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TSW* S1E4 - Ellen Schmidt-Devlin of University of Oregon
43 Plays4 months ago
TSW* welcomes Ellen Schmidt-Devlin, co-founder and Executive Director of the Sports Product Management Program at the University of Oregon. Ellen’s illustrious career spans 27 years at Nike, where she worked closely with legendary coach Bill Bowerman and gained invaluable experience in product development, merchandising, and international business management.
Ellen’s journey is marked by her passion for advancing women’s sports and her commitment to sustainability and innovation in the sports product industry. In our conversation, we delve into her experiences at Nike, the challenges and triumphs she faced, and her pioneering efforts in establishing the SPM program, which equips students with the skills needed to excel in the sports product sector.
We also explore her documentary, “We Grew Wings,” which celebrates the history and achievements of the University of Oregon’s women’s track and field teams, highlighting the impact of Title IX and the ongoing fight for gender equality in sports.
Whether you’re an aspiring athlete, an industry professional, or simply interested in sports and innovation, this episode is packed with insights and inspiration from Ellen’s remarkable career and dedication to nurturing the next generation of leaders in sports product management.
Tune in to gain valuable perspectives and be inspired by Ellen’s journey and her relentless pursuit of excellence in the sports industry.
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and First Encounters
00:01:35
Speaker
Go. OK. Excellent. Excellent. All right. So I'm here with Ellen Schmidt Devlin. Did I say that correctly? You did. OK. Excellent. Who has an excellent background that I'd love to talk about both at Nike. You have a documentary that is very compelling and now a University of Oregon with the program that you run and the new innovation. I don't want to call it the innovation space that's coming online as well. Right. So that is, I'm really excited to talk about all those things, but I like to give people an opportunity to introduce themselves when we start out as well. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Excellent. So my introduction starts back when I started college at the University of Oregon.
00:02:20
Speaker
1976, 18-year-old finishing my first cross-country race, and a gentleman coming out of the stands and shaking my hand, saying, Hi, my name is Bill Bowerman. Would you get the girls off the team to test Nike shoes? Bill Bowerman's the co-founder of Nike. And I said, nice to meet you, Mr. Bowerman, but we're not girls, we're women. He thought that was pretty funny and we became very fast friends. And so I worked in his small innovation lab in Eugene, Oregon while I was a student at the University of Oregon. And my business students now love the fact that it never occurred to me to ask to be paid.
00:03:00
Speaker
You know, I was just enjoying myself. I could get my shoes, you know, shoe goo on my shoes, you know, get shoes to test, you know, and so I was from a family of 10, you know, I mean, I could afford one pair of shoes a year. So to get a few things from Nike during that time was a huge advantage for my career. So my senior year, he asked me to take a break and to train for the Olympics. And so I did that in 1980.
Ellen's Nike Journey
00:03:25
Speaker
And those are the Olympics that we boycotted. And so that kind of started my career at Nike. So I was with Nike from Eugene, Oregon to Exeter, New Hampshire to Beaverton, Oregon, where our world headquarters is. And then I had quite a long career in Asia. My first offshore assignment was in Hong Kong. I was a product line manager for running footwear.
00:03:46
Speaker
And then I was in Tokyo, Japan. I was the, let's see, we called it the product, the footwear product director for Japan. And then I came back to Oregon and at that point Nike was a sports company, but they were, I mean, to be honest with you, the consumers were enjoying Nike shoes for a lot more than just sports and outdoor activities. So we put together a new division that was focused on what we back then we called sports style And so I did that for some years and then I came back out to Asia I ran their operations in Thailand for three years came back to Oregon to run their America's footwear business director and then my final assignment and was in Busan, Korea, responsible for their China office and their Busan, Korea office. And then I retired 15 years ago in 2009 and had this crazy idea. I said, every day at Nike, we tell the same joke. And that's, you can't go to school for this.
00:04:45
Speaker
And I thought,
Innovating Education and Media
00:04:47
Speaker
what if we could? What if we could develop a program to get people ready for the business side of creation? Well, universities had design programs. Nobody had creation programs for the business side. And so we brought together. We did exactly what we did at Nike. That's it. We asked the consumer. So we asked the companies, what do you want? And then we developed a program according to what they told us that they wanted. And so then we had partners. And so once we had partners, then we brought in students. Our first class is a Master's of Science in Sports Product Management. And our first class graduated in 2017. We already have people in the C-suite in many of these companies now. And we have 500 people out in the industry.
00:05:36
Speaker
It's a thinly veiled leadership program. So this industry, we need to change. The leadership needs to be younger. It needs to be more diverse. It needs to be more international. And that kind of describes our student body. Tell me a little bit one thing that that you didn't mention, but I think is super interesting as well as you you're the producer of a documentary called we grew wings. Yes. Yes. So I left Nike and was living in Korea. And so I moved back to Oregon.
00:06:08
Speaker
And I ran into a lot of people that I know since I had run track at the University of Oregon They said Ellen you're gonna be so pleased Because the stories are being told the books are being written the documentaries are being done and I'm like, that's fantastic I said, give me give me the most popular book. Tell me about the most popular book. They said, oh, let me think Oh, okay. It's called men of Oregon. That's by Kenny Moore I'm like, okay, how about the documentaries? Oh, yeah, yeah, there's several of them out on Prefontaine. And so my first question is, what about the women? And the person I'm talking to said,
00:06:45
Speaker
There were women then. And so I decided at that point that the stories needed to be told. And so, I mean, I started without any experience in documentary film making. I partnered up with people that had been working on in this space for quite some time. Eric Little and Sarah Henderson, they were my directors. And then we basically went out there to figure out what are the stories that need to be told. And when we first started working on it, we wanted to introduce it in 2012. And that was going to be the 40th anniversary of Title IX. And Title IX is basically the opportunity for women and girls to have the opportunity in the math and the
Women's Sports History
00:07:29
Speaker
sciences, right? But it also gave us opportunity in sports at all levels. But I didn't want to do a film that people would put into a category. It's like, oh, it's a Title IX film.
