Krisztina "Z" Holly is the vice provost for innovation at the University of Southern California and executive director for the USC Stevens Institute for Innovation. She leads a team of[…]
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A conversation with the vice provost for innovation at the University of Southern California.
Question: What is the future of the U.S. university?
Krisztinarn Holly: So there are two main parts to the university. There is the rnresearch enterprise and there is the educational enterprise and I rndefinitely see both parts of it changing a lot in the next decade or so.rn So, speaking about the educational enterprise it’s not enough for rnpeople the learn the skills that they’re learning today, as valuable as rnthey may be, but it’s going to be very important for them to learn rninnovation skills that enable them to better communicate their ideas andrn communicate a value proposition, figure out how to make greater impact rnwith their ideas by enrolling other people in their vision and to rnunderstand how to finance their idea and how to turn it into a rnsustainable business, nonprofit, whatever form it is. So that is going rnto be really important. We think it is especially important at the PhD rnlevel. We think that is something that has been ignored. In fact, Kurt rnCarlson who is the CEO of SRI International, they’re a non-profit rnresearch lab in Menlo Park, he was giving a talk recently and he said rnthat they get the most amazing PhDs around the world, around the countryrn to come and work for them and despite that, it takes them seven to ten rnyears to become fully productive members of the team. Why is that? It isrn because they lack the innovation skills. They lack the skills of rnunderstanding how they fit into the innovation ecosystem, how they fit rnin, how they communicate their ideas and how they address real world rnproblems. So that’s perfect validation for the fact that at USC we just rnannounced and we’re launching for the fall an innovation diploma programrn for PhD students that is free of charge for PhDs. It is a three-course rnsequence unlike any other program that we’re aware of, and we think it rnis really, really valuable for our students. We’re not trying to turn rnPhDs into business people. We don’t think that is appropriate. We don’t rnthink that it always works. We want to keep them as researchers at the rncutting edge of their field and that’s their whole goal is to become thern absolute best in a discipline and there have been some criticisms that rnacademics don’t understand the bigger picture or they’re too rnspecialized. The reality is if you’re going to be the absolute best you rnhave to be very specialized, but that doesn’t preclude you from rnunderstanding how to communicate with others that can take your idea andrn make it into something really impactful. So it’s sort of bridging that rngap by making both the academics aware and then of course we’d like to rnfocus on the business community as well to bring them closer to rnacademia.
Question: How might digital scholarship rnimpact innovation at universities?
Krisztina Holly: Therern are a lot of changes that are happening now that are really going to bern impacting the way innovation happens in the university. One of them, rnfor example, is open access to research results and people are rnpublishing increasingly in open access journals and in fact I think rnthere have been about 5,000 new open access journals that have popped uprn online in the last couple of years that are circumventing the typical rnpeer reviewed printed journal publications and that will have some rnsignificant affect in the future. It’s not just a matter of open access rnto the papers, but also there has been a greater drive towards open rnaccess towards the data itself. It is somewhat controversial because rnthere is definitely an interest by faculty with all the work that they rnput into collecting that data and this has been a challenge for a while,rn but it is exacerbated by this new open access. How do you get to rnbenefit from your own data that you’ve worked so hard to collect and rnthen and publish on? So how long is it appropriate to hold back that rndata before you share it with other people? Obviously the sooner you getrn the data out there the more people will benefit and at the same time rnyou need to motivate faculty to be collecting that data in the first rnplace and so that will be an interesting thing to see.
Also rndigital scholarship is changing the output of research. It used to be rnthat you can do some research, you can write it up in a thesis or a rnpaper, publish it or put it on a bookshelf and that was your rnpublication. That is not going to cut it anymore. You have digital rnmultimedia output. How do you archive that? For example, we have this rnsystem that was developed at USC in collaboration with some other rnuniversities called Hypercities. It was developed by a historian in factrn at USC, Phil Ethington and what it is, is you can put geo-rectified rnmaps and geo-tagged photographs into the system. I can look at my rnneighborhood and then click on a button and it goes from the view from rnthe sky, the satellite view down into "Well let’s see what the map rnlooked like from 1986. Now let’s see this other map from 1920," and you rnrealize "My God, there is no marina there," and it’s almost like going rnthrough time and seeing how things were. You can look at different rnphotographs and very much in a crowdsourcing fashion it enables other rnhistorians now. It’s this platform where other people can add to this rnarchive of information, so it brings up some interesting questions. One rnof the questions is how do you store that kind of output if it is not a rnpiece of paper that you can put in a library or you can scan in? How do rnyou archive this? How do you enable people to access that information? rnAnd if you are allowing people to contribute to it then how do you give rnproper credit to those individuals that are contributing to this piece rnof scholarship if there is now hundreds of people that are contributing rnto this? So this is very different. It’s a brave new world. It’s rndifferent from the way it was 20, 30 years ago and it’s going to rncontinue to change.
Krisztinarn Holly: So there are two main parts to the university. There is the rnresearch enterprise and there is the educational enterprise and I rndefinitely see both parts of it changing a lot in the next decade or so.rn So, speaking about the educational enterprise it’s not enough for rnpeople the learn the skills that they’re learning today, as valuable as rnthey may be, but it’s going to be very important for them to learn rninnovation skills that enable them to better communicate their ideas andrn communicate a value proposition, figure out how to make greater impact rnwith their ideas by enrolling other people in their vision and to rnunderstand how to finance their idea and how to turn it into a rnsustainable business, nonprofit, whatever form it is. So that is going rnto be really important. We think it is especially important at the PhD rnlevel. We think that is something that has been ignored. In fact, Kurt rnCarlson who is the CEO of SRI International, they’re a non-profit rnresearch lab in Menlo Park, he was giving a talk recently and he said rnthat they get the most amazing PhDs around the world, around the countryrn to come and work for them and despite that, it takes them seven to ten rnyears to become fully productive members of the team. Why is that? It isrn because they lack the innovation skills. They lack the skills of rnunderstanding how they fit into the innovation ecosystem, how they fit rnin, how they communicate their ideas and how they address real world rnproblems. So that’s perfect validation for the fact that at USC we just rnannounced and we’re launching for the fall an innovation diploma programrn for PhD students that is free of charge for PhDs. It is a three-course rnsequence unlike any other program that we’re aware of, and we think it rnis really, really valuable for our students. We’re not trying to turn rnPhDs into business people. We don’t think that is appropriate. We don’t rnthink that it always works. We want to keep them as researchers at the rncutting edge of their field and that’s their whole goal is to become thern absolute best in a discipline and there have been some criticisms that rnacademics don’t understand the bigger picture or they’re too rnspecialized. The reality is if you’re going to be the absolute best you rnhave to be very specialized, but that doesn’t preclude you from rnunderstanding how to communicate with others that can take your idea andrn make it into something really impactful. So it’s sort of bridging that rngap by making both the academics aware and then of course we’d like to rnfocus on the business community as well to bring them closer to rnacademia.
Question: How might digital scholarship rnimpact innovation at universities?
Krisztina Holly: Therern are a lot of changes that are happening now that are really going to bern impacting the way innovation happens in the university. One of them, rnfor example, is open access to research results and people are rnpublishing increasingly in open access journals and in fact I think rnthere have been about 5,000 new open access journals that have popped uprn online in the last couple of years that are circumventing the typical rnpeer reviewed printed journal publications and that will have some rnsignificant affect in the future. It’s not just a matter of open access rnto the papers, but also there has been a greater drive towards open rnaccess towards the data itself. It is somewhat controversial because rnthere is definitely an interest by faculty with all the work that they rnput into collecting that data and this has been a challenge for a while,rn but it is exacerbated by this new open access. How do you get to rnbenefit from your own data that you’ve worked so hard to collect and rnthen and publish on? So how long is it appropriate to hold back that rndata before you share it with other people? Obviously the sooner you getrn the data out there the more people will benefit and at the same time rnyou need to motivate faculty to be collecting that data in the first rnplace and so that will be an interesting thing to see.
Also rndigital scholarship is changing the output of research. It used to be rnthat you can do some research, you can write it up in a thesis or a rnpaper, publish it or put it on a bookshelf and that was your rnpublication. That is not going to cut it anymore. You have digital rnmultimedia output. How do you archive that? For example, we have this rnsystem that was developed at USC in collaboration with some other rnuniversities called Hypercities. It was developed by a historian in factrn at USC, Phil Ethington and what it is, is you can put geo-rectified rnmaps and geo-tagged photographs into the system. I can look at my rnneighborhood and then click on a button and it goes from the view from rnthe sky, the satellite view down into "Well let’s see what the map rnlooked like from 1986. Now let’s see this other map from 1920," and you rnrealize "My God, there is no marina there," and it’s almost like going rnthrough time and seeing how things were. You can look at different rnphotographs and very much in a crowdsourcing fashion it enables other rnhistorians now. It’s this platform where other people can add to this rnarchive of information, so it brings up some interesting questions. One rnof the questions is how do you store that kind of output if it is not a rnpiece of paper that you can put in a library or you can scan in? How do rnyou archive this? How do you enable people to access that information? rnAnd if you are allowing people to contribute to it then how do you give rnproper credit to those individuals that are contributing to this piece rnof scholarship if there is now hundreds of people that are contributing rnto this? So this is very different. It’s a brave new world. It’s rndifferent from the way it was 20, 30 years ago and it’s going to rncontinue to change.
Question: How can we stop the concealing of research in academia?
Krisztina Holly: It is an interesting challenge that in order to motivate people to excel and do things, it’s part of human nature that there needs to be some sort of incentive. So in the market economy it’s very much based on financial rewards. In academia it is very much based on reputation and so either way there is competition. I do think in academia it’s much more collaborative, so I think that although people can criticize academics at times for holding back certain research results—and it’s not ideal, it’s not optimal—at the same time I do think that there is a real sense of collaboration and the desire to create great results together. But I do think that we do have to be collaborating more and we are collaborating more. A perfect example is the Human Genome project. That would not have come together unless you had many universities and researchers that came together to work for the greater good on this project and ultimately it was clear who the big contributors were. It’s really a part of the whole ethic is to try to be able to track that, but there are challenges because if you’re starting to bring together lots of other people you know you want to make sure that we maintain that ethic for providing acknowledgment to the people who contribute.
We have lots of big challenges ahead of us, whether it is trying to reduce the cost of solar energy or trying to deliver clean water to the whole world or renewable energy in general and global warming. All of these things are going to really need to have large collaborations and I don’t know that we’ve completely figured that out yet. It’s just a prediction that it will cause some pressure and some challenges for universities because right now, especially the larger elite universities they have large research enterprises that they can build on and they can build on their reputation by bringing more research or dollars, and to be doing more exciting research. At the same time if universities are collaborating more on programs then the universities will maybe be asking themselves: "How do we preserve our brand?" Because brand is important in that collaboration. So individual universities need to have a value proposition so that it is not just a place where faculty sit and get a paycheck. Faculty can take their research and they can move to another place, so it will put more pressure on universities to ensure that they’re doing their jobs and creating that innovative environment that enables people to collaborate and work together. That is really one of the huge values of universities and a place like USC, we’ve been around for almost 130 years... absolutely integral to the local community and also within our own we’ve built up this faculty over the years. And that enables us to get the absolute best students to come through. So it’s based on a real foundation and as an example we just need to make sure that we maintain that and we keep growing and we keep increasing that or else we’re not going to be relevant.
Krisztina Holly: It is an interesting challenge that in order to motivate people to excel and do things, it’s part of human nature that there needs to be some sort of incentive. So in the market economy it’s very much based on financial rewards. In academia it is very much based on reputation and so either way there is competition. I do think in academia it’s much more collaborative, so I think that although people can criticize academics at times for holding back certain research results—and it’s not ideal, it’s not optimal—at the same time I do think that there is a real sense of collaboration and the desire to create great results together. But I do think that we do have to be collaborating more and we are collaborating more. A perfect example is the Human Genome project. That would not have come together unless you had many universities and researchers that came together to work for the greater good on this project and ultimately it was clear who the big contributors were. It’s really a part of the whole ethic is to try to be able to track that, but there are challenges because if you’re starting to bring together lots of other people you know you want to make sure that we maintain that ethic for providing acknowledgment to the people who contribute.
We have lots of big challenges ahead of us, whether it is trying to reduce the cost of solar energy or trying to deliver clean water to the whole world or renewable energy in general and global warming. All of these things are going to really need to have large collaborations and I don’t know that we’ve completely figured that out yet. It’s just a prediction that it will cause some pressure and some challenges for universities because right now, especially the larger elite universities they have large research enterprises that they can build on and they can build on their reputation by bringing more research or dollars, and to be doing more exciting research. At the same time if universities are collaborating more on programs then the universities will maybe be asking themselves: "How do we preserve our brand?" Because brand is important in that collaboration. So individual universities need to have a value proposition so that it is not just a place where faculty sit and get a paycheck. Faculty can take their research and they can move to another place, so it will put more pressure on universities to ensure that they’re doing their jobs and creating that innovative environment that enables people to collaborate and work together. That is really one of the huge values of universities and a place like USC, we’ve been around for almost 130 years... absolutely integral to the local community and also within our own we’ve built up this faculty over the years. And that enables us to get the absolute best students to come through. So it’s based on a real foundation and as an example we just need to make sure that we maintain that and we keep growing and we keep increasing that or else we’re not going to be relevant.
Recorded on May 6, 2010
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