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Monday, December 24, 2018
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Illinois Tech’s Kaplan Institute Aims to Educate a More Valuable and Employable Workforce
Illinois Tech’s Kaplan Institute Aims to Educate a
More Valuable and Employable Workforce
Howard Tullman,
university professor and executive director of The Ed Kaplan Family Institute
for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
During my time leading 1871, Chicago’s
largest tech hub, which was recently named the Number 1 university-affiliated
incubator in the world, I found myself constantly having conversations with business
owners who were yearning for more diverse technical talent equipped with the
skills necessary for tomorrow’s jobs. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. With dozens
of major corporate headquarters, countless startups, tech giants like Google,
Salesforce, Facebook expanding major operations in the city, Chicago has become
a world-class tech ecosystem and a center for the development of new and disruptive
technologies, human-centered designs, and multi-disciplinary innovation.
Few other cities across the country have
combined industry, education and technology into civic initiatives, training
programs and attractive and lucrative investment environments as successfully as
Chicago which has particularly exploited and capitalized on its wealth of
colleges and universities. In fact, only Boston has more institutions of higher
learning than Chicago and only a fraction of those are as directly engaged as
we see in Chicago in the kinds of new talent development programs which have
been spawned here.
But it’s still worth asking whether the
city’s pool of technical talent is keeping up with the rapid growth in the
overall demand. And are we developing the “new collar” skills in our students that
they will need to be successful in the globally-competitive employment marketplaces
of the future? Finally, are our colleges
and universities doing enough to ensure that those students who do graduate and
enter the workforce are ready to hit the ground running and make an immediate
impact? In today’s competitive hiring environments, even with the growing needs,
you rarely get a second chance to make a first impression.
Recent surveys suggest that the
students themselves aren’t quite convinced that we’re doing the work necessary
to properly prepare them. A 2017
poll released by Gallup and Strada Education Network showed that
only a third of student participants believed they would graduate with the
skills and knowledge to be successful in the job market/workplace (34%-36%) while
just half (53%) believe their major will lead to a good job.
Given the enormous value of and clear
requirement for critical thinkers and problem solvers in business today, any
college or university which isn’t stepping up to the challenge of educating
students in new ways as well as radically re-envisioning their old
methodologies is falling behind. Gone are the days when classroom-style
lectures and rote textbook learning were enough. Many higher education
institutions are putting every student through some type of innovation and
entrepreneurship course, regardless of their departmental majors, in order to
try to graduate highly qualified and instantly employable students.
But far too many of these attempts
lack serious and practical content, strong scholarship and applied wisdom, and,
above all, experienced and interactive instructors who have been practitioners
as well as educators throughout their own careers. They are “me-too” efforts
driven more by a desire for the schools to check the appropriate boxes and
satisfy their various constituencies than by a substantial commitment to real
change and improvement backed by concrete actions.
On the other hand, when institutions
do make a long-term investment in their students’ futures, rather than mere lip
service, the differences are readily apparent. The Illinois Institute of
Technology, located just 10 minutes south of Chicago’s Loop on the Red Line, is
a solid part of the new leadership in this area and we’ve put a giant stake in
the ground with the recent opening of the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for
Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship.
At the Kaplan Institute, we’re focused
on turning out graduates who are well-suited for jobs that haven’t been
invented yet; well-trained to use technologies that we’re inventing in order to
address challenges which we are just learning are going to be problems.
How are we accomplishing this?
Among other things, the Kaplan
Institute will serve as the new home for our InterProfessional Projects Program
(IPRO) where multi-disciplinary teams (a chemical engineer, an architect, a business
major or two and more) will work together to solve social, technical or
business problems. Unique to Illinois Tech for decades, every student on campus
spends two semesters taking IPRO classes, regardless of their major. Through
IPRO, students are tackling issues like agriculture in an urban environment by
applying robotics to vertical farming; using data to improve first responder
responsiveness; generating interfaces that bridge the foreign language gap and
improves trust and communication between families and the Chicago Public
Schools; and more.
