Rahim Kanani: Tell me a little bit about how this $20M CGI commitment came about.
Paul E. Jacobs: As undergraduate and graduate alumni of University of California, Berkeley, my wife Stacy and I have a long history with the school. When I was studying at UC Berkeley I was in the College of Engineering. Today, I serve as chairman on the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Advisory Board and Stacy is a trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation. Together, we serve as co-chairs of The Campaign for Berkeley, which seeks to raise $3 billion to support students, faculty, research and programs by the end of 2013.
We highly value the synergistic combination of UC Berkeley, which offers a broad student body one of the best educations in the world, and the City of Berkeley, which provides a very diverse and sometimes chaotic environment for personal growth and discovery. UC Berkeley’s deep strength in technology combined with its leadership across a broad range of disciplines makes it the ideal home for a program that will hone the integrated set of skills students will need to create our future.
One of my personal goals is to help encourage more bright minds to pursue careers in engineering. One of the biggest motivators is to be part of something larger than yourself. Students and faculty at Berkeley Engineering are working every day to create and foster technological breakthroughs to improve the world. Those are the kind of innovators we need as future leaders.
Rahim Kanani: Why is today's engineering education simply not good enough? And are you sending a message to similar schools across the country that we need to do something differently, or better?
Paul E. Jacobs: It’s not enough to provide our future engineering leaders with technical skills. They must also learn how to work in interdisciplinary teams, how to iterate designs rapidly, how to manufacture sustainably, how to combine art and engineering, and how to address global markets.
On the technical side, today’s engineering education seems stuck in the past. Professors often stand in front of students giving dry lectures based on notes they wrote years ago. However, students are now accustomed to quickly obtaining the information they need through rich multimedia content on the Internet. Therefore, lectures need to go on-line. With new rapid prototyping systems, students can now iterate on new hardware designs, in the same fashion as they quickly adapt and evolve the design of a web site or other software. They can then join together in teams, under the supervision of their professor and teaching assistants, to work on projects that are much closer to commercial quality, and therefore are much more exciting and motivational.
This new initiative at UC Berkeley will integrate design thinking more fully across the educational experiences of its students, so that they can better innovate, build, and commercialize their new ideas—ultimately, empowering young engineers to design innovative solutions to society’s biggest challenges.
Rahim Kanani: In your commitment speech you talked about the "interconnected innovation economy". What did you mean by that?
Paul E. Jacobs: The world we live in is increasingly interconnected, not just by communication technologies like smartphones and the Internet, but also through the way different local economies are so globally interdependent. Value is created by people, companies and places that are able to see the opportunities and come up with the best new ideas. Every technological advancement has the potential to spread rapidly to places, near or far, where it can best drive economic value and change.
Rahim Kanani: The proposed Jacobs Institute of Design Innovation will, among other things, focus on manufacturing, which will allow student innovators to "scale up their inventions and produce them efficiently and sustainably". How important is sustainability to the innovation economy, and are the rules of business in the midst of being rewritten?
Paul E. Jacobs: With the global scale of many technology platforms, sustainability is a critical factor in long-term innovation. With new manufacturing technologies enabling increasingly decentralized production on a massive scale, efficiency has to be prioritized or the potential exists to create tremendous waste, dispersed in a way that will be more difficult to manage.
Without the materials needed to manufacture new technologies, our future innovators will not have the resources necessary to tackle the biggest challenges we face in today’s society. I strongly believe in being a positive and creative force in the protection and enhancement of the local and global environment. This includes supporting a need to minimize hazardous materials, reduce consumption of natural resources, and ultimately to minimize any negative impact to the environment. We can teach our future innovators to continuously assess processes and practices to identify areas for reduction in energy, waste and emissions.
Rahim Kanani: What kinds of skills does the new American workforce need to compete globally, and where are we on the scale of equipping our students with those very skills?
Paul E. Jacobs: The new American workforce needs to possess the ability to invent, design, and create new products, devices, systems and services in order to compete on a global level and to provide the spark of innovation to seed new industries, jobs and economic growth.
Although, that’s not enough on its own. The next generation of the American workforce should be able to better bridge the gap between innovation and manufacturing. As President Obama said, “When we make things here, we perfect the next idea.”
Being “best in the world” in scientific discovery is important, but it is not sufficient for keeping any nation viable in today’s global economy. Investments in science produce indispensable knowledge, but it is what comes next, i.e., design and innovation, that often counts most. By providing the needed resources to enable such interdisciplinary efforts, the Jacobs Institute will serve as a focal point for innovation at UC Berkeley and a pipeline for innovation in the commercial world. Students equipped with this holistic experience in systems design, innovation and manufacturing will be better prepared to tackle real-world challenges in engineering, the “next big thing”, entrepreneurship and new business ventures.
Rahim Kanani: Finally, what are some of the leadership lessons you've learned along the way with regard to pursuing innovative ideas and technologies over the years. Is there a secret to 'getting it right'?
Paul E. Jacobs: There isn’t a single silver bullet that creates the necessary environment for innovation. At the foundation is a diverse, committed and passionate collection of smart people. In order to motivate those people, I provide a vision of what I believe is possible and desirable rather than providing a top down strategic plan. A strategic plan is like giving somebody a map with everything already thought out and saying, “You need to walk along this path.” Instead, I’d rather provide a vision which acts as a compass that says, “Head in this direction.” I often encourage our employees not to accept conventional wisdom, but rather to question the assumptions that others are depending upon. Finding which of those assumptions can be improved, leads to an open area for innovation. Finally, I have found that being flexible and opportunistic has been the path to success. You have to take risks and turn today’s failures into the seeds of tomorrow’s successes.
