 Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Prem Paul. I have the honor of being vice chancellor for research and economic development at UNL and We're very appreciative that you joined us here for our fall Nebraska lecture the second of the 2015 Chancellor's distinguished lecture series Today's lecture is being web streamed live, so I also want to welcome everyone who is joining us Why the web? For those of you who use social media the Twitter hashtag for today's lecture spawned neb lecture The Nebraska lectures are interdisciplinary lecture series designed to foster communication among students and faculty in different academic areas and Among our citizens and friends of Lincoln and Nebraska These lectures are sponsored by the UNL Research Council in cooperation with the office of the Chancellor The office of research and economic development and the Osher What's your lifelong learning Institute known as Ali a Warm welcome to any Ali members who joined us today. So join me in talk coming So you're probably wondering what the heck is research council But I'd say research council is composed of faculty from across many disciplines at the University of Nebraska Lincoln Council solicits nominations of faculty for Nebraska lectures the criteria that they're they have major research recent accomplishments and The person's ability to explain their work Selection as a Nebraska lecturer is the highest recognition the council can bestow on an individual faculty member Research Council also has some additional powers like they have a money pot That they give seed grants to faculty. So faculty like the research council's the seed funding a Few words about today's format Forming following our lecture Dr. Robert Powers who is chair of the research council and professor of chemistry He will moderate a question and answer session and there will be a couple of microphones Available. So we hope that you will use those Then we'll have refreshments and tours of Nebraska innovation studio also known as the maker space and And that is located at the lower level So at this time it is my honor and a pleasure to introduce our Wonderful Chancellor Harvey Perlman to introduce today's speakers. Please join me in welcoming Harvey So, thanks Prim I've got these notes and I feel like I could introduce Shane from Just spontaneously, but then I would say things he wouldn't want me to say so I'm going to stick mostly to that It is a pleasure to introduce today's lecture Shane Faradar Letter professor of engineering in the Department of Mechanical Materials engineering His work is an excellent example of how innovation that begins at UNL can make an impact upon the world He's perhaps best known for developing a surgical robot to help doctors perform laparoscopic surgery a Procedure that is less invasive than traditional methods and often results in a speedier recovery for patients This work is the result of a collaboration with the medical centers Dmitry Olnikov and a testament to the importance of working across disciplinary and institutional lines He also has applied his robotics expertise to creating innovative solutions for agriculture transportation and other industries Creation and experimentation are the common threads in his research His approach to problem-solving can serve as a model for the generation to come Ultimately leading to a stronger more creative workforce That's the goal and the purpose behind Nebraska Innovation Studio also known as the maker space This was a dream of dr. Faradar's and in the short time since its opening the UNL Makers Club has more than 700 members We are excited to see the impact this group will have on Nebraska Innovation campus on the University of Nebraska Lincoln and our state Proud to note that dr. Faradar is a Nebraska alumnus having earned his bachelor's degree for UNL in 1992 He also received a master's degree and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Before returning to his home state to become a UNL faculty member in 1998 He has often challenged my credentials as a Nebraska Born and raised Nebraska because he suggests and probably will in his talk I don't know that all Nebraskans grew up as makers. You know something broke. You fixed it. This is not my personal experience But he will discuss what it means to have a Makers mentality and how to develop that skill to make us better Innovators, please join me in welcoming dr. Shane fair Well, thank you all for coming it. It's a great crowd. I appreciate everyone taking some time out today It's a great honor to be selected to give this lecture by the research council and In some ways, I think it's quite unfair because the focus is much too much on me I have been incredibly blessed and supported in my whole career here at UNL So Chancellor Perlman and Vice Chancellor Paul have been incredibly supportive of my research and the work in the Makers space and The but the more important supports probably come what most people would see is from the bottom up This is a picture from my office. I took this morning This is the list of theses that I've had over the years since my time here at UNL And I think there are eight National Science Foundation fellows in that group there's people in there with the With hardware on now on Mars as part of the last three Mars rovers it's really been an incredible bunch and but Given that forget the sentiment Being a faculty member is a pyramid scheme So I sit at the top and I take credit for all that they do After this slide you can assume everything else is all me. Okay? So we'll dig in right here Also, I guess at the probably the most important piece of my support is my family who chose to come today This is a family theme presentation So you'll see appearances from all the kids here as I wanted to have a lot of photos in my presentation And which turns out we own all the copyrights to these images. So that makes it very nice the family photographer my wife Is not many of them because she's always taking the pictures, but Anna is going to lead us on an adventure today So you'll see these guys appear throughout as Chancellor Perlman mentioned I was born in a small town in Nebraska my dad owned a hardware store My mother and father ran that all their their lives that at least my life and I make things I make things when I'm at work and then I go home at night and I make things this is from a couple years ago an image of my workbench in the basement and We're talking today about making for innovation. So there's different types of making I think making can make you more innovative as there are several ways to become more innovative and it's really really important Now there aren't many mechanical engineering jokes and there are even fewer hardware store jokes So I just had to throw this one in there The one joke of the talk so too easy The other issue is that I've tried to become an entrepreneur So I started a couple companies based on our research one Chancellor Perlman mentioned has to do with surgical robots And we'll talk more about that today The other one has to do with measuring the quality of railroad track when I started to get into entrepreneurship I realized I didn't know much about entrepreneurship And I started to read a lot on this subject and it's a hobby of mine to read about innovation and the process of innovation So today I want to take us through a few sort of my core elements in the process of innovation I firmly believe that innovation is something that can be taught Something that can be learned something that can be improved so I'm still working on Chancellor Perlman. He can become a maker if he puts the right mentality into it So just a really basic definition to start out with I like this image It's kind of a grainy image, but it's shocking to me. So when I buy Laundry detergent I buy the one that's there right this height That's the only criteria for me whoever has paid for that height on the so goes down into the cart That's really all I look for. I think Tracy smells each one and make some kind of determination based on smell But if you look at all these they're all exactly the same to me. I really don't care at all They're they're one syllable words They all have this I don't know 30 degree up angle to the text. It's just shocking how