UT’s IC2 Institute taking on new focus, chief says

The IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin has gone through some major changes under the directorship of Art Markman.

Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing, served as director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations program at UT Austin, which he founded in 2011 and led until 2018 when he was named head of the IC2 Institute.

He has authored multiple books and currently co-hosts a show and podcast on KUT Radio called, “Two Guys On Your Head” with fellow professor Bob Duke, director of UT’s Center for Music Learning.

Under Markman, the IC2 Institute -- an organization that studies and supports entrepreneurship -- has shifted its focus to economic development in rural areas of the state. Additionally, the Austin Technology Incubator, along with the Global Innovation Lab, moved from under the umbrella of IC2, though both organizations still work closely with the institute.

George Kozmetsky, the institute’s founding director, started the incubator in 1989 as a vehicle for technology companies being spun out of UT. The Global Innovation Lab was created at the institute in 2001 as part of an effort to spread its presence internationally.

The institute has operated under a number of different directors since it was established in 1977, but has tried to stay faithful to its founder’s goal for it to serve as a “think-and-do” tank.

Markman follows in the footsteps of Bob Peterson, who led the institute from 2013 to 2016. Gregory Pogue, who served as interim director until Markman joined IC2, is now the deputy executive director.

Markman recenly spoke with the American-Statesman about IC2’s new direction and how he thinks his rendition of Kozmetsky’s vision fits into the history of the institute.

American Statesman: Since joining the IC2 Institute as its director, what have you found is the most exciting aspect of leading the institute?

Art Markman: One of the nice things about leading the institute has been that it really is an opportunity for us to take the work that we do here in a new direction... after 40 plus years of a primary focus on technology, tech transfer, bringing ideas from universities to commercialization and entrepreneurship. I think we had a great community here at the University of Texas that focuses on those issues and it gave an opportunity for IC2 to really return to its roots and begin to think about hard problems in economic development broadly. One of the things we really noticed was that there was a lack of work on smaller, rural communities and smaller isolated cities. These locations need to participate in economic growth, so we've brought together a group of researchers and developed new programs focused on that area to really catalyze a community of people at the University of Texas to look at problems in these overlooked communities. That has by far been the most exciting thing, because it has enabled us to put together a community that can work together in ways they were not doing before.

When did you begin seeing a need for that type of work in rural areas?

You don't have to look too far to see the differences between urban and rural areas — bigger centers versus smaller cities. It has clearly had an impact on the political climate here in the United States and around the world. When coming to the institute, I felt like it was important to really listen to the kinds of studies that people were doing around campus and to really see where the University of Texas had hidden strengths. I was able to meet with faculty and deans from across the university, and this theme of the smaller communities kept coming up over and over again... There just seemed to be a lot of people around campus talking about these communities, but there wasn't a coherent research effort at the university. The more that I began to talk to people, the more I began to think about the fact that as the University of Texas, we're in a state that has a large number of rural counties that often don't make the headlines that our urban centers do. This is a chance for us to do work for communities that are underrepresented in the scholarly literature, and not just something that has importance broadly, but something that actually has importance for the state of Texas, where UT is supposed to show leadership.

I have to play a bit of devil’s advocate here. When you tell a student that they’re going to grow and you’re trying to promote a smaller city, are there any challenges behind getting students excited about being part of economic development in rural areas compared to urban ones?

Historically, one of the things we see students getting excited about being in Austin is being in an urban environment; I'm not sure that that's going to change. But urban life is not for everyone; there are plenty of people who really do crave a quieter lifestyle, who may be more interested in being able to live in an area with a little bit more space, perhaps with a slower pace of life. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're uninterested in success. A number of our students come from rural communities and and have a real love for that area of the country and don't necessarily realize the ways in which they could contribute to that economy, whether it's through creating businesses or by serving as teachers or professional, doctors and lawyers. We want to help students think about where they’d like to live in addition to what they’d like to do. That actually led us, through conversations with Dean Brent Iverson of (UT Austin) undergraduate studies, to think a little bit about how we might help particularly those students who come from smaller communities think about what they might do after graduation. We have lots of programs here under the heading of “Gone to Texas” that help students from wide regions of Texas get ready to be at a university where they're going to be part of a class of 10,000 incoming students. We piloted a program this summer, and in preparation for the next summer for a new program called, “Home to Texas.”

Tell me a bit more about how that new program was developed.

Dean Iverson and I had a conversation where we were thinking, “What could we do to encourage students to think about going home after graduation?” So, the idea behind the program was to take first and second-year students who have come from rural communities, send them home for the summer with a paid internship where they work for eight weeks and make a good salary in addition to learning about their community by researching the community. They interview leaders in government, business, education, civic and faith organizations to learn about their community with the eyes of the adults they are rather than that of the kids they were before they left for college.

How did that pilot go?

For the first time, the program started with nine students. It was incredibly successful, and more than anything else, students saw how much the communities they came from would like to have them come back after graduation. It's very exciting; we're planning to have hopefully 50 to 80 students participate next summer. We're already engaged with 10 communities around the state to begin the process of finding potential internships. We'll have students apply and match students with internships at the beginning of the spring semester. We're also in conversations with people around the university to expand the scope of this program.We get bright students who can contribute to the economy in a variety of ways, so the more of our students who think seriously about living in the communities they grew up, the more diversity of the workforce you create, because you’re bringing people back with new skill sets they have picked up.

What has the institute learned about economic development in rural communities?

There is a lot of interesting thought and discussion about what can be done in these communities about supporting new businesses, but that requires a workforce that also wants to bring their skills there. And one of the things we find is that traditionally, economic development in smaller communities involves trying to attract some bigger company to land an outpost there, whether it’s a factory or some other office. When an outside company puts a facility in a town, that facility doesn’t necessarily become local, because the corporate center is located somewhere else. When students come and bring their ideas and their energy to that community, they create opportunities to enhance the middle class in those areas and create civic leaders of the future.

