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Leadership

The impact of innovation

The September Board of Trustees meeting featured presentations on Carolina's effort to fight Ebola, the success of the MBA@UNC program and innovations to help students succeed in science classes.

Create, teach and apply.

Those words, Student Body President Andrew Powell told the University’s Board of Trustees on Sept. 25, resonated with him after reading Chancellor Carol L. Folt’s recent online op-ed in U.S. News & World Report about why American universities must continue to innovate.

The way to do that, Folt suggested, is not to replace the mindset about what the academy is already doing, but to expand it to do even more.

Recently, Folt traveled to Washington D.C., with N.C. State Chancellor Randy Woodson to join a discussion on U.S. competitiveness and prosperity spearheaded by the Council on Competitiveness. The council, consisting of university presidents, corporate CEOS, labor leaders and national lab directors, explored what the United States must do to regain its competitive edge, particularly in the areas of manufacturing and energy.

“At the core was this idea that we needed to be training people who will be leading these advances,” Folt told trustees. “If you train people for the jobs that exist today, they will not be the innovators of the future. You need to train them to be masterful within the current world, but also with the skills to synthesize, question and advance.”

Leading by innovating

The power of creating and applying better ways to do things was evident during three presentations to the board – from narrowing achievement gaps in make-or-break undergraduate science courses, to expanding the reach of a quality MBA program to people across the globe, to helping people in West Africa ravaged by the Ebola virus receive life-giving care.

Michael Crimmins, Mary Ann Smith Professor of Chemistry, and Kelly Hogan, senior lecturer in biology and director of instructional innovation, showed how a “flipped classroom” model has helped dramatically narrow the achievement gaps for first-generation and African-American students in introductory biology and chemistry courses while raising the overall achievement level for students in the classes.

Teaching methods include pre-class reading assignments and participatory classroom exercises that focus on applying knowledge rather than listening to lectures, with supplemental instruction sessions led by undergraduate mentors offered. Funding from the Association of American Universities and the National Science Foundation will help expand active-learning methods for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses in the College of Arts and Sciences through mentor-apprentice programs and, eventually, redesigned classroom space.

Chair Lowry Caudill said that getting more students excited about science has long been a concern of his and asked whether this model could be translated into high schools.

Crimmins said it actually would be easier because high school classes already are smaller than large introductory college courses.

“This is a way we could lead in North Carolina,” Caudill said. “If we can figure out how to apply this model across the state, it would be a tremendous gift to North Carolina.”

Susan Cates, executive director of MBA@UNC and president of executive development at Kenan-Flagler Business School, described that what began as a radical idea when the online MBA program was envisioned four years ago has become a worldwide success that other universities now want to emulate.

In 2011, the program had 19 student “pioneers,” Cates said. Today, it has 615 enrolled students and 205 graduates.

The idea was to create a program of equal quality to the full-time MBA program for students anywhere in the world and with various backgrounds – and it has, Cates said. With a 96 percent retention rate, the program has included such diverse participants as a woman who logged on while in labor, a soldier on a ship bound for Afghanistan and a worker who spent two months on an offshore oil rig.

In a short time, the program has effectively doubled the size of the MBA program without having to build any classrooms, Cates said.

While the MBA program expanded its global reach virtually, William Fischer had a face-to-face impact on the health of people in West Africa. Fischer, associate program director for research in the medical school’s Division of Pulmonary Diseases and Critical Care, traveled to Guinea this summer to help combat the Ebola outbreak there.

As of Sept. 18, there have been 5,833 reported cases of Ebola in West Africa and 2,833 deaths – 50 percent happening within the past three weeks, Fischer said. These include 1,578 in Liberia, 623 in Guinea, 584 in Sierra Leone and eight in Nigeria. By the end of this month, health experts expect 10,000 new infections.

The disease is spread through direct contact, so in a family-centric region like West Africa where people readily care for sick family members, it is extremely difficult for people to avoid contracting the disease, Fischer said. Challenges to contain the outbreak include inadequate health facilities, a lack of the head-to-toe protective gear needed for health-care workers and a local distrust of government.

Fischer said his greatest fear was that the epidemic, if left unchecked, has the potential to become a generational event that could change the face of Sub-Saharan Africa. “This epidemic is doubling every three weeks,” he said.

The three presentations are posted online.

Making an impact

Further evidence of Carolina’s increasing impact on the world’s problems is shown in two different sets of numbers, Folt said.

The first is the total research contracts and grants Carolina researchers attract each year. For fiscal 2014, University researchers brought in $792.7 million in research contracts and grants, up nearly $15 million from the previous year.

The second, and lesser-known set of numbers, Folt said, demonstrates how Carolina research has translated into businesses here and throughout the world. At latest count, she said, Carolina has spawned at least 150 start-ups in North Carolina, from global companies like Quintiles to small start-ups like Lone Rider Brewery. Together, these companies generate more than $6 billion in annual revenue and nearly 8,000 workers in North Carolina and another 35,000 throughout the world.

The day before the full board meeting, both Powell and Folt joined an hour-long discussion of the trustees’ Innovation and Impact Committee, which focused on how to synthesize and accelerate the entrepreneurial culture that has spread across campus in the past five years.

The biggest victory, Folt said, is that everyone wants to be involved, and, “Once you open the door to innovation, you don’t want to shut it on anyone.”