March 28, 2024

Learning to Fail Productively

By Jay Friess
Editor

It looks like a form of thin insulation, like two layers of balloon plastic or potato chip bag material sandwiching a slightly thicker inner layer. It’s completely flexible and can be folded and shaped like paper.

It’s a FlexEl battery. It can be charged with radio waves.

“And,” added Professor Patrick O’Shea, vice president and chief research officer for the University of Maryland, “it’s cheap. Ten cents per square inch.”

The FlexEl battery that O’Shea brought to show his audience Wednesday at the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center for his address on converting raw scientific research into applied businesses is an example of just one idea that had its beginnings at UMD. However, for every FlexEl success story, there’s a lot of failed attempts, O’Shea told the crowd of Patuxent Partnership members.

“Another thing we need to do is to learn to fail,” O’Shea said. “Otherwise, we take the safe and easy path.”

Failure, and the lessons learned from it, are so important to O’Shea that he’s attending the Bmore Fail Conference April 20 to celebrate the analyze what can be learned from entrepreneurial failure in the rocky path between pure science and sale-ready products.

Dr. Patrick O'Shea

Dr. Patrick O'Shea

UMD and the Naval Air Systems Command at Naval Air Station Patuxent River are facing a similar set of systemic problems. Both institutions have enjoyed a gusher of taxpayer money in the last decade, NAVAIR from war spending and UMD from a nearly doubling research budget. However, that money will soon be drying up.

“There’s a lot of concern about the future of federal grants,” O’Shea said, noting that UMD gets 25 percent of its research funding from the Department of Defense.

Yet, both UMD and NAVAIR are being expected to address vexing and increasingly complex issues, what O’Shea calls “wicked problems.”

For UMD, these “wicked problems” include cybersecurity, finding nanocompounds to replace rare earth elements in electronics, determining the physical basis of human memory and creating secure wireless communications.

Most of these problems are not exclusively technical in nature. For example, cyber security, O’Shea said, is a psychological, behavioral and legal problem as much as a technical one. He said his job is to “bridge the gaps between the industrial part of the house and the non-industrial part of the house.”

“Everything is all interconnected,” O’Shea said. “It’s not a technical problem exclusively.”

O’Shea said the University is trying to “educate explorers, not train tourists.”

“We need people who are capable of thinking in very special ways,” O’Shea said. “The artists bring a very different view on things.”

But the state also needs an economic environment for these thinkers’ ideas to flourish. UMD is attempting to bring together private venture firms to take bets on the college’s research technologies in order to diversify the institution’s money stream away from dependence on federal grants.

“We have not had the (business) ecosystem in this region,” O’Shea said, pointing out many successful ideas that left Maryland for California to find venture capital. “Venture capital is a sign of a vibrant, diverse economy.”

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