Are you a hammer or a nail? Insights from Princeton’s Keller Center Innovation Day
Princeton is discovering its entrepreneurial mojo, and part of that is integrating the traditional concerns of entrepreneurs – can we make something new that someone will buy – with the concerns of the humanities.
The Keller Center Annual Innovation Forum
Under the direction of Nena Golubovic, Princeton is beginning to embrace the idea that the discoveries in not only its research labs but in its humanities classes could truly have an impact on the world. In this second Innovation Day, over 280 guests heard from inspiring panel speakers, keynotes and – the focal point of the day – from teams of student and faculty entrepreneurs who compete for recognition in a (very polite) version of Princeton’s own “Shark Tank.”
Opening panel: A researcher, a VC and an entrepreneur walk into a room…
The opening panel of the conference was moderated by Golubovic and featured Manish Bhardwaj, the director of Keller’s program in social sciences, Jessie Treu, a founder of the venture capital firm Domain Associates and Chris Kuenne, a founder of the wildly successful company Rosetta and now a member of the faculty at Princeton and CEO of Rosemark, a world-class marketing company.
Bhardwaj got the conversation going by recounting his journey from being a “dyed in the wool instrumentalist with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering” (his thesis was on optimal stopping problems) to more of a humanist. His conversion occurred during a spate of front-line humanitarian work in rural India. He saw for himself that even the most powerful of instruments such as new drugs and diagnostics have limits absent the humanitarian angle. As he says, “If you don’t have the community’s trust which you learn through studying sociology and politics, the instruments alone don’t work as you want them to.”
This became something of a meme for the conference as people asked themselves whether they leaned toward being hammers (the tools) or nails (where the tool would be deployed)! We had a little fun with the idea after the conference — check out our TikTok!
With respect to entrepreneurship, what the teams at Princeton are doing is to look not only at the economics of ideas, but also to put them in a historical and cultural context.
For example, using AI, it’s now possible to annotate bodycam footage from cameras worn by police officers. But the capability on its own doesn’t have a lot of meaning until we understand 250 years of history of policing in America. How did the problem of excessive force come about, how did the police in many cases become militarized, and how did different people see exactly the same actions in entirely different lights. Interestingly, one of the biggest opponents to the project is the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights group who believe that this introduces a form of mass surveillance that deprives people of privacy rights.
Similarly, a food delivery business was analyzed in a historical context only to learn that there was no way to make it pay unless you pass the cost on to customers. Switching to solar power, in another example, is now cheaper than using coal, so it makes perfect sense to advocate for that, right? That’s true, unless you realize that some constituencies have a lot to lose if you switch to solar. You need to do the political and cultural analysis to understand these things.
Jesse Treu, described the history of venture capital in the context of risk capital. As he said, it took a long time time for outside capital to replace personal risk capital. Back in the early days of industrialization, most startups were funded by family wealth. It wasn’t until the1974 – ARISA act and its amendment in 1979 that allowed fund managers to invest in companies, as long as they were part of a portfolio of investments. If a reasonable man would invest, it was legal. That opened the floodgates.
Today there are 3,400 VC firms with $1.2 trillion funds under management. Venture represents 90% of software jobs, 70% of biotech jobs 40% of jobs in fields like advanced manufacturing and robotics.
Unfortunately for many, venture capital is now suffering an enormous collapse, the venture industry is shrinking and people are going out of the business as investors are pulling back.
Chris Kuenne described his teaching – over 1,000 Princeton students so far – about the 7 foundational frameworks that make entrepreneurship work. He asks:
Answering the question “are you focused on material economic or social problem?”
Are you on the path to a meaningful value proposition?
Have you identified your most important customers? At Rosetta, part of the power was the integration of psychology and economic modeling
Is your team an integrated and aligned set of builder personalities?
Power dynamics within an ecosystem.
What is your route to market?
Funding and scaling the venture
We got to talking about the “scholar entrepreneur” as a role that could integrate these hard-headed economic questions with a larger social and cultural vision.
