Dorcy's Moving

On a recent visit to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, I broke away to visit Ecovative Design, a remarkable 40-employee firm creating packaging for Dell Computer, wine shippers and other clients by turning fungi and farm waste into a durable and biodegradable substitute for foam. The company was spawned through Inventor’s Studio, a course in which 20 seniors each year are challenged by engineering lecturer Burt Swersey to produce marketable innovations that are profitable, patentable and can improve the world.

Here’s a short video of my tour of the business, in Green Island, N.Y., led by Eben Bayer, who developed the company with fellow student Gavin McIntyre (read more about Ecovative’s history here).

Bayer not only explains what he calls “living nanotechnology” that turns fungi into factory workers, but also discusses what qualities should be nurtured in American education to foster creative problem finding and solving.

Bayer recently made his second trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, and I invited him to contribute a “Your Dot” essay on his views of the event, the limits of brainstorming and the path toward progress that fits on a finite planet. Part of what he says here and in the video tour offers a healthy challenge to the notion of the “networked path to breakthroughs” that I’ve focused on quite a bit.

You can read Bayer’s piece below, followed by a reaction to his company from Andrew Hargadon of the University of California, Davis, who studies the roots of innovation:

In unseasonably warm Green Island, N.Y., my little company is in the process of expanding into a tall, beige, warehouse in the industrial park on the edge of town. Another 25,000 square feet devoted to the growing packaging, insulation, and other products, from mushrooms. Ecovative’s “campus” now bridges a parking lot, shared with industrial pipe companies, janitorial services, and a wind turbine manufacturer.

I’m home from a January filled with travel, including a last week spent in Davos, a stark contrast to my current local. This was my second time attending the World Economic Forum and, with another go around, I felt that I was beginning to get some perspective on the event.

Ostensibly I was there as a “CEO” representing my company, Ecovative. But as a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I essentially studied innovation & creativity (along with a delightfully oversized serving of hard sciences) I found myself observing and interacting through another lens. Specifically: How does the Davos approach compare to the state of the art in these fields?

The answer? It depends on what school of thought you fall into.

We are brought up in a culture that embraces the “brainstorm” session. Get your best and brightest together, order pizza, and kick around idea’s until something clicks and zynga! You just invented the next Facebook!

But I have learned — first in courses on innovation and creativity at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and later through my own experience running a living materials company — that group brainstorming leads to mediocrity. Inevitably within a group a few strong perspectives emerge; even the most dynamic teams will work to rectify the dissonance between competing view points, borrowing a little here, a little there. What usually results is a grand compromise of vision, something from everyone, good at nothing.

In comparison, great technologies, companies, and products are often driven by the focused vision of just a few principles. Apple, Polaroid, and perhaps now Facebook are all examples of this approach. You may not like their visions, but they are clear and consistent and their companies follow them with dogged dedication.

At Davos I participated in a brainstorm on new energy technologies (during which I ended up getting in a fight with Lord Hastings, but we got over it, great guy). The question we were asked to consider: What major innovation will transform energy availability this century?

The recap: I proposed a growable solar cell, the person to my right proposed global transmission lines, the next a better form of power storage, then a mirror to focus solar energy on earth, and finally our last participant talked about the importance of social change. The result? My group proposed a better portable battery, which would enable transmission of power (presumably by people carrying the battery about) that accelerates the deployment of solar power through social sharing.

See the formula? Each individual concept could be expanded and “plussed” to excellence. Instead we compromised on an idea-chimera, which is currently shivering lonely in the cold Swiss mountains pondering its own existence and cursing its casual creators.

I did get a few delightful surprises though: Half way through one workshop we were asked to “switch” our perspective from resource scarcity to resource plenty (or vice versa, depending on where you placed yourself when starting the sessions). This type of exercise is brilliant, and crucial for creating insights, it forces the participants to re-evaluate their core assumptions, often these are hidden from us.

I felt this perspective switch was important during the scarcity session, because only a small group — about 15 percent of people in the session of 45 — believed resources were fundamentally constrained (e.g., earth is finite). The rest were situated on a spectrum ranging from resource scarcity is real enough to hurt the economy (but not that real) right up to we have infinite resources.

While I don’t think anyone changed views in that session, it did force contrasting participants to consider solving the problem using the other perspective. For me, this meant taking on the exciting viewpoint of limitless resources: we should double down on extraction technology, invest in new wells, fracking, and mining, with an end goal of bringing health, wealth, and conspicuous consumption to the planet.

Fortunately for my antipodes this meant trying on my radical views: we need to extract no more than the carrying capacity of the earth (its solar flux, plus material reserves), invest in efficiency (not more generation), value happiness enabled through personal connections and experiences, not purchases, and still hold a goal of bringing health and basic support to the entire planet.

The result is that everyone leaving the room had a bigger toolkit of ideas that they could use in their day to day ideas, that based on personal preconceptions, might never appear, but can still be applied, regardless of ideology (or if you prefer, cold hard facts), as tactics in our day to day lives.

So? How does Davos rank on fostering innovation and creativity?

Well, like much of the forum, mixed. There are brilliant approaches sprinkled through-out conventional sessions which lean, in fact lounge, in blandness. The best I experienced, of any conference, was actually introduced by Hilde Schwab, and featured a moderator who played jazz piano for the group in order to explain how creative flow interacts with learned knowledge. Spectacular.

Down the hall a parallel session explored quantitative easing in the Euro zone, I suspect they brainstormed that one last year. #OnlyinDavos.

When I sent the video to Andrew Hargadon, he sent this initial reaction, which I then forwarded to Bayer:

This is a very cool startup. And by the looks of it, they’re in their fifth year, which is a good sign. It’s a terrific concept, at least to me, who knows little about the science or product specs.

My biggest question for these kinds of startups: do they have actual orders from customers or are they living on research & development grants? I would be much re-assured if they have real and ongoing orders. I know first hand that students-cum-sustainability-entrepreneurs make great poster children but not necessarily long-run successes. And that’s even when the science works.

As for RPIs Inventor’s Studio — I love the bold challenge that they made to their students. This particular type of studio/class is diffusing rapidly across universities (or emerging simultaneously). The rise of the “geek gods” seems to be fueling America’s recent embrace of the entrepreneur as bringer of jobs and green salvation. I’m involved with a number of similar programs both here at Davis and at Stanford, Berkeley, Colorado State, and MIT. These are each great programs — as are many more I haven’t mentioned. And they are adding a missing and much needed dimension to engineering and science education — training engineers and scientists to identify their own problems, rather than take those as given. I would also say that while each program’s unique and different, they are likely all sufficient to get their students moving down the right road.

You can be sure I will be showing my students this video. As a note, here’s a one-minute video of a similar company — MicroMidas — that came out of Davis:

Here’s Bayer’s reply:

Good comments! I have met many teams that follow the model of business plans or grants without a real commercialization plan. Burt (from inventors studio) pressed this early on, and has always advocated speaking to the customer early and often, and asking for an order, even if you don’t have the product ready or right!

Good news for us is that this year more than half of our revenue will be from non-government customers. Almost all of these are reoccurring (though that’s sort of the nature of the custom packaging business).

I also met the MicroMidas team a few years ago. They had raised quite a bit of cash fast. I’d be happy to hear what they are up to now!

[3:40 p.m. | Updated Hargadon sent a fascinating followup about the two different types of networks needed for success in startups.]