Innovation Matters: Insights from Dr. Dedric Carter

Launch of the listening tour

As the Vice Chancellor for Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development, and Chief Innovation Officer, I am charged with bringing coherence to the many innovation streams in the UNC-Chapel Hill community and launching new ones. Beginning Dec. 1, one of my first major tasks is to conduct a 60-day listening tour to learn, ask questions, hear concerns, identify potential barriers, test some emergent point solutions and build connections.

During the listening tour, I will try to share some initial insights gained along the way. You’ll find those here.

#innovationmatters

‘Fast Car:’ Catalyzing spontaneous collisions: the passive convening power of anchor institution motivated innovation and creativity

December 1, 2023

Today marks one month since I joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Vice Chancellor & Chief Innovation Officer. I’m thrilled to announce that I’m kicking off a 60-day listening tour to learn, ask questions, hear concerns, identify potential barriers, test some emergent point solutions and build connections. My first stop was a conversation with the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, where I spoke about the University’s role in convening spaces for creativity and innovation. As the nation’s number one public health institution, this was a fitting place to begin a new journey into innovation.

Talent discovery
Close your eyes and imagine yourself sinking back in time. The year is 1986, and the location is Medford, MA in the area around a coffee café close to Tufts University. Are you there with me? I want to take you on a journey through time, creativity and innovation. The story begins with a song – Tracy Chapman’s iconic “Fast Car.”

In the late 1980s, a young, talented Tracy Chapman, then a student at Tufts University, was discovered by another student, Brian Koppel. Koppel, recognizing Chapman’s extraordinary talent, played a pivotal role in introducing her to the world. Brian’s father was an important figure in the music industry. Brian knew that if he could engage with his father and this wonderful talent that he had witnessed, it would be the first likely step in his father realizing Tracy’s wonderful ability and connecting her with the world.

“Fast Car” emerged not just as a song, but as a narrative that resonated with millions. Its honest, poignant lyrics and haunting melody captured the struggles and hopes of an entire generation. It wasn’t just a musical success; it was a cultural phenomenon. This story underscores the role of universities like ours in convening spaces for creativity and innovation. We are more than institutions of learning; we are incubators of potential, where ideas are nurtured and destinies are shaped. Chapman’s journey from a university student to a global sensation underlines this role. Decades later, “Fast Car” continues to inspire. Recently, the song has seen a resurgence, covered by contemporary artists (such as Luke Combs) and has won awards, proving that true creativity is timeless. This endurance speaks volumes about the lasting impact that university-driven creativity and innovation can have.

Impact of university-driven creativity and innovation
Now, why is this important for the Gillings School of Public Health? The song “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman is often interpreted as a narrative about hope, escape from difficult circumstances, and the desire for a better life. Key themes in the song include the struggle for a better life, the challenges of poverty and the pursuit of dreams in the face of adversity. Decades later, “Fast Car” continues to inspire. Recently, the song has seen a resurgence, covered by contemporary artists (such as Luke Combs), and has won awards, proving that true creativity is timeless. This endurance speaks volumes about the lasting impact that university-driven creativity and innovation can have.

Key themes in Chapman’s song include the struggle for a better life, the challenges of poverty and the pursuit of dreams in the face of adversity. Comparing this to the mission of the Gillings School of Public Health:

1. 1. Improvement of Public Health and Individual Well-being: The song reflects the struggles faced by individuals in challenging socioeconomic conditions. This aligns with the school’s aim to improve public health and individual well-being, as addressing the root causes of health disparities often involves tackling broader societal issues, such as poverty and inequality, which are central themes in the song.

1. 1. Elimination of Health Inequities: The narrative of “Fast Car” touches on issues of social and economic inequity. This resonates with Gilling’s goal to eliminate health inequities, acknowledging that health is deeply intertwined with social and economic factors.

