Personal på vift

We spent the morning with Tina Seelig the executive director of STVP and the director of National Center for Engineering Pathway to Innovation. Dr. Seelig focus of research and practice is creativity and innovation. She presented the STVP fellows with an innovation engine model that flows around imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Her talked focused on the creativity and innovation generation part that engages the participants in curiosity, engagement, and persistence as means to explore the world and drive the innovation engine. The second part of the morning was a creative exercise around brainstorming Stanford style that connected the work from our previous Embodied Design session with the d.school. For this brainstorm we developed on ideas for the best and the worst summer vacation in four groups. Seelig immediately tossed out our boring brainstorm ideas for the best summer vacation and distributed our worst ideas to different groups. Each group then had to reframe the worst concept into a pitch of the best vacation. The worst ideas that we started with were, vacation in the following: a war zone, no summer vacation, summer school, and everyone in the family sick. The point of reframing and connecting divergent concepts was clearly seen as each group pitched excellent concepts expanding on these difficult ideas. Our big take aways from the morning were on a overall framework for placing creativity in the center of innovation and entrepreneurship and concrete practice in reframing problems. Additionally, in our coaching session with Tina, she gave us inside information about how she successfully set up STVP.

 

We had our fourth coaching session, this time with Professor Mike Lyons. Together with Tom Byers, Mike co-developed STVP. Besides being one the founding professors at STVP his course Technology Venture Formation (273) is on of the highest rated courses in the School of Engineering. In this course, real live entrepreneurs are teaching students about mistakes they have done when starting companies and how to go about creating a startup. The aim of bringing in the entrepreneurs is for students to learn from real life experiences including the mistakes is to provide and prevent students from making the same mistakes. It is important to note failing in Silicon Valley is just part of the learning experience and not looked upon as something negative, but a key part of the Silicon Valley experience. This is a thought that we have to bring with us and teach everyone at MAH.

Mike also shared his unique take on from working with OTL-model, Office of Technology Licensing. Mike’s model focused on using the portfolio of IPR that are handed out to students looking for an opportunity to develop a business idea. If they succeed, both students, the university and the researcher get the benefit. Keeping in mind, this is a different take on the OTL model of investing in research for technology transfer.  We hope to investigate this interesting idea further at MAH.

Mike is also a venture capitalist with investments in over 50 companies and is currently director of Real Time Innovation Inc., a privately held software company. He shared his experiences from investing and managing companies. From these experiences we learned that the amount of capital invested in the valley is at much different scale than in Malmö.

After working in our group, we met with Trevor Loy. He is an adjunct professor and coach in the STVP program. Our main question for Trevor was how to persuade stakeholders to be more active entrepreneurs or to support entrepreneurial projects. Interestingly enough he is of the opinion that STVP evolved through an entrepreneurial approach itself. Meaning, have an idea like lectures with entrepreneurs, plan it, do it, check it, act upon it and don’t be afraid to kill it in case it is not working. In his opinion, STVP provides the space and opportunities to attract people. An entrepreneurial culture has to evolve by itself and can not be forced on people.

Through his coaching we got many small ideas how to foster an entrepreneurial culture. Anyhow, it seems this approach is a bit in contrast to the classical way organisational projects are done. Maybe the solution is an agile approach like SCRUM with a list of ideas as backlog. Then, take one idea at a time. Anyhow, it seems that the development cycles in organisational projects will be quite long.

Notes from the ”Kinaesthetic Design Thinking Workshop” run by Anne  Fletcher and Aleta Hayes from the d.school. Todays workshop activity was  jointly led by Anne and Aleta that forced all the STVP fellows and staff to actively explore motion, dance, and the physical body as a means to explore human centred design. Through getting all of us to choreograph our signatures with our bodies, arms, legs, belly buttons, head, neck and hips we dived deep into exploring physicality as a means of understanding the needs of users, a key part of design. At the same time we talked about history of d*school and how they organically grew up from a desk into a hallway to a core part of the Stanford (http://dschool.stanford.edu/).

 

Following the basic philosophy, Design Innovation of the d.school that operates out the convergence of business, technology, and human values we learnt how to reframe our own challenges for the STVP program. What made this workshop so interesting was the combination of moving, thinking and discussing design from the body to the mind focused on exploring how to think differently about our projects in STVP. For the MAH team this was familiar ground since we have a strong and related design philosophy at K3 and the university and it was good to experience how the d.school’s enacts their design innovation in practice, theory, and across the campus.

Off for the weekend…

The day started of at Stanford Campus a bit earlier than other days. We jumped on the tour bus with our Faculty Fellowship.

Our first stop where at the Innovation node called Rainforest. It is the outreach function of T2 Venture Creation. They use the metaphor of rainforest to visualize innovation culture and framwork as the chaos of weed growth, rainforest vs. plantation i.e. established industry.

 

They mainly deal with state and government officials who need to get a better understanding of innovative climate and (the importance of lacking of)structural support to enhance disruptive idea generating mindsets, venture capital formation, entrepreneurship development, support programs, and innovation policy.

T2 Venture Creation is (in their opinion) the world leader in the design and implementation of innovation ecosystems that are regionally relevant, culturally sensitive, and highly sustainable. They levarage networks, grow startup companies, manage capital, and build innovation ecosystems around the world. They invest capital and time in technology startups with the greatest promise and help them succeed. Their global network comes from our unique expertise at the intersection of private venture and public policy.

We got a introduced to a reshaped version of Osterwalders Business model canvas called the Rainforest canvas.

The visit was very interesting and we couldn’t quite get ourselves to scurry back in to the bus in time. A bit delayed we got to our second visit: StartX. StartX is a non-profit organization whose mission is to accelerate the development of Stanford’s top entrepreneurs in all fields through experiential education. It reminds of an incubator/accelerator but with the twist of not taking any equity, being completely free and the fact that all admitted entrepreneurs have access to a number of different highly experienced mentors in a range of professions. The visit was super interesting and we got inspired to implement a similar thing in Malmö.

 

After StartX we where a bit behind schedule and decided to take early lunch in Palo Alto instead of San Fransisco and went to lunch at the Fisherman’s Wharf.

The trip up to San Fransisco went along the beautiful 280 and the landscape is truly amazing with the lenticular clouds along the mountain ridge to the west. The traffic was not on our favour and we got to our third visit, After College, about 20 minutes late.

AfterCollege is the largest career network for college students and recent graduates. They are working to eliminate unemployment among college students and recent grads by helping students explore jobs and internships based on answers to 3 easy questions: what did you study, where, and when do you graduate. See more.

 

It’s an alternative to Future Finder that we have at Mah and Jeanette got as excited at this place as I (Joa) got at StartX. Due to the fact that we where a little late we sadly had to abort the finalizing round of Q&A in order to get to our final visit – NovoEd.

NovoEd is a social online learning environment. NovoEd partners with education institutions and corporations to offer a platform for collaborative, experiential online courses, with emphasise on collaborative. Some courses have over 100.000 participants from all over the world.

To sum it up, the day was amazing. All impressions from the visits as well as the reviews and discussions in the bus with other teams lefts us pretty beat when we finally arrived at the house in Mountain View late at night.

Today Jeanette and Sven met Nick who showed us around campus. He is studying political sciences, is working in the Visitor’s service and in a micro financing company. He plays beach volleyball and ice hockey. Apparently, sports activities are an important part of life on campus.

In fact the original name is Leland Stanford Junior University. It’s named after the son of the founders who passed away at the age of 15. Not being able to longer take care about their own child they decided ”the children of California” to be their children.” This resulted in the foundation of this university.

Stanford equals the size of 76 Disney Lands. It has the same amount of female and male students. 37000 applications come in every year. From these 2200 are selected and 1700 go on as fresh men. Interestingly, prospect students do not apply for a certain program. They apply for the university and can choose a programme after they spent some time on campus.

The Hoover tower hosts a library as well as an archive of the Russians when they were collecting information about different people during the cold war.

Bill Gates funded the computer science building. Here, also Google was invented. It’s first url was under the umbrella of stanford.edu I other buildings around companies like Yahoo had their starting point.

Joa and Daniel participated this morning in Stanford’s Pre-Collegiate Summer program for Gear Up—Bring Business Opportunities to Life. Stanford’s

Day 2
In the morning and pre noon our team had some time to work on our own. We started discussing where we are at and our different expectations of the project and how the STVP Faculty fellows program can propel us in the direction we want. Different ideas of project overviews and both expected and sought outcomes where debated.

The day with STVP were to consist of the first meeting with one of the coaches, Tom Koznik. We prepared this meeting by dissecting the competences of the different coaches in the program to optimize our time and outcome with each one of them.

In the meeting with Tom we wanted his input on inspiring students and faculty in order to flip their mindset on how our project can add value throughout the university.

We also wanted to hear a bit more about student involvement over time and the Mayfield program that we got introduced to yesterday. By chance we got to meet Yael Stegla, an alumni from the program. Furthermore we wanted Toms view on how to leverage on local engagement in education. Him beeing a marketing person the meeting mostly evolved around attracting general engagement (academic, management, Society and business) and student engagement in particular.