00:07:42
Speaker
And I wanted it to be something more than that. I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted it to be. So actually, I got a meeting with Phil Knight. I obviously worked for his company for a lot of years. And we sat down. I kind of explained the project to him. And he said, how long is your documentary going to be? You know, you need to find some inflection points. You need to find kind of some different ways to demonstrate, you know, what you're trying to say to your audience. And so we found two. The 1985 team that went to the NCAA's and the 2011 team we followed to the NCAA championships.
00:08:24
Speaker
And so we had a chance to, it was pretty cool because when we first started telling the stories, I thought, oh, this is about connecting the past with the current. Because what happens with really minorities and women is that every generation has to start over. And if every generation starts over, you can never get ahead. So I was able to introduce the women from 1985 to the current women that were competing at the University of Oregon. And it was like, wow, you know, this is incredible knowledge that can be shared between these generations. But then as we got into the project further, I could tell that it wasn't about that at all. It was about inspiring the next generation to believe in their dreams and to never give up.
00:09:08
Speaker
And so that's what the film is about. It's very much using women's stories, the obstacles that the women of 1985 had. I remarked that there was no Olympics in 1980. Well, at the universities we ran the 1,500, the 3,000, the 5,000, and the 10,000. The Olympics, the longest event was at 1500 meters. And so in 1984, they added the marathon, but they didn't add anything longer on the track. And so this group of women that ended up winning the NCAA's, nobody knew them because they ran events that were not in the Olympics.
00:09:46
Speaker
So they competed against Jackie Joyner, Kersey, and Gail Devers. These were incredible names that a lot of people knew because they were Olympians. But the Oregon women were not, because what they competed in was not known. And then we followed the 2011 team. And one of the teams wins, one of them doesn't. But it was interesting, we did a 20-minute piece and then we showed it to the next generation. And they told us two things. And the first thing, both of them surprised me to be honest with you, the first thing they asked is what do the boys think?
00:10:23
Speaker
And I thought, oh, I'm going to be disappointed. But then I realized that they thought this was so cool. They wanted the boys to know. So we brought in Chip Kelly
Documentary Release Details
00:10:35
Speaker
to talk about the women's track team, because he was he was a football coach at the University of Oregon at that point. And we thought for him to talk about the women's team, because he would actually leave football practice and come watch the women compete, the men and women compete in track and field. So he had a good point of view. The second thing that they told us is that why do you only tell us stories about people that win, right? Because they didn't know it was 20 minutes They didn't realize that we were gonna tell them a story that of people that won and then people that didn't win, right? So yeah, so and we produced that we Released it in 2012 and we did the opening during the track and field trials and down in Eugene, Oregon, to a packed house. We had Katherine Ross as our narrator. Those that know Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid know that she was the actress in that. And her husband is very well known as well. Sam Elliott is her husband. We used to have him drive her to the recordings, and so he said, we're going to put that in the credits. Sam Elliott, driver.
00:11:44
Speaker
But obviously, it was a self-funded project. But it was very much a passion of mine to be able to tell stories that hadn't been told. One of the things that you said that sticks out is, and we teach this in entrepreneurship as well, that the stories of losing, the stories are often much more impactful than that of winning. And yet, oftentimes, it's taught. and the cases are taught based around the success stories. One thing, I want to go back to something else too that I noticed when you were talking about both the documentary and the master's program, is that you do something, I think,
00:12:31
Speaker
I call it with my students building the bridge while you're crossing it. The story seems to be evolving in the documentary as you're learning more. You're learning how to do a documentary. You're learning how to do it. What kind of master's program do you want? And so I'm hearing a lot of that. I'm wondering, too, now that you have this new center coming on board, the NTX Bridge Innovation Lab. Did I get that correctly? Yes. How much of a bridge are we building as we're crossing that too? And how are all of your experiences kind of informing the development of this
Life Lessons from Nike
00:13:05
Speaker
space? I think it's interesting because if you think about my time at Nike, 1980 to 2009,
00:13:13
Speaker
I mean we were building that company and when we all felt like we were a part of building that company I mean we didn't know what we were doing you know I mean today you look at this huge 50 billion dollar corporation and it's like I don't know if it was easy or hard but we never saw it happen you know we all saw it happen we were a part of it So I think leaving Nike, in a certain way, I'm pretty fearless that I'm not afraid of failing. And to be honest with you, I just assume I'm going to at Nike every single day where we're like, okay, I did a hundred things today.
00:13:46
Speaker
I just hope 51 of them are right. So I think it was at fearlessness and not being afraid of the unknown and not being afraid to let it reveal itself. Because I think oftentimes we go into things, particularly once we have experience, thinking we know the answer. Don't you think? That's absolutely true. Yeah. We were talking about that a little bit before the podcast where I was saying, you know, I think I know how to do these centers, but that doesn't mean anything. What matters is what everybody else, what the world will tell you and how it will inform and shape, you know, the ideas. Yeah, and I think if you look at companies, usually the companies that are overtaking the behemoth-tightened companies are the new ones, because they're not assuming they know. So I think it was the same with the film. I never assumed I knew. I assumed I was going to run out of money at some point, but I never assumed I knew what the story was.
00:14:46
Speaker
I assumed it would reveal itself. And the same with the master's program. I assumed that there were a tremendous number of people out there that would help. And when we built that program, every person that helped us build it will tell you that it was their idea and they built it. So we were able to create a vision that everybody felt like they had a level of ownership, that it belonged to them. You know, and when you do that then people stay with you too, you know, because if you can build something that's only one piece of it That's right, you know and and building is hard enough, you know But building and then having to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild and I think the fact that we were able to create kind of that ownership feeling from
00:15:31
Speaker
really companies from around the world that, you know, now once they have the ownership filling, do you think we had problems getting internships? Right. Of course not. You know, we had problems getting jobs. Of course not. That's right. They were their people. You know, we would just have them for 18 months or 21 months, you know, 18 if you come to Portland, 21 if you're online. Sure, sure. So it was kind of that kind of partnership. Yeah. And how do those those those similar kind of mind, how does that similar kind of mindset and those challenges How do they touch this new center now that you're bringing online? What are you noticing? That's a good point. Well, so April of 2023, I think that everything you build, it builds upon that.