1. 1. Work Across Various Settings and Communities: The song’s portrayal of everyday life and challenges mirrors the school’s focus on working in diverse settings and communities. It emphasizes the need for practical, on-the-ground understanding of people’s lives, like the school’s emphasis on community-based work and understanding local contexts.

1. 1. Bridging Academic Research and Practical Public Health: The song, while not academic in nature, brings to light real-world issues that are often the subject of public health research and intervention. This echoes Gilling’s focus on bridging the gap between research and practical applications in public health.

1. 1. Making a World of Difference: The song’s message of change and aspiration for a better life aligns with the school’s vision of making a significant, positive impact on health globally, which involves understanding and addressing complex, real-world challenges.

Nurturing creativity to educate and inspire
Overall, the central themes of “Fast Car” – hope, struggle and the desire for a better life in the face of adversity – align well with the mission of the Gillings School of Public Health, which focuses on improving health, reducing inequities and applying research to real-world public health challenges with a dispassionate impatience for moving tomorrow’s solutions forward to today. Both the song and the mission highlight the importance of understanding and addressing the broader social and economic determinants of health.

At the opening of the Innovate Carolina Junction, I offered remarks harkening to the show “Schoolhouse Rock” that helped to educate a nation on our beautiful and complex language. One of the ditties was – conjunction junction what’s your function. A junction is a joining place, a place of bringing together and convening. The Innovate Carolina Junction is positioned as a center for innovation – one in which we hope you will live in, spend time in or link to early and often. In so doing, you will add to the energy, the ethos and the entrepreneurial ecosystem that is present and growing in and around campus.

As the Vice Chancellor for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development & Chief Innovation Officer at UNC-Chapel Hill, I see our mission as fourfold: to educate and to inspire – and to innovate and translate those outcomes into impact on the human condition. Like Chapman’s “Fast Car,” let us drive forward with the knowledge that what we create and nurture within our university can resonate for decades to come. Let us be the launching pad for the next generation of innovators and creators, who, in their journey, may redefine the world as we know it.

I welcome you to join us on the journey on which we in the UNC innovation community are embarking. I look forward to being collaborators in education, inspiration, innovation, translation and impact both now and in the years to come. I learned years ago that poetry is a language that says more and says it more effectively. Both I and my team are ready to do more and do it more effectively. That is my definition of innovation poetry and the potential for impact that lies ahead.

This Fast Car is just getting started. #innovationmatters

Willing to enter the arena

December 3, 2023

Last spring, as my wife Dr. Ebony Carter and I contemplated leaving a wonderful life that we’d built up over the last decade in St. Louis to move to Chapel Hill, we pondered many things. We asked ourselves if we had been released from our assignments to do the challenge of something new. In short, are we completing a great work and moving to the next? More importantly, we looked to our daughters to gather their insights on our move considerations. They had one request (apart from assurances that all would ultimately be well). As gymnasts, they wanted to go to the first gymnastics meet of the UNC Women’s Gymnastics team. Our reactions – DONE! I didn’t know completely how, I just knew that they dreamed big, and they wanted to see examples of others with big dreams operating at a high a level of excellence and determination.

So on the first December Sunday, my family and I walked up to Carmichael Arena for the first meet and greet with the team. This event was the brainchild of dynamic coach Danna Durante who shared her big dreams for the UNC program with us and the other season ticket holders. In doing so, she shone a light on the phenomenal young women that form the women’s gymnastics family. As I walked to the event, I stopped in the parking lot and looked over at this image: the Carmichael Arena.

For me, it was the sunset on the arena, holding significant potential, and the partial realization of a promise that I had made to our family’s future – my little girls. You see, Carmichael in the sunset reminded me that sometimes you must dream big, you have to put yourself in the arena – realizing that twists and turns will occur (that’s what makes life interesting sometimes) but the action and the opportunity is in the arena. The tumbles and passes can be swift and fleeting, but the execution – well practiced and well-constructed will plant seeds for further “do’ers” who (1) dream big, (2) dare to enter the arena and (3) strive to stretch and grow into more perfect forms of themselves.

