Innovation Studio
The Innovation Studio aims to transform the research of faculty at the School of Public Health into real world innovations that have the capacity to change the world. Since October 2015, I have designed and implemented how the Innovation Studio interfaces with faculty, students, and external stakeholders.
Situation
As a public institution, the University of Michigan has a public mandate to create a positive impact on society. Yet faculty members are often overburdened with conducting research, applying for grants, teaching classes, mentoring students, writing journal articles, etc. As a result, they have minimal time to consider how their work might be applied in practice.
Complication
Many higher education institutions, including University of Michigan, provide a variety of resources for faculty to commercialize their research, such as iCorps. Most commercialization programs expect the faculty member to continue to assume the tasks of launching a start-up, such as market research, customer discovery, product development, fundraising, etc. Yet faculty rarely have the time or expertise to pursue these activities. As a result, many innovations based on faculty research are stifled at the outset.
Furthermore, many commercialization programs are tailored to faculty in engineering and medicine, where research is more likely to be patentable. In public health, research typically takes the form of data science where insights are not readily patentable. Moreover, data science and/or algorithmic insights require a clear value proposition and business model to generate value to society.
Resolution
At the Innovation Studio, we have designed a program that minimizes the burden on faculty to engage in the venture creation process. Instead, we hire a team of interdisciplinary designers to design a desirable, viable and feasible solution based on faculty research insights.
Since 2016, we have conducted six projects with faculty in the Innovation Studio. To date, two projects reached a "no-go" decision because we were unable to access users to adequately test our prototypes. In the remaining four projects, we reached a point, where we determined that more research was necessary before the solution could be viably commercialized. In these projects, faculty have been able to use the insights generated through user interviews to apply for new grant opportunities.