00:16:15
Speaker
So the film that I did, the person that was so impressed with this film was the dean of the business school at the University of Oregon. And so I said, I have a crazy idea. I talked to him. And so he had seen that happen. And he was like, well, she could do that. So he had this unbelievable level of confidence in me to do something I had no idea how to do. But he partnered me with a really strong emeritus professor, Dr. Roger Best. And so when we worked together, I mean, we were able to do, we started with, I was a street smarts and he was a book smart. And so then he had me go back and get my PhD. So now I have a little bit of the book, the smart side.
00:17:00
Speaker
But I mean, it was that level of confidence. And then we built the SPM program. Now, this is running for eight years. And so then I get a phone call from somebody I've known
University Collaborations
00:17:10
Speaker
for years at Nike and saying, hey, you know what? I'm working with a company. I'm trying to convince them to bring an innovation center to Portland. I think that you, the University of Oregon and the program that you've had in place, I think you can help me do that. Would you sit down with them? And when it first started, to be honest with you, it was like, well, we may bring them over to see you. We may bring, pretty soon, because, I mean, we have, obviously we have an incredible website. We have a lot of video that we've done about ourselves.
00:17:41
Speaker
They studied us and then they came through the door and they were like, we want to partner with you. We think that you are about the future of this industry and we are about the future of this industry. We want to partner with you. So I think it took that building, but then it also took the fact that this has never been done before. We don't really know what we're doing, but we're figuring out along the way. And it really is all about the people. I mean, the first thing I did was I went back and I got somebody from our first graduating class. And I said, you have to work with me on this. Because I know you. I know what you've done. For eight years, you've gotten all the way up to vice president. Come and help us stand this up. So I would say my job is a connector. If I know talent, I know how to put things together, that you can build things if you're a connector. Interesting.
00:18:28
Speaker
Can you speak to a little bit, and maybe this isn't the case, but having had a background in industry and running my own company for a number of years and then switching over to academia, one of the things that I've noticed is partnerships, particularly partnerships at academic institutions that are outside and are industry related, can introduce some tension sometimes because there's the academic mission and so on, and then there's the mission of industry and sometimes they may or may not align. And that may not be the case with what you've been doing, but have you have you encountered that? And how do you work through some of that? I would say that we're a little I mean, University of Oregon, we're I mean, if you look at our campus, you see the pioneering woman, the pioneering man.
00:19:14
Speaker
We're still pioneers, you know, and so I When I mean obviously I just run the sports product management program when we met with NTX We talked to them about a relationship with the University of Oregon because we have a sports product design program I mean we have AI there they work on AI we have chemists We have all these different parts of our university. Yes, and so I think once I had gone to Asia for 10 days I really understood that what they were doing and because I also understood the university then I came back and I pitched it to the University of Oregon saying we want this they want this those align you know and for us I mean if I just speak to sports product management
00:19:57
Speaker
are three pillars of excellence are global sustainability and innovation. And this checks all three of those boxes. And if you think even those are only the pillars of the Sports Product Management Program, those are pillars that you could use for almost any program. And when you have a partner that's saying, we're not from here, We're driving innovation. In fact, we just spent $200 million on innovation. And what we built is the most sustainable process in your industry. You know, hey, do you want to partner with us? To be honest with you, it wasn't a hard sell back to the university. I think also is that our main university is in Eugene.
00:20:40
Speaker
We're in Portland. And so as a satellite, I think it gives us an opportunity to build new things, because the bigger organization is in Eugene, and we connect back to Eugene. So we can establish it here, then we connect back to Eugene. In fact, on Monday, NTX is here, and we'll take them to Eugene to the human performance lab, to the night campus, to meet an AI professor, to meet a wearability professor. We'll go to the track meet down there. I mean, we'll connect back to the mothership. But they're connecting to a smaller entity of the university.
00:21:24
Speaker
a little less politics, a little less barriers. Here in Portland, Jane Gordon is in charge of Portland. She reports to the president of the university. So if I can convince Jane, she'll convince the president, and we're off to the races. That's interesting. The two spaces that I established at DePaul, and now the one space at Washington and Lee, all have found a similar kind of path. And I think the term that I've used, it's a tiger team. Are you familiar with this? I am not. I think it's a Tiger team, which is the idea that an institution in order to foster change from within will create a team that's not outside, but somewhat adjacent to or close to the outside and allow that group to evolve and try out new ideas.
00:22:19
Speaker
And if it fails, then the people get reincorporated back into the organization. But if it's successful, both the people and the ideas get reincorporated back in into the institution. So at DePaul, you know, we were on a kind of like a corner, weird, high rise building space that the golf team used to occupy in the third floor of a downtown building. Chicago and nothing else was around there and we were kind of allowed to operate a little bit outside of the all of the norms that the institution held similarly at Washington and Lee the the building that that I run is is a little bit off of our campus and as a result just that that little bit of an air gap separation allows for new ideas to evolve and then the institution can can bring them back in if i should have come to visit you because i visited a lot of universities when we were building this program and one of them was harvard and so if you think about what their harvard innovation lab is right it's it's outside you know and so and that was when it occurred to me what we're trying to do
00:23:23
Speaker
is to influence the inside, but we're going to have to do it from the outside. And one of the professors I was interested in was Anita Albrus. And when I explained to her what I was trying to do at the university, which I think this is part of why an outside team sometimes can do this while the inside team cannot, is that she looked at me straighten the eye and she said you are trying to do the hardest thing at a university. I didn't know that and I think my naivety probably was my strength on this you know because it was like I mean please never tell Ellen she can't do something you know I mean obviously that's a competitive side you know but I think if we follow the line of that separate team
00:24:09
Speaker
You know, when we were developing this at the University of Oregon, there had been no new degree program in the business school for 30 years. So there was no institutional knowledge of how do you put a new degree program in place. You know, so obstacles were put in place because they just, I mean, it was like, there just wasn't a knowledge of, okay, we're going to send you back to prove that everybody can get jobs. Okay. And we'll go do that again. You know, and again, I'm supposed to go to the industry, you know, and I finally just went and say, you guys all need to tell me you're going to hire these guys. They did. I think that that helped obviously, you know, and then with, with Roger, Dr. Best having the internal knowledge.
