Innovation can’t be taught. X’s Karen Roter Davis stresses cooperation and creation instead.
Standing at the intersection of media, technology and business is a weighty mission for entrepreneurs who want to bring innovation to the journalism industry. For Medill’s media innovation and entrepreneurship students, mastering all three in a one-year program is a whirlwind task.
Karen Roter Davis, a team lead at Alphabet’s X and a Northwestern University alumna (JD, MBA 2000), taught MIE’s graduate students in San Francisco about the business of innovation in media, highlighting innovation in journalism and beyond, bringing to attention the wisdom and advice of Silicon Valley’s thought leaders and introducing them to her network of Bay Area professionals including Two Sigma senior vice president Kristen Thiede, Modsy founder and CEO Shanna Tellerman and Sauce Labs vice president of engineering Brad Adelberg.
Rather than drilling hard skills in a rapid-fire 10-week course, Karen says she wanted to demonstrate to students that techniques like working in teams, awareness of culture, communicating and creating were valuable and instrumental to entrepreneurship and innovation.
“You can’t teach innovation — that’s counterintuitive,” she says. “You can only do your best to cultivate an environment for it for those receptive to it, and make sure people know there are lots of ways to build success.”
Davis shared her thoughts on teaching goals, cross-pollination to breed innovation, and why she is humbled by working with entrepreneurs:
You graduated from Princeton University and then studied law and business at Northwestern University. Tell me a bit about your career path since Northwestern and the pivots that led to your current adventure at Alphabet’s X.
After my JD/MBA at Northwestern I joined a boutique Silicon Valley law firm called Venture Law Group, which represented startups and venture capital firms. After seeing the dot-com boom and bust from founder and VC perspectives, Google — which was then a fast-growing startup — recruited me to join its legal department in 2003 as one of its first attorneys.
I worked on some of Google’s earliest partnerships, M&A integration and legal/sales operations for high-growth, rapidly scaling businesses like AdSense. I also led internal operations for Google’s IPO.
Shortly thereafter, I transitioned to New Business Development, working with product managers and engineers on early-stage incubation and exploratory efforts. I left Google in 2008 to advise startups, did a stint at GE Software and Analytics kickstarting their IoT strategy for its industrial businesses and, in 2013, joined Urban Engines, an urban mobility analytics startup, as a GM and first business person on the team.
In fall 2016, I rejoined Google when Urban Engines was acquired. After a year at Google, I transitioned to X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory.”
What do you do at X?
I manage an early-stage portfolio at X. We aim for radical solutions using fledgling breakthrough technologies with the potential for huge impact if successful. Sometimes I act more like a board member; sometimes I’m a player/coach, determining whether or not these will go anywhere, and if they can, seeing how quickly we can get them off the ground and growing.
This was your first time teaching in Medill’s MIE program. How did you come across this opportunity? What was it like to teach at your alma mater?
Mary Lou Song — a longtime friend, Medill alum and adjunct professor in San Francisco — reached out to me about the opportunity. We had spoken about teaching before as something that had always interested me. Both my parents were teachers. The fact that it was at Northwestern was icing on the cake!
You taught a class on the business of innovation, but most of your students had no business experience. How did that affect the way you taught? What were the key lessons that you wanted your students to come away with?
This may not be a popular answer for anyone reading this! (Laughs.) But when I thought about my experience at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and how it prepared me — or didn’t — for my current work, I realized that I didn’t remember very much, factually speaking. What stuck with me as really critical were things like relationship building, culture, communicating well, using different lenses for approaching ambiguity or problems and either overcoming them or living with them, and learning what would and wouldn’t work for me personally in my career. How do I teach those things? What would be most resonant over the long term for students?
I spent a lot of time thinking about that and planned the course with that in mind. “Real world” guest speakers had been impactful for my classmates and me, so I made sure to invite them from my network. Working in teams, awareness of culture, communicating and creating — all instrumental to entrepreneurship and innovation — were things I wanted to demonstrate were valuable and to foster in real-time, even if students had to learn them the hard way. I wanted people to spend more time doing and less time reading, so — counting on their journalism skills of distilling large amounts of information — I divided up the reading list among the students and had them provide summaries for each other, and had them seek “real world” feedback from their networks.
At the end of the day, if I was able to demystify unfamiliar terms or topics and give students the confidence they needed to pursue their goals in ways authentic to them despite not knowing all the answers or how to do everything, that would be a win.
Because you can’t teach innovation — that’s counterintuitive. You can only do your best to cultivate an environment for it for those receptive to it, and make sure people know there are lots of ways to build success. That was my goal.
What role do you think your course and the MIE program plays in fostering innovation in the media industry?
I’m a big fan of cross-pollination, which I think is vital to innovation. Giving students the opportunity to learn about innovation in the media industry as well as other industries, and giving them the confidence to dive in is bound to create new ways of thinking, terrific new media applications, and lots of value.
What is the most rewarding part of teaching aspiring entrepreneurs?
I find working with entrepreneurs at whatever stage to be intellectually engaging, personally rewarding, and always very humbling. Entrepreneurs get a ton of advice thrown at them, but don’t often take a lot of it — and a lot of times that’s actually a good thing. I feel incredibly grateful to be included in their journeys, hopefully providing as much useful help and support as I can along the way!
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About the MSJ Media Innovation & Entrepreneurship Specialization
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