Dr. James Parrish talks about benefits of partnerships between industry and academia. While these groups can seem worlds apart, James explains why this should not be. He goes on to list what he's doing to better align the two camps.
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The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.
Transcription
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James 00:00:20 Hi there. My name is Dr. James Parrish. I am an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at Nova Southeastern University’s graduate school for Computer and Information Sciences.
And today, I think that I would really like to speak on the notion of collaboration between academia and industry, because I truly believe that it is the gateway for catalyzing the tech community and the technology economy here in South Florida.
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Ryan 00:00:55 Wow, that -- isn’t that like oil and water, though? I mean, you want to mix academics and industry?
- James 00:01:01
Yeah, you know a lot of times they are coming from two entirely different perspectives. I mean, you’ve got these industry folks with their feet planted firmly on the ground and you’ve got a bunch of academics who people think have their heads firmly in the clouds. But there’s a lot of synergies that can come about through the interaction of the two groups.
- Ryan 00:01:26
Very cool.
So, this definitely doesn’t sound like the kinds of experience that I saw in college. So is this ultimately a very new thing, like the idea of working hard to make this work?
- James 00:01:37
It’s not a new thing. The partnerships between industry and academia has been going on for a long time. It’s just that many times people find it difficult to get it to work.
A lot of times what you’ll find is that there’s this big call for industry and academia to get together to move some iniative forward. And we all get together. And we all exchange numbers, exchange business cards, and we go away feeling great. And there’s really no second step. And what I’m really advancing here is this notion of, yeah, let’s take second step, let’s move this process forward beyond that initial meetings
- Ryan 00:02:20
Yeah, that makes sense. I think that a lot of times -- you know some of these -- you might have a weekend event or something like that and everyone enters in with the best of intentions and they say, you know, I think the likely outcome is X and then there’s not necessarily that gameplan to make that happen, right. Like there’s no kind of way to follow through. So everyone is kind of working and they’re kind of coming to a certain end, but it maybe isn’t as strong as it would be if maybe there was a little bit more thought about how to carry through.
- James 00:02:49
Yeah, and just the collaboration and the different resources that industry and academia can bring to a problem, to bring to bear on the solution for a problem. It certainly makes any collaboration like that worthwhile. And it makes getting that effort going worthwhile as well.
So, in order to combat this notion of there being no second step, a lot of the work that we have done at Nova Southeastern University has been to take -- you know, take up the mantle and go out and take that second step ourselves. I personally have been involved in meeting with a lot of people out in the IT community in order to find out things like what types of skills are really desired out there in the workplace. One of the initiatives that we did was to meet with several different recruiting agencies because we felt like that would give us a nice broad-based view on what skills were in demand in the marketplace and then to go and bring those -- the results of that effort back and try to get that integrated into our curriculum.
Another initiative that we’ve brought out has been to really become involved in the industry community, to come down -- I guess the notion or the stereotypical notion is that we’re all in these ivory towers in academia. Well, to go out and become involved with different industry groups, I mean, our dean, Eric Ackerman, is the president of the local chapter of InfraGard. I sit on the board of the South Florida Tech Alliance with the sole purpose of acting as liaison between academia and industry.
So there are a lot of things that we’re doing here at Nova Southeastern University, and specifically in the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences that are trying with the intent, anyway, to develop these industry and academia partnerships, to take them past that first step and actually get some actionable results from them.
- Ryan 00:4:54
That is really interesting in that as you said you’re taking that next step, right? I think oftentimes -- well, this looks like a hand-off, right, like students learn and then they get a job, right. So there’s a direct cutoff, seemingly, where one thing happens and the next thing happens. But you’re saying that you’re going past halfway, right, seems like that’s oftentimes in a good partnership, someone has to do that, someone goes more than halfway and then all of a sudden this thing -- everything starts falling into place.
- James 00:5:27
Yeah. I mean, and it doesn’t really actually stop once they get a job, for us at the university anyway.