00:24:50
Speaker
You know, he was able to better understand, you know, okay, if we're going to—we need 27 new courses, you know. And I remember when we first started, you know, I said, if this is going to be true to this industry, that it's going to take—whatever courses we have at the University of Oregon, it's going to take either adapting or adopting those. and changing those or new courses. And then I was told that will take you 27 years to get that through. So then we made the decision to take existing courses and then just change them. We also had Dr. Jim Bean and Jim went on to be the Provost at Northeastern in Boston after this. Because I think what happens
00:25:34
Speaker
Is it obviously to create something new? You're using everybody's social equity. That's right. You're also using energy that sometimes can't be refueled. That's right. Because there's a lot of fights that happen. There's a lot of disagreements. There's people will use a lot of emotional energy to help because something gets to stand something up. And then oftentimes they have to walk away. That's right. And I've seen that. I'm guessing that's a trend you're seeing too. That's right, and within my own experience as well. But I'm seeing a lot of patterns here with having internal stakeholders who are familiar with the tribal knowledge of the institution and can kind of help you navigate those waters is important. You mentioned something that struck me as
00:26:20
Speaker
There's a humorous anecdote I've heard where a consultant is somebody who comes from the outside and tells everybody what you've already been telling them the entire time. Something like that, like the person from the outside who can come in and bring that kind of experience. Bosch also, when you were talking about bringing the outside in, they have a global network of innovation centers called the Connectory. And the goal of the Connectory is to bring the outside in. So really, it's that in order to defray the costs of research and things like that, they have collaboration centers where startups can come and work and then they'll acquire that IP if it becomes successful. But there's always this pattern, it seems, of finding ways to take outside knowledge and then internalize it if you so choose. And I think it requires a tremendous amount of trust and respect. So if you're dealing with the academic side and they don't have a respect of business, it's not going to work. And if you're dealing with business and they can't respect academia, it's not going to work. So when I told you I went back and got my PhD, I actually did it at Case Western.
00:27:39
Speaker
And it's a practitioner scholar and PhD. So it's kind of taking those two sides and figuring out that together we're so much stronger, but we don't speak the same languages. And because we don't speak the same languages, oftentimes we miss out the advantages of either side. So if we go back to NTX, I think that in Asia, there's a high level of respect for education. You know, I mean, I will walk into a room and they know I'm a professor that would be like, oh, you know, thank you so much for being here, Dr. Shane Devlin, you know, such respect, you know, so it wasn't a big leap for them to make a decision to partner with a university here in the United States versus another company.
00:28:28
Speaker
Um, they also they have a long-term view of this You know, they understand that if they educate the next generation on how to use their ai how to use their water Waterless coloration systems, then that's what these all the people are going to do when they get to the companies They're going to be like wait, we need the material that's highest on the higg index I know it. I I actually know how to print a t-shirt that way. I know how to die. Uh jean that way i know because i learned it when i was at the university so speaking to the respect between academia and industry you'd mentioned something that i once had a dean at de paul tell me that he had never had an academic
00:29:14
Speaker
Present key performance indicators for a program. He said that's not how it typically not how we typically approach things But you you'd mentioned that your program has global sustainability and innovation attached to it Which sounds to me a lot like values that then you attach strategies and tactics to and you begin to measure and things like that and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the program, the innovation lab, whatever it is that kind of strikes your fancy about how you measure success with these things.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah. So we actually, we go through a very rigorous strategic planning process every year. And we have probably one of the best strategic planners who used to work at Nike, some of our faculty professors of practice. So that helps us out tremendously.
Revamping the SPM Program
00:30:02
Speaker
And we made the decision that we were hit hard by COVID-19. And, and we really needed to recover the program. And so we have a big part of our program that we call just SPM 1.0. And that is how do we run an excellent program here in Portland and online. And so, and that's, I mean, that's a That's a full-time staff to do that 27 pro tem faculty for full-time faculty I mean that's that's what it takes And then we made a decision over the last year and a half that I'm the executive director That as a co-founder as well. Let's give me something called SBM 2.0.
00:30:44
Speaker
So let me go out there and figure out what else is out there. What can we build on top of the 10 years of degree program that we've had in place in the 500 graduates? And so NTX came out of that. So that was realizing that we need to go beyond where we're at today. You know, because this industry, I mean, I feel like we teach and educate our students on what's happening today and what happened yesterday. But I don't believe we're teaching them about tomorrow. And I believe NTX gives us an opportunity to do that. So SPM 2.0 was an opportunity to look where's tomorrow and how do we become an important part of that.
00:31:29
Speaker
We also have some other parts in there, too. We're doing, for example, we're doing a traceability summit, and we'll be doing that in October, and we're partnering with Syracuse University Sustainable Apparel Coalition, I think is the name of it. cooperative cooperative and I mean basically the I I talked about the brands and the tier one manufacturers tier 2 tier 3 all the way to the farm there are new policies in place in The developed countries in the US and in Europe that are requiring companies to do something different When they ship things into the United States and ship things into Europe and so and there's no standard
00:32:16
Speaker
So every company is doing this different and to meet the requirements of the US government or Germany or someplace else. So we have created what we consider a Switzerland for the apparel and footwear industry. So we can bring together the brands, the tier one, tier two, tier three, manufacturers, the government, and basically what we're working on is building a standard for the footwear and apparel industry that everybody in the industry will adopt. And the government's looking at us like, could you do that? And we're like, we certainly hope so, but we don't
Corporate Education and Expansion
00:32:50
Speaker
know. I mean, it's back to the, let's see if it works. And so we've got that going on on our 2.0. And we also have that area that we're calling corporate education.
