Emergence Now
AJM Enterprises
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Introducing an emerging context for human-centered design work, this paper extends previous EPIC literature on startup innovation upstream into university science commercialization. It provides new perspectives on how the human-centered design community can engage with scientific models of agency to inform broader engagement with the innovation and design challenges inherent in ‘intelligent’ technologies, and offers the challenge of engaging with and developing empathy for the dispositions of scientist innovators as a new vantage point from which to reflect on our core strength as facilitators of cross-disciplinary collaboration for innovation and design.
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INTRODUCTION
The project to engage with and humanize the culture, practices and outputs of technical disciplines (particularly computer science and software engineering) has been at the heart of the work of practitioners in the human-centered innovation and design community from the beginning. (Cefkin 2009) This paper addresses itself to a relatively new chapter in this project, as human-centered design practitioners are drawn more into engagement with science and scientists because of the increasingly significant role of science-driven emerging technologies in mainstream product and service experiences (AI, genetics, etc.), and the increasing centrality of university-based science to the industrial base of Industry 4.0 (Pollitzer 2019)
The successful propagation of human-centered innovation and design further upstream in Industry 4.0 innovation processes faces both structural and cultural challenges. Recent EPIC conferences have heard about opportunities for ethnography and human-centered design to bring more ‘meaningful innovation’ to the startup sector, but also that the metrics-centric cultures of Lean Startup and Silicon Valley venture capital constitute barriers to such a change (Haines 2014; 2016; Ries 2011). This paper’s focus goes one step further upstream than Haines, to look at how science innovation happens pre-startup.
In science innovation, moving from pre-startup to startup innovation usually means moving across the boundary between the university and the world beyond. This boundary is both a profound conceptual one, rooted in several centuries of scientific discipline formation (Schaffer 2010), and frequently also a physical one, with commercial startup activity taking place in science parks located around the periphery of university campuses.
We argue that whilst the contribution that the human-centered design community can make to providing and building innovation and design skills and capability within the startup and pre-startup science community is crucial, a more important opportunity lies in the human-centered design challenge of engaging with and understanding scientists and science culture – the motivations, dispositions and skills they bring to their innovation and commercialization efforts – to define how best to support them in contributing more effectively to the wider innovation processes in which their work plays an increasingly important part. (Stuart & Ding 2006)
This paper’s co-authors have engaged in this challenge from opposite and complementary directions: one as a serial technology entrepreneur who now runs a technology commercialization program for students and scientist ‘inventors’ at Cambridge University in the UK; the other as a business anthropologist and human-centered design practitioner who has worked with major global product companies to optimize their innovation processes, from science-based R&D through to product strategy and design, and who has introduced human-centered design approaches to the curriculum of the same university technology commercialization program.
Drawing on over 12 years experience of working in university pre-startup science commercialization, we present a detailed ethnographic analysis of a program designed to facilitate culture translation between the worlds of academic science and commercial application. This program brings together scientist ‘inventors’ with teams of student and early career scientists on projects to identify potential paths to application and commercialization. Projects aim to provide a microcosm of the startup experience, and can be seen as a form of participant ethnography, engaging with a wide range of participants in the university startup ecosystem, and with potential users and stakeholders in the world beyond.
We describe the journey that project team-members make in terms of shifting notions of scientific agency, from enchantment with the ‘cool science’ they are keen to get the opportunity to work on at the beginning of a project (Gell 1998), to gradually embracing broader socio-technical systems and cultural contexts (Latour 2005) as they formulate plans to bring positive impact into the world.
We consider the balance between enabling rapid adoption of templated research and design tools, and nurturing and developing the creativity, problem solving skills and dispositions that team members bring from their scientific education and experience.
We conclude by presenting a model of the motivations, skills and dispositions that scientists bring to innovation and commercialization, as an invitation for further engagement by the ethnographic research and human-centered design community.
BACKGROUND – SCIENCE AS INNOVATION
This paper is written from the perspective of practitioners, with the objective of promoting collaboration between the two communities of practitioners to which the authors respectively belong – science commercialization and human-centered design. In this context, our exploration of how scientific research leads to innovation has primarily a practical objective – that of enabling human-centered design practitioners to collaborate more effectively with scientist-innovators by comparing how innovation happens within the context of pre-startup science commercialization with the best-practice expectations of commercial innovation. We thus take our definition of ‘innovation’ from the context of human-centered design, as a practice which addresses relevant and meaningful problems in people’s lives by designing solutions delivered through products or services. We frame our investigation in this way to allow us to explore the affinities between scientist-innovators and human-centered design practitioners in their projects to both understand and change the world.
