Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Idea Bandwagons

Does it ever seem that we are imagination challenged, bound to imitate or follow a popular idea or approach, whether successful or not? (At this point, I could insert a quasi-obligatory reference to lemmings plunging into the sea. For the record, lemmings do not commit mass suicide; that is a persistent urban myth.)

Once an idea gains traction, it often seems everyone adopts a "me too" approach. There is, of course, intellectual safety in following a crowd. After all, if "everyone" is doing it, then ipso facto it must be a good idea. Alas, not necessarily. In Gartner hype cycle parlance, this mimicry can happen early, during the "peak of inflated expectations," or later, riding the "slope of enlightenment," if the idea survives the dreaded "trough of disillusionment."

My AI friends still talk ruefully about the long and difficult AI winter that followed early, unrealistic expectations (e.g., human language translation in the 1960s). Funding became scarce and the community shrank. Today, of course, we are basking in the AI spring, when many early hopes and predictions are being realized in dramatic fashion, powered by new machine learning ideas, large volumes of data, and powerful computing systems. Despite AI's enormous success, we have not yet realized the dream of strong AI, though I retain fond hopes. And yes, I am an optimist; I do not share the fears expressed by some about strong AI. However, I digress – back to viral memes.

Uber, the ride sharing service, has spawned seemingly endless variants, all described in pitch decks as Uber for X – a new instance of the sharing economy. As Wired noted last year, Uber for X has been the headline of more than 400 news articles. If you are thinking that the Uber for homework opportunity (there are several startups) might not be the next, well Uber, you are almost certainly right. There is, as former Federal Reserve chair, Alan Greenspan, called it, some irrational exuberance.

Following the success of AirBnB, a new category of startups, somewhat whimsically called MaaS (Mom as a Service), has exploded. (Let me just state right now, I apologize to moms everywhere. You were right; we should have cleaned up our rooms.) These MaaS companies provide services such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, and food; among the best-known food examples are Grubhub (prepared food delivery) and Blue Apron (cooking ingredients delivery). As one who is culinary-challenged, I hope this segment fares well.

Because humans are involved, this faddish behavior is largely domain invariant. As such, it extends to research and scholarship as well. In the best cases, a triggering discovery stimulates the cognizant research community to shift directions and build a rich and robust intellectual infrastructure around a novel idea. The discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique is a wonderful example; research groups worldwide quickly pivoted to investigate the technique and its applications. In other cases, a technology crosses a threshold (e.g., price or performance) and that quantitative change enables qualitatively new approaches to old problems. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), long a niche technology, are now the subject of intense research as AI accelerators.

Whether in startups or research, advantage often accrues to first movers, those who pioneer a new idea and explore its applications. Doing so requires imagination – the ability to step out of the incremental, "me to" mindset and take transformative intellectual (and often financial) risks. That is not easy, both because creative thinking is challenging and because failure is often punished. Now there's an opportunity – IaaS (Imagination as a Service). Let me get to work on that research proposal and pitch deck.

Pinball, War Games, and Universities

When I joined Microsoft after twenty-five years at two highly ranked public research universities (Illinois and North Carolina), I found not only the welcoming embrace of long-time friends and research colleagues, but also a much more intentional mindset about the ecosystem of evolving technologies, business and consumer expectations, corporate partners, and powerful competitors.

Technology and business models were both in rapid flux, with the rise of Apple's iPad and IPhone, Google and Facebook's ad-driven revenue models, and the emergence of scalable cloud services, led by Amazon's AWS. At the time, I was working on multicore parallelism, leading a team exploring novel data center designs for resiliency and energy efficiency, and later, heading Microsoft's global technology policy group.

We knew Microsoft was competing against equally talented and determined opponents in a world where the stakes were market share and ultimately, corporate survival.

Pinball Wizards and War Games

One of my friends once described the technology business as like playing pinball. (Perhaps this anecdote dates me, but so be it, I am what I am, an aging geek.) If you are a good pinball player, you get replays, continue playing, and you draw an admiring crowd. If you are a bad pinball player, you must keep putting quarters into the machine, playing alone until either you improve or you run out of money. At Microsoft, we had a pile of quarters, but we were learning a new game, facing wily competitors, and the cool kids were drifting away. Hum a few bars of The Who's 1969 classic, Pinball Wizard, to appreciate the mental imagery.

I thought I was
The Bally table king
But I just handed
My pin ball crown to him

In the corporate world, one way to drive the flippers and anticipate how the silver ball may bounce and move is via war games, sometimes called scenario planning. Given technology predictions (e.g., data center capabilities and costs) and market positions, what might your competitors do (e.g., new products, new strategies, acquisitions, or divestures), what would you do, and how might those choices affect your relative positions? It is a fascinating game to play, especially when tasked with playing the role of a competitor. It is also enormously illuminating, because it forces each of the participants to step outside their current Weltanschauung and imagine a different world, one where not all plans succeed, and the unexpected can disrupt the status quo for all players. I loved the experience.

Academia, Alice and the Cat

Having returned to academia and another AAU public research university (Iowa), I often find myself thinking about how rarely the strategic lessons of business war gaming are applied in university circles. Yes, universities do compete, for funding (philanthropic, business, state, and federal support), for talent (faculty, staff, and students), and for recognition and ranking, and they do so with one another and with a host of educational and societal investment alternatives. And no, universities are not businesses.