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, we're educating people. We're going to educate 70 people a year. This industry has hundreds of thousands, millions of people. So the companies have asked us to come out and to educate their people. And so our first client is actually a company out of Sri Lanka, a manufacturer that wants to understand better what happens at the front end. So what happens in consumer insights, in branding, in product line management, in design thinking. and then with a kind of a red thread of leadership through that training. And so we'll go out and offer that training to companies. And so those are kind of all the new products that we're looking at. And 2.0 is an opportunity for us to reach further. Like one of our faculty, Professor John Everly says that Ellen's job is to kick the ball further down the field. So we're in a meeting, it's like I can tell, are they ready for me to kick the ball? Or should I just be quiet? Right, right, right. And work with another group on the 2.0, so. Right. You know, one of the things that I've heard from industry partners in the past, kind of speaking to that looking forward component and what, not just looking back and looking at the present, but what do we need? How do we
00:34:15
Speaker
create, build a student, how do we shape a student who can fit into that more forward-thinking vision.
Designing Sustainable Systems
00:34:22
Speaker
One of the things that I hear from, I've heard from a lot of, you know, like Bosch, for instance, Caterpillar, is one of the key markers they're looking for when it comes to looking toward the future is really something that seems so simple to me and doesn't really seem future thinking at all. Which is that they're looking for students who can collaborate and communicate and they see it as a missing component in a lot of the way that an academic institution is preparing students right now. I don't know if that's something that you've. I would agree with both of those and I would add one C and that would be curiosity.
00:34:56
Speaker
I mean when we are looking for students we are looking for students that are and I think everything we've talked about so far is You know not taking a look at the way things are today But the potential of what they could be in the future and I think that I think it takes a high level of curiosity And yes, it takes collaboration Communication, you know, and I think you and I talked earlier about the whole concept of communicating right is that it's a different world now and I mean, you need to know how to communicate across cultures. You need to know when you can send a text and when you need to go and be there face to face. And I think that that requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and being able to turn to the person that's done that for years and say, okay, if I were going to do this, how would, if you were going to do this, how would you do it? And trusting that person and realizing that, you know, that they,
00:35:50
Speaker
They likely will have their way, and maybe you want to follow it. Maybe you don't. But at least you have some way of learning through others. So being a systems builder, which is kind of what it sounds like. You're building lots of systems. Designing sustainable systems is my PhD. Oh, OK. Well, there you go. OK. And that's what you're doing. Sustainable can mean a lot of things, too, right? Sustainable over time, et cetera. It's all an energy thing. Anyways, how do you build systems that encourage those three C's that you're talking about and shape students to value the creativity component, the communication, the collaboration? How do you develop a system that does that?
00:36:37
Speaker
Yeah, oh, I think it starts with not building. I mean, universities are set up in a series of components. You know, it's like, okay, these are the admissions people, you go get people, right? You're the educators, you educate them, and you over there, you go find them jobs. You know, so when we built our program, we didn't build it that way. We brought into admissions committee meetings, people from the industry, So they all have to answer, this person fits in the industry before we will educate the person. So what we're trying to do is, just like we would talk about a circular system and sustainability, do the same thing with people. And so, I mean, yes, you're not going to get it all right. I would say of everybody that we, I would say 96% of our people are in the industry and everybody says, well, what about the other 4%?
00:37:25
Speaker
I said they found a different place. We're in the people business, so it's not going to be exact. But I think that that trust and respect that we talked about between academia and industry has to be the same thing with our students. That we trust them, we respect them. And we treat them like young professionals. And we expect them to treat us as if we're their first company that they're working for or their fifth or whatever it is.
Faculty and Student Dynamics
00:37:55
Speaker
So I don't know. I think it takes a great amount of effort. And there's something that our faculty have that I think is really interesting. And I don't know how to explain this.
00:38:11
Speaker
92% of our faculty come from an industry that they're very very well compensated So nobody that teaches for us needs the money we give them. Yeah, nobody nobody does so they all do it for passion Yeah, and they all do it to be a part of something greater than themselves because the way we have them teach is that in a term you're teaching with four other people and So you meet once a week with the other group. I mean, it's very collaborative teaching. So obviously you would say one way we teach collaboration is we demonstrate it every single day when we're teaching. And then the same with communication. All the professors know what has happened in any other class. So the students, you can't pass anything by our professors.
00:38:58
Speaker
You know, it's like, well, I know you were taught that on Monday, or I know we have a test next Tuesday, therefore your paper for me is going to be, you know, so I think we demonstrated. And then because we get people from an industry with really high requirements. They're all very, very competitive. We're also very, very curious. And so I think we demonstrate a lot of those three things. And then we require it. So when they come in our program, they come in as individuals. They're going to be educated as a cohort. And then we put them in creation teams. And so your backgrounds in design, you know how difficult it is to be with a creation team.
00:39:36
Speaker
It's not like every other team. They've had an undergraduate where they've had the luxury of, I'm in business, the business college, all my other teammates are from business. Well, we all kind of understand our design. We all kind of know creation team. You got an engineer on there. You got a designer on there. You have a business person on there. And we have a human physiology or biomechanics person on there because we're sports and outdoor. And then we always put somebody in that I consider other. Because I was the other. I was an education major. And so that creation team moves through the program together. They have to build a brand together. They have to build a product together. They have to take the product to manufacturing. They have to test the product. And then they have to bring the product to market. So I think that it's the school of hard knocks, too. They can't get through this program if they're not collaborative. And they can't communicate.
00:40:32
Speaker
So I want to I want to touch on a couple things that you brought up you brought up the experiential kind of I'm sorry the bringing people from the industry into the program which speaks to kind of like an experiential component to me you also brought up I think in general, the cohort model, how you bring students through it, and respect as well. When I first started the Innovation Centers at DePaul,
00:41:03
Speaker
I don't want to say I did an interesting thing. I did a thing. And I don't know if it's interesting or not, but it seems interesting, which is that we put the students in charge of it. We put the students in charge of naming the space. We put the students in charge of, and then the second space is while we put them in charge of coming up with the policies. We had a long discussion with them about how safety is not about fear. It's about respect and giving them kind of the respect that we given this framework, you can build on this and you can do what you want, made the program, the centers, I think more sustainable over
Experiential Learning and Global Exposure
00:41:38
Speaker
time. They will go on to exist, I'm convinced, for a long enough time as a result of them being student run rather than like central around one individual or one individual's ideas.
