A conversation with Diana Joseph, Innovator at the Corporate Accelerator Forum & Co-Host of The Ecosystem Show on Clubhouse

“We have two really strong capacities [as human beings]. One is about discipline, finishing things, and staying aligned. …We’ll call that the discipline muscle. The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That’s where we’re going out on a limb, we’re taking a risk, we’re being creative, we’re curious about what might happen if.” -Diana Joseph

In this episode of Control the Room, Diana Joseph and I discuss the need for open dialogue between startup & corporate organizations and the unique space Diana curates to collectively bring them together through specified expertise. We take a look inside the world of anthropology and its benefits of implementation in the workplace and explore design-based research thinking. Listen in to hear about Diana’s passion in design-based research and the explorative efforts both corporate and startup organizations can gain in changing the conversation and working together. 

Show Highlights

[1:31] Diana’s Start in Corporate Innovation
[10:25] The Startup/Corporate Mashup 
[19:31] The Design of Diana’s Unique Experience  
[23:26] The Anthropology Link in Work 
[26:36] A Look Inside Design-Based Research
[37:54] Diana’s Take for Newcomers Exploring Facilitation

Diana’s LinkedIn
CAF

About the Guest

Diana Joseph is the Founder of the Corporate Accelerator Forum, a creative space  organization that encourages conversations between startup & corporate organizations. The expertise & shared learning experience Diana creates for these organizations allows them to lean into innovation projects without fear. For over four years, the forum has focused on interactive experiences to embrace learning, gain insights, and nurture professional relationships. Diana was the leading strategist at Adobe and has a diverse background in academia and non-profit organizations. She understands the strategic, design perspective and the innovation mindset required for startups and corporate organizations to succeed. As a leading design thinker and entrepreneurship expert, she continues her mission to accelerate meetings between large, corporate groups & startup organizations. With a Ph.D. in Learning Skills from Northwestern University, Diana’s specialty skills range from organizational innovation culture and design thinking to facilitation expert and startup mentor. She is the  reigning Co-Host of the Ecosystem Show on Clubhouse, where she explores the complex world view of innovation ecosystems. Diana continues her mission at CAF for corporate innovators to challenge the social environment in normalizing conversation between key organizations.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast. A series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To Control The Room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all for the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime you can join our weekly Control The Room facilitation lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators, sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings. You can download the Magical Meetings quick start guide your free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advice from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas:

Today I’m with Diana Joseph at the corporate accelerator forum where she guides and gathers corporate innovators who work with startups. She is the co-host of the ecosystem show on clubhouse and author of many research papers, articles, and blog posts. Welcome to the show, Diana.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much, Douglas.

Douglas:

Yeah, it’s great to have you. So let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start in the world of corporate innovation.

Diana Joseph:

Sure. I’m going to take you back a little bit. So I’m a learning scientist by training. That’s an interdisciplinary field that draws on education, computer science, cognitive science, and tries to understand how learning works and then given how learning works, trying to create learning experiences that are very effective and sticky, memorable actually make a change in our skills and mindsets. And in my dissertation work, I focused on something called the passion curriculum project. I was really interested in learner interest and how we might create curriculum that uses learner interest to get at the skills and mindsets and knowledge that, let’s say adults want young people to get. So I was working with fourth graders, fifth graders, and trying to focus on something that really interested them. And it was really hard, so I also had to work on the methodology to help us make sense of that challenge.

Diana Joseph:

So that was called design-based research. So I had kind of the seeds of my thinking about self-determination there and the seeds of my thinking about design and iteration that were part of the part of that methodology. And then I had children and moved to be closer to my parents and took a job with Adobe where I ran a research group during the time when Adobe was moving all of its products, but even first it’s learning content to the cloud. So I ran the research group that was helping the people who used to write that fat book that came in the Photoshop box, instead of being writers those people now had to become almost anthropologists. They had to understand what was going on in the world of their product and who needed what, and who should produce what, because they were shifting to community content now that the cloud was a possibility. So very interesting work, helping them change and doing both quantitative and qualitative research. And then I got exposed to their internal innovation program, which was called Kickbox. Have you heard of that one?