they're they must be actively trying to be the same here That's the opposite of innovation. This is me to technology I think my two criteria it has to test to be different if you're doing the same thing like these Detergents are doing if you're doing the same thing as everyone else. That's a key that you're not being innovative That's the first clue. The second thing I look for is good. It has to be good You can do things differently and and be bad about it That in my book is not innovative and I slide the words innovation and creativity In and out of here, but these are the two things that I'm talking about I think we should do things differently and I think we should do things well Those are my two chunks of criteria One way to do that is through the process of making and when I talk about making it's not just the physical Products so most of my work is is about physical things But it can be software. It can be companies. It can be a lot of things. This is a famous Maker Henry Ford made the Model T and I always point out that it's important to note that it's the Model T T is I think the 22nd letter of the alphabet. I should count that sometime But he made a model a model B model C the top left is actually the model n Which was somewhat successful and he sold a lot of those But this is the way he thought through how automotives The automobile industry should function how he thought through how people should use automobiles when he started doing this in 1898 People really didn't know what cars should look like how cars should function how cars should be used and It he would build a model that he would see how it goes Then he build a model and see how it goes I think there are a lot of people again Nebraska is probably over represented in this group who think through problems physically and That's going to be the core of the talk today Another bunch that did this is the Wright brothers We had a chance to visit Kitty Hawk where they made their first flight in 1903 They were definitely making Innovation through excuse me making for innovation. They started building gliders in 18 1999 and they built a season they would go out each season 1900 1901 1902 then they finally flew in 1903 all trips to Kitty Hawk all different Machines they call them all different gliders But they exist in a really important quadrant if there's another book called Pascal's quadrant But you can make a chart which has usefulness on one side you make four boxes Something is useful or not useful and then you can talk about academic rigor in the other axis So something that has academic rigor and something doesn't so Thomas Edison for example was not academic rigorous He just tried a lot of stuff, but he tried enough stuff that he made very useful things You can also talk about very academic folks whose research may not be terribly useful But they're definitely very rigorous, but the interesting quadrant is called Pascal's quadrant in this textbook But I think the Wright brothers exist there they made useful things and they used great academic rigor When they didn't understand how propellers should work they came back and built a wind tunnel so they could study the problem formally They use mathematical analysis and we're really a Good models of good engineers who thought through problems physically who thought through problems by making so again as engineers We like to have lists I'm going to try to give you a few steps here the steps you can take to be more innovative I don't know what comes after one, but let's let's dive in here. This is Sarah's list So the first thing I want to point out is that we all need to adopt what's called a growth mindset This is research from Stanford University Psychologist named Carol Dweck, and I think it fits our our football Slogan that we often use but it's the process that you need to focus on the process is what's important She studies lots of different folks athletes high performers at many levels but two of the people that she points out that kind of explain the concept best to me are John McEnroe who had a fixed mindset and Michael Jordan who was probably the best basketball player of all time who clearly had a growth mindset so People with a fixed mindset believe hey, I was born smart. I'm smart and Therefore they spend the rest of their lives Validating the fact that they're smart and when things went poorly for John McEnroe it wasn't his fault after all he was the smart one in the room and he blamed other people for this and He had a much shorter career in professional tennis. He was incredibly talented obviously and he worked very hard But had a fixed mindset now Michael Jordan came out of North Carolina Incredibly athletic, but not the best basketball player. So he came into the NBA and like everyone who jumps up a level like that People were faster and stronger in the NBA and he didn't shoot the ball very well I think he entered the league shooting something like 17% from the three-point line and exited the league at 47% or something like that He improved throughout his career and retired a couple times Playing his best basketball Someone who improved it from beginning to end now as we look at this we would all say obviously I have a growth mindset I don't Think things like this, but you know very quickly you can you can find people who say listen, I'm not creative That's not me. I don't do that sort of thing There are many many examples when you talk to your children you can tell your children hey I'm I'm glad you did well on that test. You're very smart, right instead of saying things like I'm I was so proud of how hard you worked and that can really make a big difference as you as you think through Again think through this you have to think about the process is the most important thing So this is that this is a core tenant that if we do some things we can become more innovative If that's not true then forget the rest of the presentation because that doesn't matter very much I think we can all become more and more innovative now one of my favorite tools for innovation is something called little bets and it's It's subtly different than the way a lot of people think about innovation I want to try to point out some of those points it has similarities to other Other descriptions so experimental innovators are an important thing Lean startup is a process about how you make startup companies through small little steps And then agile programming is probably one of those rather than Waterfall or cascade programming you need to take an agile approach to programming So it's related to that my best way to explain little bets is with Matthew and Anna playing with Legos When they start playing Legos, they don't know what they're gonna do They're gonna have fun playing Legos. That's their goal the process is the focus They take the Legos and they dump them out onto the table then they spread them out They still don't know what they're gonna try to build But then they look for what are called small wins they start picking through the pile and they find an interesting piece So maybe this is an airplane wing and you say hey Let's make an airport and as you're building an airport your airplane doesn't look like an airplane So it changes into a space space space dock or something and they adapt to their goals that from the process of Taking these little bets finding these small wins so Kids are very very good at this and this is something that we squeeze out of people I Can't imagine ever finding a manager who's gonna take a process or take a step like this I don't know what's gonna happen, but let's do some stuff to see how it turns out and we should learn something in the process Experimental innovators think that way Middle managers do not think that way So you have to be on guard for this a little bit is an action You have to do something you have to allocate some resources You're gonna lose something in the process of little bets. That's key But as you take little bets your goal is to learn again focus on the process. You're not you don't really even care what the What the outcome might be? And again, this is a famous example in the literature when Hewlett-Packard Wanted to introduce the first handheld calculators and they do what big companies do they commission a study a