Today, it was my great pleasure to announce the formal naming of the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Paul’s support for the UW and his leadership in computer science education are both humbling and inspiring.
Category: Innovation
The 2016 University of Washington Annual President’s Address: For Washington and the World
When I get asked what my vision for the University of Washington is, I have a ready answer: I want this university to be the number one university in the world in terms of impact. I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about that impact – on our state, nation and our world. Above all, on our collective future.
President Cauce speaks at Business Journal Live event on what’s next for the UW
This Wednesday, August 17, President Cauce sat down with Puget Sound Business Journal columnist Patti Payne for a wide-ranging discussion about the University, her experience thus far as president and what the future holds for the UW. Topics at the breakfast event, attended by dozens of Seattle business luminaries, ranged from the incoming freshman class to the Population Health initiative to the Husky Promise, the UW’s commitment to making education affordable to eligible Washington students. The Puget Sound Business Journal’s TechFlash blog followed up the event with a story, linked below, focused on the Global Innovation Exchange, the UW’s groundbreaking partnership with China’s Tsinghua University.
Puget Sound Business Journal: “UW president lays out vision for Global Innovation Exchange”
The University’s Role in the Innovation Ecosystem (Times Higher Education Asia Summit keynote)
Universities play a vital – and unique – role in the innovation ecosystem. Leading the University of Washington, I see every day the ways in which the environment and community of a university are not only conducive to creation and discovery, more often than not, they are the drivers of innovation. Universities both augment the innovation in companies and institutions around them and they compensate for the fact that some organizations are not as well-equipped to do so.
The game-changing future of innovation Seattle-style
If we are to lead as an epicenter of innovation, we must bring people together—business, nonprofits, educational institutions and entire communities — to identify challenges and develop solutions. Bringing together local business and nonprofit leaders to ensure that our region remains strong, diverse and competitive. As pioneers of innovation, these visionary CEOs are tackling issues like education and infrastructure head on, with creativity, collaboration, ingenuity and sustainability.
Big data holds tremendous opportunities to solve health challenges, Cauce tells Tsinghua forum
The challenges of our time cross boundaries, so universities and nations must do the same to solve them. That was the message President Ana Mari Cauce delivered during her keynote address Monday at the Tsinghua University Innovation and Big Data Forum in Beijing.
“The future health, prosperity, and well-being of our nations and our planet depend on our ability to cross boundaries and build relationships. Relationships between our students, who are the future leaders of our nations; between our faculties, who are driving innovation around the world; and between our countries, as leading players on the global stage,” Cauce said.
Cauce said the opportunities of “big data” are perhaps most evident in public health, an area that is an area of particular strength for the UW. She discussed work by both the School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to bring big data to bear on health challenges, from adverse pharmaceutical reactions to the effects of pollution.
IHME’s ongoing work with Chinese researchers and health agencies are identifying community-by-community health trends and challenges, and this enables a systematic approach to solving these challenges.
“Where you’re born matters. And by harnessing big data we’re able to see for the first time just how much it matters, to identify the hidden boundaries between us, and to do something about them,” Cauce said.
Disruptive innovation at the UW
Entrepreneurial thinking is central to the University of Washington in the most profound and powerful way imaginable. It is also reflective of our state. I see a UW where all students have access to the basic skills and resources for taking a creative solution and pursuing its delivery into the world. It’s a vision of empowering all UW students to have more impact in society. We are embarking on an exciting next phase in enabling innovation mindsets and entrepreneurial thinking across campus and the community.
We foster innovation on our UW campuses not just because of its deep economic impact, but also because we know it can create a world of good. Our students are embracing their areas of interest by working to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Teaching innovation and creativity gives our students an extraordinary advantage, whatever path they ultimately choose to pursue. We want every single UW graduate to have the opportunity to be part of the energy and passion that is our innovation ecosystem: to know that they can change the world.
The UW Innovation Agenda is an integrated plan to drive positive change for our state by empowering students and researchers to learn, discover and build the solutions to tomorrow’s challenges. At its core, it is about taking our innovation ecosystem to the next level — by leveraging our strengths across the UW and throughout our region as we work together.
This includes improving access to computer science and engineering classes and actively working to spark innovation in students, faculty and staff across the University.
Part of our Innovation Agenda is about “disruptive innovation” — something our new Vice Provost for Innovation Vikram Jandhyala is introducing as the exciting next phase of CoMotion’s mission: developing spaces, programs and partnerships for students and researchers to come together, to collaborate and to foster innovation with impact. The Innovation Agenda is strongly focused on building Innovation Ecosystems that help us create and realize ideas, and CoMotion serves as a catalyst for that mission.
We must find ways to bring our ideas, our knowledge and our inventions to people wherever they are. To address key 21st century challenges, we must be accessible, collaborative, experimental and global.
We need to approach problems in new ways, embrace mistakes and be willing to start again with a different strategy to find better solutions. We need to be nimble, adjusting course — not only in the research space, but in the teaching space as well.
We live in an increasingly global world — a world filled with international and comparative dimensions. That includes much of the work we are doing here at the University. So we must engage globally. We need to interact with people from other places, to talk to them, to share ideas, to find commonalities, to manage differences.
We need to find avenues to bring outside expertise from around the world into our University to enhance our research. We have to engage across cultures, languages, countries and global challenges. Even locally, international and global understanding is critical.
We want to make it easier for those outside of UW — at other institutions, in other regions like this one, in other states and countries — to engage and do business with us in a more productive approach that results in less friction and more opportunities for all teams involved.
Innovation is about empowering our students and researchers to learn, discover and build the solutions to tomorrow’s grand challenges. It’s about fostering that entrepreneurial mindset on our campuses and in our communities.
Yes, there is a direct cause and effect between our region’s rise to prominence in the innovation space and the UW’s tremendous success in taking innovation to impact — here, and around the world. And together, we can grow our region’s innovation ecosystem to new levels of success to make a real-world impact.