What then are the transferable lessons from corporate war games? To be clear, I do not mean lessons about MOOCs or technology in the classroom; those are tactical issues, pedagogically important though they are. Nor do I mean the fascinating mathematical and social aspects of non-zero sum, multiplayer game theory. Rather, I mean the great and largely implicit renegotiation of the societal compact with higher education, taking place in a world that is changing ever more rapidly and disruptively.

The words and phrases -- globalization, urbanization, population growth, socioeconomic disruption and stratification, ethnic and religious strife, mass migration, environmental stress, and natural resource competition – have both a human and a cultural face. Against that backdrop, those computing and communication technologies, once only imagined in corporate war games, have disintermediated global supply chains, reshaped some industries and destroyed others, and transformed our modes of communication and social discourse. I make no value judgements about these changes. I note only that the change is real, rapid, and recurrent.

In this turbulent world of change and Tofflerian future shock, those of us in universities, particularly ones with a public charge, would do well to think more intentionally about our institutions' futures. What are our values, our strategies, our markets, our products, and for some, our survival plans? How do we adapt and respond to societal needs, expectations, and wants? In short, how do we act with foresight and contingency, rather than reacting, with panic and surprise? Equally importantly, how do we choose wisely and well, while preserving the time-tested values of critical thinking, systematic experiment, and learned pedagogy?

It is worth pausing to remember the exchange between Alice and the Cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland:

Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don't know.
Cat: Then it doesn't matter which way you go."

There is a tempting Schrödinger allusion here, but I leave that as an exercise to the reader.

I fear that all too often, contemporary university strategy is just as confused; we do not know which way to go because we do not know where we are going. More troublesome, we often assume that we need not worry, that our current form and structure are unchanging Platonic ideals. In war games, as in life, denial and defense are rarely long-term, winning strategies. Indeed, the American university of today bears little resemblance to that of even a few decades ago, with many, though not all, of the changes wrought by external forces.

Any war game or scenario game begins with current and projected environmental context. Put another way, this is the current world, these are the current actors, and this is a likely range of possible futures, each with weighted probability. In U.S. public higher education, the current and near term world includes flat to declining state support, rising tuition and student debt, increasing public distrust, declining college age populations, and for research universities, flat to declining federal research support, all set against the disruptive changes outlined earlier. The primary actors include parents, students, state and national governments, business partners and employers, other colleges and universities, community colleges, for-profit educational programs, and other training services.

Dan's Cloudy Crystal Ball

Though my crystal ball is cracked and cloudy, on occasion, I have been billed as a futurist. I am no seer, but I will hazard some predictions on possible scenarios for public research universities.

• Driven by accelerating economic disruption, demand for lifelong, just-in-time education rises dramatically, equaling or exceeding that for traditional, on-campus education of young adults. Disintermediation of the three common attributes of a university experience -- socialization, knowledge transfer, and branding – continues. In situ skills refresh, knowledge upgrades, and competency certification require new educational delivery models and public-private partnerships to deliver personalized content at lower prices and on demand.
• Mirroring rising wealth disparities in the general population, the stratification of colleges and universities continues to increase, with a small number of wealthy private and flagship public universities holding assets multiple orders of magnitude larger than those in the second and third echelons. This "winner take all" network effect applies broadly to institutional endowments, basic research funding, and student admission selectivity. Put more directly, the question is not the future of Harvard or Michigan, but the future of Random State U.
• Resource disparities accelerate research specialization and educational differentiation. Unable to subsidize research across all areas, midsized and asset-constrained institutions specialize, focusing research and scholarship only on targeted areas. Success ensues for those who identify intellectually, culturally, and economically profitable niches, and who collaborate with complementary peers. Sadly, the smallest institutions face insolvency as tuition revenues cannot meet operating costs, a trend already evident for small private colleges.
• The 19^th century land-grant mission of taking new agricultural and mechanical knowledge into the field and factory is reinvigorated, taking new form in the 21^st century knowledge economy. Society demands that public universities address pressing problems. Applied research and development partnerships rise in importance, spanning such issues as health care costs and accessibility, severe weather and climate change, rural depopulation, and global economic competitiveness.

If any of these scenarios or any number of other variants, created by automation, tax policy, immigration changes, or other social issues, accrues, even in part, then each higher education institution must ask itself how it will act and react, given its common and unique assets, its brand equity, its values, and its most appropriate mission. This may be one of the defining social questions of our age.

At its best, I believe a great public research university is many things …

• A tabula rasa for dreams
• A magnet for global talent
• A crucible of discovery and innovation
• An engine of the knowledge economy
• A framer of the crucial debates
• A transformative societal force

It has been all of those things for me, and I want the same experience and reward for our children. I believe passionately that higher education is a public good, a defining value of our culture, and an asset we dare not squander. I also realize that perspective is not universally shared.

However, the enduring lesson of business is unmistakable – stasis is impossible; change is constant; and the unexpected always lurks. Public research universities must engage society in collaboratively shaping intentional plans for their futures, grounded in both reality and objectives. This is the essence of the war game message.

As in pinball, the quarters do matter; though in this case, they are the lives and futures of our children and our globally competitive position. We need to play the game wisely and well, for our competitors surely are.