marketing study How big is the market? How many can we make how much what are the cost of goods? What are the retail sales? How many can we expect? What's the growth curve look like for the next five or seven or eight years? And it all came back, you know, that's okay some engineers will buy this we don't see it as a mass market thing It's probably not worth investing in So David Packard who is another terrific experimental entrepreneur Didn't like that answer just didn't believe it Not that he didn't believe it, but he didn't understand it completely these look like cool things to him So he said let's make a hundred and they made a hundred of these and he started giving them out to friends And he finally gave one to some guy in the airport said the guy in the sitting next to him in the airplane said I'll take a thousand I want more and They they made a thousand I gave him to that guy they sold him to that guy and then they realized that they were getting more and more calls we want more and more of these and There's an important lesson there first of all the smartest people in the world going into this Didn't know what the right answer was you can study and study and study and People who have been in meetings with me I get to a point where I want to stop thinking about the problem And I want to do something To figure out what the real answer is because I don't think we're smart enough. There's a little bit of humility here We're not smart enough to figure out what the real problems are when I was in graduate school my PhD advisor Told me a lot of things called me a lot of things, but He said there's two ways to draw a circle One is to take your time I thought about digging up this have you guys seen on YouTube this guy that draws circles so perfectly Now these competitions about who can draw the round of circle on a chalkboard. It's pretty shocking That's one way to do it But the other way to do it is the image on the right make the worst guess you can at a circle and then start then look at It what worked here what didn't work here if you look at that sort of oblong Ellipse there. You're clearly too sharp in the top right in the bottom left. We need to flatten those out and You learn from the first effort and you can make a rounder circle in this way That's quite important too So the goal here is to learn fast now a lot of people will use these fail quickly to learn fast The first one to fail wins that kind of stuff and I think that's probably the wrong way to phrase it Everybody's heard that right you got to fail quick kind of stuff and entrepreneurship That shouldn't be the focus either the The key here that's why I put it in parentheses The key here is to learn fast to build and to create as a way to think through problems The bottom line I think is really important to me that you want to do something so that you can think about the problem better Again almost no one I know thinks that way they they say let's sit down Let's figure out what the right thing is to do and then let's try that But the the experimental entrepreneur will say stop thinking about it. Try something And I think that's a key step To little bets because these things create small wins and the small wins are like finding the airplane wing You didn't even know that it was in there But I'm going to make an airport now because I found an airplane wing in the pile of Legos You didn't know it existed, but that's you weren't smart enough to figure that out in the beginning You found out through the process of doing So small wins will build on each other and you'll eventually get to an excellent position This one I like to this is Luke He had an idea at least I think I remember this correctly that he wanted to use his head to control video games He was into programming video games at the time. So He built this little contraption Let's use a rubber band to hold it on we can wire it up like this Let's put on a hat because I don't have a better way to attach it to my head, right? These are not product ready ideas. This is not thinking through everything in the beginning This is trying something quickly So that he can figure out is this a good idea to control a video game by the motions on my head So you can talk to him more about that after the talk That's another book I read I have to throw this in here because I like this phrase You guys know Norm Abram from PBS he builds these where's the plaid shirts and he builds stuff on PBS he has this show called the new Yankee workshop anybody help me out here. All right We all know Norm we love Norm But he wrote a book with the famous phrase that you should measure twice and cut once right? The assumption there is that you know how long the board should be right that you have an idea that this is the correct length of Board if you know this is the correct length of the board By all means measure twice and then cut it. Okay. Just make sure you've got the correct length But I think the more interesting problems are we did where you don't know what the right Link to the board is and you should not measure just cut a board see how it works and cut another board boards are generally cheap Just keep cutting boards until you have the right board Maybe you don't want a board in the end. So don't measure cut twice. I think is the better phrase in that one Okay, I should I guess I shouldn't pause for questions. We'll have questions at the end. They're more formal than that I want to change gears a little bit. I want to give you an example of our lab and how it functions in This making for innovation sense. So enough of this. Let's talk about robots. This is Matthews robot We make lots and lots of robots. This is a collection of robots made by our students in our lab Each robot is named after the lead designer and you can see there's a few signatures cropped in and out of here So there should be a tombot soon. There's a there's a jack bot. There's a Tyler bot There's an Amy bot all kinds of different robots in there if they're the lead designer They get to name the robots after themselves if you look at the images on the top left There's an arm and then you start to see these crawlers develop when we started this doing this work 10 or 12 years ago My first thoughts were that we wanted to focus on imaging We want to be able to image better inside of surgery. This is really a limitation in laparoscopic surgery But it turns out we were kind of wrong about that Really what we want to do is manipulate tissue and image just imaging is not enough But we we put both of those that first robot went in an animal within two or three weeks We started testing that within two or three weeks of the first one This is a process of thinking through the problem now You could also say like Thomas Edison would is we know all the ways not to build robots Which is important, but we finally come to a place where we think we know how to build a robot What it should look like how it should be shaped so that can make a real impact This is my colleague on the left dr. Dimitri Linnikov and this is our cycle of little bets We test these robots frequently as frequently as we can We've probably done It's been a busy year. We've probably this is the 10th month. I bet we've done a dozen surgeries Between the different groups at the medical center. So we test very very quickly I even have a mask on there and this is the robot I brought this guy here too. It's a little model of our current device This is again the even you make robots. You got to show hardware. So this is the little robot that we have This is to scale. This is the right model So you want to straighten your robot out and you want to make a small incision in the belly button They inflate the patient to make some space in there Then you can insert this robot inside the body and it kind of unfolds as it goes in there There's a camera here that pops out Slaps down in there and then the camera can look around left and right up and down You can pan and tilt the camera and control the camera But once this robot's on the inside it's unconstra- it can reach anywhere in your abdomen and that's really an important feature So it's like we've shrunk the surgeon down. It's got two arms and a head just like I have two arms and a head Do we look alike? And the surgeon