From STEM to STEAMi

Recently I was in Istanbul presenting to a conference of business leaders on STEM education. I’m sure this is not an isolated event worldwide because these are boom times for STEM education. In a world still open to the wonders of space exploration, still wary of the latest infectious disease outbreak, we thank our lucky stars for science and technology. Math? Of course, as it relates to coding of computers. Technology and engineering? Who could object to suspension bridges or the iPhone?

At a national level the narrative is clear: STEM education leads to greater employability of young entrants into the workforce. It is also seen as leading to greater economic and social value creation capacity for society. Accordingly, ministries around the world are searching for the Holy Grail of science, technology, engineering and math. Money is pouring into basic science research, which is said to be a benchmark of innovation capability while the nerd has become a new cultural folk hero.

This is all well and good, but the problem comes about when STEM is seen as equivalent with innovation. “How are we doing on innovation?” says one minister of economic affairs of an unnamed European country. “Fine. Our percentage of GGP devoted to basic research has gone up .5 percent.” To which my rejoinder is, “Fine, but what about innovation?”

Obviously a world class STEM workforce is seen as essential to virtually every goal a nation has, whether it’s broadly shared economic prosperity, international competitiveness, a strong national defense, a clean energy future, and longer and healthier lives. And so societies invest, often heavily, in STEM education.

There are just a couple of problems with this narrative, which is a prime example of what social scientists have nicknamed the streetlight problem. When asked why he was looking for his lost keys under the streetlamp the drunk replies, “Because that’s where the light is.” Leaving aside the behavioral science implications of this story we can conclude that the tendency to look for things within our comfort zone or within our existing frames of reference is very appealing. In other words we tend to see what we have eyes to see and to exclude everything else.

So it is with innovation.

An important contribution to expanding the STEM frame comes from John Maeda, former president of RISD and former professor at the MIT Media Lab. He concluded that STEM required a missing leg in order to stand straight, which was including the A for Art and which led to the acronym STEAM.

There’s a rich body of thought to back this up. The A for Art embodies a great deal of the creativity that can animate technology. Technology is about how, art is about why and often poses questions of deeper purpose. John Seely Brown, when he was the head of Xerox PARC, started a program there called PAIRs, which stood for PARC Artist in Residence. This program teamed up scientists and technologists on the one hand with artists on the other to develop new forms of collaboration. The results were said to be salutary.

But the literature even goes further back to none other than the eminent cultural historian C.P. Snow, author of the classic Two Cultures that described the growing divide between the rationalism of science on the one hand and the qualitative and emotional depths of the humanities on the other.

I believe that the significance of Maeda’s contribution comes from the ability of design to assert itself into the broader conversation. It provides a path for design to find its way into the tent of policy making, resource allocation and strategy at the leadership level. This is important because the A for Art connotes artfulness, consideration of form, but most importantly doing what designers do well which is designing for someone, developing empathy for an end user, and understanding the nature of human beings.

I applaud this although I hear many more cynical policy types saying, “Yeah, yeah. Let’s get some of that “nice” stuff in there to augment the “serious” stuff.” But STEM has another missing ingredient. Rather than looking at innovation as an epiphenomenon of STEM, we need to look at it as a capability unto itself, which is a necessary bridge to the fruits that we all want in such terms as economic and social development.

Hence my proposal for the term STEAMi; putting the “i” into STEAM to yield STEAMi. The “i” stands for two things. First, innovation. We need to look at innovation as a discipline until itself not as the result or epiphenomenon of people in white lab coats or the Silicon Valley person who discovers the latest killer application. In a way the narrative around STEM comes from a nostalgia for certain historically-determined models of innovation.

Elsewhere I have referred to three eras of innovation. 1.0 was the industrial model which in a sense gave rise to the initial value placed on STEM with its emphasis on manufacturing, efficiency, time and motion studies, rationality, etc. 2.0 is the Silicon Valley model of killer apps, which is a sense represented the triumph of the engineer, the nerd, the technologist, to disrupt existing business models through the use of technology. The third era is what I called human-centered innovation, which is placing the individual — the human being — in to the center of the innovation process. Designers design for someone. The tools of empathy and user-centered design are key to starting the innovation process and this theme finds itself resonant in other areas such as egovernment and social entrepreneurship.

Obviously innovation 1.0 and 2.0 are heavily tilted towards the primacy of STEM. However, it is the era of innovation 3.0 that puts the I of the individual back into the innovation equation.

There is also the “i” of integration as innovation is a complex phenomenon that draws from a number of disciplines. John Seely Brown has an eye-opening diagram that places art and design on one axis, science and technology on another. In a sense innovation comes from the mash up and blending of those. If we boil down the innovation process to its essentials, I use the simple words plant-grow-harvest. Plant involves generating ideas or the equivalent of planting seeds, grow is the cultivation of those ideas and the development of them, whereas harvest is about scaling and taking these items into the marketplace so that they can change the existing order of things. Seen in this way innovation becomes highly integrated because it includes elements of science, technology, design, entrepreneurship, creativity studies and more.

Scientific innovation still has pride of place. It is a familiar concept. It’s well known. The funding mechanisms and the social institutions to support it are well defined, but it cannot be equated with innovation. So we could say we innovation itself has an innovators’ dilemma. The very success of STEM in creating objective forms of wealth requires cross the chasm to looking at wealth as the capability for innovation, the skills of a talented person, the ability to exert strategic foresight and so on.

The other point is a practical one from the point of view of crafting national and organizational strategy. Developing capabilities for innovation is the key agenda. Science itself is expensive. It’s an expensive enterprise and it can be divided into a number of different agendas: originating scientific discovery, including the most expensive of all which is curiosity-based scientific discovery, building on science that has been developed by others, the application of science — the add-on or standing on the shoulders of giants — and then third using science or finding the practical application of almost the engineering of the scientific breakthrough.

These are all strategies but I believe they need to be informed by an appeal to the entire innovation process, the bringing of innovation to the marketplace and most importantly the return of the individual to the equation so that we can move finally from STEM to STEAMi.