From our practitioner perspective we do not aim to engage directly with debates about the nature of scientific knowledge production that have been developed within the fields of the philosophy of science and STS (science and technology studies, or science, technology and society) – but those debates provide important context for our discussion. Kuhn noted the processes whereby scientists’ worldviews are shaped by rigorous training via ‘exemplars’ to the currently dominant scientific paradigm (Kuhn 1962). Our scope goes beyond the processes which recruit scientists into the disciplines in which they work, to look at how they negotiate their own balance of career success and impact within science with other possibilities for impact outside it resulting from the application and commercialization of their work. A similar difference of scope is evident if we consider how Hélène Mialet, talking about Popper, draws a distinction between, “the context of discovery (the realm of imagination) and the context of justification (the realm of logic and method)” (Mialet 2012: 457). The journey that we describe in this paper starts with the context of discovery and imagination, but moves beyond the legitimization of scientific discovery within academic science in the realm of logic and method, to look at the thread which links the initial discovery to its potential for application and commercialization.
The ethnographic data that this paper is based on is structured around the journeys of individual scientists, in their science careers, and in their experiences of the commercialization of science. This may appear at odds with the shift in STS, initiated by Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, from a focus on scientists and science culture towards ethnographic investigation of how science works in practice through the operation of networks not only of people but of the objects and technologies with and through which they work (Latour 1987; Martin 1998). But, whilst our focus on individual scientists’ journeys is primarily a methodological device to draw out comparisons between innovation processes in scientific and commercial contexts, we do also see it as being in line with the position taken by Hélène Mialet’s reframing of Actor Network Theory in her investigation of innovation careers in an international energy company (Mialet 2009):
…if we pay careful attention to science in action, we can see at the centre of a web of practices, collectivities and technologies, an individual who acts, that is, who ‘creates’. I call this actor the distributed-centred subject. I argue that the more this actor is linked up with his institution, his objects of research, his co-workers, etc. the more potential he has to become inventive: and the more inventive he becomes, the more he seemingly distinguishes himself by his singularity as an inventor. (Mialet 2009: 257)
The scientists whose innovation journeys we explore in this paper take on the challenge of being inventive in the sense defined by Mialet – but in multiple contexts: basic science research; application of science; and commercialization. Each of these contexts involves different constellations of disciplines and practices, of organizations and institutions, and of instrumental and mediating technologies. The challenge for human-centered design practitioners is to map out what is required for scientists to successfully navigate these contexts whilst bringing a human-centered focus to their innovation efforts.
Changing relationship between academic science and commerce
The occasion for this paper, as for EPIC’s 2019 theme of Agency, is our contemporary sense of living in a historical moment in which science-driven technology innovation – through a confluence of computer science, genetics, and materials science – plays a uniquely critical role in the fate and future of humanity. For our purposes of understanding the culture and institutional forms of science as innovation, it is interesting to look back to the period during the twentieth century when the structural relationships which still underpin the relationship between science and commerce became entrenched. The British novelist and physical chemist C P Snow, writing in the late 1950’s, characterized it thus:
I believe the industrial society of electronics, atomic energy, automation, is in cardinal respects different in kind from any that has gone before, and will change the world much more. It is this transformation that, in my view, is entitled to the name of ‘scientific revolution’. (Snow 1959: 31)
The period that Snow was describing, in the aftermath of the intense science-driven military-industrial competition of the Second World War, was one which saw a major shift towards governments attempting to shape the basic scientific research agenda to the needs of national military and industrial strategy. Close relationships were established between science departments at research universities and military and industrial R&D labs – relationships in which science labs delivered basic science discovery and R&D labs delivered innovation (Powell & Sandholtz 2012: 385).
The emergence of the first genetics-driven biotech university spin-outs in the US during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s initiated a process of transformation in this relationship. The traditional divide between university science and commercial innovation has been increasingly supplanted by what Walter W. Powell and Kurt Sandholtz describe as, “interdependent and collaborative knowledge development spanning both public and private organizations,” as, “biotechnology forged a recombination of scientific and commercial cultures, which led to the creation of new organizational practices and forms of discovery.” (Powell & Sandholtz 2012: 386; Flink and Kaldewey 2018: 257)
Forty years on from that first biotech revolution, the hybrid of science, commerce and finance described by Powell and Sandholtz is a vital and integral component of the science and technology commercialization ecosystems which have formed around leading research universities around the world. But though university science has become increasingly integrated into commercial innovation processes and agendas, innovation within universities remains very different to commercial innovation. The aim of this paper is to provide a guide to those differences for human-centered design practitioners coming from the world of commercial innovation. So in what ways might science innovation not conform to their expectations?
