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Chuck: I know you get to do a lot of different interviews. And I want to really focus today on the innovation aspect, what I thought we would do is go back to a story that you told me once about, I think you're at Pittsburgh, you have this class where you're teaching innovation, or can you tell me more about that?
Lovell: Sure. It was a course called product realization. And I was running something called the Swanson center for product innovation. And really, the idea about the course was we had companies that were coming to us with ideas about products that they wanted to have us help them create at the university. And I thought why wouldn't be great if we had a class, you know, take some of these ideas and actually have them work on their ideas and actually make products out of them. And so the way the course work is the companies would just have a set of requirements to the product had to meet and then in the semester, you know, whatever the students produce, I'd match up against what the requirements were and how well they actually met the requirements helped determine what their grade was for the course.
Chuck: And if I remember correctly, there was some work you did around, you had a way to you watch the habits of there was, I think you said a psychologist somewhere, you're actually looking at what habits lead to more effective results. Yeah. So
Lovell: Yeah. So it was very interesting, because it's my first start of the course, about 50% of the teams that I that I worked with, had a working prototype at the end. So it was only, you know, one and two. And it was always kind of frustrating for me, because I could never predict which ones were going to be the ones are successful or not. And I don't necessarily understand why. And so I met a cognitive scientist by the name of Chris, Shawn, and he studied innovation. And so we got to talking it actually was very interesting because as an engineer, when you talk to a cognitive psychologist, it takes a while to get the language together because what I think is a model he thinks about I mean, it is very different. So it took us several months to really understand each other's approaches what we're doing. But then we realized, but wouldn't it be great if we kind of married, you know, his approach, you know, from a cognitive perspective to my practical expenses near. And so we actually started, we wrote several research proposals. And we had, the first one was not successful. But after that we had four in a row that got funded between the party of education, the National Science Foundation, and some some of the foundations that we were working with. So we had, what we were able to do was we were our table outfit, to studios, where the student teams did all of their work. And so we had four cameras, we captured everything that we did, we ended up hiring seven or eight undergraduate students that cataloged what they talked about what they did. And so we watched them through the course of the semester, and we were able to determine that there was a science behind this. And so we went from 50% of the students being successful in the class to seven out of eight.
Chuck: If I remember there's there's a one or two big learnings that kind of came out of that
Lovell: Yeah, so the very first learning was that students that had schedules that lined up and they met more often, that was actually one of the, one of the most direct links to being successful with students that meant a lot and had discussions a lot. But from a from a engineering perspective, you know, I, I started the course, I'd always encourage them to get to a working prototype as quickly as possible with the ideas once they had prototype, then they had a better chance of getting something that was going to work and iterate on it. But what we learned in the class was just the opposite, that we had to keep them from making a prototype in the course to at least halfway through the course if not longer. Because what happens is, is that once you have a working prototype, everything you do is one iteration off of that prototype you can fixated so the idea was real estate, the ideation stage for much longer periods than I would have thought, you know, originally when we started the course. And then the third thing that we learned was the most innovative have, you know, products that were developed by the teams were those that used analogies across domains taking something totally unrelated to the product they were working on, and bringing into the space like they were had been working on their car and they were, they bring it into the biomedical space. That's when something very special happened. Oftentimes disruptive,
Chuck: You remind me of a story that we were working on one of our LED products at CRI. And one of our scientists, a guy named Jerry, who were stuck on a Friday went home, and he came back next week, cuz I've got it figured out. And he goes, What do you do? He goes, Well, I was walking down the aisle at Home Depot. And I saw this thing on a shelf. And it made me think, Hey, could I apply that idea to some semiconductor problem, and it was the same idea, his and I think there's something about people's mindsets that allow them to make those connections, you know, this idea of connecting the dots and so I'm curious, is it teachable? Or whether Do you think there are people that were inherently better at it than others for certain reasons? Yeah.