Now we’ve gone that step past halfway, at least here we have anyway, to find out what skills are needed in the marketplace. And as we bring those in to our curriculum, we internalize those into our processes, then we have more valuable graduates, more valuable graduates it’s easier for them to get jobs. Once they get jobs, then the -- the notion is, is that you have a good program. If you have a good program, well, that really drives enrollment into your program.
So in a sense by going out and talking in the industry and making our outputs more valuable, we’re increasing our attractiveness and hopefully, therefore, increasing the amount of inputs in the number of students we have joining our programs.
- Ryan 00:06:24
That makes almost too much sense. It seems like conventional wisdom about school is the most important thing that you learn is how to learn is because odds are most of the stuff you learn is not going to be relevant by the time you get out, at least, you know, in technology, right. But it seems like you’re kind of fixing that.
- James 00:06:40
Oh, absolutely. I mean, the stats all show that in a four year technical degree, half of what you learn will be irrelevant by the time that you graduate. But that’s one of the things that differentiates us as a university from your typical trade schools and those things is that we do really focus in on that things that you need to know, or the things that you need to know to learn to learn, to be able to pick up new technologies.
So when we go out and we talk to these employers, we don’t talk to them necessarily about what do you need right now, or what your immediate needs are. Of course we do that to some extent, but we also ask them where do they see things going?
And as a result of those conversations, some of the things that we’ve done here at Nova Southeastern University and the graduate school of Computer Information Sciences is to start to become more forward facing in our cirriculum, more I guess forward oriented. We are putting in labs for cloud computing and mobile development, becuase we’ve heard that in this -- you know, in IT in general, but especially in South Florida, these are things that are going to be out there -- you know, they’re on the horizon.
In fact, worldwide, one of the reports I’ve seen says that mobile development will be the number one type of software being developed by 2015.
So we’re actually putting initiatives in place now so that we can have graduates ready and able to fill those positions when they’re available a couple years down the road.
- Ryan 00:08:16
Wow, that sounds really cool. That sounds kind of counter to what people generally say about college cirriculum right? Like the idea that its so hard to change usually it can’t be changed, but you’re saying it absolutely is.
- James 00:8:30
Well, it all depends on the institution, first of all.
You know, there are some institutions where that might be the case, but we’ve always sort of had this slant towards the industry here at Nova Southeastern University where we’ve tried to be flexibile, we’ve tried to be adaptable. We’ve long been pioneers in online and hybrid classes and how we present our cirriculum to our students. And it just stands to reason that we’re also very innovative in the types of cirriculum that we’re offering as well.
- Ryan 00:09:08
I think that this approach makes me think of a lot is, you know, it seems like many people say that the most important thing of their whole college experience was the internship that they had, becuase all of the classes may or may not directly relevant to what you do, but you know, the people that you meet and the actual interaction with what, I guess, will be your peers or what -- become your peers, is probably the most important thing. And then, when I look back at my experience that was such a very, very small part of the whole college experience. But it seems like what you’re describing here is a situation where that’s pretty much laced all throughout, or at least much heavier than my experience was.
- James 00:09:50
Well we’re certainly trying to integrate it in through the entire curriculum as we have it here at Nova Southeastern. I was recently involved with the NBC Education Nation event where they had different luminaries involved. And I was actually fortunate enough to be asked to speak at that event on what it takes to get jobs and what needs to happen in these partnerships between industry and academia. And what industry is really looking for.
And there were two things that came out of that, two main themes, one of which we’ve already really talked about and that’s this notion that academia needs to understand what industry needs, what skills they need and what they’re looking for.
The other one was the notion of soft skills, and producing students that were able to function out in the workplace with respect to communication, with respect to interpersonal skills and those types of things.
And so here at the graduate school of Computer Information Sciences, we’re really looking at giving students the opportunity, as much as we possibly can, to interact with IT professionals. And we do this though a couple of different initiatives, one of which is we host several different industry groups here at Nova Southeastern University. We’ve had tech connect event -- I mean, we’ve had South Florica Tech Alliance events. We’ve had different events such as SQL Saturday, different InfraGard events where students are able to come out and not only, you know, interact with IT professional, but get some skills as well.