Whether our daughters practice gymnastics for another day or decade, the moment in Carmichael will have become a memory that is lasting and motivational for those who are passionate, possess a will to stretch and grow, and a desire and sensibility to be excellent.

That’s what an innovative mindset requires. Go Heels! #innovationmatters #uncgymnastics

New Year, New Possibilities

January 4, 2024

A new year brings with it fresh opportunities and unanticipated possibilities. As we step into 2024, I am excited to continue my listening tour and have conversations that will help me continue to build a strong innovation community here at UNC-Chapel Hill, Innovate Carolina and beyond.

Recently, I had the honor of presenting a session at Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) on building and growing an innovation program, along with my esteemed colleague Anne Maglia, Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at UMass Lowell – an organization that hits well above its weight class in industry partnerships tailored to their strengths.

I shared key strategies for developing successful innovation programs including the “Set, Tailor, Measure and Adapt” framework. This tactic emphasizes the importance of creating an intentional environment, tailoring programs to institutional strengths, measuring progress and adapting based on feedback.

To create and nurture an innovation program, you begin with this three-pronged strategic approach for successful program development:

• • Set: Establish a conducive environment. This is critical and involves creating a culture that encourages innovative thinking and providing the necessary resources and support.

• • Tailor: Customize the program to leverage unique strengths and capabilities of the organization. This step ensures the innovation strategy aligns with overall institutional goals and objectives.

• • Measure and Adapt: Incorporate continual assessment of the innovation program’s progress. This is essential and involves setting clear metrics to evaluate success and using these insights to adapt and refine the strategy. This iterative process will help maintain the program’s relevance and effectiveness in fostering innovation.

The “Set, Tailor, Measure and Adapt” framework will guide you in developing robust innovation ecosystems, ensuring they remain agile and responsive to changing needs and opportunities.

I look forward to incorporating this approach for UNC-Chapel Hill and our innovation ecosystem, and hope you find value in this approach as well. As we embrace the possibilities this year and beyond, I thank you for joining us on this journey. #innovationmatters

Unexpected insight

January 29, 2024

Earlier this month, I received a magazine at my house that was intended for a prior resident but ended up in my hands at a time when I was curious to dig deeper into our new hometown, Chapel Hill. The focus of the magazine was influencers and included a list of names, but one stood out to me in particular. It was a member of my Innovate Carolina leadership team, Sheryl Waddell. The magazine highlights the new Junction space we’ve opened as well as our mission to emphasize with great fervor the economic vitality of the Town of Chapel Hill, the region and the state through technology-based economic development and new venture creation. I celebrate Sheryl and share the sentiment of Chapel Hill Magazine. You see, I think that my team and the larger innovation community at UNC Chapel-Hill has a wonderful collection of influencers. I look forward to working with, supporting and engaging many of them in the next era of innovation at Carolina.

As I turned a few pages in the magazine, I found additional unexpected insights. This issue included an interview with Mary Pope Osbourne, a UNC alumna and storied author of the Magic Tree House series, among other wonderful literary works. The interview was titled “Always a Tar Heel,” and resonated with me by reminding me that in my quest to better understand innovation at UNC-Chapel Hill through the lens of my deep roots in the Carolinas, there was much about UNC that I already understood from decades of proximity and linkages to this space in the “southern part of heaven,” as a good friend and colleague put to Ebony and me on our decision to come to Carolina.

The Mary Pope Osbourne magazine interview asked her about her favorite space on campus. She responded with “the stone fence on Franklin Street” because “you never know who you are going to meet there.” I knew that location immediately. It’s a stone’s throw from my office, and I walk it regularly and love it because it embodies what I often hear around Carolina. I began focusing on the wonders of unexpected engagements, spontaneous collisions and innovative interactions that spring forth spontaneously and ephemerally, like muses leaving seeds of creativity, curiosity, connections, inspirations, ideas and new insights. Though the time of the collision may be brief and fleeting, the impact may be impossible to understand in the moment.