00:41:50
Speaker
So there are a couple kind of things I want to unpack in there. And one is, have you noticed, going back to one of the first things I was saying, have you noticed anything different about how somebody coming from industry teaches a class and how that affects the class from the standpoint of respect? If it's a more experiential kind of thing rather than lecture, maybe there's a little bit more trust in the student there. Absolutely, yeah. And we really encourage that with our faculty as well. I mean, they're going to have knowledge that they want to share, but it's not about old war stories. We're very careful of what knowledge we want each topic expert to share. And then their classes are built around, they have to teach the students the information that students have to try.
00:42:40
Speaker
And, you know, they basically, everything they're doing, I always say that we teach the head through the hands and the heart. You know, so the branding class, they're building a brand. You know, with all the requirements, the same way that if you were building Nike, you know, you're building a brand for, that you're gonna take forward from your first term all the way to the end. You know, with the building of the product, we have an innovation lab. You can build anything in our innovation lab, from footwear apparel, equipment, 3D, you can do anything there. And so what we do with the students is we require them to be able to use their hands. And not because we think they're going to be out sewing on machines, making things. That's not going to be their job. But they're going to understand costing. They're going to understand timing. They're going to understand all those other things by doing. We actually take them on two international trips, one to Europe, one to Asia, just because I really wanted them to be a term in Asia, a term in Europe.
00:43:38
Speaker
But what we also do is that we require them to do an internship. And when we started, I wanted all domestic students go international, all international students to stay domestic. Now, we were never able to fulfill that. But I mean, this year, we'll send 25 students to Asia. That's great. You know, I think oftentimes when you say international in the United States and you're talking to a student, they think, oh, good, I can go to London. It's like, it's not about that. It's about getting your hands dirty, you know, learning, you know, in a manufacturing location, which most of the places they'll go this summer will be manufacturing locations. So they'll be working on R&D and manufacturing in Asia, which I think it's our tentacles then are in Asia, which if you ask about why we find NTX or how they found us, I think that they could see that there was a lot of respect, that we don't know everything over here. We've got to bring the people to Asia to learn.
00:44:32
Speaker
And then, you know, and then they could see after COVID-19, people are not coming over the way they used to. So a realization that you have to be here if you're going to do this work with the brands here. I love the idea that it's like the between the idea and the reality lies the shadow sort of thing where students who are in a space understand that all the theory of the the chalkboard problems that they're coming up with suddenly are rubbing up against the real world and and you know even going back to sustainability there's a large component of sustainability that comes down to that when it comes to generating waste and understanding that the products that you create
00:45:07
Speaker
can be designed in a way that generate lots of waste, or if they're thoughtful, can be generated in a lot of ways that reduces waste, or at least uses materials in an optimal way when you're manufacturing things. And I think the students are always surprised that they're going to have an opportunity to make those decisions. Yes. You know, so as they're learning it, it's like, really? This is going to be in our hands? It's like, yes. That's why we're educating you, so you make good decisions. Right, right. So speaking to, going back to sustainability maybe one more time, because it seems like you're thinking about it in a way when it comes to educating students about the processes that they engage with, things like that. But when it comes to a
00:45:51
Speaker
Thinking about sustainability a little bit more theoretically, when it comes to building a program or a place or a system, how do you think about making those kinds of things more sustainable over time at an institution like this? It's a good question. And I think when we started with building a program and then I could quickly see that a program without a place is it's difficult for people to believe, you know, and to be honest with you, before we had students, I said, I mean, everything I did was smoke and mirrors. I could convince people this is going to happen and it will happen, you know. And so we had the opportunity in downtown Portland to build a building specifically for this program. Yes, and I think that that helped people understand The program and helped people understand what we were doing because it had never been done before people were like Because if they hear here sports product management in their mind they think and if I say creation in their mind They think design right, you know, and then number times like oh here these are designers. It's like, you know design is an incredibly important
00:47:01
Speaker
function and and very very technical and difficult to learn right and that's you if you're going to be a designer you went to school to be in design if you're gonna be on the business side of creation this is all the other stuff you need to know right and likely we're gonna put a designer on the team with you because designers come through our program right because designers oftentimes want to start their own companies and they come through design school they don't know how to do that that's right I mean, they haven't costed out of that product. They don't know where to make it. They don't know how to take it to market.
Physical Space and Mental Models
00:47:32
Speaker
The people coming out of our program do know how to do that. That's right. What is it about a place? That's a good question. I think it's people. The area that I study, I study global and local brands. And if you think about it, I mean, we have global brands, but all consumers are local.
00:47:52
Speaker
As I was looking at this whole concept, I started looking at the concept of location. And I think from a social identity standpoint, there's a lot of reasons that place makes a difference. And I think that we have the advantage, obviously. We have over 1,200 sports and outdoor companies in Portland. And because of the big one, because of Nike, when you say Portland, people think about our industry. So we already had kind of the branding piece of it connected to us. And I think once we had a place in downtown Portland, people then began to understand, oh, that's where that happens. So I think there's something about location and social identity that go together.
00:48:38
Speaker
okay and we talked about that earlier with the campus that's right you know that's right have we think about how us as um the students see the university as a part of their their brand and part of their that's right their identity that's right you know one of the when we talked about place earlier one of the things that we had discussed is you know it being important to have a space that's maybe like a little outside too and you know what i found in in the past is that if i'm going to teach a student a design class or an entrepreneurship class. It works much better in a center that is geared solely towards that than it does in a classroom where they also learn how to use an Excel spreadsheet or something like that for finance because their mental model of what they learn in that space
00:49:27
Speaker
maps to the space itself.
Innovation Lab and Community Building
00:49:30
Speaker
Right. And so, yeah, that's really interesting. So let's take athletics. Right. So in the athletes at a university, they'll have a training center, you know, usually a gym that they use there. And then they're going to have the field, you know, the field of the track, or the football field, or the soccer pitch. Those two things are different places. So they're getting ready, and then they're doing it. And I feel like our Innovation Lab, we always describe it as kind of the gym, the training center.