According to its website, the institute is also introducing a new competition with a focus in rural areas. What’s that about?

Yeah, so the idea behind the student competition is, we want students to think about how to learn about these overlooked communities. In February, we’re going to let graduate and undergraduate students — although every team has to have some undergraduates in it — spend a month and choose a community outside of an urban corridors of Texas and learn about it. They’re going to study the accessible economic records, but reach out to the chambers of commerce, as well as to economic development leaders and learn about the community. After that month, we’re going to have kind of a hack-a-thon with an economic development challenge. We’re going to ask a question, and the teams will have 36 hours to put together a proposal about how that community that they studied should address that challenge. They’ll write a report, and the top 10 teams will pitch their ideas to a celebrity team of judges in March.

What was the thought process behind some of the recent organizational changes to institute, specifically those regarding the Austin Technology Incubator and the Global Innovation Lab?

George Kozmetsky, the founder of IC2, had an interesting vision. His vision was that the institute would be what he called a “think-and-do” thank. Traditionally, a think tank is a group that generates and disseminates scholarly ideas, but the idea behind a “think-and-do” tank is to do research, understand key problems, then create programs that can be implemented to take those ideas into communities where they will have an influence. It’s a wonderful idea, but it has a bit of a drawback. And the drawback is, the people who think, and the people who do are not always the same people. Many of the people who think are the people that universities traditionally employ; our faculty spend a lot of time and are evaluated primarily based on their research output. They’re not also evaluated on whether those ideas are brought into the marketplace. Over the years, IC2 spun up a number of different groups that you can think of as the “do” side of the group. We had a global commercialization group that was focused on teaching techniques around the world. The IC2 created the ATI, which was the first big technology incubator in town, and the longest surviving incubator at a university in the country. Both of those programs have had enormous impacts in their spaces, but they became full-time jobs for the institute, which made it hard for the institute to do cutting-edge research to create the next generation of programs. The thought was that the commercialization group would be better served in a unit that was more focused on the university’s global strategy. And the ATI is mature enough; it’s a 30-year-old organization, that there is no compelling reason why IC2 should be administering what it does. It’s very successful on its own. This enabled IC2 to be a little more nimble, we’re able to engage a little bit more with the researchers on campus, and are able to think about new programs without having to manage legacy programs.

Could you add onto your personal journey of “think-and-do?” How did your work in academia produce actionable outcomes?

This fits well with my personal journey as an academic and researcher. Early in my career I wrote a lot of papers that primarily get read by thirty of my closest colleagues that were traditional academic papers and literature. I still do that and I enjoy that, but about, I would say about 12 or 13 years ago now, I began to think a lot more about ways that the work that my field does can have more of an impact outside of the academic community. I started thinking of ways to engage outside and that led to many different experiences, including working with companies that wanted to use cognitive science in their work. It led me to develop seminars that could be taught to people outside of classes at the university. When we developed the Humans Dimensions Organization program, one component of that was professional seminars; one-day classes that could be taught to people out in the community who want to better themselves. All of that was in the name of public outreach, so in many ways, taking that type of approach at IC2 is a natural approach of where my own career was going. It has been fun, in some ways, to take the next step in the work that I’m doing and using that as a way of creating a community of people who all are great scholars, but also care about how that scholarship has an impact on the world. This particular focus we have right now on the overlooked communities, I don’t expect IC2 to stay focused on this forever. Our goal is to have a community of researchers that are self-sustaining, and have other projects that we can use to serve as a catalyst to economic development in different ways.

You’ve written several books already, and you co-host a podcast. Tell me a bit more about your personal history. Were you always a public person?

It’s an interesting trajectory. I grew up around a lot of professionals -- my dad was an accountant, my mom was a teacher. I grew up around doctors and lawyers. When I went to college, I thought that I’d go into business, but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I ended up as a cognitive science major, which is this amalgam of different neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics and anthropology. By the time I finished college, I thought that I’d do basic research for the rest of my career. I fell in love with research in the field of cognitive science, but when I made the shift to trying to learn how my work applied outside academia, it came in part as a reaction to demonstrations that were going on during that time against college grants for research. Just because somebody is helping advance the understanding of happiness or well-being, it doesn’t mean that the research isn’t extremely worthwhile. If we could teach more people about how their minds work, I think they would live differently, and better in my opinion. That really drove me to think about how we can tell people what we’ve learned from the research. I took some personal responsibility to do that, so that’s what led me to this more outward-facing work.

Is it always important to you that a research project, discussion or even a new program produce something that we can see, feel and do something about? How important is it to engage a subject just for the sake of engaging in it?

We live in a world where everyone assumes that everything they do needs to be goal-directed. And I’m not sure that’s the case. We’ve spent a lot of time talking today about the importance of thinking and doing, and certainly I think that is critical. But the thinking that you do does not always have to be related to your actions. Sometimes it’s enough to be thinking and doing and letting those things influence each other in more indirect ways. Ideal conversations can help solidify your relationship with somebody, or they can lead you to think differently about something long term. Basic research into something without an answer to how it’s going to be applied is the engine for creating tomorrow’s products, because we stumble upon things that are more interesting than anything we could have hoped for through the process of doing that type of basic research. I by no means think that everything that we do has to be goal-directed. I think academia sometimes creates biases about the problems they think are important ones to study based on a community of researchers who are focused on those problems. There is a way in which universities can get very arrogant in their stance and assume information only flows from the university outward to others, and I think what the real lesson of public engagement is that it’s really a two-way street, that there are things that the public, business and government can benefit from listening to universities, but their thoughts should feed back into the universities and deepen our scholarship and change the way we do research.