Our guests on the latest GeekWire radio show and podcast were Vikram Jandhyala, Vice Provost for Innovation at the University of Washington and Thaisa Way, director of the new Urban@UW center. The conversation focused on bridging the gap between the UW and the startup world, and ways to use data to improve cities.
If you missed the show, or just prefer text, continue reading for edited excerpts.
Q: Tell us what’s going on with CoMotion. This is the group that used to be known as the UW Center for Commercialization, so you’ve had a lot of changes in the past couple of years. What is the status of the efforts to get these innovations out into the world?
Jandhyala: “We are really in the third wave of tech transfer: the first is licenses, where you create patents and you try to create revenue from the licenses; the second is startups; and the third is innovation in a broader sense. How do we take all of these ideas which are coming out of this research and make them really valuable in the real world? How do we get our teams of faculty and students to work together across campus, and how do we bridge the connection to outside campus, whether it’s things like Startup Hall or the entrepreneurial community? That is what CoMotion is trying to do.”
Q: This is a real cultural shift in how the university thinks about innovation. How is it going in terms of making sure the professors, students, everybody is on board?
Jandhyala: “It is true, it’s a cultural shift. I think there was a pent-up demand for it. People were doing this organically but I would say there was no institutional organization which could help do this at scale. There were a few places that were already doing this because it’s a part of their DNA – the Computer Science and Engineering department creates a lot of startups, the business school has a really good entrepreneurial program, the medical school does a lot of innovation around healthcare. But what we are trying to say is, how can we take this across campus?”
Q: Tell us more about Urban@UW. What is it? What are you trying to accomplish? How did it come together?
Way: “Urban@UW is an initiative to bring all the urban research and teaching that goes on at the university together to address the big challenges. I think we all know that cities offer us our biggest opportunity and our biggest challenges as we move forward — whether it’s population growth, urbanization, climate change, energy, these issues. And they are full of opportunities but they are complex, and no one person, no one discipline is going to answer them. Social work isn’t going to fix homelessness, public health isn’t going to take care of all public health but if we bring everyone together we can address those big challenges.”
Q: Is the infrastructure going to be able to keep up with the growth that is happening here?
Way: “One of the places we often get stuck is that we assume that going forward we only have the same tools that we had yesterday. If you actually bring all of the creativity and innovative thinking of the university and of the people who are on the ground working, I think we can actually come up with new tools. The big challenge going forward is being able to think creatively about those new tools, and then the real challenge is having the guts to try them.”
Q: So how much data do we actually have about our cities?
Way: “We have a huge amount of data. The question is, what do you ask the data? One of the things that Urban@UW is doing is helping to put together data scientists with researchers who need to use that data but don’t necessarily know how.”
Q: Vikram, you are also involved in bringing a new type of institution to the Seattle region called GIX. If people haven’t heard about this, what is your elevator pitch? What is this institution and how will it work?
Jandhyala: “The really short elevator pitch is GIX stands for Geeks. The five-floor version is it’s a way to bring industry, international partners, and our faculty together in a way that has not been done before to create impact through things like startups but also problem solving. So it’s a problem-solving, project-based learning solution which is really new for higher education and could be a model for something new.”
Q: So it is a collaboration between the University of Washington and Tsinghua University in China. What is unique about that?
Jandhyala: “This is really the first time that a Chinese university will have a presence here in terms of a joint program. There have been cases of top universities in the U.S. going to China and creating campuses, but the thinking was, what can we do here to bring the world to Seattle? We have an amazing tech climate here, and of course we have a strong school like UW with top departments — computer science and electrical engineering play a big role in GIX. But we wanted the global component as well. What can we do with global thinkers and teams where we can start looking at problems which are not just local problems but global problems.”
Q: If this is successful, what does it look like? What is it going to do for the region?
Jandhyala: “We think of it as a multiplier impact for our faculty. It is important to know that we are not trying to create new faculty. These are the faculty that are already at the university. But imagine they have a startup idea or they have a problem where they feel having the right students working on the problem for a year might help them make big advances. I think it’s going to create that kind of student which the Google founders call the ‘smart creative’.”
Q: I think a lot of people might be asking what happens to the intellectual property that comes out of an institution like this. Who owns it? How are you addressing issues like that?
Jandhyala: “The IP runs through CoMotion so we have looked at this very carefully. The other model where this is happening is Cornell Tech in New York City. What we are seeing is that there is a nice way to do this where we have three different IP models. One is open source from day one. The next is where the industry which brings in the problem owns the IP, and the third is where the students own the IP. We are going to have these three options available, and depending on the comfort level of the students and the industry who contributed the project, they can actually pick and choose from these different arrangements.
Q: What is the significance of partnering with a Chinese university instead of a university in another region?
Jandhyala: “One way to look at it is the top two economies in the world right now have a way to get together and solve problems we have in common, like looking at the future of cities, environment, pollution, technology, and how to make the planet inhabitable for a long time. So that is one of the reasons to go with a large economy.”
“Tsinghua is a leading university in China and many of their faculty are U.S.-trained, so they are used to the system already. But this is really a first step. We hope to eventually bring on three or four more partners from other regions and really create a global flavor.”
Listen to the full interview below, starting at 20:00, or via this MP3 file.