00:50:05
Speaker
You know, because the students basically spend time in there with each other. You know, we run it 24 seven. So we don't put professors in there 24 seven. I mean, they're probably in there 20 hours a week, you know, but we keep it open for the students because and we put away the dangerous things that they can't use it. We're not there. But the majority of the time they just want to be together. That's right. And because as a makerspace, they want to be together making. And the fact that we create a space that they can make in, you're right. That's not where they're going to have their accounting class or where they're going to have those other classes. It kind of belongs to them, which I think goes with the social identity, that belonging piece.
00:50:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that in, first of all, I love the idea of like a gym for the mind almost, I think. Those are your words. I'm sorry, I'm interpreting. It's going in through my brain and coming out. In game design, we teach about something called the magic circle, which is the rules and assumptions that you accept when you step into the circle that make a game a game. So if you're playing soccer, you arbitrarily can't touch a ball with your hands. but you accept that you're going to do that and and as a result play emerges because we all accept that we're going to do these arbitrary things we're then allowed to to play right and it sounds like that's kind of like what you're talking about these spaces making spaces play you know i mean and we don't charge any lab fees right and we get a lot of donations on materials right and so the students are like okay i'm going to make a pair of jeans and i'm going to make a jacket you know it's like i mean sometimes they're good sometimes they're just practicing yeah but
00:51:48
Speaker
They're definitely playing in there. So I've heard there's a professor at MIT. His name is Marty Culpepper. And I think his title is actually The Maker Czar. I think he just runs a lot of their spaces, though, right?
NTX Partnership and Future Innovations
00:52:05
Speaker
And he talks about these spaces as people first and culture first, like you're talking about, as opposed to machines first, which is, I think, what a lot of institutions, they get some funding. They want to build a a center or a space, whether it's for innovation or maker or whatever else it is, and they buy some machines and then everything else is supposed to follow very field of dreams kind of, you know, focus and he calls those machine mausoleums basically they become places for machines only and then
00:52:32
Speaker
Nothing else really happens there. Having said that, I'm very curious, especially when you talk about NCX and you talk about all the tech that they're using and things like that. What are the approximations of that that you have in the spaces that you use to encourage students to learn these processes? I'm sure, I'm assuming, maybe I'm wrong, that they're not using acid and things like that. But they're using other technologies and processes that are maybe kind of like an approximation to what they would be doing in the field. What kind of things are they using? The nice part about this company is that they have machines that are like development size. I mean because their production machines are huge. I mean that would be bigger than any of the buildings.
00:53:16
Speaker
So they have development-sized machines. They also have many different processes. So they can take a picture of you and give you a shirt with that picture on it in an hour. They have—when I first visited NTX, my first thought was, oh my gosh, this is the company. This is Xerox. This is the company when people are like, you're going to print on paper? I don't have to use carbon anymore? I think there's a future here where I go to my
00:53:51
Speaker
my closet in the morning I pick out whatever color shirt I want I lay it down it prints yeah that's what I wear that day yeah you know and then I wash or wear it a couple times and I wash it out then I printed something else right they're getting to that point now everything they're doing is not it's not it's not b2c they're not doing it here for you you know they're doing it working with companies they're a b2b company But the technologies that they're working on right now are so sophisticated and getting to the point. Because at some point, when IBM is as big as a building, it can't be on our desktop. But as they're innovating, these are getting smaller and smaller. So you can imagine a day where, yes, you do have the bigger machines that are very efficient. And we all wanted that picture of you on our shirt so we can make 100 of them.
00:54:45
Speaker
or you wanted it but then we only wanted one then you do it yourself you know and so you know because we saw print shops you know so i think we're going to see a day where this technology because of how much cleaner it is the fact it doesn't use water that you're going to find a day where it's going to move from b2b to b2c right you know and i think that It's not going to be the first place they go. So you'd say, why are you educating your students? I think the students are going to be that much more creative than I am. They're going to take these machines and say, what if we can do this? What if we can do this? What if we can do this? And that's what NTX wants to have happen. They're like, we could have 50 students basically playing with our machines in a very safe way, trying different things.
00:55:33
Speaker
Oh my gosh, we're going to learn so much. They're going to learn so much. And then in the meantime, it's like, okay, students out Adidas is coming through, you know, a couple hours, you guys are out, the companies are in. And so, yes, we imagine that will be happening, but we'll have students working there. And so I'm sure I have some people on the Adidas account, the Levi's account, you know, the different accounts as well, you know, so. You know, I was listening, uh, I forget what I was listening to the other day, but there was a, there was a good discussion about, um, you mentioned Xerox and there was a discussion about Xerox park and IBM and some of these institutions. Google does it now, maybe a little bit and a couple other places, but, but. A lot of innovation and research used to come out of the private sector. It still does, perhaps not as much as it used to, but it sounds like the company that you've partnered with here has a similar kind of research angle.
00:56:29
Speaker
Has that helped? I'm sure that's creased the wheels. There seems to be some synergy there versus a company that's private and maybe not doing as much research work or things like that. Absolutely. And it's an area of interest on their side too. Like their chief innovation marketing officer is a PhD in chemistry. So they have a high level of interest in doing that kind of research. And so we've connected them with our researchers in Eugene. We've also connected them with the University of Massachusetts Lowell, because they work a lot with the US government, the Department of Defense. And because of the Berry Amendment, our textiles need to come out of the US. Well, there are so many exceptions put in place now that many of the textiles are not coming from the US anymore.
00:57:17
Speaker
What if they could again? And so, I mean, we'll be talking to them about camouflage. We'll talk to them about coatings, a lot of things that the machines that NTX is bringing here can do right here in the United States. So yes, we'll be innovating and trying new things, but your day-to-day business is that you can print and dye materials, and then you can make products here in the US. I think reshoring has become a very popular topic. I mean, not particularly, but when all of the supply chain shortages happened during the pandemic, I think there was an acute realization that we are relying on very complex systems that span across space and time in a way that when one component of them is affected, it affects the rest of the system. Which makes us very vulnerable. That's right. Yeah. That's right.