now is unconstrained by this It's as if they are inside the abdomen, which is where you want to be when you do surgery. So Let's uh, I think I have a movie here again robot people show movies. Oh, here we go one of the most important procedures that we're looking at is colon resection people get colon cancer your colon is a Tube that goes up across and down and out the bottom. I shouldn't talk about what it does or what goes through that too but People get colon cancer and you have to cut out a section of the tube and you have to reconnect it together Our robot is the only robot that can access the entire colon One incision in the belly button will allow you to reach other letters up there H through all the way to a You can rotate the robot and reach all these things. This is a really important issue So let's just show you some robots here. Then we got to get on to the maker space So here's the robot just mounted on the surgical table moving around There's the camera looking left and right and up and down you can see there's lighting and imaging there You guys already know how big it is. There's a cell phone for comparison. I Like to move quarters around quarters are fun and then the surgeon uses these hand controllers to control the device lots of Different features here I could point out, but you can see the hands of the robot have these little graspers so you can grab things Rotate around and take another grasp on things now this little game where you put these soft sleeves on and off pegs Is the standard way to train surgeons for this type of surgery? So we're just showing how our robot can behave like a Like a lap or normal laparoscopic surgeon, so Going back to colon cancer. There's 300,000 people per year in the US who have colon cancer about 250,000 of those folks get an eight or ten inch midline incision To get in there and fix their colon We think this robot will allow them to do it through a two inch incision in their belly button And if I would show you my six pack you would notice that you know You guys know what your belly button used to be it's the space between the cans, right? It's a natural path. You don't touch much muscle as you enter through the umbilicus your belly button and you can perform surgery that way So we want to take those people to get the open incision and allow them to have the little incision We think we'll shave about seven or eight days of hospital stay off of each of those people So as we tell our students and I remind them every day if you can save eight days of hospital stay for 200,000 people per year that puts you into the useful quadrant, and it's a good reason to get up in the morning So that's just a little example you can see how we thought through that problem. We didn't start out saying It's colon resection. We got to solve the problem of colon resection. We started out saying let's make a robot Let's try it out and let's learn from that in through that process and then we made another robot and another robot and now we've made over 40 robots and In the end we've come to a good place because we've taught ourselves what the real issues are. What are the right things to do? So we'll we can come back to any of this in the end But I want to speak a little bit about a project we have going on here. Actually that comes up in a little bit The culture for innovation. I have to get this little stab in at the university before I do that It's important if you're going to be an experimental entrepreneur if you're going to make for innovation if you're going to take little bets The bad news is the is you're going to have to do it. No one's going to give you permission to do this No one's gonna You're gonna have to force this to happen now The good news is of course it's possible you can learn how to be more innovative we can all move further down the innovation curve This is a graph I like to show off because if I if I Did accounting and email like I probably should I think I could have a 40-hour a week job doing those tasks I don't want to do a full-time job doing accounting and email and HR and those kinds of things I want to do engineering, so I try to carve out time for Creativity every week and I should mention we have administrators here You know you can you can think of crazy proposals. Let's have quiet time at the University of Nebraska on Wednesday afternoons from one to three No meetings. Nobody can send emails. This is time. You're supposed to be sitting around there being creative about your problem We're a research University. Let's do this. That's a proposal that will go nowhere But it's a good idea and it's something that I try to do my other proposal Next time I talk to the governor if I ever talk to the governor. I'll spring it up I would like to have no weddings on Husker football Saturdays. I'm sick of looking like this in the wedding Receptions no one will find a guy that thinks what marriage is more important than me, but can we schedule them at different times or something like that? Couldn't the state help us out with that I? Sat in my office one day starting at 10 a.m. You can see in the top right at 10 a.m. At 10.04 I started doing creative things at 10.04 the phone rang and then at 10 10 I Got an email that I looked at and then at 10 12. I was so distracted by the email I did something else so if you look at the differences in times I can sit in my office and the first First time for interruption was four minutes six minutes two minutes five minutes. I recorded this for about three hours I said I'm going to do this experiment for three hours and the meantime between interruptions I'm an engineer and make these graphs was less than four minutes You can't be creative that way You you need to force this to happen and so that's another little little Thing that I would encourage everyone to do is think about setting aside time For for thinking and for doing real problems. It's really really important and it doesn't happen naturally so With that let's talk more about the culture of innovation through something We're trying to accomplish here on Nebraska innovation campus, which is called Nebraska innovation studio I don't know if Leanna is here. Sure. She is my partner in crime Leanna. Oh, what is the? Director of Nebraska innovation studio It's a maker space and a maker space is designed It's a space designed to help with everything. I've said so far. So everything I've said so far is focused into This maker space. It's a space for creativity We all Are aware that there are gyms out there that you can join the rec center here on campus or a prairie life fitness or the YMCA where you pay a monthly fee To get access to stuff that you don't have at home You may not have an exercise cycle you may not have a gymnasium You don't have a swimming pool, but you want to do that stuff to become more fit So you pay a fee each month to join these places Because you want to become more fit the maker space is that for creativity You may not have a table saw or a 3d printer or a laser cutter or a CNC router Or any of this stuff at home, but you want to be more creative. So you can join a maker space and Have access to these things now when you do that important things happen Just like at the gym one of the important things that happen is you get to be next to other people who are also interested in making things You can start to join a culture of people who want to be creative I think that's really really important. You can take classes. You can learn how to use a laser cutter You can learn how to use a CNC router You can just simply become smarter in these skills that you want to develop and you know Just as examples this is stuff Leanne and I taught a class called making for innovation last semester and these are outcomes from this class we had One student who designed a new dress that had electronics embedded into it and she could push buttons and the dress would change shape We had a someone make a quadcopter we had a sculptor on the right The orange thing detects the moisture in your garden and it puts up the blue flag when you need to water again I think that's kind of a useful thing The bottom left one is a tough one. It's called pot bot which just terrified me But I was very relieved that the student made of this robotic device