And, because the Kaplan Institute
provides a new 72,000 sq. ft. campus home for these classes, the instruction,
interaction and innovations no longer take place in the traditional silos –
standard classrooms with desks and walls and barriers – or exclusively in a
single school at the university. The only way to solve the cross-disciplinary
problems of the future which cross every kind of boundary, schools like IIT
need to invest in and build new physical environments like the Kaplan Institute.
Its sheer size will allow the
university to have all the IPRO classes held in a single, centrally-located,
collaborative space. Hundreds of student teams, focused on dynamic
problem-solving projects, will have the unfettered opportunity to work
together, learn from each other, and share resources and ideas. Students will
literally collide with each other in ways that enhance learning, problem
solving and teamwork.
Less focused than others on
“start-ups” and business plan competitions, we take a hands-on approach to
problem-solving with active projects, collaborations, and actual commercial outcomes
and products. Working on these projects with corporate partners and industry
sponsors, provides unique experiences and exposes our students to a broad pool
of future employers across every sector which sets them up for
successful opportunities when they graduate.
Friday, December 21, 2018
How a University Tech Incubator Is Preparing Students for an Automated Future
How a University Tech Incubator Is Preparing Students for an Automated Future
By Jeff Link
Standing with three classmates at a podium in the newly opened Ed Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Kislay Bhagat, a fourth-year engineering student, gestures to the windows while tapping on his Android phone. Seconds later, an omnidirectional hovercraft—one that looks like a child’s disc sled—lifts off the ground and glides smoothly along, floating inches above a pedestrian sidewalk.
Bhagat’s team built the machine for an Interprofessional Project (IPRO) robotics class that meets in a new, 70,000-square-foot, cloud-like building designed by John Ronan Architects. A lightweight, interstellar take on the architecture characterizing the rest of the Mies van der Rohe–designed campus which surrounds it, the Kaplan Institute is the school’s first new academic building erected in 40 years.
The institute is like an incubator, one that prepares students for future jobs driven by accelerating innovation, increased automation, as well as the “new” collar skills needed for multidisciplinary collaboration. It stands as a litmus test for what John Ronan, principal of the eponymous firm, calls a vision of “the future of higher education.”
The IPRO program, newly housed in the Kaplan Institute, offers undergraduates a collaborative design experience that university professor and KI executive director Howard Tullman says could set them apart as job candidates. This thinking anticipates a world moving rapidly toward increased automation and digitization, eliminating other types of work. “Automation is frightening,” says Tullman. “If I can turn a task into a set of rules or instructions, those jobs are going away.” A serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Chicago digital startup incubator 1871, Tullman is hardly a Luddite.
In his office, two smoothly curved robots idle in the corner (they can identify Tullman by face and say hello) and David Bowie’s face swims in an expressionist pastiche behind his desk. During his tenure at 1871, Tullman helped woo hundreds of tech companies into Chicago’s business district, watching the city’s tech sector grow from representing just two percent of the city’s workforce in 2012 to almost 14 percent in 2018. He also led 1871 to its current stature as the Number 1 university-affiliated incubator in the world.
He says the economic and environmental gains touted by proponents of automation—from advancing telemedicine to realizing autonomous vehicles—require a shift in preparing students for workplace demands that US education has not yet addressed. “Starting in high school, there’s a failing of education; a huge reliance on quantitative, measurable skills,” he says. “Those aren’t the skills of the future. Why would you memorize anything when you can Google it?”
As digital startup incubators like 1871 have emerged to develop new products and services, the labor market has changed. Employers are no longer enticed by candidates with encyclopedic subject knowledge: They’re seeking students with real-world design experience and transferable soft skills. These could include the ethics and social etiquette of working in a team, the entrepreneurial mindset to sell an idea to stakeholders or funders, and the lab-based practice of designing prototypes and models. The Kaplan Institute seeks to cultivate these types of skills.
