Back to School Night - Speaking at CMU-VS About Innovation Research

I had the privilege to speak to Professor Ray Bareiss’ “Software Products Definition” class in October at Carnegie Mellon University – Silicon Valley.  I haven’t presented to a class full of students in some time.  However, once I learned that the class was at 6:30 p.m., I knew that I wouldn’t be dealing with your typical students.  I suspected, and was proven correct, that the students would be well seasoned professionals in the industry.

Fortunately, the traffic from our Studio in San Francisco to the classroom at Ames was fairly light, so I had time to grab a quick hamburger in the drive thru and still arrive about 30 minutes early.  Yes, I was a little concerned that I may be hamburger breath, but I thought that would probably be better than having my stomach grumble while I spoke.

Once I arrived, finding the classroom was very easy and straightforward thanks to the directions I had been given by Stuart Evans, another professor at CMU-SV who is the one who helped get me connected to Professor Bareiss.  I meekly entered the room and Professor Bareiss picked me out right away and told me to call him Ray.  Professor Bareiss… Ray, gave me a rough overview of what his class had been working on.  I was quite impressed and I let him know that I think this type of approach and education was invaluable.  I gave him a brief history of my work life and walked him through my evolving mindset from naïve, arrogant young engineer to a more seasoned manager where I now not only understand the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to innovation, I embrace it.  I learned that Professor Ray Bareiss is the Director of Education Programs at CMU-SV.  He’s been in and out of few start ups as well as teaching.  He speaks from a position of experience and knows what he’s talking about.  I liked him right away.

Since the class was also held virtually with participants in Barcelona, Hong Kong, and other locations, I was mic’d-up and got my material ready for a Web presentation.  My wife, who is a formally trained Physics Teacher and is now working for a virtual school, would have been impressed with the systems available and the ease at which it all worked.  At 6:30pm we started and I began the introduction and dove into the material.  I had instructed the class to interrupt me at any time if they had questions or comments and I would soon find out that they would not hold back.

Prior to the class, Professor Bareiss had provided me an outline of what the students had been working on.  Since there was a strong bent towards research for their innovative products, I decided I would tailor the presentation material toward frog style research and design concepts.  This is a bit out of my area as I focus on the Technology aspects of what we do.  But, I felt that mixing the research component with the Technology discipline would provide a perspective to the class that should be relevant and hopefully somewhat insightful.

After I started by explaining who I was and a brief history of frog Design, I started to dig into Design Research methods.  I walked through some of the techniques frog uses and how they provide insight and information about the products we focus on.  I made reference (and credited) to a discussion about Information Versus Insight that I had heard just the previous day from Jan Chipchase in the frog SF Studio.  I continued to bring this back to the multidisciplinary approach that frog uses by having Creative, Technology, Strategy, and Program Management involved in our projects to enable viewpoints from different angles and approaches.  This helps prevent us from continuing to go down the same road of innovation and allows us to truly explore the envelope of innovation and find our Blue Oceans (and yes, I gave an unsolicited plug for Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne).

The class members did indeed interrupt me while I was presenting and asked a number of insightful questions.  It’s hard to remember them all, but they were very interested to know about how research can affect the design.

This led me to a story about my experience that I was able to relay to them.  I spoke about my education as an Aerospace Engineer and the vim, vigor, and arrogance I had (and some may say I still have) early in my career.  As an engineer I thought I could conquer the world and do it all by myself.  However, experience has shown me that it’s as important to have a creative mind involved in innovation as it is to have the engineer who will make it happen.  Having a psychologist involved is as important as the hard core coder.  This epiphany is what lead me to frog design where we truly embrace this approach.

I really did have a good time answering them and they made me think about the answers as their questions were very sharp and specific.  Frankly, I was impressed with their understanding of innovation and what it takes to get the job done.  I’m only hoping that I was able to provide them some information that we useful in the class work and their real lives.

When the time was up, I realized that an hour and a half went by in barely the blink of an eye.  We had a couple small chats on the way out and I found my way to my car and made my way home.

I’m looking forward to what we can do next and how we can possibly find ways to continue our interactions and maybe even get the CMU-SV students involved in what we do here.  That’s something I need to noodle on and see what we can do.  Overall, it was fun and insightful for me and I’m hoping for the students as well.