to stir his apparently his time is so important He can't stir his own spaghetti sauce and he made a machine to stir his spaghetti sauce So he could walk away from his spaghetti sauce that students now a PhD program at Yale by the way Not because of this These are things people want to have for themselves. These are things they're interested in making I don't think there's probably a product in this thing, but there's stuff that might bounce around the product realm None of this is probably super innovative. I don't think the pot bot is going to get a patent application, but They're all right there. They're all close. So eventually we're going to play a numbers game Again, it was mentioned earlier that we started a maker club here on campus which is now an apocryphal story, but Night one we said, let's have a meeting. I was pushing to build a makerspace on innovation campus I realized will anybody come if we build it will they come we need to show demand I felt strongly that there was demand out there and we just scheduled the meeting So we ordered pizza because pizza helps bring students. We ordered pizza for 50 and we had this meeting Which was 240 ish people showed up at the first meeting again now. They're over 700 members That was step one was creating a maker club the maker club has now done a lot of nice things a lot of outreach to To young kids and those sorts of things they made the ribbon-cutting machine for innovation campus But importantly this demand is still there for Nebraska innovation studio, which I all hope you were to or across the hallway here We have just over I think we just broke 200 People who want to join Nebraska innovation studio. We knew this would be a big demand We were afraid everybody would show up for day one and they all want to use the tables on the first day And we can't train them all so we are we have a sign-up list and we're now I think we've had about a hundred that we've asked to join and there's another hundred still on the waiting list So the demand is real and again, I think that's because One of the reasons is because we're in Nebraska a lot of people sort of I think look down there Knows is that maker spaces that we are a research institution and a maker space is a community college function if you want to go learn to weld or or that kind of stuff go to Southeast Community College or You know that this isn't really research I would disagree violently on that subject and I think there are real differences with maker spaces that make them incredibly important The first is that they're unstructured Everything we do over on campus main campus is structured You're told when to go to class you're told what to study you're told how good you are at it by getting these tests back This is completely unstructured. You only go there when you want to go there You only make what you want to make that's important again If you look at the research on innovation that is critically important You make things that you're passionate about and you will innovate around things that you're passionate about That's key now I put this picture in here because this is Matthew and Anna Putting together a Lego set and if you notice Anna has this instruction book This is something that frustrates me about Legos these days when I had Legos actually I had lock blocks with the cheap knockoffs The American made knockoffs. I think They were just a bunch of rectangles. That's all we had if you wanted to make something interesting You had to imagine it out of a bunch of rectangles Now you can get incredibly complicated kits Which are You know you get a death star and a X-wing fighter if I wanted to make an X-wing fighter I had to do a lot of imagining to make it into an X-wing fighter But now there's a 40-page manual telling you how to this is completely structured now They've taken the they put so much structure in Legos. I see why they are cool when you get an X-wing fighter, but We lose something fortunately at our house all them they all get mixed in the end so the instructions get lost and They all get mixed the second thing that's important about maker space is that you play there You're not working when you're there. It's play and Einstein said that play is the highest form of research. I really think that's true When it's unstructured and you're self-motivated and you're playing that's really important You're intrinsically motivated to be there This is again something that's repeated throughout the literature on innovation is that you need to be intrinsically motivated if you go to your team and you say I need a new design for this product and The best design will get $10,000 bonus. That's a poor way to motivate a design team Just like when you tell your kid. I don't care what you do You're playing the piano and you're doing until you're 17, right? You hope at some point that transfers over to a love of playing the piano It's a fine line. We all have to walk same with mathematics and whatever else you're trying to teach your children But eventually I just read a statistic or my wife just told me a statistic that something like 70% of adults Want to play the piano and and but 70% of them once took piano lessons and gave it up at some time There's huge interesting numbers around that. So guess what kids you're stuck So intrinsic motivation is key. The other thing to recognize is that intelligence is diverse This is something that engineers are guilty of Me I'm very guilty of the only thing that makes you smart is your score in on your ACT your math math Your math score on ACT if you have a high math ACT score, you're smart If you do not have a high math ACT score, you are not smart. That's a little bit of an exaggeration But intelligence is truly diverse again. Henry Ford could not have scored more than five or six points on an ACT exam He was not smart. He could barely read if you'd ask him to read something. He would make up an excuse that he left his glasses at home You know, he I gotta leave I gotta go to the restroom something like that He was embarrassed by the fact that he was not an educated person, but he was a mechanical genius and you can be a dancing genius or a Making genius and not do well on your ACT math score Okay, given all that the maker space we are creating is not a tide a cheer a gain or a fab It's a maker space unlike any other. It's going to be a world-class space That has features designed To make it more innovative There are lots of maker spaces. You'll see in the world. There's a couple in Omaha. There's all kinds of different forms Some schools will create a maker space by having an engineering lab They'll rename it a maker space, but only engineers can go there We're not a maker space like that. There are special attributes to what we're trying to accomplish We call it actually Nebraska Innovation Studio with the I word in the middle Because that's really what we're trying to focus on This is the image that always comes to mind when I think of this Of course, this is Van Gogh's crazy painting. He was in a saying asylum when he painted this But we all love it, right? If you want to have an innovative space again based on the literature of innovation first of all You need a diversity and a special kind of diversity not some sort of politically correct version of diversity But you need a diversity of ideas and a diversity of perspectives and a diversity of goals That's the first step then you need a density of ideas So you need to get these ideas together in the same physical place This is the theory about why we have cities Guns, germs and steel talks about why civilization formed and why cities are getting bigger It's because you need this density is very important and that's a tough one for Nebraska. So the first is density Diversity and density are the first two now if you look at campus across here Honestly, there is a diversity of ideas on campus and there is a density of ideas on campus What is it 10 blocks by 10 blocks? It's pretty dense compared to the state of Nebraska It's pretty dense diverse population But one of the problems is I don't think we mix enough you need a mixing of these diverse dense ideas And that's where the painting helps me to remember all this I can go a long time without Speaking to anyone in art history