I celebrate that unexpected insight that Mary provided; the wonder that happens when you sit on the literal stone walls of UNC while imagining the figuratively low stone walls and being open to what life gives you. Sometimes that requires pushing back on those ideas or sentiments that could become barriers, working to ensure that the varied obstacles provide opportunity for innovation. Those places where we find unexpected insights are often dense enough that spontaneous collisions occur, and hopefully we have enough time to appreciate, welcome and act on them.

In a recent stop during my listening tour, I again heard the analogy of low stone walls from a long-time community member and leader at the University. I responded with a simple question: “I have heard the storied, low stone walls from those who have been here for years. I have also heard what I would characterize as high electric fences from some recent community members. How do we reconcile the two?” My question was met with a smile and the sentiment that they are both likely true.

There is a history of low stone walls and collaboration, but organizationally there may be elements of high electric fences due to the diverse and decentralized nature of the University. I am keeping that explanation in mind as I move forward in my listening tour: being open to modifications but confident that the more spontaneous collisions that occur, the more prominent the low stone wall collaboration and resulting innovations will continue to be at UNC-Chapel Hill.

It is my hope and belief that the Innovate Carolina Junction will be the central, spiritual convening space of sorts for innovation at UNC and beyond, whether you decide to live there (take up tenancy as part of the community), loiter there (find reason and motivation to be regularly in the midst), or link there (connect with others in meaningful ways).

My thoughts today are in celebration of spaces and places where spontaneous collisions and unintended insights abound. #innovationmatters

Unlocking Carolina’s innovative potential

March 14, 2024

The first phase of my listening tour has come to a reflection point, and I am excited about some topics that have become salient to me. I had the opportunity to share some of these with a great group of research deans, and institute and center leaders earlier this week. I’m excited to work together as we build upon existing efforts to catalyze innovation here at Carolina through research translation, commercialization and tech-based economic development. I wanted to highlight a few key takeaways from our time together.

Starting with my definition of innovation – when one finds economic, strategic or societal value in fundamental knowledge. Knowledge is free or subsidized through the funding of our research enterprise. Value creation is not. That value creation and impact is true and measurable innovation. We have a shared opportunity to create an intentional culture, community, competencies, connections and advisory support. We will grow our “shots on goal” for candidate technologies and research assets maturing into new ventures and products that can impact our world in many ways with technology-based economic development.

After spending time over the past several months visiting and listening to people across campus share their perspectives and experiences with innovation at Carolina, five observations have become most apparent to me. These observations have become heuristics that help me to resolve 230 years of history and move nimbly at the pace of innovation. George Box helped us realize that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. The five points of this model are my start:

• • Love and mission – People have a deep love for Carolina and its mission, which is one of our superpowers. It can also be a crutch if we allow our devotion to the University to cause us to fall into the rut of doing things the way they’ve always been done. We might miss the chance for a global optimum over a local one. Happiness comes from each but perhaps impact is greater in one.

• • Differential asset value – Sometimes the way we value assets internally at the University diverges from how the external world values them. As we examine the valuation of UNC’s innovation assets, we should account for, be aware of and limit the potential for “strong personalities” to influence how assets are approached and valued to ensure that we don’t lose strong advantages.

• • Emerging process capability maturity – Maturing our processes can mitigate the influence of individual preferences and personalities and allow us to move forward in a more intentional and planned manner that will maximize our impact on the public good. Setting an intentional culture in innovation is key to growing and catalyzing innovation.

• • Divergent walls and fences – Carolina has a history of low stone walls and collaboration, but organizationally there may be elements of high electric fences due to the diverse and decentralized nature of the University. By encouraging more spontaneous collisions, we can make low stone wall collaboration and resulting innovations more prominent than ever.

