Incentivizing Faculty Participation in Innovation and Entrepreneurship
PTIE has written a very effective playbook on driving cultural change at academic institutions with respect to innovation and entrepreneurship
As I continue to educate myself on the challenges facing innovators seeking to commercialize research, I occasionally come across a gem that reenergizes my desire to press on despite the feeling of pushing a rock up a hill. I found one such gem in the form of the Promotion & Tenure - Innovation & Entrepreneurship (PTIE) initiative being spearheaded by Rich Carter of Oregon State University (OSU), and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
PTIE is a grassroots movement promoting innovation and entrepreneurship on university campuses across the United States, based on the idea that embracing the cultural change required to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in university settings revolves around properly incentivizing faculty researchers. They achieve this through rigorous research into faculty motivations, ultimately recommending expanding the metrics that are included in faculty performance and tenure reviews to include innovation, entrepreneurship, and community impact beyond the lab.
Their approach has been highly successful, growing from its roots in OSU to include more than 70 American universities.
More importantly, PTIE has published a detailed playbook on how they did it, a playbook that, with a few tweaks, is readily implementable in Canada. If you’re interested in digging in, you can find some suggested introductory literature below. In this post, I give an overview of the playbook, and comment on how it could be adapted to the Canadian context as part of the push toward more effective Canadian innovation.
2014 PNAS Paper by Sanberg et al (NIA):
Promote a culture of innovation
PTIE bases their approach on building incentives that correlate to innovation and impact into performance and tenure review metrics for professors at participating universities. The idea is simple and powerful. While traditional metrics of academic performance include things like papers published in high-impact journals, teaching, and administrative service, PTIE recommends expanding the ways in which faculty are recognized for their effort when being considered for promotion and tenure.
The task of driving innovation is generational in scope, since impact will only be felt years after implementation. Because of this, successful adoption of PTIE recommendations requires a movement that has staying power that outlasts any individual involved. The only way to do this is to embed a culture of impact into the fabric of the institution in a way that becomes independent of any individual within the organizational structure.
Anyone who has run a business with more than a handful of employees will tell you that culture trumps strategy every time, and that changing culture is extremely difficult, requiring buy-in from every level. PTIE’s approach to driving cultural change revolves around a two-pronged approach, building bottom-up support at the level of faculty and top-down support from the university Senate and the VPRI. This movement is typically seeded by someone who is at the level of faculty and who is not in any sort of administrative position, someone who can both engage with faculty on their terms and can represent them in conversation with leadership. Their task becomes one of aligning the PTIE metrics with the mission, vision, and values of the university, to be able to frame the necessary change in terms of what the administration is already trying to achieve (and thereby drive the top-down push for culture change), while working with faculty to build the required support from the bottom up. PTIE provides numerous tools for this task, including surveys to assess support at the faculty level and examples of language used to align culture change efforts with existing missions, vision, and values.
Innovation takes many forms
The PTIE approach emphasizes whole-faculty engagement and looks for ways to incentivize innovation in all its forms. While it is often the case that innovation becomes synonymous with entrepreneurship in these conversations, commercialization of STEM research is just one of many means by which the research taking place in universities can have impact outside of the university itself. PTIE encourages engagement with faculties and researchers not traditionally thought of as entrepreneurial to build an inclusive, grassroots movement that involves the entirety of a campus, not just STEM faculties.
The PTIE approach to measuring impact has value independent of the initiative itself. The need to define metrics that correlate with downstream impact is a theme in most of my writing, but PTIE has gone farther than any initiative I have come across to date in terms of practical implementation. They have 6 classes of metric, detailed in the recommendations document on page 5, and summarized below:
Intellectual Property: Unsurprisingly, PTIE recommends a focus on IP, but is explicit that IP encompasses a lot more than just patents, and includes things like copyrighted work, artistic installations, and and almost any form of ideation, whether or not protectable. By using a much more diverse and inclusive definition of IP, PTIE allows faculty that may not even think of themselves as innovators to identify themselves in the mission.
Sponsored Research: To some degree, industry sponsorships are already recognized in Canadian faculty metrics, but it is worth mentioning that industry sponsorship in the US is much more likely to involve a startup than in Canada. Because the vast majority (more than 90%) of SBIR grants are to companies with fewer than 10 employees, industry sponsorship has a slightly different practical meaning in the United States than it does in Canada, something to keep in mind when adapting these guidelines for Canada.
Use & Licensing: PTIE defines use as products authored or created by university faculty and publicly posted information used or adopted for community benefit, and it is here that I suspect most of the impact is felt. IP created but not used is practically worthless, which is why reporting the number of patents filed in isolation is meaningless. By specifically counting and rewarding IP assets that are used for community benefit, PTIE better correlates IP creation and downstream impact.