or anyone in in the English department We need to have that more mixing occurs and I think that's where the university model that was created in Oxford in 16 whatever 100 of departments of The structure is being challenged by interdisciplinary spaces like our nanoscience facility or the makers or the brass innovation studio which are Our Different models of diverse dense mixing now The next thing you need is mechanisms for ideas to grow and Mechanisms for ideas excuse me mechanisms for ideas to come together and mechanisms for ideas to grow We're going to try to create that in Nebraska innovation studio This is an example I give because we own a bison basketball hoop in our driveway as you see there bison is a brand named That's built here in town by a wonderful company They make lots of different products, but one of the things they make is basketball hoops for driveways I've asked them let's sponsor design competitions at the makers at the brass innovation studio Based around basketball hoops for driveways. What how can we improve this product? How can we help them sell more of this product? First thing I think of is you should have scored a scoreboard, right? You should have a shot clock right now modern basketball hoops have the you can have the view from how about a camera that Looks down so that when I do that reverse dunk you get a great sports illustrated type view of me As I'm doing these things. I think these things help sell basketball hoops But I think there's more to it than that if you're not playing basketball these things aren't very pretty right Can we approve the aesthetic or the function around how they look when they're not being used? It's always there when you wash your car can your basketball hoop help you wash your car Can your Can it support other sports if you put a net on there Can you throw a baseball back and forth and have it bounce back at you can you sell an accessory that will help you play Pitch baseball on your basketball hoop. I think these are great questions And this is just a few off the top of your head kind of things But the the idea to get mechanisms to get diverse ideas to combine and grow is to say let's have a design competition Let's get 20 design teams together and let's you know Give them each 500 bucks and have them build something have them think through the process by making to create a new Product that will improve driveway basketball hoops, and I'd like to see this across lots and lots of industries I hope that nabaskin innovation studio creates new product lines for all kinds of Local industry Now That's how we're different. We're in an innovation studio. We're not just a makerspace We're an innovation studio because we have density. We have diversity. We have mixing We have mechanisms for ideas to combine and mechanisms for ideas to grow those are our points And we have a lot of different ways that we're going to implement that Now the other thing that I think is special is again as Chancellor Perlman alluded to is that the state of Nebraska is full of makers All professional hockey players come from Canada. It's almost true None of them come from Lincoln and that's because in Canada. It's not because we're genetically different than Canadians It's because there's an infrastructure in Canada to create professional hockey players when you're four years old Here's a hockey stick when you're five years old you get pushed out on the ice when you're six years old You're on a traveling team We don't do that. So we don't produce hockey players here. What we do here, which I think is special is We create makers when you're four years old you're handed vice grips When you're five years old, you're asked to climb down into the bend to release the auger There's a long list of things that you do. I also think that we're probably the world's best per capita at backing up Two-axis trailers I'm not sure how to capitalize on that one, but I think we can capitalize on the making portion Especially when you're 14 the 14 year olds they can back up two-axis trailers. It's pretty special This is something that we need to add to the we have the bottom structure in place We need to add this we need to help people we could lead the world in hardware-based products Silicon Valley can do mobile app stuff. Silicon Valley can do online banking Let them make Instagram and those sorts of things Let's make physical products because that's what we're good at and let's become world leaders in Entrepreneurship around hardware-based companies hardware-based companies are harder than mobile app companies That's why there's so many mobile app companies because you lock three programmers in a basement and just slide beer under the door every And what a Mentos and Mountain Dew and they keep programming Hardware is tough. You need a makerspace. You need something to make hardware You need to know how to use a table saw you need to know how to use a milling machine We're good at that stuff. Let's let's roll with it the makerspace will connect people will build on this Nebraska culture by connecting people I have a few examples of this the class already did that I showed you the dress that changed shape because there were electronics in the dress the The textiles student couldn't have done that on her own She got help from electrical engineering students who have also happened to be in the class We need to make more and more of these connections I can't do surgery, but my partner can and he can't make robots despite what he might tell you It's a different form of learning Stuff that you won't get in the classroom because again, it's unstructured and I think it can be a source for entrepreneurship I think everyone who drills a hole in the Nebraska innovation studio. I'm making the pot bot for myself Is there a product here? Will people buy a stirring robot Maybe it doesn't look like the one that Walter made but maybe it's like that and we plan to have a Strong link to a hardware-based business accelerator as part of that I think you bring all this together and Nebraska innovation studio will be a magic place And I know that's a supernatural word, but I think it will be a vortex of innovation. I Can't wait until these these are all the milestones people ask you about the milestones in here My favorite one is that is it on here? Yeah, the first student wedding I think people will think this is so cool that they will choose to have their wedding in the maker space Not not on a foot football Saturday. I hope We won't allow that that we can we can control that one really If you see the student said hey, I made this this is my product This is my pot bot my dress that I made It's really a different type of rewarding than hey look I got an A on my test That's gonna help me get my degree and I'm gonna get out of here. It's a different a different Result from different motivation Okay Again, I hope everyone will go across the street and tour, but this is Even in the architecture. This is a planned view of what we're building But first of all you can see the kinds of things that we have here. There's an electronics Where should we start top left woodworking and then metalworking and then on the bottom is a digital fabrication area with all these new Technologies like 3d printing and laser cutters then we'll have an art studio next to an electronic studio That's a diverse group of people in there if you have all those people now in the architecture We'll see a huge collaboration space that runs from the top to the bottom With open bench space. I want those people to talk to each other We have a density of diverse ideas. We're gonna make them mix by the way we lay out our benches and the like There's a multi-use lab and again a business accelerator in the end. So we're trying to make it an innovation studio from the Well from the bottom from the very beginning Now the University and Chancellor Perlman have been incredibly supportive actually chance or vice-chancellor Paul and Several other vice-chancellors. I'm looking around here have been incredibly supportive of this We've actually completed a portion of the maker space and it's open for business I mentioned that there are 200 people who wanted to join we have allowed about a hundred to join so far It's up and running but only