Douglas:

Mm-hmm. Yeah, of course.

Diana Joseph:

Okay.

Douglas:

There’s some really great materials online still as far as I know it’s not around anymore, but all the old materials are still there for folks to check out. And there’s some really interesting stuff for sure that I advise all facilitators to check out and think about how it might influence your practice.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, absolutely. I second that recommendation and it is actually coming back. Somebody bought the Kickbox concept and it’s coming back. So Douglas, I’ll make sure to tell you about a session that’s coming up, where we’re going to talk with some folks from IKEA, an innovation leader about, and the folks who are doing that, the Kickbox stuff now.

Douglas:

Nice, awesome. Looking forward to it.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. So Kickbox was a really inspiring experience. I almost, if people are going to look at it, okay, I’m going to have to tell you, I was thinking about keeping it secret until they look later, but I’m going to have to tell you for context right now. So Kickbox comes with a beautiful bootcamp. I had the opportunity, I was in maybe the third cohort at Adobe with the inventor of the Kickbox program, Mark Randall who’s just an amazing, inspiring person.

Douglas:

What’s Mark doing now?

Diana Joseph:

I think he’s retired for the most part. Even then was very focused on his family. And so I think-

Douglas:

Smart man.

Diana Joseph:

… he’s been able to enjoy that, right? So beautiful experience, really inspiring. And at the end of the bootcamp, you get this red box and inside the red box are a bunch of resources. There are sticky notes and sharpies, and there’s a timer, and there’s some chocolate, and some coffee, and by the third cohort, I knew the most important thing that was in there, which was a prepaid credit card. It was a card with a $1000 on it. And that was really mind blowing because I mean, it was a good corporate job. I had money, I could have spent a $1000 of my own money on any project in any given time without feeling the pinch, particularly. But this was a $1000 worth of company budget.

Diana Joseph:

And no one had ever delivered trust to me in that way before. If I wanted money, I had to fight for it or expense something that already sort of fell into a set of expectations. And with this Adobe was saying to me personally, “We trust you. Here’s some resources, go do something interesting. And if you turns out you think we’d be interested too, come back and tell us, but otherwise we trust you that it’s a worthy expenditure of your time and money.” And it was just, it just completely changed my relationship to the company.

Douglas:

You know, it’s really fascinating to hear you mentioned this notion of trust that never been delivered to me in that way before.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, yeah.

Douglas:

And I’m about to do a talk on innovation culture and how we can deliver that in meetings. And we’re kind of breaking it up into three phases, and one of them is the invitation. And so I’m almost thinking I want to bring the story into that presentation now because that’s such a beautiful story of inviting innovation, because that delivery of trust to you as a really strong invitation to do something. And it meant a lot to you, right? That was the significant kind of gesture.

Diana Joseph:

Yes, yes, exactly. They didn’t have to say anything else to make it clear that it was okay for me to do something that could fail. They didn’t have to say a lot of words about failure. It was just like, “Here’s money if it turns out interesting tell me.” So that took a lot of weight off that whole idea of failure as well. And because it happened to be me, it really hearkened back to the work I had done in graduate school. I talked about self determination and the passion curriculum project. The thorny challenge I ran into in trying to make these interest centered experiences happen, is that we are really complex when it comes to motivation, most of us are you do meet people who are absolutely zeroed in on a particular thing. Like I have a nephew who’s wanting to be a race car driver since he was five and he’s 22 now. And guess what? He’s a race car driver, okay.

Diana Joseph:

But most of us, it’s not like that. Most of us don’t have that kind of focus where we’re giving up a lot of other things that we could be interested in. Most of us especially if we were good in school, we have a lot of achievement motivation that’s going. We want to get that high score, we want to get ranked the way our context can rank us, right? So there’s achievement motivation, there’s maybe really deep interests, there’s social motivations, we want to be like somebody, and we want to be unlike somebody else that connects with identity. So there’s so many things that are going on. It was really hard to thread that needle.

