Or maybe archaeology is just being used to distract attention from other research disliked even more by the Republican majority, which passed a bill adding burdens to the National Science Foundation while doing nothing to improve public understanding of the science done with federal support. According to Lamar Smith (a Republican Congress member representing the … Continue reading »
NSF
Getting Lean in Education — By Getting Out of the Classroom
This week the National Science Foundation goes Lean on education by providing $1.2 million to educators who want to bring their classroom innovations to a wider audience. ——– The I-Corps programstarted when the U.S. National Science Foundation adopted my Lean LaunchPad class. Their goal was to train University scientists and researchers to use Lean Startup methods (business model design, … Continue reading »
Why Lean May Save Your Life – The I-Corps @ NIH
Today the National Institutes of Health announced they are offering my Lean LaunchPad class (I-Corps @ NIH ) to commercialize Life Science. There may come a day that one of these teams makes a drug, diagnostic or medical device that saves your life. —- Over the last two and a half years the National Science Foundation I-Corps has taught … Continue reading »
Why fund studies of Maya architecture instead of saving lives?
That is the question two members of the current US House of Representatives pose in an opinion piece in USA Today, writing: Congress is right to ask why NSF chooses to fund research on Mayan architecture over projects that could help our wounded warriors or save lives. As an archaeologist specializing in Maya archaeology, who … Continue reading »
Ignorance as political bliss: The Republican war on social science
Several recent posts on the Legal Planet blog have been about the political process, discussing issues like political polarization, congressional deadlock, and special interest groups. The discipline of political science is in large part the study of how collective decisions get made. It would seem to be in everyone’s interest to have a better understanding … Continue reading »
Blinded by the light — The epiphany
“Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun /iˈpifənē/ : A moment of sudden revelation or insight.” We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. But there is no process to teach how to get an epiphany. We can only try to create the conditions where this might occur. It all just … Continue reading »
The government starts an incubator: The NSF Innovation Corps
Over the last two months the U.S. government has been running one of the most audacious experiments in entrepreneurship since World War II. They launched an incubator for the top scientists and engineers in the U.S. This week we saw the results. 63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks, turning laboratory … Continue reading »