a portion We had some funds to build out about a third of the space that's built in blue there We're raising money to build out face to which we hope will open a year ish or something like that so that we can be up to full Capacity, but we're doing things. We're learning by doing right now So very excited about this and I'll just end with a couple of projects This was again from our making for innovation class. This is an architecture student a non-traditional architecture student named Alex who made furniture he was There are a couple machines over there That are like crack cocaine I keep comparing them to that you once you start using them You start saying more more more and you make more more more He was like that with our CNC router and he made chair after chair after chair This was his process of thinking through how he wanted to make his chair design Was by making more and more and sitting in them having a beer in one and sitting there some more I didn't show the pictures of him in this backyard sitting in these chairs Also, what he found out was that he liked the sheet of plywood that he would cut these out of He would paint the back red and other piece of plywood and put them together and then he'd display those That's a small win that no one expected But now we use these as our backdrop when we talk about innovation studio And I hope to have one hanging in the hallways around here at some point They're artistic in their own right these these leftover remnants from his process of making I think I have one here So I think the makerspace is going to be the coolest spot for you know I keep saying 500 miles and maybe there's something cooler in Chicago. I guess but Forget the bars downtown. This is the gonna be the cool place to be This is Alex sitting at the table that he made on two of the chairs that he made as he thought through his chair designs Now this one This is from an artist friend in town. Charlie is here actually I Like this example because this happened prior to the makerspace, but this is exactly what we want to happen This was hard to get done. Charlie came to me and said hey, I'm an artist in town. I want to make this and My first thought was I can't help you this I Don't do art stuff. I make robots and those kinds of things but Charlie connected with Tom here who was a PhD student and They decided to build this new interesting piece of art now. You'll see the actual thing is not quite Exactly like Charlie's early design But it makes me smile when I look at it. I don't know if that was his goal, and I'm sure he has some deep artistic Thought or expression here, but to me it's just a bunch of spinning Beach balls that make me smile. This is a collaboration between engineering and art that makes better art and I Don't know it's great example of that connecting of diverse ideas Neither one could have done this on their own or wanted to do this on their own But it's again the result is it makes me smile so With that I'll conclude I guess I should as I come here. I realize I didn't talk about the violin This is another thing that we made in the makerspace. This is a 3d printed violin electric violin So my daughter keeps telling me I need Ross and to play it and I don't know how to play the violin But it's a fully functioning full-size violin. There's been printed in 3d. You can come check this out. It's electric It's got a PZ electric pickup here, and there's an amplifier on the back So you can plug it into an amplifier and then play the violin But why are violins so expensive? Can't we make violins easier now that we have this 3d printed We can injection mold these and just bang them out I'd like to make three or four hundred of these and give them away. There are five parts They're assembled. There's a steel rod that runs through this. So it's kind of an interesting design That's a collaboration between art and engineering that I want to have this music plus 3d printing That's not a common thing that you see. We're creating an innovation studio that I hope all of you will first of all come across the hallway and tour Check it out, but investigate and increase Your innovation through making so thank you very much So the talk is now open for questions. I think there are two microphones wandering around And I can start off for the question Shane So you gave it very nice discussion in terms of the process in terms of innovation One of the things that I find is probably the biggest challenge innovation is when you're working against entrenched dogma. So how do you How do you fight that obstacle? That's a good first of all, he's covering for you guys. You guys got to ask questions entrenched dogma is a Staple of the university, right the university system Well, you know, I think one of our biggest challenges has been this this concept that this is about You know tech stuff that should be should not be taught at the University of Nebraska I think we'll win that through our first company that we start at the maker space and our first patent application that a student applies For out of the maker space that will go away through the process of doing just like I suggested here There's all kinds of other sort of entrenched dogma like I said, I could have a full-time job doing email only and Accounting if I can if I did those things well, I could make that into a full-time job I think if you want to be innovative you have to Force that to happen you have to take the time you have to realize I'm gonna stop doing email here for an hour and I'm gonna let it slide and now I'm gonna spend an hour doing design work So I think you have to force that and I I don't blame institutions I think it's up to the individual to kind of observe What's happening and then you have a choice to make so I don't think it can be used as an excuse Just random thoughts that almost answer the question now. He gave you time So As you know, I'm a PhD student Dr. Ferreter and I've worked with you a lot on your kind of the research side And I've also had a chance to work with you on the making for innovation innovation studio. I'm curious How can we build better connections between the research community at the university because I I feel like there's so many Professors who you know, they're they're brilliant in their research field. They they come up with these great ideas How can making for innovation help them get to where they want to be faster? You know, they rely so much on kind of fundamental analysis So we need to build up a model and we need to think for a long time Well, good question J is the president of the maker club So he's been incredibly supportive through all this. He's one of those minions in the pyramid that I step on every day Well, I think it's a challenge for the university. I think the university has been been pushing this for a long long time but I Serve on a faculty committee talking about how faculty will interact with innovation campus and one of the challenges Chancellor Proman always puts to us is how will innovation campus transform? City campus, how will it challenge the way we do traditional things? I think innovation campus is a great model for this first of all You know department lines mean much much less out here. There's chances to get common lab space. I think there's a potential for Innovation campus to be a big part of this chain agent That's one of the reasons that innovation studio is here is because we want to interact with diverse Faculty members the company members who are here on innovation campus One of the things that committee is pursuing is an innovation curriculum to be taught on innovation campus I look at this and I ask myself. Where is innovation taught? Where is the process of innovation taught in undergraduate curriculum at the University of Nebraska? And people will pop up a hand here or hand there and say I have a class over here that talks about design Thinking or I have a class over here that talks about leadership or multi-disciplinary teams But I think we are now Hopefully making a formal decision to teach the process of innovation On innovation campus, I think that's I think the maker space innovation studio is one way We're going to transform city campus. I think we can create an innovation curriculum that will transform how we function