Douglas:

I was just thinking that, I would imagine it can be difficult to sometimes align those things that can sometimes be at odds with each other. If you’re trying to self-actualize your dreams and this notion of wanting to be successful on the test or whatever context is thrown you, that situation may not align with this future goal, right? And that can be hard.

Diana Joseph:

Absolutely, and those things can be intention with each other. And I think in general, we’re not aware of those different motivations that are going. So because we’re not aware of them, we can’t use them as handles. Once we become aware. Okay, well, so I have my dreams, our intention, there’s some kind of conflict between the step I need to take to pursue my dream and the step I need to take to score well on somebody else’s evaluation. Okay. Well, can I invent my own evaluation that would align better and can I give that primacy in my mind, right? So the awareness becomes really useful.

Douglas:

You know, it makes me think about young adults that have responded to coaching advice with the phrase, “Can I do that?” You know, it’s like this notion of like, “Wait, I can write my own test.” And it’s like, “Yeah, you can.” I think our system has programmed folks to feel like there’s one way to navigate one way to succeed and then I think that permeates our work life and meetings. We run into this all the time with how folks show up as professional and they’re expected to behave or be a certain way. And I think a lot of times that’s at odds with our desire to innovate, ideate, create when we come in and we stifle all that because we’re trying to be so buttoned up and professional. And so that brings me to something that we were talking about in our pre-show chat, which is this work that you do, bringing together corporates and startups and I think startups are like maybe more stereotypically playful.

Douglas:

They’re in the garage tinkering, they’re the explorers, they’re the little sapling that’s just kind of does go in any which way it can to find the sunlight. Whereas like the big corporates, the big Oak tree, that’s like, it is what it is. It’s like not very malleable, it’s established. And so there must be some really interesting stories or even tactics that you found to help bridge that gap and bring those two together so they can work together without the classic example I’ve always heard is, like startups working with corporates is kind of like dancing with elephants. And so how do you help the startup not get crushed by the elephant?

Diana Joseph:

That’s such an important question. Let me give you a little more context of the kinds of experiences that I’m creating. Sometimes I’m bringing together the corporates with each other. So corporate innovators who work with startups need to talk to other corporate innovators who work with startups, because it’s really hard to develop best practices by yourself. It’s really hard to see what’s happening in the landscape when you only have one perspective to look from. And you’re also in this challenging social situation where you’re sitting in that exact tension that you were talking about, Douglas. Your job is to connect the internal stakeholders who have these very, very aligned tasks to fulfill every quarter that have been promised all the way up the hierarchy to the SCC. And on the other hand, you have your external stakeholders who are the startups, and they have a totally different set of goals and timelines that are truly existential for their company or their idea.

Diana Joseph:

And so the corporates like to talk to each other, there’s value in them just talking to each other within that same role. And then of course, there are times when we bring the corporates and the startups together to talk about what’s getting in the way. I’m working in situations where both sides recognize that it’s important to make that connection happen, but they haven’t been enabled to figure out how to do it. And then there were other times when we’re thinking about the whole ecosystem and we have stakeholders from all around our region or all around a particular industry challenge. So to zero in on the context where we have corporates and startups at the table, I’ll tell you the story of an experience that we built in December of 2019, which I want to say is last year, there’s like a whole missing one in there, but it was one of our last live experiences that we did before the pandemic.

Diana Joseph:

One important part of it was the curation. So we worked very, very closely with the corporates who were the sponsors of the experience to understand what they saw as the challenges that were stopping them from really connecting with the startups. This was for the materials industry. It was called Bridging The Gap Materials Giants, and Startups. So we curated on the giants side to understand what the most critical questions were. And then we curated on the startup side, went out and found startups who had their own challenges and questions, not necessarily the exact same ones that would work together.

Diana Joseph:

So that was certainly possible. But someone who had startups who had tried working with corporates and had good perspective on what had and hadn’t worked in that context. And then we designed a separate moment within that day long workshop, we designed a separate moment for each of those curated topics. One of them was a discussion. One of them was a poster fair. The corporates felt like they never got a chance to tell, they listened to pitches from the startups all the time, but they never get a chance to tell the startups what they’re about, what they care about, what matters to them. So they got to have a poster fair.

