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Sunday 22nd October 2006 7:43 am
Cathy Davidson: The Future of Institutions: Skunkworks!
At the MacArthur launch, someone mentioned the “skunkworks model”—my favorite tactic for institional innovation. The name comes from a moonshine factory in the Lil Abner cartoons. Shine on!
One of the goals of the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative on Digital Learning is to think through the kinds of institutions that best promote learning in a digital age. Learning happens in schools and outside of schools. Learning can be conceptual, social, or practical. Learning is a process and a product, form and content. How we learn shapes what we learn--and vice versa.
Where we learn also matters. And not every institutional space is amenable to true, creative, exploratory, adventurous, interdisciplinary thinking. When that is the case, how do you change institutions?
I believe you change institutions through targeted innovation. At the MacArthur launch, someone mentioned the “skunkworks model”—my favorite tactic for change. A skunkworks is a small team that takes or is assigned responsibility for developing something in a short time with minimal management constraints (skunkworks definition on whatis). When a skunkworks fails, the loss is isolated and small. When it succeeds, the larger institution (educational or corporate) can redefine itself to include what the skunksworks accomplished. In this way, institutions themselves change, sometimes gradually, sometimes quite abruptly.
I know this model of institutional change is counter-intuitive, but I also know it works. From 1998 until June of 2006 I was Duke University and the nation’s first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. My job was to help create research and teaching programs that spanned the nine undergraduate and professional schools. Everything we did was against obstacles. Here’s my favorite example. In just about every department and school there was a faculty member (usually only one) who, like the MacArthur Foundation, understood that Digital Learning was the future. We brought together twenty or so of these innovators and created Information Science + Information Studies (http://www.isis.duke.edu), a program designed to teach the next generation of technology innovators and users how to think creatively and critically about digital media.
No other program at Duke looks like ISIS. An introductory ISIS class might have fifteen students in fourteen different majors, from art history to photonics. ISIS students both think about and make things collaboratively. For example, they design games, play games, analyze games, hold classes in game spaces (www.cs.duke.edu/projects/MT/Game2Know). Duke’s infamous iPod experiment (featured on VOA) was taken up by ISIS students and faculty who co-developed academic podcasting in ways no one would have imagined three years ago. They created the University’s official interactive campus map. And faculty who may once have felt solitary are now university leaders, in positions of authority and prominence.
The name “skunkworks” comes from a moonshine factory in the Lil Abner cartoons. A skunkworks can become a powerful center of institutional innovation. Shine on!
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