here That's kind of the top down answer. The bottom up answer is Students who are doing research in labs are going to come over here because they need a drill press We have a drill press you can join in use your press That's the bottom up answer one of the things I love about the maker space is it's 100% bottom up It has nothing to do with Chancellors or vice-chancellors or vice vice-chancellors assistants device vice-chancellors. It's all about students coming over and making things So you should look and see how mad they are Shane hi, how can we get you talked about creativity? Getting innovation happening in in the students here, but you also talked about how Creativity is is innately there in your own children. So how do we get the maker space model the innovation model? Creativity model in kids who are fighters old kids who are at LPS right now Who I think get this stuff kind of you know shocked out of them at a very early stage But I think if if we can get creativity if that kind of invigoration in young kids Once they get to UNL they will be super ready for for this place That's a great question another loaded question. There's a there's a book I love called orbiting the giant hairball, which is a wonderful book At least you should look at some Ted talks that the IDO guys Tom Kelly talks about orbiting the giant hairball But a story that that guy tells he was at Hallmark He was an executive Hallmark who wrote that book and he started the black humor Division of Hallmark, so you know Hallmark is about to my lovely daughter. I love you so much I will always love you right and that's Hallmark cards is what we think of this guy said a happy birthday You're closer being dead, you know those kind of cards that he started so you can imagine the entrenched Dogma that he fought against there one of the stories He tells us he goes to kindergarten's and he says who's an artist and he talks about art And they all stick through every one of them sticks their heads up And it's just this exponential decay as you go up to first grade second grade third grade fourth grade and by the time You're in 10th grade no one sticks their hand up and says hey, I'm an artist, right? So there's something that is squeezed out of people over time I Think that's changing. I think the career Academy here in town is a great way to do it Sabrina here helps teach a first robotics class inside Nebraska innovation studio. Leanna has probably done 15 different functions with Different young groups. We want to have family memberships to innovation studio I don't have a global answer for you, but I think I Recognize the problem and we're taking some steps to sort of break that down a little bit again When you're handed vice-crips at four years old, we want you to keep using vice-crips Good Nebraska innovation Okay. Hello. I'm one child from department of physics, you know, so I'm a postdoc here Now working on the tip of the bottle particle accelerators. So basically also innovation So hopefully we can turn in the big conventional accelerator to a kind of museum. So that's our goal And well, my question is actually what is a the goal for the innovation studio? You know, I was really impressed by the impressed by the better talk by a lecture and I saw a lot of kids Working on some different innovations and some art and in science working together So it's kind of confused to me. So what is a the goal here for the innovation center and Another question is like the researchers like me How can we participate here in the innovation center? So I'm very interesting, you know, you know innovations like it's another Challenging question. What's the goal? So what's the goal for the Raskin innovation studio? So I start out by saying We're gonna have a facility where anybody in the community, you know students community members Old and young families they just go there and make stuff. They just make whatever they want and they want a Saustering robot or they want a new coffee table or whatever they want to make they go there and make and I could say done That's enough. Just people making stuff that they want is a nice extension outreach from University of Nebraska So I could in there that's that's one spot You could just simply stop and say mission accomplished goal accomplished We just have 200 people coming in and out every day and they're making stuff that they care about done That's not where we're going. So we have sinister behind-the-scenes undercurrents It becomes a numbers game We've created the maker space in such a way that the literature and innovation says it will produce inventions so We have diversity density mixing combining all that stuff that we're just gonna go on there So it's a numbers game if you make 500 projects in there most of them are picture frames and Quilt Those kind of projects that are just literally just making But it's a numbers game out of the first 500. There will be one product. I see it I join maker space when I was in graduate school and I can name off the companies that started there one guy made the speaker system that you go to the museum and you Push the button and you can hear about this exhibit and only you hear it because he went to this class with Ambrose Bose the Bose guy Was a faculty member there and taught a class in acoustics and only you heard it and he sells those and I went to we went to Meteor crater I should put that picture in here and they had one there And there's a museum in Okuboji that we went to an art gallery that had one there And I see these this guy made products there I know I could go on and on I guess the other end of the spectrum is this square thing that you put on your Cell phone and you swipe your credit card through there. That was first built in a maker space so People make stuff. That's one goal. That's done gold. That's enough On top of that we've made this in a very special way so that we get products out of here And we serve the state of Nebraska. We educate our students better. We do economic development There's a there's a long list of secondary goals that will come out of the maker space. Does that make sense? Are there any other questions? Come on How's it funded Yeah, so we've looked at a lot of business models for maker spaces and One of the drivers for our in for innovation studio here is to keep costs low low barrier of entry We want our students to have access to this We don't want to charge $150 a month. There are business models where you can create a maker space and you can make money But you have to charge $150 a month. You have to charge for every class. It gets burdensome for students So the university has generously provided the space and some people you take those two things off the table and then you fund it with memberships Basically, that's that's the rough business model. Have I mentioned we're looking for private donations to So please join me again in thanking our speaker Shane, thank you very much for inspiring presentation and More importantly for your leadership in creating a culture of innovation I think that that will have long-term benefit For the community and for the state because I think the most important thing is that we need to to think about and create the pipeline Provide the experience the talent base and with that along with the innovation campus and other Wonderful things are happening in the state. I think that as a state we will gain from it and and we will be able to You know people will not only talk about Silicon Valley and Boston, but they will first talk about Nebraska. So with that Shane There's a tradition that the poster that had been prepared for your Nebraska lecture now as you get to look at it every day So we a we have a frame copy. Oh for you and one of the copies will be Proudly displayed in the research office and video centers So when every time you go you got to make sure you salute that so thank you very very much Our thanks to each of you for taking time and participating in this wonderful lecture We take great pride in our you know the Fantastic faculty as a an example that you heard from Shane There is a refreshment and a tour of innovation studio downstairs It can go back and down and over here. So look forward to seeing you there again. Thank you very much. Have a good good evening