Strategy. Innovation. Brand.
Looking Ahead – Will 2014 Be Better?
Meet your genome.
We all may well agree that 2013 was just plain weird. So, what’s next? Well, 2014 is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. It seems that all of our recent wars result from World War I, directly or indirectly. Perhaps we should just re-name the era the Second Hundred Years War.
Are there brighter things ahead? Do we have something to look forward to? Here are some suggestions from some of my favorite sources.
Meet your genome – Science magazine suggests that the era of personal medicine is just beginning. We’ll sequence your genome to develop personalized treatments for diseases like cancer or multiple sclerosis. In fact, it won’t be long before we sequence the genome of every newborn baby, just as a matter of course.
Meet your advertiser – as medicine gets personal, so does advertising. We’re changing from broadcast adverts to narrowcast – targeting demographic slivers wherever we can find them. Soon, it will be personalcast – advertising aimed at you and only you. Brick-and-mortar stores are even developing tools to track your movements in the store and make real-time special offers based on where you are.
Meet the robots – Technology Review notes that robots are ready to take their place in the workforce. They’ll start in dangerous places like battlefield rescues, but they’ll soon be able to “integrate seamlessly and safely in human spaces.” How will they learn? By studying us.
Meet your drone rescuer – the World Bank says that drones will be a “game changer” in disaster relief. They’ll help pinpoint where the problems are and drop supplies to isolated survivors. They might even “drone-lift” survivors to safety.
Meet an extinct species – 2014 is also the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the passenger pigeon. There are plans to bring it back. What next? I wonder if a T Rex would make a good pet.
Meet Consumption 2.0 – why bother to own things? Why not just pay for each use? We see it with music streaming … why not other things? We could conceivably stream books and magazines and pay for each page we read. Similarly, I just bought a new mobile phone. But I didn’t really buy it. I bought a service that provides me a phone and the right to upgrade it once a year. With technology changing so fast, why would you buy it?
Insert your computer here – biological transistors should allow us to insert computers into any living cell. That may help us repair or replace diseased bits of soft tissue just like we can replace bones and joints today. Indeed bio-computers might help us understand our own brains better. We didn’t really understand what our hearts did until we invented pumps. We may not really understand what our brains do until we build biological computers.
Meet the tech-lash – robot, bio-brains, big data, technology-driven job destruction, loss of privacy, drones, etc. etc. Where will it all lead? According to The Economist, it will almost certainly lead to tech-lash – as the technology elite “join bankers and oilmen in public demonology … in a peasants’ revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace.”
Meet the world champion – of course, 2014 also brings us the World Cup of football. My country is in the “group of death” and I fear that we won’t make it to the knockout round. My money’s on Germany.
University of Travis
Go UT!
When I’ve written about best-of-breed education in the past (here, here, and here), I’ve mainly stressed the benefits to students. Students can acquire competencies in many different ways, have them tested and verified, and get on with life. They will have more choices, more flexibility, and a better education at lower cost.
That’s all well and good … but what about teachers? Would best-of-breed (BOB) education be better for us?
More specifically, could I start my own university?
I enjoy teaching and I especially enjoy teaching at the University of Denver (DU). But teaching at any university imposes some constraints. For instance, DU is on a quarter system so I can only start new classes four times a year. If I had my own university, I might start a new class every Monday on the Internet. Students would have a lot more choices of when and how to get an education.
I could probably lower the cost of education as well. While DU is competitive on cost, it’s not cheap. I could offer my courses for $100 per student – very competitive – and make it up on volume. I would probably make more money than I’m making now and, at the same time, students could reduce their costs dramatically. They’d also get some darn good classes (if I do say so myself). Quality and flexibility go up while costs go down.
Setting up my own university is not as far-fetched as it might sound. It all has to do with how Learning Management Systems (LMS) have evolved. LMSs typically run on the Internet and help teachers manage all aspects of the education process – from lectures to grading to student communication. They can even help you identify plagiarism.
Traditionally, choosing an LMS was an institution-wide decision. A school (or a department within a school) would choose an LMS and all the teachers and students in the school would use it. For instance, I teach in University College (UCOL), the professional and continuing education unit within the University of Denver. Some years ago, UCOL standardized on an LMS called Pearson eCollege. Every course we teach now uses eCollege. (By the way, it’s quite good and I recommend it).
