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Cultivating Creativity

Two weeks ago R'Biz described the endeavors of a team of Virginia Commonwealth University graduate students to build an operating table inexpensive enough that medical clinics in poor Third World Countries could afford it. Project Simple, as the effort was dubbed, was an outgrowth of VCU's da Vinci Center for Innovation in Product Design and Development . (See " Cracking the da Vinci Code ".)

There's a larger story worth telling about the da Vinci Center itself. The program is unique in the United States for building interdisciplinary teams of students not only from business and engineering, as a handful of other universities have done, but design as well. At the da Vinci Center, VCU's highly ranked school of the arts is an equal partner.

I provide more background about the institutional side of the da Vinci Center in a column, "Cultivating Creativity," I wrote for my Bacon's Rebellion website and blog . The da Vinci Center is one several new-generation initiatives emerging in Richmond that are pushing the region into the vanguard of productivity and innovation. R'Biz has written briefly about the other two – the Virginia Biosciences Commercialization Center  and the Business Excellence Consortium -- and we shall delve deeper into those topics in the future. From Bacon's Rebellion :

Disruptive innovation tends to come at "the intersection," to borrow a phrase from Frans Johansson , author of "The Medici Effect." When people with very different perspectives come together -- whether those perspectives are born of deeply bedded cultural assumptions or methods ingrained by academic disciplines -- they are far more likely to generate outside-the-box ideas. That insight is an organizing principle at VCU, as manifested by the decision to build the new business school and engineering school buildings next door to one another and to have the faculties collaborate in developing a partially shared curriculum. The da Vinci Center takes that thinking another step forward.

Before coming to VCU two years ago, [School of Engineering Dean Russell] Jamison ran a multi-disciplinary program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne that combined business and engineering. One of the exciting aspects of moving to Richmond was the opportunity to launch the interdisciplinary da Vinci Center, which combined not two but three disciplines, adding design to the mix.

The interdisciplinary ideal was the leitmotif behind locating the new business school and engineering schools side by side on the newly constructed Monroe campus. But simply placing the two schools together would not create collaboration, says Jamison. "Physical adjacency isn't enough. The schools need intellectual adjacency." Developing a shared curriculum was one way to create that adjacency. Another was creating interdisciplinary projects for students to work on. That's where the da Vinci Center came in.

Located in the engineering school, the Center runs on a "shoestring," Jamison says, supported financially and programmatically by all three schools and seven corporate sponsors in the Richmond region. In an evolution beyond the business-engineering program at the University of Illinois, da Vinci incorporates the strengths of VCU's highly regarded school of the arts. As anyone familiar with iPod or iPhone knows, design is a critical component of successful product development, not an element to be tacked onto the end of the process.

"Operation Simple" was atypical in that it was sponsored by the da Vinci Center itself rather than a corporate sponsor. While it's possible that a corporation might adopt a solution conceived by VCU's students, the real value proposition is recruiting, Jamison says. The sponsorships run $30,000 a year. For that investment, Philip Morris USA , MeadWestvaco , Alpha Laval , Hamilton Beach and the Commonwealth of Virginia , hope to develop a stream of students who have mastered not only their academic disciplines but the art of product development. Hiring VCU students with the kind of project experience that da Vinci provides saves tens of thousands of dollars in on-the-job training.

The program still needs tweaking, though, Jamison concedes. "We're doing everything for the first time," and there's still a lot to figure out. The Center hasn't even hired a full-time director yet. Now that the initiative has run several projects back to back, it's time to re-think and re-calibrate, he says.