David Krakauer, the new director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), says a lot of interesting, challenging, borderline-radical things. Then again, he comes from a pretty interesting place, born of a borderline-radical approach to science and research – one where ideas are free to grow in an interdisciplinary greenhouse in which odd hybrids are nurtured and appreciated rather than cut off at the roots.
Last fall, Krakauer joined WID via the independent Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in the early ‘80s by a small group of distinguished scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory who “shared a general dissatisfaction with the stove-piped, bureaucratic, funding-centric approach to science that had taken hold both at the federal laboratories and academia.”
But if all that sounds like a lot of rarefied, high-brow esoterica that has no relevance to the real world, businesspeople should take note of the company the Santa Fe Institute keeps. Among the members of its exclusive business network are Microsoft, Google, Intel, NASA, Boeing, eBay, John Deere, Thrivent Financial, and Thomson Reuters.
Not a lightweight among them.
“Essentially they [are members] because they realize that the sorts of ideas that are being generated are potentially valuable, and they’d rather have them than have their competitors have them,” said Krakauer, who was the featured speaker at a Wisconsin Innovation Network luncheon last Tuesday. “This is not contractual work, it’s just access. And it’s a physical daily access, not waiting for someone to come to you and say, ‘I had this great idea.’ It’s you who spend your time, in this instance with me at WID, daily when you have time to understand what’s really going on down on the ground. …
“So this is perceived to be a competitive edge, and a lot of very successful companies are willing to pay for it.”
The WID’s vision
Just about every Madisonian has driven past the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, which, along with the Morgridge Institute for Research, occupies the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery building on Campus Drive across from the new Union South. But not every Madisonian is quite sure what it’s all about.
Its vision statement is to “promote discoveries at the emerging interfaces among fields rooted in the common language of information.” Krakauer says it’s a place to “cultivate entrepreneurial interdisciplinarity” with a goal of creating “an extraordinary constraint-free environment for smart people.”
That may be as clear as mud to the layman, but if it works as intended, its importance could be transcendent. According to the WID’s mission, the center is committed to new ideas, new technologies, and unlikely collaborations with a view toward “accelerat[ing] discovery and delivery in the domains of health and well-being.”
But while the idea of a bunch of academics playing in a multimillion-dollar sandbox might seem off-putting to members of the nose-to-the-grindstone business community, Krakauer is quick to note that the balance between upstream and downstream research (i.e., pure research and practical application) is one that needs to be preserved in order for society to advance. In Krakauer’s estimation, it’s a balance we once relied on but that has since been thrown out of whack.
“The basic tension for those of us in academic life versus you guys coming largely from business is that there are two different value systems in play that are extremely difficult to reconcile,” said Krakauer. “Most of my colleagues are fundamentally interested in writing papers, getting grants, getting great reviews from their students – that’s our currency. They don’t care about entrepreneurial activity. That’s not why you become an academic. On the other hand, there are others that are interested in taking the sorts of ideas that are generated and applying them downstream.”
According to Krakauer, there was a golden age of research – what he refers to as the Sputnik to Desertron Period – in which the balance between pure research and industrial applications (i.e., the “upstream” and “downstream”) was ideal.
“Extraordinary science was being produced by the … scientific community, great papers, Nobel prizes were being awarded, but they were also building the technologies that we have come to depend on,” said Krakauer.
That balance, he said, was disturbed by measures such as the Mansfield Amendment, which helped create an environment in which, some say, innovative and creative thinking is misdirected by looking at the market too soon.
“That is, money that was made available by, for example, federal agencies with a defense interest ensured that from then onwards, that money had to be spent on what is a very explicitly defense-related project,” said Krakauer. “So the Internet, for example, it grew out of defense spending, would not have been admissible because it was a little bit too generally valuable.”
Another historical development that may have had an impact on the upstream/downstream balance was the Bayh-Dole Act, which gave universities control of the intellectual property arising from federally funded research.
“What it did was it tried to turn academics into businessmen and women, and the consequence was the sort of drying up of some of the creative ideals and an emphasis on efficiency,” said Krakauer. “So this I would view as the curse of the Six Sigma, a totally stupid idea if you’re in the business of trying to create new things.”
That loss of balance, says Krakauer, has stifled communication and cooperation between the academic and business communities.
“And so the academic reflex has been to say, no, we’re not going to talk to you guys because you don’t understand us, you don’t understand our objectives, our value system,” said Krakauer. “We don’t want to give our ideas to industry. This is about scholarship, and I think this is a completely ludicrous state of affairs, because these are not fundamentally misaligned interests.”
Nurturing hybrids
Through the WID, Krakauer is hoping to create connections among academic disciplines, but also between the academic and the entrepreneurial worlds. The more hidebound goals of individual academic departments are not his bailiwick – his interest lies in interdisciplinary exploration.
“WID has to do the following things that the campus can’t do easily,” said Krakauer. “First of all, what I call experimenting with hybrids. That is, I want to create a kind of weird monster in the space of scientific ideas that are extremely difficult to do in a department. A department will say ‘that isn’t physics’ or ‘that isn’t chemistry.’ I don’t care what it is. I just don’t care. I don’t have that kind of responsibility. Is it interesting?
“The idea in the end is that we essentially will be growing new hybrid forms that we can then disperse back to campus. So I view it as a little bit of a revolutionary locus situated in the middle of campus to reform campus.”
And that degree of openness to new ideas is in no way limited. Krakauer stresses that the chief aim of WID is to “merge interfaces among fields.”
“I don’t care what they are,” he said. “If you came to me and said, ‘I’ve got this great idea that involves a professor of Elizabethan literature and a biochemist, and you have a compelling story to tell me, you are in. That’s what we can do.”
The university’s growing importance to business
So what’s the bottom line for business? Krakauer cites a May 2010 Deloitte white paper titled The Future of Life Sciences Industries in which nearly a third of senior industry executives surveyed foresaw a reduction in future R&D spending and nearly half believed 40% of biotech companies would cease to exist in five years. The survey also found that 43% of respondents were focusing on products that would provide a more immediate return and 32% were reducing R&D spending.
“If this is all true, the university becomes much more important to companies,” said Krakauer. “Because as you cut down your basic research, cutting off your upstream source of ideas and focusing on product, and we redouble our interest in basic science, the only real way forward is a new kind of collaboration between academia and industry, and I mean a fundamentally different kind of collaboration of the sort you may never have seen before, and that’s something I think that WID can do.”
Krakauer also said greater funding ties between industry and the academic world are important to the future health of both.
“We have to think about alternative funding models for research that are not based so strongly on federal [money],” said Krakauer. “This university has been an extraordinary success at attracting federal funds, but federal funds are not the future. And so the question is, what can we do together to provide funds for basic research that you feel is valuable for your objectives?”
To that end, Krakauer says WID is willing to foster those relationships, but that the business community must step up as well.
“I think we can create an environment on campus that’s much more friendly to industry and entrepreneurs, that’s much more open at every point in the process; so that’s one thing that I can do,” said Krakauer. “So one thing we’re starting at WID is what I’m calling The Future of Funds in the Market for Ideas Program. And the idea is we have to get that extraordinary talented pool which is huge here of academics and students interested in alternative funds and potential new product development, and we can’t do it by saying we’re going to have an entrepreneurial series, because they’ll never come. And I think seminars like that, bringing people in who wouldn’t otherwise come, are things I can do. But then I need you to also come because I can’t do that downstream part.”
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