Lovell: Yeah. Being on a grant with the cognitive scientists who actually studies these things. First of all, it is teachable that that's one of the things that we learned. And we actually it's a thought process to help people go through. And, but there are people that are predisposed to be good at this, you know, so there are people that are better at than others. It's just like anything else, you know, you can teach someone to play sports, but some people are just gonna be better at it than others. Right?
Chuck: You and I can practice all we want. We're not gonna be Michael Jordan.
Lovell: Exactly. And so but the idea is, is that yes, but people can get better at this. And again, we did show that just about any team, you know, can be innovative. If they go through the right process.
Chuck: You said they met a lot was a key thing. So you want a lot of interactions amongst the team. You know, it comes to mind or one we try to have remote teams and they're not connected. The world that Cree was we actually put everyone right together, right. We wanted these as the old idea. You want that water cooler talk, whatever you want these interactions. Do you think then that Some of the things you learned are maybe hindered today by how we try to do this remote or we try to do it like a video conference is nice, but it's not the same thing as you and I sitting here talking. So what do you think about that?
Lovell: I definitely think one of the strengths was when you have that group together in the drawing on a whiteboard, and they're commenting and thinking about each other. Again, one of the really neat things we found was that those crazy ideas that you want to throw out right away, we have them reserve judgment for 24 hours, because sometimes those were the best ideas, ones that initially didn't seem like they made much sense. And I worry that if you're not in a room together, in are able to share those things, you know, if you dismiss them when you're away from each other, they're gone. Right? And but if you're there, and we ask you, hey, reserve judgment on this for 24 hours before you decide to throw an idea out
Chuck: In some of the work I was doing, I was looking at the difference between a traditional brainstorming which is all ideas are okay. And then a conversation where they've actually done research where you introduce the debate condition and and the research says you actually get better ideas when there's some debate. What you're teasing out there is that debate conditions way easier for you and I to do if we're in the same room, it's some kind of self balances itself. There's a there's something about human interaction that allows me to be more constructive and you go, okay, you're talking about my idea and not the person. And I think when we separate we get those boundaries, whether you know, your remote people, I think you lose some of that ability to be really kind of honest and creative in the moment. So you said you have to think more first and not prototype right away. And so everyone's talking today about design sprints. And the first thing is take an idea, test it, test it, test it, I personally have seen that work, but it seems to fly a little bit in the face of what you learned in this process. Do you think maybe that those design Sprints while solving one problem are limiting some of the bigger ideas?
Lovell: No, there's no doubt in my mind. And, you know, it's interesting, I've done other things in my career where design sprints and doing a lot of I did a lot of perturbations of something have over a short period of time can lead to success. I think you need things to, you know, really, you know, fester in your opportunity to grow. You know, and that just takes time.
Chuck: I think there's a difference between iterative ideas and the big disruptive ideas. I think the big disruptive ones happen in a different way. And I think that's what you guys were seeing at Pittsburgh. So last on that topic. When are we going to be able to have someone at Marquette have the course?
Lovell: It’s great because I'm actually going to teach for the first time this fall, and in when it's raining because I've thought this will be the third University I've taught the course because I actually taught in Pittsburgh and then I brought it to UW when I was there. And it Pittsburgh, I had engineering students, business students together at UW m, I had engineering students in the art students together and here I'm going to have engineering students in the comp students together. And so it's interesting because I think you get a little different flavor by the different combinations of people, the brain together and I will say that it's always great. You know, when you have not just students, but anyone from a distance has been working with you, because a lot of times they question the paradigms that you accept as being absolute when actually, you find out that sometimes they're not so absolute. When people start questioning Well, why can't you do this? And this will because this what we learned No. But he was that really makes sense. And so I'm looking forward to, you know, having, you know, our students working with the engineering students on this.
Chuck: I want to step back a little bit prior to that. I know you at one point, you were at Pittsburgh, you were I think you were getting your master's degree and you joined a startup.