The first difference that a commercial human-centered design practitioner might notice when trying to identify how science innovation happens in the university context would be in terms of process. The same forty years that has seen the rise of startup ecosystems around universities has seen commercial innovation transformed around the imperative of human-centered design, and along with this has come a convergence around a best-practice process for innovation, the underlying principles of which are deployed within branded product and service companies across almost all product categories and industry sectors. Making people’s consumption experiences in-context the organizing principle, the widespread adoption of this best-practice process within commercial innovation practice – exemplified by the five steps of Design Thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test – has been driven by intensifying market competition, shortening product and service renewal cycles, and pervasive digitization. As a result, commercial innovation processes have become increasingly rational, organized and integrated, aligning functions and objectives across companies.
By contrast, science innovation is discontinuous, cultural, and fragmented. Unlike commercial innovation, it is not organized under a single imperative or objective. Science innovation happens through the overlapping of a set of related, but separate interests and objectives. These are distributed across complex ecosystems, whose key elements include: academic science departments; university technology transfer offices; business, design and engineering departments; student societies; and university and commercial startup incubators and accelerators. From the perspective of mainstream innovation best practice, as the ‘front end’ of the emergent Industry 4.0 innovation process, pre-startup science innovation might be expected to involve an open exploratory market or contextual discovery phase. This is largely absent from the current science innovation process, whose primary focus, of course, is on science discovery rather than problem or opportunity discovery. A key objective of this paper is thus to explore the conditions for science innovation to include effective problem or market discovery.
APPROACH
This paper is based on the authors’ auto-ethnographic analysis of their experience in the science and technology commercialization ecosystem in and around Cambridge University in the UK. Following a successful career as an entrepreneur in technology startups, in 2006 Amy Weatherup set up i-Teams, a program for pre-startup science commercialization, based in the University’s Institute for Manufacturing, and serving the whole of the University1. The program consists of projects which run for ten weeks over the course of an academic term, bringing together scientists with potentially commercializable ideas with teams of post-graduate scientists to define whether or not there is a viable commercialization path (Moktar 2018). In the period during which Amy Weatherup has run i-Teams since 2006, it has hosted over 150 projects – in which over 1000 students have participated – and generated over 70 startup companies. Simon Pulman-Jones joined the i-Teams program in 2012 as a project mentor, and since 2015 has run Design Thinking workshops as a component of the i-Teams curriculum.
In addition, twenty ethnographic interviews were conducted with previous i-Teams participants during June and July 2019, exploring their experience in science innovation from the start of their science education, through their experience on the i-Teams program, to their ongoing experience in science commercialization. This sample covered a range of experience, including scientist-innovators who have generated spin-out companies but remained in academic science careers, others who have moved out of academic science and gone on to found and run startup companies, and post-graduate scientists from a range of disciplines.
COOL SCIENCE: SCIENTISTS AS INNOVATORS
In her introduction to Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter, Melissa Cekfin writes of “the drive anthropologically oriented researchers feel to work deep within the engines of the business sector” (Cefkin 2009: 2). In this section of the paper, we explore what drives scientists to become involved in the application and commercialization of their basic scientific research, and their experience of that journey. From the perspective of the potential for collaboration between human-centered design professionals and scientists, it is interesting to note the similarities between their motivations and dispositions – particularly in relation to becoming engaged with business.
Scientists’ innovation journey
The term ‘cool science’ is often heard in connection with i-Teams projects. In the first instance the prospect of being able to work with ‘cool science’ motivates students to participate in the program. And the coolness of science was also something that many of the i-Teams participants that we spoke to talked about as what motivated their initial interest and involvement in science. In this section we explore how scientists make the journey from their first involvement in basic science through to becoming engaged in commercialization: what leads them, usually in the absence of any formal objectives or process, to follow this path.
Stage one: engagement in basic science research
The dominant theme when our i-Teams science-innovators talked about what first motivated their involvement in basic science research was creativity and imagination – frequently framed around a heightened visual sense of entities, structures and phenomena unfolding in three-dimensional space.
One of our research participants, a molecular biologist, talked about why she was attracted to the work of the lead scientist whose team she aimed, successfully, to work on after completing her PhD: “It was novel. It was imaginative. He managed to turn the field around a few times during his career. He will embark on risky stuff that no one else is doing. He’s just driven by his interest and is not afraid of jumping into something that might give fruit or might not.” The way in which the work was imaginative became clear from her description of one of the team’s main discoveries: