Challenge – let’s build a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy
An idea from Professor Caroline Wagner – Ohio State University
How to engage students, innovators to collaborate and grow |
The Pain
- The diffusion deficit – A weakness exists in the local links between the University and innovative actors in the region, exacerbated by a lack of incentives to create these links.
- The data deficit – Numerous events in the physical world leave “data traces” in isolated silos that could be useful to the knowledge economy–but, the data are at different granularities and they lack interoperability; paucity of knowledge access and flow inhibits the pace of research and innovation.
- The insight deficit – difficulty in processing and analusing the data into meaningful information – Add to this problem that over 80% of data analytics time is spent in time-consuming pre-processing tasks and we have an insight deficit.
- The attraction deficit – The Knowledge exodus – Smart students leave the region to go to innovation-rich regions.
How do we keep them ? In order to keep them in the region, we need to create local opportunities for them to be entrepreneurial – to solve problems and re-invent locally.
A Potential Pain Killer
National service in an Altruistic Capacity Right now, our pro-social students are overwhelmingly attracted to a year of service at Teach for America, City Year, Peace Corps, ViSTA – |
- how can we harvest these altruistic vitalities towards building the local and regional economy—to grow the society they want to live in right where they live?
- how can we link students with local enterprises that will simultaneously build the data we need, create the local links, give students a chance to create their own jobs/businesses/non-profit start-ups, all while making data-for-innovation available to larger groups and decision makers? Let’s call this: Catalyzing innovative energy.
HOW DO WE SCALE THIS VISION?
How can we find a way to get the funding needed to:
- pay students;
- seed pro-social enterprises;
- create an open data platform for innovation;
- link students to faculty (who are themselves linked to the global knowledge network) to diffuse knowledge to make it locally available???
Let’s call this: building a sticky innovative platform for a transformational economy.
That is my challenge to you – help me design this system from the ground up, tap dynamism, incentivize growth – include the poorest and excluded in the development. Ideas needed!
Posted on October 26, 2015