Lovell: Yeah. So I was in Pittsburgh, and I was actually was when I was doing my PhD. I just completed my my first year and there was I met a gentleman who was working for a startup company started entering software company, at the time was called swans analysis systems. JOHN Swanson was the founder. And I had, I'd been doing code for my perma dissertation. And as we talked, you know, they had an internship and so I started with the summer internship. And then I ended up continuing staying long with the company for the last two years. My PhD and then is my first job out of school, my first two years out of so I was four years, you know, with the startup entering software company, which was a really, for me, it was a really good experience. I often describe going through that process, when you do your dissertation, you go really deep on a topic. And you know, you have a hard time separating the forest from the trees, but then I did the startup software company, I got to see the world in a much different way than I was traditionally getting a PhD at the University. And I oftentimes think that that experience of those four years really helped shaped You know, my later on in my career is the way I thought in the way I did things.
Chuck: So that company, I believe, is now called ancestry. And so yeah, I was looking them up their their revenue is now about 1.3 billion. Their market cap is $16 billion. Do you ever wonder if maybe you might have wanted to stay?
Lovell: It's interesting because the I thought of that. So when I left it went public at the end of four years, and that's when I pivoted Out, out my friends that were there, that stayed there, many of them retired in their 40s. You know, and I think, you know, that was a different lesson, but I never I've gone to I never regretted not staying, you know, with the company. And I was really interesting because, you know, when the reasons why I pivoted out is when you're in a smaller startup company, then you go public, the company, the culture changes in an instant, it was amazing, because I remember going to the when right when it sold, I remember the very first meeting we had is a full company wide meeting and the changes that they were making the way they were talking about the company changing differently. There were a number of us not just myself that said, Okay, this is a good opportunity for us to pivot out of the company just because, you know, it was much wind from a very much a family atmosphere to a corporate atmosphere. And it is it actually it is I think it's the biggest engineering software company in the world now in terms of in terms of Sales and revenues.
Chuck: I think that the transition of what a public company does is pretty interesting. I have to say, you know, when I joined Cree was public, but it was we didn't make any money, it was 6 million in revenue. And so the difference between a 30 person company was 6 million in revenue and the one we built which was 1.7 billion and 7000. So I had a stated goal, we were going to build a billion dollar startup. And I think if you look, we were still startup like at a billion. And I said, Fine, we're gonna do a 2 billion and somewhere there it quickly the public company, boundary conditions and rules just started to overwhelm at the end of the day that predictability required by the public company by the by the stock market by the quarterly results, it just made, you have to do things to reduce risk and that risk reduction effectively reduces your ability to be innovative.
Lovell: One of the nice things is even though I pivoted out of the company, I still develop code for them for at least you know, probably 15 more years until I came to Milwaukee. Yeah, so I still was able to do it remotely. It was something that I did it because I enjoyed it more than anything else. And he kept my hand and still being a part of that.
Chuck: I want to make this pivot to your role as more cat president. So you're, you're at Pitt, then you come to UW m to become the dean. And then along the way, you become the Interim Chancellor, and then you become the chancellor, and then you come to market and how many university presidents Do you think have been in a startup and wrote code for 15 years?
Lovell: I'm not sure there's been a whole lot, not too many. But again, you know, I think you'd all of us have me whether I'd be myself or other presidents, you know, we all have different experiences, different backgrounds, that uniquely position us to lead and you know, I always say that, you know, I was fortunate because, you know, I was preceded by 23 Jesuits, who took the university to a really great place in we're a fabulous institution, but my background and experiences are much different than my predecessors. And so that is actually, I think, a benefit to mark hats. Because, you know, when I look at the university, I have a different lens than they do. And I see things and opportunities that they may not have seen. Likewise, they had things that they saw that I wouldn't have seen myself. And so, but I do think it's a time, you know, 400 education that we need to be more innovative and entrepreneurial. And so I think the background that I have, you know, doing those things, you know, I can now apply to university and anytime it's important to be able to do that.