• • Significant latent potential – The research and scientific discovery at Carolina are amazing. We have outstanding latent potential that remains untapped, and by focusing on specific areas we can increase our impact and growth. The opportunity is significant for to catalyze innovation.

As we assess the growth and trends related to Carolina’s commercialization activity both internally and relative to peer institutions, we must address gaps in inventorship and commercialization. By doing so, we can capture new inventions and translational research to grow our innovation capacity and position the University for future success and impact. As our team works to map the innovation ecosystem and the research-to-commercialization asset pipeline here at Carolina, we’ll continue to ask for your insight, partnership and support.

I invite you to consult #innovationmatters for more information about UNC innovation now and for what’s to come. The outlook for innovation at Carolina is promising, and our team appreciates the opportunity to collaborate and help the University move further and faster toward achieving its great innovative potential. #innovationmatters

Celebrating six months of innovation and growth

March 27, 2024

It’s remarkable to think that just six months ago, we gathered for the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the Innovate Carolina Junction. Since opening our doors to UNC innovators, citizen entrepreneurs, startups, industry partners, alumni and the wider community, we’ve embarked on a journey of profound learning and growth, bolstered by the unwavering support we’ve received.

In my initial address as “designated/ but not yet arrived” Vice Chancellor for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development & Chief Innovation Officer, I shared how as a child the Schoolhouse Rock program helped me stay in good favor with my mother, an English teacher turned professor. The song’s playful lyrics resonate with the essence of the Innovate Carolina Junction: “Conjunction Junction, what’s your function? Hooking up two boxcars and making ’em run right. Hooking up words and phrases and clauses…”

You see, the Junction is a place of connection, a catalyst to partnering with the university, a place of coming together and learning and growing – of ideation and creation, of visionary applied entrepreneurship education and of new venture creation.

In these short six months, we’ve worked to nurture and support the robust innovation ecosystem here at UNC-Chapel Hill and in our community, including:

• • Establishing a thriving co-working community of more than 180 members who receive free innovation programming and support. Our diverse group of members include solo workers, Hutch Law, startup organizations like Eats2Seats, Takeout Central and Level the Playing Field, and community support initiatives such as Durham Tech, the Small Business and Technology Development Center, the UNC Law Clinic and Launch Chapel Hill.

• • Offering and hosting 45+ unique Innovate Carolina events and programming to the community including panel discussions, fireside chats, design thinking workshops and networking sessions.

• • Engaging 100+ companies across diverse industries, including Cisco, Deloitte, Fidelity, Gensler, Idea Fund Partners, Infosys, Siemens, Steelcase, Volvo and others.

• • Hosting 3,200+ attendees for community events and programming.

• • Collaborating with 10+ UNC schools including medicine, nursing, business, journalism & media, data science & society, information & library science and public health.

• • Giving 200+ tours to the public who are interested in learning more about our innovation community.

All the while, we’ve been curating, creating and catalyzing the spontaneous collision and curiosity that spark something new and novel. The university has so many opportunities to use innovation, entrepreneurship, commercialization and new venture creation as a platform for impact as well as increasing our capabilities at technology based economic development. As we continue to converge and work in new ways at the Junction, we aim to see new inventions moved to market, new companies launched, new jobs created, new partnerships formed and new possibilities for public good uncovered.

Haven’t had a chance to visit? We welcome you to the Innovate Carolina Junction and the journey that the UNC innovation community is embarking on. We look forward to being collaborators in education, inspiration, innovation, translation and impact now and in the years to come.

Please, don’t hesitate to stop by for a tour or sign up for a free co-working day to learn more about how you can be part of our dynamic community. Whether you are looking for a place to co-work, attend programming or look to connect with others in meaningful ways, the Junction has a spot for you.

Your involvement holds the potential to shape the future within our ecosystem here at UNC-Chapel Hill and beyond. #innovationmatters