As LMSs have evolved over the past decade, they’ve become very rich platforms for serving up myriad educational experiences. The decision-making has also changed. It used to be an institutional decision. Now it’s a personal decision. Many LMS platforms are now free (or close to it) and they’re fairly easy to maintain. So I could acquire an LMS, set it up on this website, and start teaching. I could probably have it up and running in less than a month.
While students could learn a lot at the University of Travis (UT), they might find it difficult to prove that they had learned a lot. I would, of course, provide verifiable test scores and certificates. But that’s probably not enough. We would still need some type of universal testing system and “student passport” to verify what the students have learned and retained. As I’ve argued in the past, it’s not conceptually different from evaluating fine wines.
Andy Warhol once said that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. I have a slightly different take. In the future, everyone will be a teacher for 15 minutes. Barriers to entry are collapsing. While some people will teach full time, most people will teach from time to time. Opportunities to learn will expand dramatically and costs will drop.
Just one remaining question: what mascot should we choose for the University of Travis?
Innovate Here and Produce Here
Time to make it cool again.
When my clients talk to me about innovation, it’s almost always a conversation about products rather than processes. They want to know how to create new ideas that create new products. I often remind them that they should also be talking about new processes. New processes can lead to greater efficiency, reduced costs, and – sometimes – to new products.
When my clients do talk to me about new processes, it’s almost always about customer service and satisfaction. I can’t remember the last time I had an engaging conversation about innovation in manufacturing.
It’s a shame really because we may be entering a new paradigm in manufacturing. New processes and methods may just allow the USA to re-establish itself as a leader in manufacturing. That’s the point made by William Bonvillian in a recent article in Science. I think it’s an important trend that we need to think more about – so I’d like to summarize Bonvillian’s article here.
Bonvillian identifies the differences between front-end and back-end innovation. Front-end innovation is mainly about R&D and new products. Back-end innovation focuses on manufacturing; what’s the best way to produce those products? Bonvillian argues that our national innovation investment used to be fairly balanced between the two. Today, with the possible exception of the defense industry, we focus most of our innovation investment on the front-end.
The background to this shift is a change in the way we see manufacturing – a change in the paradigm. The original paradigm was innovate-here-and-produce-here. The current paradigm is innovate-here-and-produce-there. This has largely been driven by offshore manufacturing. Bonvillian argues, however, that the current paradigm is not just driven by low wages. Offshore centers like China have also invested heavily in back-end innovation.
The next paradigm could be innovate-there-and-produce-there, which would leave the USA essentially as a services economy. Bonvillian argues, however, that we could reverse this trend and return to the original paradigm – innovate-here-and-produce-here – through initiatives in Advanced Manufacturing or AM. He points out that Germany, like the USA, has a high-cost manufacturing infrastructure yet runs “…major trade surpluses in manufactured goods, whereas the United States has run large deficits”.
So, what does Advanced Manufacturing consist of? Bonvillian outlines six different initiatives:
Network-centric production – embed IT into every stage of the manufacturing chain and use big data to raise the IQ of the entire production process.
Advanced materials – “Create a ‘materials genome’ using supercomputing to design all possible materials….” Designers could then select the most appropriate materials for any given product.
Nanomanufacturing – “Embed nano-features into products to raise efficiency and performance.”
Mass customization – use advances in 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) to create one-off products “at the cost of mass production”.
Distribution efficiency – the goal might be to reduce distribution costs by 10%. According to Bonvillian, that’s enough to shift decisions about onshore versus offshore manufacturing. (Could delivery by drones be part of this?)
Energy efficiency – Bonvillian argues that “U.S. manufacturing has long been overly energy-intensive.” Using energy efficient technologies “could significantly drive down production costs.”
Bonvillian develops a good list but I think one more thing is needed. Somehow we need to make it cool to participate in back-end innovation. Today, it’s cool to do financial innovation and product innovation. But I don’t see the best and brightest minds drawn to manufacturing innovation. Time to launch a branding campaign to make manufacturing cool again.
Delivering Student-Centric, Best-of-Breed Education
Passport to Education
So, how do we deliver student-centric, best-of-breed education? It’s a worthy goal and I think three things have to happen. Here they are … I’d love to hear what you think as well.
