational Assets: From Pipelines to Platforms

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Calit2 - A Platform to Leverage Collaboration for California’s Future Calit2 was launched in 2000 through the California Institutes for Science and Innovation Initiative, with the purpose of tackling large, societal issues facing California by accelerating innovation, creative responses, and job creation. This objective required a new paradigm for conducting research and for organizing the university system itself. v Calit2 cultivates connected knowledge by serving as a proactive and neutral platform for interdisciplinary research and development activities. It focuses in five areas critical to California’s future—environment and civil infrastructure, intelligent transportation, digitally enabled genomic medicine, new media arts, and disaster response. Solutions to these challenges require breakthrough thinking, highly interdisciplinary approaches, and risk taking. To support this, Calit2 offers an open and accessible institutional platform for collaborative research teams to form, secure funding and leverage Calit2’s technical and social infrastructure.

Deep & Connected Thinking: Calit2 builds horizontal links among departments and practice domains to foster deeply integrative thinking and crossdisciplinary activities. It isn’t uncommon for digital media artists, geneticists, and material scientists to be working side by side. It recognizes that opportunity exists as science and technology disciplines interpenetrate and ultimately change each other to reveal new insights. The Internet is just one of many tools that support breaking down physical barriers and linking researchers from any location.

Extensive Stakeholder Involvement: The institute broadens involvement beyond faculty to students, industry, government, and community partners to provide opportunities for diverse feedback and co-creation. Such extensive involvement helps Calit2 frame research questions and solutions in more informed and creative ways.

Prototyping in “Living Labs”: Calit2 focuses on the development and deployment of its infrastructure solutions in the real world context. New facilities at UC San Diego and UC Irvine create the opportunity to live and practice its technological and social goals. Examples include a rooftop “antenna garden” to support wireless experiments, and a building outfitted with over 40 vibration sensor monitors to detect earthquakes. Living the prototype facilitates real world testing and helps to push projects beyond academic theory and peer review publishing toward achieving stakeholder relevance more quickly.

Technical professionals help facilitate the bridge between academia and industry.

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Pipeline Structure

Opportunistic Growth

Traditional Growth

Dynamic Growth

Constrained Growth

Specialized Knowledge

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Platform Structure

Connected Knowledge

4. MSU’s Organizational Roadmap: Toward Dynamic Growth

MSU and its Food, Society & Sustainability initiatives are well–positioned to transition to a networked collaboration platform that cultivates connected knowledge. The specialized knowledge nodes and diverse relationships already exist as a part of MSU’s rich legacy. Broadening its connectivity base through collaborative spaces, interactive processes, new incentives, social and technological norms and tools is its future legacy. A networked collaboration platform offers MSU a growth path to more diverse opportunities, partnerships, sources of funding, and greater societal impact.

Currently, MSU largely organizes knowledge creation according to dedicated funding pipelines that encourage highly specialized knowledge (bottom left quadrant). In the long run, this approach underleverages its knowledge base by constraining connectivity and knowledge flows to narrow contexts, disciplines, and stakeholders. Ultimately, this approach is not sustainable in the world of complex, systemic challenges. MSU’s strategic growth path is in making an organizational transformation to a networked collaboration platform (top right quadrant) that optimizes the connectivity and flows of knowledge to create and apply new insights and knowledge. This approach is more dynamic and capable of responding to the highly systemic and interconnected innovation needs of global society.

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4. MSU’s Organizational Roadmap: Toward Dynamic Growth

Connected K Opportunistic Growth Pipeline—Connected This approach centers on individuals and their extended networks, creating mini hubs within formalized pipelines.

Collaboration capitalizes on emerging opportunities and personal networks (social and professional). The resultant informal network creates value by identifying the right person, the professional skill set, and the shared social norms of cooperation to match the task. Knowledge creation and support structures are ad hoc and informal, largely relying on individual support structures that may limit capacity to push new frontiers.

Optimizes personal social networks

Pipeline Structure

Ad hoc collaboration Opportunistic leverage of knowledge sharing

Traditional Growth Pipeline—Specialized The emphasis is on incremental advancement of specialized knowledge within defined disciplines. Expertise resides with particular individuals, not necessarily across the institution. The dominant skill set is most relevant for highly specialized problems that are not time urgent.

Knowledge sharing processes and related support structures tend to be rigid and formalized.

Optimizes individual expertise Limited collaboration within familiar groups Underleveraged knowledge capital

Specialized K

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d Knowledge Dynamic Growth Platform—Connected An open platform optimizes knowledge stocks and flows through connectivity across institutions, disciplines, and other boundaries. Flexible support structures and incentives for cooperation encourage interactions at network edges and horizontal connectivity. Knowledge creation processes move beyond sharing perspectives to integrating diverse perspectives, creating new knowledge flows and pushing new frontiers. This approach flexibly responds to time sensitive and opportunistic projects, and accommodates alternative funding models of foundations and corporations.

Dynamic collaboration across boundaries Leverages knowledge flows and connections to create relevant and timely knowledge

Constrained Growth Platform—Specialized The tendency is for formal collaboration that aggregates nodes of expertise – individuals with specialized knowledge – around a particular topic or task to gain different perspectives. Disciplinary contributions may be additive rather than integrative. Collaborations may be time dependent, but are not necessarily spontaneous or long standing. Examples include serving on a blue ribbon panel or national study on a timely topic of interest. Knowledge creation, processes, incentives and support structures are specified by topic and task.