Douglas:

I love that. I was part of an event, I got brought in to help with an event where a group was working with corporates and they were kind of defaulting to their normal practices and standard like protocols, right? And one of them was like the startup pitches, right? And I couldn’t help but think to myself like, “Man, you brought these corporates in and they’re just going to listen to a bunch of pitches.” Like, I mean, it seems like there’s so much more of potential there and if I was at a corporate, I don’t know if I’d want to come like mentor startups and give them advice on their pitches and listen to pitches versus like help try to solve my problem, right?

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

And celebrate my wins. Everyone loves a little struggle of the ego, right? And so this poster event sounds as music to my ears because I feel like so many times the corporates are just brought in and kind of paraded around these typical kind of situations that the startup communities kind of doing. And it’s like, I think if we’re going to bridge ecosystems, we need to rethink things and it sounds like you’re exploring some new approaches.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. I think it’s, what you’re describing is the only moment where the corporates and startups get to talk to each other is this performative moment of the pitch. So the startups have worked on that and they’ve polished it and they boil it down to something tiny and either it hits exactly what the corporates happened to need, or it doesn’t because in that context, that’s the only thing the corporates are listening for is, does it hit? Okay, great. It’s a pitch. Either it’s going to solve my problem or it won’t. What we did in this event was to change the conversation to be like, how can we work together better? It’s on the side. So is a little bit disarming. You don’t have, it’s not only that one moment you get to have a longer conversation and get a sense for what these people are like as people, while working on something that’s important to both of you.

Douglas:

It’s also explorative and generative too. Right? So, like there’s new things that emerge from that situation versus like just things that are going into it.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, definitely. So, yeah.

Douglas:

That’s really beautiful. That’s cool. So what are some of the things that you found that make for good relationships or foster a better connection through these folks that seem to be at completely different levels and vantage points?

Diana Joseph:

There’s a game that I like to play at the beginning of every session and I’m sure I steal parts of it from somewhere. So I apologize to whoever I’m not crediting, but I call it spectrum. And the way it works is I ask a question to which the answer is a quantity. So it’s a number or a size or something like that. And then people need to move in the room to represent their answer to that question. So I might say, how old is your company? So in the materials room, for example, this event I was describing, there was a company that’s 150 years old. And there was another company that just incorporated two weeks ago, right? So, you can see the difference and you can see that there could even be some overlap. Size of company, not much overlap their comfort level with innovation.

Diana Joseph:

We could see among the corporates, how things were different there. And because people have to move around, they have to talk to each other to find the right place. If I ask, how long have you been in your current position? People have to move and they have to talk with each other. So there’s an icebreaker component to that. There’s informational component to that because we can all see in the room, the answer to this question. It inspires other questions. So people start to put in, well, here’s what I’d like to see next. Here’s what I’d like to see us represent next. And that gets the ball rolling on dialogue.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve heard that referred to as the human histogram and I love it because it’s visual, right? To your point, there’s information that’s being shared, but it’s highly visual. We can just look across the room and get a really quick read on it. And then to your point, as people are getting inspired by, Ooh, I’d like to see this next, you’re building alignment, commitment, connection, all these good things are kind of coming out. That’s really, really great. And I love that you’ve got these two groups and you’re thinking about questions that might cause a little bit of blurring of the boundaries, which can be a really eyeopening moment for them. It’s like, maybe we’re not so different.

Diana Joseph:

Right. How long does it take you to get a contract signed?

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s so good. Oh, man. Well, amazing. So I want to talk a little bit more about the designing of your experience because I think that’s something that our listeners do a lot of. And also when we talk about meetings, this is something that we’re passionate about, drawing inspiration from folks that are creating workshops, events, any kind of experience, and how do we make our everyday meetings experiences? And the advice of just bringing agendas, it’s just not enough, right? We need to think about what is the arc of the experience? How does it start? How does it end and how do we want people to feel? I mean, even if people just did a human histogram in their status meeting, right? That might elevate things a little bit, it’ll be memorable. That’s for sure. So I would want to hear more about your process for designing experiences and if there’s any tips or tricks or things that listeners might be able to borrow from.