Another thing that we’re doing is we are hosting a series called Tech Connect here at NSU where we bring out our alumni, we bring out our current students, we bring out our partners in the industry and we have all these folks to come out and really network with each other and in addition to that we’ll have people from industry come up and talk about the power of networking and why networking is absolutely critical.
Many times this point is lost on computer science and IT and technically oriented students, becuase they really come out thinking that it’s pretty much all -- you know, it’s all about what you know. But in today’s economy, especially in today’s economy, it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know.
So we’ll have people from industry stand up there at the event and give a real quick presentation about the power of networking, or soft skills and why those things are important even in technical environments.
- Ryan 00:12:47
Wow, you’re definitely preaching to the choir here.
It is amazing how often that comes up. I think it started off in the beginning sort of like this ironic thing when soft skills would come up frenquently to then it became somewhere between the obvious and funny realm, and now I think it’s entering into probably the Cloud Plumbing drinking game. We talked about soft skills again.
- James 00:13:06
Yeah. And it’s really amazing. I mean, you would think that a lot of times some --business students always get it, you know. And business students, they make you get -- in business school, they make you give so many presentations that the students come out with PowerPoint poisoning.
So they understand this notion of networking and everything, but that isn’t as integrated in to the technical disicplines as it is, and you would think after awhile that it would be. So we’re really, we’re really focusing on developing our students from that perspective in addition to developing their tech skills.
- Ryan 00:13:51
Yeah, that was one thing in my cirriculum there was, you know, some mass comm classes and pubic speaking, technical writing, things like that. And i just assumed that that was kind of normal for the field. And then when I got out and started talking to people it was like what do you mean you’ve never, you know, like written documentation like this before? Or what do you mean you’ve never talked in front of a group of 20, 30 people. I mean, that’s not even a big group, right.
But it seems like that is not common. And it should be.
- James 00:14:18
Oh, it certainly is. I mean, the ability to stand up and to have a meaningful exchange of ideas or information with another person, or to be able to communicate whatever you’re trying to communicate clearly and concisely is absolutely imperative out in the marketplace. So we’re giving students as much as we can an opportunity to be able to develop those skills before they leave here and hopefully that will translate into them having more successful interviews and more successful careers.
- Ryan 00:14:55
Yeah, hopefully there is globally more push towards this idea of this communication skills and things like that, becuase I mean, there’s -- you kind of can’t just assume people are going to find you becuase you’re brilliant, right, like that’s a little bit naive.
- James 00:15:11
Oh, absolutely. I mean, especially in an environment where you’re looking at online -- you know, most resumes now aren’t mailed in, they’re all online. And you’re resume is probably one of, you know, 5,000 to 10,000 that gets submitted for any particular job.
So it’s -- the notion of having a network of contacts and being able to really go through and present yourself in the best possible manner to perspective employers is absolutely critical.
- Ryan 00:15:44
Yeah, it’s been interesting, I’ve heard from more than a couple of companies that have publicly said they don’t want word docs from programmers, they want GitHub profiles, right.
- James 00:15:56
Yeah. And the other thing I’m hearing, too, is that in fact it was just in Harvard Business Review where they spoke about portfolios being the new interviews. And they wanted -- they wanted to see, you know, not only how you presented yourself personally, but they wanted to see the work that you’ve done as well. And then they’ll go on to even look at your Facebook profile and all those other things.
So the whole nature of hiring has changed tremendously, even in the past two to three years.
- Ryan 00:16:28
Yeah, as a graphic designer that makes sense, because the portfolio has always been kind of what we live and die by. But it -- so it makes almost, you know, perfect sense that other industries would kind of judge each other off the same thing, right? Like what have you actually done? And what was your involvement in this project, right?
- James 00:16:45
Yeah, it’s proof of concept of you. And that’s just another point that we’re trying to emphasize in our curriculum at the Graduate School of Computer Information Sciences is to integrate those projects in to serve really as a proxy for experience. That’s one of the things that we learned from industry is they’re really looking for people with two to three years of experience as sort of their magic number.