Chuck: You obviously know well, that I was the board chair when we were doing that search, you know, at the time as a board, we could see that hire, that change was coming in hired, we didn't know when or how fast but you could feel that something different was coming to disrupt this business model. So as we look for candidates, and it was an extensive process, interview a lot of people and it was so clear to me when I finally had a chance to meet you that your background as an innovator was going to be critical to the challenges market. is going to face and so you're starting your six? Well, what's the challenge higher ed needs to overcome that we need to apply innovation to.
Lovell: So higher ed is in a very interesting place. And again, I've been in, you know, hired for 20 years. And it's never been a place where there's so many forces acting against it, you know. So I think the biggest thing is, you know, the, the public is now questioning the value of higher ed. So when people are questioning the value of a product, that's interesting space to be in to begin with. And there's really several reasons for that. First, is that, you know, we think about student loan debt, you know, sometimes the people call it a national crisis. It's because over the last 30 to 40 years public investment in higher education in general from the both the federal state governments has decreased significantly, you know, by, you know, any accounts by a factor of two or three. And so that means the burden of the classification falls on students and their families. And so that means that students, you know, have to take out more debt than they have in the past. And you apply that, you know, on top of that to the fact that there's people who question whether what we're teaching at the university is applicable, you know, anymore. And there's good reason for that too, because we know that traditional education is becoming obsolete because data information, you know, we haven't touched our fingers, you know, on our phones. We know that 65% of students are gonna be working in jobs that don't exist today, you know, solving problems, we don't know, our problems yet using technologies have been invented. And so, knowing that that's the future, you know, the way we educate students, you know, what they learn when they're here? And what they're paying, you know, that's, you know, all of those things, you know, people are questioning, you know, whether we're still teaching the right way, we're teaching the right things, and are we costing too much? And if the question is about your product in the cost of your product, you need to change, you're going to become obsolete because you're gonna go out of business, right? And we're seeing that, unfortunately, that we've had more, you know, He's got a business in the last two or three years than we ever have in our history.
Chuck: It brings a bunch of questions to mind. So you know, one of them is on the universities going bankrupt, I saw something that Clay Christensen, who wrote the innovators dilemma said it was in 2017. And it's something along the lines of the 4000 colleges and universities in the United States, he predicted within 10 to 15 years, half of them would go bankrupt, right? It's a business model that needs to be disrupted, right. I was listening to a podcast about artificial intelligence. And they were projecting out 10 to 15 years. And the number of jobs that artificial intelligence will be able to do is incredible. But the person said something really interesting, he said, but the jobs they won't be able to do are the creative jobs, and the compassion jobs.
Lovell: I couldn't agree more that the skills that people are going to need to be going forward. They need to be creative problem solvers. They need to communicate, they need to work with working teams, and then you'd be innovative and entrepreneurial, you know, those are the skills Think about the future where people are going to need to be successful. And so I would argue, you know, actually I gave, I've given a talk, you know, at national conferences about this, that we need to double down on the humanity and liberal arts, part of our education, you know, because those skills, that's where we learn them. And, you know, we're engineers. And in during this class, you know, we learned the answers were black and white, right? The equations you know, you didn't learn those other skills in engineering. You know, I often talk about the most valuable course that I ever had, was a philosophy of religion course, because I was writing papers on the existence of God and I struggled, that was the hardest course I ever took. I so I think that part of you know, we continue to focus on our core. You know, I think that that's important. That's an important skill sets we have but on the same respect, we have to change the paradigm in which we're teaching students and we talk about how do we deliver the value either more valued, same POS or the same value lower cost? I do believe technology is going to lower the cost of education. Ultimately, it has every other sector, you know, when I think about what we need to be doing is the flipped classroom or you know, students watching videos and learning before they come. And then when they're here, we give them real world problems and examples. And the instruction becomes how they master what they've seen or heard the knowledge they've gained before they come into the classroom. And that can be done. You think about those in engineering business. But that can be done in any course it can be done in ethics and other things where, you know, we actually are applying those principles. And I think that's where we think about, you know, that the future is and I also believe that, you know, the idea that students are going to get a degree in four years and never come back to work at another institution. Those days are over as well, because I think that people are constantly have to come back and retool. So I think the future of higher ed, where, where I believe the market opportunity is is those universities have positioned themselves that are easy to come back to to get skills they need is they need to evolve and change and that may be it may be needed. But more likely it's going to be some kind of certificate or badge or just, you know, something people need to get to the next stage in their career.