Diana Joseph:

Great. I mentioned curation. So these aren’t quite everyday meetings. These are sort of big, significant milestone meetings that we’re having. So, it feels appropriate to invest a lot into the curation. So we know that the questions were addressing are burning questions before we go in. We think a lot about who in the room should kick off the discussion or the workshop around a particular question. It’s not often an expert. It’s often somebody who has the problem. Someone who can tell a story about it, someone who is puzzled by it. By starting with a question or starting with a puzzle that invites, it creates a white space. It creates space that the rest of the community, the rest of the people at the meeting can speak into. So right from the beginning, we’re sort of creating a vacuum that pulls participation forward, if that makes any sense.

Douglas:

It makes total sense. And I love this idea of bringing the non-expert into, oh, we always talk about how, when you’re in a complex system, experts aren’t super valuable because their experience may not be applicable. And experts have a tendency to bring the solutions that worked in the past. And you know, what we’re facing right now might not be exactly what the expert saw. If they’re able to listen to someone who’s going through something and share that story, then they might be able to take all their experience and offer up some interesting insights. But if we start with the expert it might, all the people experiencing stuff, it might cloud their memory or even their vantage point of, they might get this false sense of hope that, oh, I just go take that pill the expert mentioned and it’ll be all good. Right? Whereas if we start with that curiosity, that story, it also shapes the narrative, right? Like, because we’re going to work best the perspective we’re going to look at it from.

Diana Joseph:

You make me think of the design thinking toolkit concept of the T-shaped person. Right? So everyone in the room has some expertise. We curate for that as well. You have some expertise, it’s different expertise from the person next to you. So if you’re very, very good in some particular point, but you’re also very good at connecting, listening, and sharing, then the group together can make a lot more sense. I think you have to have expertise in it, again, in a complex system there are going to be pieces of it that could be oversimplified if there are no experts in the room. If you put the experts in a context where there’s dialogue between them and between the generalists, between them and the generalists, there’s a lot of power there.

Douglas:

100%. And you know, I had written down a bunch of notes as you were talking today. And there’s some things I was able to come back to and other things that just kind of got lost in the forward momentum. But one thing I’m going to come back to, because it applies to what we’re saying now, as you mentioned, anthropology, and it just struck me just then it’s like a lot of this work is about being an anthropologist, whether we studied in school or not, right? Like, you’re kind of thinking about what’s going on here and how do we shape this little mini tribe, if you will.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, when you said that, it made me think of myself as an anthropologist, trying to understand people. But also I think, I never thought about it this way before, but I think I’m also trying to invite everyone else in the room to be an anthropologist. Let’s understand each other. And it comes back to something that you said before also about invitation. I think the primary job that I have in designing these experiences is to create the invitation for a participation, the invitation to bring your ideas, the invitation, to bring your questions. And that’s what really shapes the outcomes.

Douglas:

I totally agree. I think that your point around nailing the research, so often we see issues with teams and just not doing enough preparation, right? It’s like they could kind of Intuit the moves. They could come together and collaborate. But the thing is, if we haven’t done the research upfront, we don’t even know what meeting we’re having. We don’t even know what workshop we’re doing. We’re just kind of maybe going through some motions, or we kind of put something on the calendar because we felt like the project needed to move forward. But if we just spend some time thinking about the questions that we want to ask, thinking about who might need to ask that question or share that story, I think everything else, especially if you got any bit of experience or skill, everything else works itself out, right? Like, once you figure that stuff out, it’s like, oh, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like it’s all unfolding before me.