And if we can provide meaningful projects, whether they are projects that are done in conjunction with a university -- or with the university with an industry partner, or projects that are done as part of a class project, or even projects like things that are done for a certain industry competitions like Microsoft Imagine Cup. Those things in a portfolio can help to sort of serve as a proxy for actual experience out in the marketplace.
- Ryan 00:17:49
So let’s drill down into that a little bit, the Imagine Cup that you just referenced. I saw from your profile that’s something that you’re active in. Why don’t you explain that to people who are not familiar with what that is.
- James 00:17:53
The Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world’s largest technology competition. And it is -- it’s actually a suite of competitions if you will. There are several different competitions ranging from digital media to IT knowledge to imbedded systems. The one that I’ve particularly been most involved in is one called the software development invitational. And they’re all really sort of centered in on this notion of providing technological solutions to the world’s biggest problems
One of the guidelines that they give you as they do things is this notion of the United Nations Millenial Goals. If you’re addressing one of the UN Millenial Goals, such as child/maternal mortality rates, AIDS, HIV, clean water, you’re pretty much tackling one of the world’s toughest problems at this point.
And what’s really interesting about it, and what got me really hooked in on it is two things. First of all, because the students are having to tackle such a really out of box type of problem, or such a large problem, they’re sort of forced to come up with out of the box solutions. So I really like the competition and the contest, because it forces them to think out of the box. It forces them to go outside of their comfort zone in many instances. And I think that winds up really helping them as they move out into the marketplace.
The other thing I really like about the competition is that, at least the software design initiative, is that it requires students to effectively communicate what they’re trying to accomplish not only through their technological innovation, but through a business plan as well. They have to think through, OK, not only this is -- you know, they don’t just have to say here, here’s my app. They have to go through and say, OK, this is the problem I’m trying to address, this is why it’s a problem. This is my solution. This is why my solution will make an impact on the problem. And this is why my solution will be accepted in the marketplace.
That goes way beyond just designing a piece of software. And particularly in Management Information Systems cirriculums is it’s really core to what a lot of organizations are asking those particular positions that will be filled by those graduates to do.
And it’s not judged just by an academic. As they send these things in to the competition, be it a Microsoft competition, or be it really any industry competition, they’re getting evaluated through the eyes, or through the perspective of an industry person. So they’re actually being evaluated in many times based on the criterion that they’ll be evaluated on once they go out and get jobs.
So I think that things like that are realy valuable to students as they go through an academic program, becuase they serve as sort of a bridge between the really cushy, feel good world of academia and the cold, harsh realities of business life where if they, you know, here in academia they can make as many mistakes as they want to -- of course, it’ll affect their grade, but there’s no job on the line and if they make the mistakes out there in industry, then they’re out of a paycheck.
So it serves as a nice bridge between those two worlds.
- Ryan 00:21:53
It’s interesting, becuase you know this example does seem more what you would expect from, you know, an academic side more than the business side, right, because it seems like very, very big, blue skies, you know, theoretically. It seems -- maybe I just interpreted that wrong. Is that true, or is that fair?
- James 00:22:12
No, I think it’s fair to say that, but it really is -- I think it’s also in line with what industry is looking at.
If you look at the big push -- one of the biggest pushes that we have down in South Florida right now, and even across the country, is this push for tech innovation. And the support from the government and industry and academia, one of the things that we’re really are getting together fairly well on is supporting tech innovation through tech incubators and tech accelerators. If you look at some of the stuff that’s going on at other universities like UM and the Launch Pad, here at Nova Southeastern University we’re getting involved in tech entrepreneurship in a big way and looking to create an incubator of our own.