1) Develop the student passport – if education is invested in the student rather than the institution, we’ll need a way to track what students are doing over time. I think of it as a passport, in three different ways: 1) It’s kept by the individual rather than the institution. 2) It’s universally recognized. 3) It keeps track of all the individual’s educational experiences.
On the other hand, it’s probably not a physical booklet but rather an online system. The student is responsible for keeping it up to date and can choose to give access to it (or not) to educational institutions, potential employers, potential spouses, and so on.
2) Agree on the competency required – let’s say a student acquires a number of educational experiences and claims that the sum of those experiences is equivalent to an MBA. To decide whether the claim is accurate, we first need to have some agreement on what constitutes an MBA.
That may sound difficult to achieve but we’ve already made a lot of progress. Different schools may have different emphases but accrediting agencies have a sense of what the common competencies are. Indeed, we now have a vision of a Common Core Curriculum for public education in the United States – and that was certainly a politically fraught process. Deciding what competencies constitute an MA or and MBA or a Ph. D. should be simple by comparison.
Notice that I emphasize “competency” rather than “curriculum”. Schools today may teach the same curriculum but some teach it well and some teach it poorly. We get by with a rough-and-ready sense of the prestige of the institution granting the degree. For instance, we might value a degree from Stanford more than a degree from Princeton. But that’s a very slippery yardstick and a student-centric universe would value what’s in the student more than what’s in the institution.
3) Universal testing, certification, recognition – if we focus on competencies rather than curricula, we’ll also need some method to test and certify that a given student has a given competency. We already have this in professions like law, medicine, and architecture. In a student-centric world, we would extend the model to other disciplines and professions. Indeed, I’ve always wondered why we need to test and certify architects but not, say, captains of industry.
We already have a number of testing agencies at the national level. For instance, Educational Testing Services (ETS) administers admission exams such as the SAT and GRE in the United States. ETS seems to be well positioned to test other competencies the domestic market. I would argue, however, that the testing should be global rather than national. At the moment, I don’t see an institution that’s ready to take on a global role.
So there you have it. Just three small steps to flip the educational model and put the student at the center of the universe. Can we do it? Well, we’ve already done it with wine. More on that tomorrow.
Best of Breed Education
Baby Talk – Competency Level 1
When Elliot was a teenager, he went off to a weeklong sailing course approved by the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) in Britain. He passed with flying colors and received an International Certificate of Competence as a Sailing Crew Member – Level 1. The certificate attests to one’s “ability and provides documentary assurance from one government to another that the holder meets an agreed level of competence….”
With his certificate in hand, Elliot could serve on any sailing crew that requires Level 1 competency. He could also take his certificate to any other RYA-approved sailing school and immediately enter the course to achieve Level 2 competency. He could choose the next sailing school based on schedule or location or teacher or whatever. Not only does Elliot know something but his knowledge is also certified in a manner that’s globally recognized. That means he has a wide array of choice and options – he’s a free agent.
Why couldn’t higher education work the same way? Why can’t we flip the educational model to make it student-centric? Why can’t a student accumulate knowledge from a variety of sources and then have it certified in a globally recognized manner?
For instance, my online students at the University of Denver clearly want to acquire knowledge that will afford them broader skills and opportunities. Some are pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But many students also want that knowledge to be certified. Since the University grants the certification, students are incented to take courses only from one institution. It’s an institution-centric system.
Now the University of Denver is a great school but why couldn’t one of my students – perhaps living in Montana – also take online courses from New York University and the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics plus some on-campus courses at Montana State and have it all count toward a Master’s degree? In fact, why couldn’t she also acquire knowledge from workshops offered by the local Chamber of Commerce or a chapter of the Project Management Institute and also have that knowledge count toward a degree?
Why couldn’t she bundle it all together and have it certified as the equivalent of an MBA? We can certainly imagine that courses from multiple sources might offer a richer, more varied, and perhaps higher quality education. Every university has some good teachers and some not so good teachers. Why not select the best teachers and best courses from multiple institutions rather than taking all courses from only one school? Let’s call it best-of-breed education.
To deliver student-centric, lifelong, best-of-breed education, we’ll need to develop several new processes and agencies. The good news is that several of them are already under way. Let’s talk about them tomorrow.
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