Diana Joseph:

Yes. Yes, exactly. It’s almost like the more careful curation and design I do upfront, the less active facilitation I do in the room, because we’ve made the space call forth the behaviors that we’re looking for. We’ve made the timeline call forth the behaviors we’re looking for, we’ve made the materials call forth the behaviors we’re looking for. And then as facilitators, we can just come in and make a little point here and there to move things along if they need anything.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’d love to talk about setting the initial conditions. You know, it’s almost like a science experiment it’s like when they built a large hydrogen Collider, they then just get in there and just say, “Oh, how do we guide these particles?” They came with a very, very solid hypothesis based on research, set up very specific guidelines and then let it run. And then it stuff popped up that was unexpected. Then they would address those things, right?

Diana Joseph:

Right.

Douglas:

And then when they run an experiment, they’re probably just kind of sitting back for the most part and monitoring and making sure everything’s good. And to me, I never really thought about the analogy of facilitators or research scientists, but that’s probably not a bad way to approach it, which brings me back to another point that I had written down and I want to hear more about, which is design-based research.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah.

Douglas:

So help me understand a little bit more about, I can intuit based on some of the things you were saying, but it sounded like it’s a very developed methodology or body of work. And I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and how it continues to play a role in your work today.

Diana Joseph:

Design-Based research is a social science framework that recognizes that things are going to change. If you are doing work that’s intended to change the world, the intended to change even a small world, right? If you’re researching something that is intended to change its local environment, then your data is going to change. So a survey is not going to work. An interview is not going to work. We needed, there were actually a number of us who are thinking about building learning environments that were supposed to have impact. And we knew that we were going to need to iterate based on what we were learning. So we had to sit down and lay out what would be a disciplined way of thinking about that. It can’t be just that we randomly do whatever we feel like. That’s not science. It’s not comparable. It’s not credible.

Diana Joseph:

On the other hand, if we tried to hold, if we try to control, like in a lab science experiment, if we try to have a control group, that doesn’t work in the context of education, because it’s people who are doing things. You can’t teach one way for an hour and then teach a different way for another hour without being influenced across those two cases. So, we had to think about iteration. We had to think about how we could change goals. Maybe we would discover, maybe we discovered in the course of our work that we had the wrong intentions to begin with, we had to be willing to change any piece of it. So we actually formed something that we ended up calling the Design-based Research Collective and about 10 of us worked together very closely for, I don’t know, it was a long time ago now, maybe a year, to lay out the ideas we had about how design-based research could work.

Diana Joseph:

And it’s interesting. We still see people citing that early paper from time to time. The way it works for me most now is, it’s very close to design thinking. So design-based research and design thinking are very similar to each other in that they permit iteration, they focus on design, creating something that’s useful. The biggest difference is that in design-based research, we’re trying to develop theory. We’re trying to understand what are the repeatable principles from doing something this way. And in design thinking, we’re trying to make something.

Diana Joseph:

I think that on the research side, we’re not always good about finishing the project and getting it out in the world to have impact. Something that graduate students work on and then they move on to something else. On the other hand, design thinking is not as strong at developing the theory. So we make something that’s really powerful, but what happens to the lessons that we learned from that experience? Often they just kind of blow away in the wind. So sitting in the middle, having experience with both of these has been really helpful for me and remembering to pay attention to both sides of that equation.

Douglas:

Wow. That’s super fascinating. I’m going to have to dig the paper up and check it out because I can completely understand and appreciate what you’re saying about how the theory gets left behind. Right? Because while design thinking can make change in the world, that change is driven by economic interests. And sure there’s probably some nonprofits and stuff that are like doing some design thinking, but at the end of the day, those people get grants and they have budgets. And so there’s like, there’s funding that’s driving this work. Right? And so there’s limits to the focus, right? And so the focus is deliver this thing, deliver this change. There’s a lack of focus or incentives and rewards to codify and extract out the principles, the theory that are repeatable, like what does this mean for greenhouse gases? I don’t care. I’m working on like cleaning like water or whatever. So, yeah, that’s fascinating.