Treu raised the point that many polarities in technological development are really hard to resolve. For instance, Elon Musk plans to launch 29,000 satellites as part of his Starlink venture, which is cool because it offers the promise of communication to every corner of the globe. But, at the same time, its success would kill observational astronomy. So how does society balance these tensions? A similar concern is that AI and big data centers are adding a significant amount of thermal burn to the planet and there doesn’t seem to be a planet wide mechanism to change that course.
I think we’re going to need those scholar entrepreneurs after all.
An entrepreneurial superstar, now a Princeton Dean
We had a fascinating perspective from Andrea Goldsmith, who is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. The woman is formidable – she has 29 patents, was part of startups (one of which went public) and was recently named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame. So what persuaded a warmth-loving and highly successful person to decamp from Stanford and join Princeton? Exactly the integration between the two spheres – the sciences and the humanities.
As she put it, the “informal model of Princeton is to be in the nation’s service and in the service of humanity. We want to use technology for good. Our unique role in the technological innovation ecosystem is to take our informal model and use that for guiding the innovation that we do.” By being able to bring together the perspectives of science, social science, the humanities and engineering, Princeton is uniquely situated to adopt that perspective.
The pitches!
What would it be like to have to explain your whole life in 3 minutes? That’s what the entrepreneurs making their pitches to a panel of judges had to do. And the judges are not exactly lightweights themselves - Stephanie Register, Sashank Rishyasringa, Manu Namboodiri, Ron Van Varick and Grant Warner make for a formidable panel.
The STEM contenders were:
Harmonia is the world's first pattern-based digital audio workstation (DAW) with integrated structural harmony.
Opto-therapeutics uses light to accelerate tissue regeneration in patients with chronic wounds – a new to the world therapy that could revolutionize wound care,
Vault Robotics aims to solve the “last mile” problem in package delivery by going from the truck to your doorstep without human intervention required.
Morphex is exploring the world of 4D printing which goes well beyond what simple 3D printing could do.
And from the humanities, we had:
Excited Delirium a non-disease often used to justify violence against people encountering the criminal justice system.
Performing the Peace, an initiative led by Princeton’s Chesney Snow to use the arts to enrich law enforcement training and build community trust.
Reimagining Gaming Blackness uses video game platforms to understand the impact of games on culture and vice versa.
Innovation and the Public Interest
The day’s keynote presentation was from John Payne, the first Head of Design at Public Policy Lab, a New York City-based non-profit. He picked up on the hammer and nails theme and said he was honored to be between the hammers and the nails (his keynote was in between the STEM and humanities pitches). He shared 3 case studies in which his group had used design principles to tackle social problems, often in partnership with various agencies and not for profits.
Soul Care is an initiative in New York City to support culturally sensitive long-term mental health support for young people in foster care. The Prison to College Re-entry pathways program provides mechanisms for incarcerated individuals to begin and successfully continue a program to achieve a degree. The Compass Pilot program is figuring out how to allocate more federal small business to historically under-represented groups.
As Payne explains it, the perspective of the Lab is that service systems are made up of layers of people and power, and you need to understand how they interact to create meaningful change.
Who sets priorities?
Who specifies scope?
Who sets rules of engagement?
Who interacts with users?
The public does more than receive services, they also participate. He finished by sharing the example of what he called the “lived experience gap” in which policymakers simply don’t have any sense of how those likely to be affected by their decisions are living. This resulted in www.thepeoplesay.org, an online place in which real stories of how people interact with services can be accessed, tagged with multi-media research data.
And the winners are?
For Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math
First Place: Opto-therapeutics
Second Place: Reinventing package delivery
Humanities and Social Sciences
First Place: Performing for Peace
Second Place: School for Participation
Much to the delight of my conference buddy Scott Wolfson, we were able to snag a quick couple of videos with Chesney Snow, both before and after his award!
It was an energizing day – I’m already looking forward to next year!