Carnegie Mellon’s Integrated Innovation Institute’s Vision To Build Innovators Of Tomorrow

by Peter High, published on Forbes.com

05-27-2014

In decades past, companies derived value from deep knowledge and discipline within specific functional areas. They were strong at operations or in finance or in service, etc. Companies were often strong at multiple of those, but the organization structure that owes tremendously to Alfred Sloan and General Motors was almost militaristic in its hierarchy and in its silos. Just as the military has had to think creatively about how breaking down these silos, promoting people who have breadth of experience as well as depth, companies too have derived great value at thinking about value derived at the nexus of disciplines.

Harrah’s Entertainment (now Caesars Entertainment) leap-frogged the competition in the casino gaming industry by virtue of the insights derived by Gary Loveman, a Harvard Business School professor whose specialty was at the intersection of marketing and technology, together with an extremely talented team in his Marketing and IT departments at Harrah’s, the company was an early winner with customer relationship management (CRM).

Likewise, many have attributed Apple’s success to bringing together technology and design in ways that were not the norm, even in Silicon Valley.

It should not be surprising that leading universities are starting to train people in a comparable fashion. A recent example of this is the Integrated Innovation Institute at Carnegie Mellon. Jonathan Cagan, the Co-Director of the Institute is a good representation of this trend. In addition to his co-directorship, he is the Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Ladd Professor in Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering. As he notes in my interview with him, the Integrated Innovation Institute operates at the intersection of business, engineering, and design in the hopes of providing depth and breadth to the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders.

(This is the twelfth article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read the prior eleven, please visit this link.

Peter High: What is the charter of the Integrated Innovation Institute?

Jonathan Cagan: The Integrated Innovation Institute focuses on the intersection of business, engineering and design to advance fundamental knowledge and practice in product and service innovation. The Institute cross-trains students in the three disciplines to become elite innovators, which enhances the effectiveness of thinking and generating results. In addition to Masters level professional degrees, the Institute offers corporate training and pursues research to advance the state of the art.

High: How were the three disciplines that make up the program – engineering, design, and business – chosen?

Cagan: These are the three core disciplines necessary for product and service innovation: business, because the product/service needs to be viable in the marketplace; engineering, because it has to work and provide functional benefit; and design, because it needs to connect to people’s work and lifestyles in an aesthetic, interactive and emotional way. Carnegie Mellon is unique in having top programs in each of these fields and a long history of collaborating across disciplines.

Additional topics covered in the article include:

• How will you measure the success or lack thereof of your program?
• What sort of outreach do you have to current entrepreneurs to participate in the program as lecturers or advisors?
• You have said, “Innovation can be studied, formalized, taught — and continuously improved upon with new knowledge.” What are some examples of this?
• There has been much written about how the innovation has become too much “little i” and not enough “Big I.”  Why has the pace of major innovation changed, and what are some of the best ways to change that?
• Do you find differences in the ability to innovate between large companies and small companies?
• What factors separate innovative people from non-innovative people?
• You have campuses in Silicon Valley and in New York, but your home campus is in Pittsburgh. That city has received praise in the past for friendliness to entrepreneurs, and fostering a growing start-up community. What is your perspective on this, and what role generally do civic leaders have in encouraging entrepreneurship?

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