Table Of ContentOrganized Innovation
Organized
Innovation
A Blueprint for Renewing
America’s Prosperity
Steven C. Currall
Ed Frauenheim
Sara Jansen Perry
and
Emily M. Hunter
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Currall, Steven Christian.
Organized innovation : a blueprint for renewing America’s prosperity / Steven C.
Currall, Ed Frauenheim, Sara Jansen Perry, and Emily M. Hunter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–933070–6
1. Technological innovations—Economic aspects—United States. 2. Research,
Industrial—Economic aspects—United States. 3. Economic development—United
States. I. Title.
HC110.T4C87 2014
338.973—dc23
2013024406
9780199330706
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
CONTENTS
Preface: Restoring Our “Vision” vii
PART ONE: The Problem
1. The Innovation Imperative 3
2. Unorganized Innovation 18
3. The Myths behind Unorganized Innovation 30
PART TWO: The Solution
4. The Organized Innovation Framework 47
5. Channeled Curiosity 67
6. Boundary-Breaking Collaboration 81
7. Orchestrated Commercialization 98
PART THREE: The Prescription
8. Organizing Our Innovation Ecosystem 117
9. Seeing Is Believing 132
Acknowledgments 135
Appendix A: History and Impact of the Engineering Research Center
Program 139
Appendix B: Research Methodology 149
Appendix C: Research Questions for Future Scholarly Examinations of
Organized Innovation 158
Bibliography 160
Index 169
PREFACE: RESTORING OUR “VISION”
Professor Mark Humayun and his colleagues have created a small device
with a big story to tell. It is an artificial retina, whose electronics sit in a
canister smaller than a dime, and that literally allows the blind to see. The
device reflects a new approach to innovation that can help America find its
way to a more hopeful, prosperous future.
People have been dreaming about restoring sight since ancient times.
The idea took hold of Humayun when his grandmother started to go blind
in 1988. Humayun was in medical school preparing to be a neurosurgeon.
But his grandmother’s loss of vision put him on a quest to create technol-
ogy that would help people see again. He switched his focus to ophthal-
mology, earned his MD, and imagined an implant to send digital images to
the optic nerve. But when he asked biomedical engineers to help him de-
velop such a device, he found they spoke a different language.
“I remember trying to tell them I wanted to pass a current to stimulate the
retina. I wanted to excite neurons in a blind person’s eyes. They looked at me
and said, ‘What?’ I still remember their words: ‘Is it faradaic? Is it capacitive?
Where’s the ground? Is it a dipole, coaxial, or monopolar stimulation? What’s
the voltage, what’s the current, what’s the impedance?’” Humayun says. “I’d
heard the terms voltage and impedance and current. But all of the other things
were not something you learned in medical school. I couldn’t communicate
what I wanted.” So Humayun did something that remains rare among Amer-
ican researchers: he crossed over into a different discipline. He earned a doc-
torate in biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina.
Now that he knew what faradaic, capacitive, and coaxial meant, Huma-
yun began working on a system. By 1992 he and his team of fellow
researchers, then at Johns Hopkins University, had a rudimentary proto-
type. It consisted of an electrical current generator that relayed controlled
pulses to an electrode designed to rest on a person’s retina. Then came the
fateful first test on a human—a man who had lost his vision fifty years
earlier. Humayun flipped the switch. No reaction from the patient. The
researchers spent twenty minutes checking their connections. It seemed a
bust. Finally, the patient piped up: “Are you guys talking about that little
tiny flicker off to the side?”
Yes, they were. Humayun’s team fiddled with their controls and con-
firmed that they were, in fact, stimulating a very primitive form of sight.
Humayun recalls the moment as one of the biggest in his life, up there
with the birth of his firstborn child and his wedding. “That changed the
day,” he says. “I knew that I had to build this device. We made a blind
person see. I couldn’t just stop.”
LESSONS FROM AN ENGINEERING RESEARCH CENTER
Humayun and his key collaborators, ophthalmologist Eugene de Juan, Jr.
and engineering professor Jim Weiland, continued their work on the reti-
nal prosthesis, moving to the University of Southern California (USC) in
2001. Weiland and Humayun conducted further studies to better under-
stand the electrical and mechanical parameters needed to make the artifi-
cial retina work. Humayun and de Juan also helped form a start-up
company, Second Sight, which aimed to commercialize the implant. And
in 2003 Humayun and his colleagues won a National Science Foundation
(NSF) grant to launch a research center to pursue retinal prostheses and
other potential medical implants.
That center—the Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems program—is
part of a broader NSF initiative called the Engineering Research Center
(ERC) program. The ERC program embodies government research fund-
ing, principles of planning, teamwork, and smart management and has
quietly achieved remarkable success, returning to the US economy more
than tenfold the $1 billion invested in it between 1985 and 2010 (Lewis,
Engineering Research Centers).
The USC-based ERC prompted researchers to put their basic research
projects on a path toward commercial prototypes. It also cultivated con-
nections between academics and private-sector executives, as well as be-
tween researchers of different disciplines. And it provided funding for ten
years—much longer than the typical academic grant.
During Humayun’s leadership of the ERC, his team hit several mile-
stones. Most visibly, the artificial retina won approval from regulators in
Europe and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States,
and began changing people’s lives. The BBC broadcast a segment of a once-
blind grandmother playing basketball—and making shots—with her
grandson. The video went viral.
[ viii ] Preface: Restoring Our “Vision”
Meanwhile, Humayun and fellow researchers developed a next-generation
version of the artificial retina. While the commercially approved devices have
as many as 60 electrodes, allowing patients to see low-resolution images, the
devices in Humayun’s lab have 240 and some very early prototypes have
1,000 electrodes. With digital signal processing at the camera level as well as
some sophisticated software programming related to the functioning of the
electrodes, these higher-electrode-count artificial retinas could enable blind
patients to walk around more independently, better read large print, and rec-
ognize faces.
As Humayun and his team expand into other applications of artificial
implants, the possibilities resemble science fiction—for example, improv-
ing short-term memory loss, headaches, and depression. Whatever they
accomplish, the ERC program will have played a fundamental role.
Humayun says the time for reflection it afforded, as well as the continuous
conversations with diverse scholars, physicians, and business leaders it
cultivated, gradually opened his eyes to the expansive possibilities of
implants.
The story of Mark Humayun and his artificial retina has a host of
hopeful lessons. Among the biggest: the United States still can achieve
fundamental technology breakthroughs. We say “still” because in the past
decade or so, doubts about America’s innovation leadership have crept
into the national consciousness. And for good reason. Although the United
States remains an innovation leader, other nations—especially China—
have been gaining ground as innovation has become more important to
economic prosperity. America’s leadership also has been questioned as the
world seeks new science and engineering solutions to tough global prob-
lems such as climate change, famine, and communicable diseases. At this
pivotal time of shrinking self-confidence, in other words, Humayun and
his bionic eye device help restore our vision that the United States can go
large when it comes to innovation.
Another lesson from the artificial retina is that universities must play
a central role in American innovation. In particular, universities can help
close the research and development (R&D) gap that has emerged over the
past few decades. That gap is the result of US companies shifting re-
sources away from basic research efforts to more limited, applied research
and product development efforts. With the decline of Bell Labs, Xerox
PARC, and other corporate research centers, US universities took on
more of the basic research duties. But thanks partly to an academic cul-
ture that is often insular and discipline bound, universities and compa-
nies have often failed to work together effectively to commercialize new
insights.
Preface: Restoring Our “Vision” [ ix ]