Diana Joseph:

Yeah, I think the same is true on the other side. So if you’re in Academia, whatever methods or whatever field you’re in, there’s also a need to make that financially sustainable. So you’re writing grants and those grants are dependent on you writing papers that are publishable. And it takes a really long time to collect the data that allows you to publish. That’s a much slower timeline than actually producing something that works, right? So producing something that works well enough to collect the data is as far as you really need to go if your incentives are to raise funding for your lab and get tenure. You don’t have to finish the things that you’re making.

Diana Joseph:

So it takes really something. And there are many professors who get past that. They have to really invest in bringing it forward into the world, because it’s not what they’re incentivized on to begin with. In the same way that if you’re in design thinking or innovation in any context, you’re incentivized to make something happen. You’re not incentivized to sit down. And it really takes something for you to invest the time to write it down in a way that you’ll remember and that others will remember, maybe not make the same mistake.

Douglas:

You know, there’s also, we’re getting into some interesting territory but there’s another issue that I think Academia faces, which is a big challenge, right? Because even if you do get passionate about pursuing the work and you take it out to go kind of productize or commercialize and expanded out, there’s this concept of voltage drop, which is like the work we did in the lab and the hypothesis we had and the research we did. Once we start taking it to different audiences or different scenarios, we start to realize, oh, okay, this actually is not quite as repeatable in different scenarios. Right? And now we have to go figure out why that is. And do I have the energy or the runway to go do that or is there another problem that might be more interesting to go research, right? So like what I love to do, what I have the gumption to do, and is it even a solvable problem, Right? It’s like looking at like, “Oh, wow, how do we even address this?”

Diana Joseph:

Yeah. That makes me think about all the innovation projects where we think of this idea of failure as kind of being a problem, because if it didn’t become commercially viable, so it failed. But look at all the things that you learned along that path. Like, okay, so that was a dead end. You learned that was a dead, at minimum, you learned that’s a dead end. We’re not going to do that again. But also you might’ve learned why it turned out to be a dead end then you can apply that principle. So there’s so much value in making these attempts. And then saying no, closing the door when it’s time.

Douglas:

You know, I think also there’s like an identity crisis too, right? Because it’s like, am I an entrepreneur or am I a researcher/academic? Right. Because when you cross that threshold and then it’s like, oh, this isn’t scaling like I thought. I sure I learned these lessons, but do I want to continue to be an entrepreneur or do I want to go back to what I know and what I love maybe? So I think it’s a really fascinating challenge. And I watched it from a distance because I’ve never really, I’ve never been a researcher but it’s super fascinating.

Diana Joseph:

I feel it really personally now, not so much the researcher side, but there’s doing the actual work of designing these experiences and the curation and bringing people together. And then there’s the business side, and I’m not a business person. That’s not where I come, I mean, I am now because I put myself in that, but it’s not my background. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about, well, where can we partner? Maybe someone is a researcher who needs somebody who’s got a stronger focus on the business. Maybe not everybody has to wear all of the hats at the same time.

Douglas:

There’s got to be some interesting models. I’ve seen some accelerators that have focused on helping academics commercialize some of their inventions. And it really, the ones I’ve talked to tell me that it really depends on the university’s policies around IP.

Diana Joseph:

So much.

Douglas:

And because if they’ve locked it down too tight, then it’s like it doesn’t give them much wiggle room to even help the academic, right?

Diana Joseph:

Tech transfer is like this really boring thing that has such a huge impact. We’re actually hearing about it a lot on the Ecosystem Show that you mentioned before. So every week we’re visiting a different entrepreneurial ecosystem, often in biotech. We’re doing this one hour thing on clubhouse in lots of different places. So like this week was London, next week was Paris. And tech transfer comes up all the time in so many places. It really depends culturally, it depends on where you are by country, even by city, even by school, how the tech transfer office is thinking about IP.

Diana Joseph:

Sometimes the university has pressure on the tech transfer office to make lots of money. And so then they ask faculty, who are starting a business, to give them lots and lots of equity in the business. And once they do that, it’s not possible for VCs to invest. It’s not, they’ve made themselves into a non-investible business or the university has made it into a non-investible business. And so then it doesn’t succeed and doesn’t make money for the university either. At the same time, there is this agreement that’s been made where the university has invested a lot and has an interest. And so working out what that’s going to be is really important. A place that does it really well is University of San Diego, if people want to investigate.

