What is a liberal arts college’s role in this process? Specifically what is Middlebury College’s role in this process? What is our goal? Is it creating a culture on campus that embraces thinking and behaving more innovatively, and that celebrates risk-taking? Does it mean graduating students who think and behave more innovatively and who have had personal experience with taking risks and risk management? Answering that question is at least difficult unless and until we have defined exactly what we mean by thinking and behaving more innovatively (or entrepreneurially) in the liberal arts context, and understand how we measure and evaluate the results of such behavior. How does the recently-announced Middlebury College Initiative to Support Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts inform this process?
Rory Riggs ’74, who sees entrepreneurship as a process of the leadership of information and ideas, has developed one framework for defining the entrepreneurial (innovation) process. According to Riggs, “The entrepreneurial process can be presented in four steps.”
I - Information sources enabling information mining and innovation
D - Discovery enabling development
E - Entrepreneurship representing executing and implementing the idea
A - Advancement representing greater adoption, evolution and growth
For Riggs “IDEA” is an anagram to delineate the states of entrepreneurship. It is not unique to business, as it is a component of the evolutionary process of ideas in all fields. In each case IDEA represents the process of discovery and implementation. The only things that differ are the information sources and outcomes.
IDEA offers a valuable framework as we begin designing and executing the research and pilots that will lead to the exciting creativity and innovation that I know Middlebury can generate under President Liebowitz’ initiative.
As I see it, the Initiative represents a critical first step towards building a culture of innovation, risk-taking and risk management that truly embraces and can be integrated in the liberal arts tradition. Most important, the Initiative recognizes that we are not engaged in a zero sum game within which gains made toward building innovation, risk-taking and risk management into the culture imply a commensurate shrinking of the adaptive culture that now dominates the liberal arts.
As such, it is helpful to think about entrepreneurship as leadership and innovation; as individuals overcoming obstacles and constraints to achieving cultural change. Innovation begins when the culture encourages exploring, taking risks and experimenting. It is sustained by being decisive: Killing what does not work (without penalty), understanding where to focus, allocating scarce resources strategically, placing the goal ahead of real or perceived constraints, challenging the status quo, and placing a premium on focus and delivering concrete outcomes.
Adaptive Culture vs. Innovative Cultures
What are the characteristics of innovation? What do we mean by it?
An adaptive culture embraces incremental improvement inside the box that flows from existing constraints growing out of existing legacy assets. Pervasive constraints define what can and cannot be accomplished within the existing adaptive culture. Adaptation is synonymous with being comfortable, risk-averse, tradition-driven incremental change and a culture that is overly constrained.
Effective innovation, by contrast, nurtures and rewards thinking and behavior that goes outside the box and that is not subject to all of the existing constraints. It creates a culture that removes artificial and perceived constraints, relaxes other constraints, encourages and rewards risk taking and innovation and lets people define the constraints they want to change and the new constraints they want to impose. It forces innovation by redefining goals in ways that put people in situations where success requires that they change constraints. Failed experiments are quickly abandoned without punishment or retribution.
Effective innovation is not a zero sum game, and it can be additive because it wraps a culture of innovation around the existing adaptive culture. Indeed expanding innovation does not and should not threaten existing framework. Moreover, it may well accelerate adaptation by raising the value of legacy assets and encouraging adapters to take more risk by experimenting outside the adaptive box.
Effective innovation means empowering individuals to change their own constraints and then take responsibility for, and to maximum extent possible receive the benefits of the innovation they produce. They are rewarded when risk taking produces exciting results and never penalized when it does not. As I read it, achieving these goals and being an agent of change is precisely the mission of the Initiative to Support Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts. It integrates the IDEA approach into a process that has potential for creating an innovative culture at Middlebury College within which entrepreneurship and risk-taking can thrive because it recognizes that at its core entrepreneurship means innovation. To the extent that we succeed, we will be changing the rules by which the liberal arts game is played to the benefit of every participant on the field.