Tullman says the institute has attracted private sponsorships from a number of leading companies and is well positioned to connect with Chicago’s growing tech sector which is hungry to diversify its talent pool. “We think there is a model where companies will come here and have teams of students work on projects and say, ‘these three hit it out of the park, we’ll give them offers.’ It’s absolutely a pipeline,” he explains. “We have people in the Loop saying we can’t get diverse technical talent. We say, ‘Here’s a dime, take a bus to the South Side and go see it at IIT.”
Architecturally, the Kaplan building is in many ways a physical embodiment of the institute’s mission to prepare students for the jobs of the future. Enveloped in partially obscured ETFE material and bearing a larger footprint than the first level, the building’s second floor appears to hover weightlessly above the earth. The interior is lightweight and airy with wide, all-white corridors that wend past lounges, conference rooms, presentation areas, design studios, crash pods, makers’ labs, a community kitchen, and a café.
“I would describe it as a descendant of what Mies called ‘skin and bones’ architecture,” says Ronan. “Some of the things from the Mies era we carried over—the use of steel, for example, and the 24-foot grid he designed the campus on. But I wanted the building to look to the future; a building that would be cloudlike and make [nearby campus building] Crown Hall look heavy by comparison.”
The first floor is programmed for IIT undergraduates, who are all required to take six credit hours in the building. The second floor houses the Institute of Design, a graduate-level design school bearing the influence of Mies, who once headed IIT’s Department of Architecture.
The Bauhaus-inspired vision Mies had for the school, one that would unify art and industrial design, is alive and well in the building. In a real sense, the physical structure is a canvas for creating and refining ideas: equations, sketches, and workflows are scrawled on walls serving as large-scale dry erase boards. Mobile whiteboards also allow work and ideas to move freely. In the Janet & Craig Duchossois Idea Shop and Grainger Maker Space, students design and create models with 3D printers, CNC routers and mills, laser cutters, bandsaws, electronics work benches, oscilloscopes, and Autodesk Revit and Inventor software.
Opened in late October 2018, it remains to be seen how students will fare within its walls—and post-graduation. Tullman acknowledges that other university tech incubators, while well-intentioned, have not always lived up to their promises. “Most have not been particularly
successful because there is not a lot of tension,” he says. “Professors work with a safety net, and universities are risk averse and don’t have well-developed processes for the monetization, or commercialization, of ideas,” he says.
Tullman is hopeful the Kaplan Institute will be different, just as automation will make future jobs look very different than those today. “Look, this country for twenty years has looked down on vocational skills, but the auto mechanic, who, in the future, will not have greasy fingers but be working on a computer diagnostic machine, is going to make more than the liberal arts undergraduate who will be virtually unemployable.”
By Jeff Link
Standing with three classmates at a podium in the newly opened Ed Kaplan Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Kislay Bhagat, a fourth-year engineering student, gestures to the windows while tapping on his Android phone. Seconds later, an omnidirectional hovercraft—one that looks like a child’s disc sled—lifts off the ground and glides smoothly along, floating inches above a pedestrian sidewalk.
Bhagat’s team built the machine for an Interprofessional Project (IPRO) robotics class that meets in a new, 70,000-square-foot, cloud-like building designed by John Ronan Architects. A lightweight, interstellar take on the architecture characterizing the rest of the Mies van der Rohe–designed campus which surrounds it, the Kaplan Institute is the school’s first new academic building erected in 40 years.
The institute is like an incubator, one that prepares students for future jobs driven by accelerating innovation, increased automation, as well as the “new” collar skills needed for multidisciplinary collaboration. It stands as a litmus test for what John Ronan, principal of the eponymous firm, calls a vision of “the future of higher education.”
The IPRO program, newly housed in the Kaplan Institute, offers undergraduates a collaborative design experience that university professor and KI executive director Howard Tullman says could set them apart as job candidates. This thinking anticipates a world moving rapidly toward increased automation and digitization, eliminating other types of work. “Automation is frightening,” says Tullman. “If I can turn a task into a set of rules or instructions, those jobs are going away.” A serial entrepreneur and former CEO of Chicago digital startup incubator 1871, Tullman is hardly a Luddite.