Collaborations tend to be ‘in addition’ to regular work responsibilities.

Platform Structure

Optimizes the institution as part of a vast knowledge ecosystem

Optimizes established institutional relationships Formalized collaboration Inefficiently leverages limited knowledge sharing

d Knowledge

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Achieving Global Impacts with Networked Collaboration Platforms Networked collaboration platforms are emerging in various global industries like apparel, consumer products, biotech, pharmaceuticals, design, digital media, and curriculum. The Hong Kong firm Li Fung leverages a vast network of thousands of supplier and production partners to create customized apparel for its design customers. vi Consumer products giant, Procter & Gamble, opened up its R&D network globally through its Connect and Develop initiative to collaborate with external innovators. Over half of its new products now originate from outside P&G’s internal R&D organization. vii Ultimately, reinventing itself as a networked collaboration platform will help MSU to have a more global impact and become a more dynamic change agent by leveraging its knowledge and human capital assets more efficiently and effectively. University stakeholders, including foundations, communitybased organizations, and corporations, are eager for opportunities to collaborate and experiment with new approaches.

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4. MSU’s Organizational Roadmap: Toward Dynamic Growth

Foundations

Increasingly want to be a part of the solution and a catalyst for change rather than an arm’s–length funder. They desire a closer relationship in order to ensure impact.

Community-Based Organizations

Have valuable local expertise and social capital that can help frame issues in meaningful ways.

CBOs want to co-create solutions and build local agency.

Corporations

Want relief from the burden of managing wicked problems related to the complex problem space (like food security). They desire effective collaborations in pre-competitive spaces.

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5. Engaging the Global MSU Community

Transforming MSU successfully into a networked collaboration platform is a shared responsibility of the broader MSU community. As previous MSU faculty and community pioneered a model for university research and innovation in the 19th century, we all have an opportunity to help transform MSU and inspire other universities with a new approach for collaborative knowledge creation and innovation in the 21st century. It will require a creative re-examination of organizational structures and currencies as well as individual practices, group processes, and incentives. Different constituent groups at MSU can make critical contributions in the transition to a networked collaboration platform that will optimize the university’s rich legacy, vast knowledge assets and human capital.

Action Steps Individuals and groups at MSU can take action and make distinct contributions towards creating a networked collaboration platform that cultivates connected knowledge and helps address the pressing challenges of an interconnected global society.

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5. Engaging the Global MSU Community

Executive Level: President, Vice-president, Provost, and Deans The executive level at MSU has a critical leadership role in articulating a compelling vision of MSU’s role as a pioneering change agent and responsive global citizen in the 21st century. This means sustained support, over time, of policies and practices that reinforce the strategic need to move toward a more dynamic growth path. This group puts in place the language, incentives and processes of connected knowledge and networked collaboration platforms and clearly articulates the risks of remaining in the old pipeline, specialized knowledge world.

Department Chairs, School Directors & Heads of Centers This group of MSU professionals is poised to use their support structures as flexible interfaces of the new platform. Department chairs, school directors, and heads of centers can innovate and experiment with alternative conduits that link diverse networks and remove barriers to knowledge flows. This group is well–positioned to pioneer cooperative systems and collaborative processes that encourage growth of new knowledge and resource abundance through expansion of MSU’s collaboration network. The potential to join together existing networks and create new ones is a source of great potential value.

Faculty & Professional Staff Faculty and professional staff provide immense human capital to MSU through their expertise and their personal and professional networks. They form the core of a new social and collaborative context for knowledge flows and connectivity. If faculty and staff can recognize their networks as a critical currency for MSU’s collaboration platform, they hold the potential to expand the edges of MSU and catalyze its spaces for innovation. This group can help contribute to identifying and shaping a more robust and meaningful set of metrics and incentives for collaboration and performance.

Administrative Staff Process and flows are critical to a networked collaboration platform. MSU’s administrative staff can make significant contributions to MSU’s future legacy by seeing themselves as innovators of processes, tools, and communication that will facilitate connectivity, collaboration, and flows. Networks don’t necessarily grow by themselves, but need to be monitored and nurtured.

MSU’s administrative staff has an important role to play in shifting their perceived value from gatekeepers to network facilitators.

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How can you spark connections and collaboration for MSU?

i John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, Basic Books, 2010, P.31. ii Jared Diamond, speech at The Economist’s Big Ideas Series, Innovation Ideas Summit, UC Berkeley, March 22, 2010. iii Roger Martin, The Design of Business, Harvard Business Press, 2009, p.94 iv http://dschool.stanford.edu/index.php

This report is part of a larger food, society and sustainability initiative at MSU. External support has been provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Andrea Saveri, Saveri Consulting Project Evaluation and Assessment

v http://www.calit2.net/about/index.php vi John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, Basic Books, 2010.

P.83-85. vii Roger Martin, The Design of Business, Harvard Business Press, 2009, P.96-97

Kevin D. Walker, Professor, College of Veterinary Medicine, Michigan State University walke357@msu.edu

Richard M. Foster, W.K. Kellogg Professor, Food, Society and Sustainability, Michigan State University fosterrick@anr.msu.edu

Scott R. Winterstein, Professor, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Michigan State University winterst@msu.edu

Copyright 2010 Michigan State University Board of Trustees