Entity Creation: PTIE recognizes the value of startup creation arising from research. While historically in Canada startup creation has not been explicitly recognized in faculty promotion and tenure reviews, this is beginning to change. PTIE recommends following these entities for some time, tracking revenues, investments, and job creation over time.
I&E Career Preparation: Training and mentorship are core to PTIE recommendations as well, recognizing that training innovators is just as important as being one. This is something that is also recognized through the Canadian Invention to Innovation national network.
I&E Engagement: Broadly speaking, anything that involves engaging external stakeholders to the innovation and entrepreneurship process is recognized as well. This could include, for example, engaging with government stakeholders in driving innovation policy, which is to say that CanInnovate itself would probably be recognized by PTIE as being a contribution to promotion and tenure reviews (not that I have any personal interest in either).
More importantly, though, is that PTIE recognizes that impact often happens in intersections between these categories. IP created in an academic lab that is licensed to a newly created startup led by a postdoctoral researcher mentored by a professor who is recognized as being an effective trainer of innovators, that then goes on to sponsor research in the originating lab, touches on all 6 categories.
Effective communication
To my eye, the cornerstone of PTIE’s success lies in their approach to communication of their mission. Their approach emphasizes delivery of the message is at least as important as its content, emphasizing the dual importance both of data-backed communication and of ensuring that the message is delivered with empathy, in a way that allows the recipient to identify themselves in the messaging.
How this plays out practically lies in careful choice of words when conducting surveys of faculty to assess interest, and recognition that not everyone in a university values innovation and entrepreneurship, or recognizes it as being relevant. As an example, considering the faculty level, asking researchers if they view themselves as innovators results in most people responding positively, while asking if they view themselves as entrepreneurs receives only a minority positive response. At the leadership level, it is not always immediately obvious how innovation and entrepreneurship align with institutional mission, vision, and values, a connection that may need to be made through careful demonstration of faculty interest and societal impact, delivered in a way that avoids being an imposition. Through careful testing, PTIE has developed a set of surveys that can be deployed at universities that get at the heart of the issues without losing respondents to issues of language.
Canadian adaptation
One of the key differences between the United States and Canada with regard to promotion and tenure relates to getting the buy-in of the relevant unions. In the United States, only about a quarter of university professors are unionized, whereas most are in Canada. Because promotion and tenure evaluation metrics are often explicitly captured in collective agreements, faculty unions represent a key stakeholder to the adoption of PTIE-based policies in Canadian institutions.
Even though this is not an issue I see explicitly addressed in the PTIE playbook, their approach can adapt readily. Instead of seeking to replace traditional metrics that are considered for promotion and tenure, PTIE works with university faculties to expand the scope of what is included in performance reviews, providing ways for researchers to benefit from forms of impact that may not be considered by incumbent metrics without negatively impacting those who prefer to walk a more traditional academic path. Provided the relevant union representatives are engaged early in the consultation process, the support of unions in recognizing more of their members’ contributions toward promotion and tenure could be a powerful force to achieving bottom-up support for inclusion of more diverse metrics. On the other hand, failure to involve the union in the conversation early would likely result in failure.
The union approach also means that promotion and tenure are somewhat less impactful than their American counterparts, since it is rare (relative to the United States) for a tenure review to fail in Canada. Likely other angles will need to be emphasized in Canada in terms of incentivization as well. Interestingly, PTIE has consistently found that monetary considerations are not all that important in faculty motivation, something that runs counter to the prevailing sentiment among Canadian VPRIS and TTOs. PTIE literature puts significant emphasis on altruistic motivations, and suggests that finding ways to identify and measure community impact is better correlated to long-term target outcomes than simple monetary considerations. As with most things innovation-related, this assumption needs to be tested in Canada through direct engagement with faculty using PTIE surveys.
Top-down buy-in in Canada involves overcoming a different sort of challenge. While in the United States, Bayh-Dole provides federal support for innovation and entrepreneurship, Canada has no equivalent. We need funding agencies at the federal and provincial levels to recognize the forms of impact suggested by PTIE in their funding mandates, thereby incentivizing university administrative leadership to get on board. Lobbying for federal and provincial policy change to provide a direct incentive for institutions to value innovation and entrepreneurship through funding agencies will be a key part of moving the needle in Canada. These policies should include a requirement to favor new startups as IP receptors, given a proven track record of more effective delivery of disruptive technology than large firms.
Given its focus on DEI and inclusivity, PTIE (and indeed all NSF) funding in the United States is likely uncertain, a fact that speaks to the wisdom of basing the movement on cultural change that will be much more difficult to undo than would a simple funding-based incentive. As is explicitly acknowledged by PTIE, this work is generational in scope, and the same pressures that are impacting PTIE in the United States make Canadian adoption of a similar framework all the more urgent. If we hope to address Canada’s innovation challenges in a timeframe that is relevant, we need to start now.
If you’re interested in further exploring a Canadian adaptation of PTIE with me, get in touch.