Chuck: I struggled in philosophy of man, I think it's called. And I still remember the questions they wanted me to answer. I just thought I thought the professor was crazy. It's like, I don't know, what what, isn't there an answer you want? The answer was there was and it was a thinking process. And I think, you know, that's so much of what's buried in the Jesuit tradition is this. I know, years ago, we did something what is Jesuit 2.0 mean? And it's, we don't teach you what to think we teach you how to make and I think there's something to that because it feels like we need more experiential learning, and more multidisciplinary learning because the real world is rarely engineers sitting by themselves anymore. And so how do we make that pivot in a place and when I say a place, I don't mean just Marquette Hira generally where it's really structured around the silos of college.
Lovell: And so that's where we evolve and change and I often talk about how will we be They'll do buildings or do new things on the campus that they'll never be seen as plenary anymore. And the is, you know, the collisions interactions that happen when you have people from different different different areas just like myself, the cognitive scientists, you know, what I learned from him in the innovation that occurred or just, you know, just amazing. And so creating more spaces on the campus, when I think about what's the power of the 707 Innovation Hub, you know, again, that idea came from two students, an engineering student and a business student, Sam and Creighton, to have a place where students can find each other and be innovative and entrepreneurial, and have external partners and have the university support their endeavors. Those are the spaces of the future when we think about what the university needs to do and you know, we think about a new business school for example, it's not going to be just business we're going to have engineering and supply chain you know, that kind of those interfaces there as well. To ensure that we are preparing students for what is it multi-disciplinary, you know, future for them
Chuck: Is there ever going to be another building For a college?
Lovell: Well, it's like innovation ality that's exactly the concept of conditionality. You know, it's to solve a problem. So we need to provide a space where we can have corporate partners, you know, working with our faculty and students solving problems we know that are going to be helpful to society, but also give our students and faculty skillsets and opportunities to be innovative and entrepreneurial. And so we think about that concept. That's exactly what you described, I think that's really where the future is gonna be headed.
Chuck: So you've been in a startup, you know, you've been part of building new business to solve a problem. So you and I, tomorrow, decide, we're going to go start our new way to approach higher ed, what would you do different that versus changing it from the inside? If you were starting from the outside? What problem would you come at differently? That's hard to do from the inside?
Lovell: Well, you've already pointed out you know, higher ed was built in silos. And so every school or college you know, you know, have their own entity their own buildings. In the world is not that's not the future. And there also were built in an era where the standard classroom lecture model applied, and so the space is, first of all, will be completely open, you know, interactive and different, but also the people in them will be from all disciplines, you know, going forward, I think that's really the key, you know, to helping, you know, US formulate what the future would look like, it would be just the physical space will be different. And then the technology platforms, you know, be able to have, you know, much more of this, you know, developed so that you could do much more of this, you know, using the technology. But understanding going back to conference, we had the very beginning of this, knowing that the person to personal interaction is still going to be important to provide the skills that people need. So we still need those spaces, where you are working on real world problems and pushing each other in having those disagreements so those dialogues so that we can be creative and innovative as well. So, you know, that if I was to think about what the future of higher ed, if it was Already from scratch, would look like. I think that's, you know, much more than what it is today.
Chuck: As you know, I recently agreed to be the first innovator in residence here at Marquette. We're not really sure what that means yet. But they said, Okay, well, this is great. Where would you like an office? I said, I don't, I don't want the office said, Where are you gonna sit? I'm going to say wherever. What do you mean? I said, Well, I'm just going to go wherever I need to go. And it's because I want those interactions. Right. You know, so much of what I learned and one of the challenges is, you know, when you're leading a large organization there's a lot of people that want to pay you stay here and will bring everything to you. way easier to lead being out and about than it is sitting and waiting for.