It helps students to start thinking, going back to the big out of the box or pie in the sky problems that we’re having them address, it gets them thinking in that innovative type manner. If we go through, or if they go through a cirriculum where they’re never realy challenged to think outside the box, well, then we’ll have a bunch of people that we’re putting out in the workforce that know essentially how to do the same, you know, database driven website that is ho-hum and everybody else is doing. But if we give them the ability to leverage their creativity, to step outside the box, to expand the boundaries of what even they think technology is capable of, then I think that we’re influencing them to become more innovative.
And I’m not saying that they’re all going to go out and start the next Facebook or the next InstaGram, but, you know, innovation, or what they call intrapreneurship, is something that is extemely valued within, even, you know, your big, large, standardized structurally stable organizations.
- Ryan 00:24:23
It’s interesting that you tie the two together, becuase I feel like I hear a lot of people talk about the importance of everyone now in the workforce having an entreneurial spirit of some sort, and you know, whether or not you use the intrapreneurial term. I mean, basically that’s what people are talking about, right. Like the idea that you want to be a little bit more of a master of your own destiny. You want to take the helm, probably show more leadership even if you are a cog in a machine, right?
Now you seem to be drawing that line which is saying, well, you don’t really need to call it entrepreneurship, what we’re talking about be innovative wherever you are. You don’t need to be an entrepreneur, you don’t need to be a business owner. And just because you own your own busines doesn’t mean you’re innovating.
- James 00:25:06
Well, absolutely. I mean, if -- there’s a distinction between -- at least in my mind -- and I’ve talked to certain people out in the community like the head of the small business development center here in Fort Lauderdale. There’s a real distinction between, in my mind, an entrepreneur and an innovator --or just a business owner.
Entrepreneurs really innovate. Entrepreneurs go out on limbs. They break new ground. They create new things in the marketplace. Whereas a business owner, while they might like to call themselves an entrepreneur really is -- is really just that, they’re a business owner. I mean, you’re not really breaking any new ground if you buy into a franchise for something.
So this innovation, this notion of innovation really is tied in my mind to entrepreneurship, but it’s also tied to employability. People -- organizations want people that are going to come up with new solutions. They’re going to want people that can go outside the box to find that solution that everyone else hasn’t thought of before. And that is really, let’s face it, that’s really the only real sustainable, competitive advantage that companies have any more, and that’s the ability for their employees to be able to think outside the box and to break into new markets and to create new products and to come up with solutions to problems that other people just can’t come up with.
- Ryan 00:26:46
Yeah, so you’re talking about all the different acquisition hires recently, right. Like big companies buying little companies mostly just so they can have those smart people on their team, which probably bridges that gap between two things that might not otherwise be intuitive about what you said before, because at first you’re saying, you know, Microsoft wants to opine about your curriculum so that they can maybe hire people out of it, right, like that kind of thing. Then you start talking about incubators and things like Launch Pad helping people start their own businesses. It’s like, wait, wait, wait I thought we were trying to funnel people into these big companies.
- James 00:27:21
You know, I think that -- I think our goal here is really to funnel people into tech, you know, that’s our main goal is to get people out there and get them contributing to the tech economy in whatever way they feel that they can most appropriately contribute to it. And whether that’s going to a more standard -- I say standard, but a larger, more stable company like a Microsoft or an IBM, or if that’s, you know, starting out something in their garage and spinning it off into a Fortune 500 company like Mark Zuckerberg did, we want to be able to give our students the tools to go whichever route they want to go.
- Ryan 00:28:04
Very cool. Well, that’s an excellent note to leave off on. It sounds like you’re doing good work. I like to hear that. I think oftentimes you hear people talk about education is broken and usually they’re mostly talking about their own experience, so it’s good to hear, you know, innovation is happening within academics.
- James 00:28:21
Yeah, I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to come out here and to come onto your show and talk about some of the things that we’re doing, because as much doom and gloom as we get in the press and in the mainstream media, there are a significant number of people that are really working to catalyze the tech industry here in South Florida and to make it really something that can be the envy of the nation, if not the world.
- Ryan 00:28:51
Spread the word.
- James 00:28:52
Preach on, brother, yes.
- Ryan 00:28:55
Thank you.
- James 00:28:56
Thank you.