Douglas:

Yeah, that’s great. It’s great to have examples where it’s done well. So I want to just shift gears, yet again. So this is, as we kind of start to close here, I want to come back to something that really kind of struck me. You know, we’ve talked quite a few times previously and it’s all really focused around the corporate accelerator work. And I’m just for the first time starting to realize your background and learning and learning science, and that’s something that I’ve come to appreciate a lot in the last three years, working with Eric, our VP of learning experience design, and kind of thinking about how we train facilitators and ultimately launch our certification program. And he’s mentioned that, it got my gears turning, I got really curious. I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially with this design-based research stuff you were doing around building, almost like adapting classroom or learning environment.

Douglas:

What would be your advice to folks that maybe are tuning in, that are interested in facilitation or are just getting started, or maybe they’re feeling like they’re just need to up their game in some way, especially in these times of rapid change. We’re on, S-curves seem to be just killing S-curves and the rate of change is just quite insane. I would imagine your concepts and your background could be quite informative for folks that are interested in amplifying their learning and how they can go about becoming better facilitators, better professional. So I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to navigate that and what the learning process, how people should approach the learning process right now.

Diana Joseph:

I think, and often say that everybody has to be more entrepreneurial. We should be very, very good at being entrepreneurial as human beings. We’ve evolved for it. We have two really strong capacities. One is about discipline, finishing things and staying aligned. And we’ll call that the discipline muscle and is particularly strong in those of us who liked school. You liked school and did well in school. School’s really good at building that discipline muscle.

Diana Joseph:

The other muscle is the initiative muscle. That’s where we’re going out on a limb, we’re taking a risk, we’re being creative, we’re curious about what might happen if. And that muscle should also be very strong in us, right? We’re predators and we have to adapt, right? So on the one hand, we’re flock animals. We’re very good on the discipline side. On the other hand, we are predators and we should be very good on the initiative side, but school doesn’t really help us very much with the initiative side.

Diana Joseph:

So those of us who did well in school tend to be sort of weak in that particular muscle. And those of us who hated school might actually be a lot stronger in it because we made it happen that way. I’m the first kind. So for me, learning by trying things out in the world, is really hard and scary, but it’s so much faster and more efficient than going to school and getting a degree in it. Not to say that you shouldn’t do that. When you know exactly what expertise you want, that can be really perfect. But when you’re trying to figure out what’s going to be my style of facilitation, let’s say, what am I going to offer in particular? Or when you’re trying to figure out, who’s the audience that I can benefit most effectively so that I can create my line of work?

Diana Joseph:

I would say that the way to learn is to just try it. That’s what tells you what questions to go look up on Google? That’s what tells you where you need extra practice. That’s what tells you what the unsolved problems are. And you said something about it earlier too and it made me think, this is what I thought being an adult was, and I really never did it before the last few years. I was always waiting for somebody to tell me which boxes I needed to check next. And so I invite people to step over that line, into the uncertain place where you just make a decision and it might be wrong. And that’s where the learning comes from.

Douglas:

I love that. So good. We often say practice makes practice.

Diana Joseph:

Well-Put.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, it’s been so good chatting with you today, Diana, and I want to invite you to leave our listeners with a final thought. So is there anything you’d like them to keep in mind or maybe how to find you, or the work that you do? I just wanted to give you an opportunity to send the message.

Diana Joseph:

Thank you. The easiest way to find me is at corporateacceleratorforum.com. You can sign up for our newsletter to learn about experiences that are coming up, and we have lots of them that are free and open. You can also find me on LinkedIn. You’re welcome to direct message me there. I think I’m the first Diana Joseph that comes up, although there are many of us. I’d love to talk to folks. That’d be great.

Douglas:

Excellent.

Diana Joseph:

Thanks so much for having me Douglas. This was really thought provoking for me.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe, to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.