In his office, two smoothly curved robots idle in the corner (they can identify Tullman by face and say hello) and David Bowie’s face swims in an expressionist pastiche behind his desk. During his tenure at 1871, Tullman helped woo hundreds of tech companies into Chicago’s business district, watching the city’s tech sector grow from representing just two percent of the city’s workforce in 2012 to almost 14 percent in 2018. He also led 1871 to its current stature as the Number 1 university-affiliated incubator in the world.
He says the economic and environmental gains touted by proponents of automation—from advancing telemedicine to realizing autonomous vehicles—require a shift in preparing students for workplace demands that US education has not yet addressed. “Starting in high school, there’s a failing of education; a huge reliance on quantitative, measurable skills,” he says. “Those aren’t the skills of the future. Why would you memorize anything when you can Google it?”
As digital startup incubators like 1871 have emerged to develop new products and services, the labor market has changed. Employers are no longer enticed by candidates with encyclopedic subject knowledge: They’re seeking students with real-world design experience and transferable soft skills. These could include the ethics and social etiquette of working in a team, the entrepreneurial mindset to sell an idea to stakeholders or funders, and the lab-based practice of designing prototypes and models. The Kaplan Institute seeks to cultivate these types of skills.
Tullman says the institute has attracted private sponsorships from a number of leading companies and is well positioned to connect with Chicago’s growing tech sector which is hungry to diversify its talent pool. “We think there is a model where companies will come here and have teams of students work on projects and say, ‘these three hit it out of the park, we’ll give them offers.’ It’s absolutely a pipeline,” he explains. “We have people in the Loop saying we can’t get diverse technical talent. We say, ‘Here’s a dime, take a bus to the South Side and go see it at IIT.”
Architecturally, the Kaplan building is in many ways a physical embodiment of the institute’s mission to prepare students for the jobs of the future. Enveloped in partially obscured ETFE material and bearing a larger footprint than the first level, the building’s second floor appears to hover weightlessly above the earth. The interior is lightweight and airy with wide, all-white corridors that wend past lounges, conference rooms, presentation areas, design studios, crash pods, makers’ labs, a community kitchen, and a café.
“I would describe it as a descendant of what Mies called ‘skin and bones’ architecture,” says Ronan. “Some of the things from the Mies era we carried over—the use of steel, for example, and the 24-foot grid he designed the campus on. But I wanted the building to look to the future; a building that would be cloudlike and make [nearby campus building] Crown Hall look heavy by comparison.”
The first floor is programmed for IIT undergraduates, who are all required to take six credit hours in the building. The second floor houses the Institute of Design, a graduate-level design school bearing the influence of Mies, who once headed IIT’s Department of Architecture.
The Bauhaus-inspired vision Mies had for the school, one that would unify art and industrial design, is alive and well in the building. In a real sense, the physical structure is a canvas for creating and refining ideas: equations, sketches, and workflows are scrawled on walls serving as large-scale dry erase boards. Mobile whiteboards also allow work and ideas to move freely. In the Janet & Craig Duchossois Idea Shop and Grainger Maker Space, students design and create models with 3D printers, CNC routers and mills, laser cutters, bandsaws, electronics work benches, oscilloscopes, and Autodesk Revit and Inventor software.
Opened in late October 2018, it remains to be seen how students will fare within its walls—and post-graduation. Tullman acknowledges that other university tech incubators, while well-intentioned, have not always lived up to their promises. “Most have not been particularly
successful because there is not a lot of tension,” he says. “Professors work with a safety net, and universities are risk averse and don’t have well-developed processes for the monetization, or commercialization, of ideas,” he says.
Tullman is hopeful the Kaplan Institute will be different, just as automation will make future jobs look very different than those today. “Look, this country for twenty years has looked down on vocational skills, but the auto mechanic, who, in the future, will not have greasy fingers but be working on a computer diagnostic machine, is going to make more than the liberal arts undergraduate who will be virtually unemployable.”
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