00:58:10
Speaker
So I'm wondering, you know, through your development of these programs, these collaborations, things like that, and going back to, I thought it was really fascinating when you framed things as energy, there's an energy cost. I don't know if you've run any SMIL and energy and civilization where everything boils down to energy and entropy and things like that. Whether the words you speak or the energy is not just a calorie cost, right? It's a it's a energy is all sorts of other things. Anyways, I digress my my quack because I want to get to my question And maybe it's related to energy or maybe it's not but it seems like there's a valuable there's a lesson to be learned in there for people about how they are
00:59:01
Speaker
Efficiently use their energy in a way that that has some sustain it to go back to sustainability It touches on sustainability could touch on a lot of things and really the question is Are there what valuable lessons have you learned in developing all these programs and then for some reason? I'm just obsessed with the energy thing right now and so you can choose to ignore that if you want or touch on it It doesn't yeah, it doesn't matter So I would think if we just go let's go at the to the end and then we'll go back to the beginning So I think with ntx and just the power of relationships, you know, I mean this is I feel so close with the principles on this project, you know, I mean that I can see what they are What they what they want to do, you know, I mean they they really want to bring
00:59:48
Speaker
a new way of not just making products, but the whole development process. The development process in Asia right now is 28 days. It's still 18 months in the U.S. in the sports and outdoor industry. And that's the way we've been doing it for 50 years, and probably longer than that. you know and so they want to bring a new way to do it because if you bring a new way to do it then you eliminate inventory issues. You know I would say that my grandkids or great grandkids will be saying you know grandma great grandma you actually could go into a store and they had things yeah and they and that store did not know if people wanted those things yeah
01:00:31
Speaker
What a luxury we have lived. I don't think the future is going to be that way. I think that we need to know what is needed before we make it. And I think that that's where NTX is coming in. Are they all the way there yet? No. No. But do they have some of the best innovators working on this? Absolutely. So I think that I could see, working with the principals, working with that company, that we shared a similar view. that what tomorrow looks like it can be entirely different than today or yesterday and I think with that it's like now how do we bridge the gap, bridge the gap between the knowledge you know and that knowledge I mean COVID-19 really maybe isolated it in Asia you know because well we said let's spend a lot of money on innovations I don't think I mean maybe certain industries did but a lot of industries didn't I mean you see the criticism happening now against Nike because of that
01:01:33
Speaker
They've done a huge reduction in their workforce, and they've talked about innovation being very difficult for them during the crisis. These companies that we're working with in Asia, they invested a tremendous amount of money in innovation, and they have found new and different ways to do things. And they're offering those to the companies in Asia. So if they don't offer them to us, then eventually we will lose. I recently was in Shanghai, and so I live in Portland, Oregon, and obviously we're a relatively small town, so this comparison isn't exact, but it will give you an idea.
Pacing in Life and Business
01:02:11
Speaker
So i'm in the portland airport at 5 30 waiting in line at the starbucks Waiting in line waiting in line and finally two people come out saying people didn't show up today. We're not going to open Yeah, you know, and so of course we all get on our planes now fast forward i'm in a train station in shanghai and there's uh starbucks now and ow And I mean they have lined up over 100 banks that can hold two drinks in each of them. They have 25 people working behind the counter because they know that you only have 15 minutes to get what you need from them. And I'm thinking, obviously, this is
01:02:53
Speaker
a comparison that's that's not exactly right because one's in a small company one's in a huge metropolitan city but it's showing you oh my gosh if star starbucks is gonna make a hell of a lot more money expanding further in china than they're gonna make ever that's right expanding in portland oregon you know and so i i just think that there's such a different mindset and if we can bring that mindset here then we can continue to compete and there are a lot of things that we do a lot better You know we can continue to compete and win. Yeah, you know and I think the companies that are saying hey You know what we're gonna come over there. We're gonna sell our products We're gonna learn from you right and we're gonna well. Let's do this together I mean I think we all it's that back to that bridge right right well if you could bring that mindset having recently moved to the south I would I would only ask that if you could bring that mindset to the south that would be excellent as well because
01:03:45
Speaker
What whatever I thought and when I lived in the north how things moved slowly has has changed It's a it's a fast pace now. It looks like a fast pace now over. I went to high school in Louisiana. Okay, Louisiana So yes, it's a whole different pace I have a theory about how it has to do with the weather, but i'll say my mother did too My mother said it was because of the weather and I spent three years in thailand Yeah, and they move a different pace in thailand too, huh? There but I kind of like the pace a move. No. Yeah, I mean there's there's something to be said for all all different Um approaches to life, I suppose um, anyway, um, I have one
01:04:27
Speaker
closing question i want to be respectful of your time i really appreciate you uh... i just really appreciate you and thank you for coming uh... and and that is we talked about valuable lessons uh... but i also wondered if you could touch on things you may have done differently things that you approaches that you took that maybe you would you would change uh... and again this could have you you've done so many interesting things that this could this could have to do with You know the the collaboration with NTX that we've been talking about could have to do with the pro it could have to do with any of these things What are some different approaches that you might take going forward like what's some what's some advice somebody could get I think, I mean, I was a distance runner at the University of Oregon, so the number one thing you need to know as a distance runner is how to pace. And so if you asked anybody on the track, I was a great pacer. In life, I'm not such a great pacer. So I like to move fast. And I'd say that that works a lot, and then sometimes it doesn't work. So I think just advising Ellen would be
01:05:40
Speaker
be more mindful of when that will work to your advantage and when it won't, you know, and so I am very adjustable when things are not moving at the pace I want. But I usually I'm that one that is pushing, you know, and I think that In most cases, I think it can be a superpower, but in other cases, it has an energy expense. When I got done with the film, I probably had two weeks that I couldn't even get out of bed. When we were able to get the program approved through
01:06:16
Speaker
the University of Oregon to be able to do a master's of science at support product management. I was down for the count sick for two months you know and so and at NTX I'm just hoping this time I brought some people in that can help pace me. So I think pace is probably the number one thing.
Leadership and Collaboration
01:06:35
Speaker
That's great. The other thing is that I think when I was younger I was very much into you know of follow me, follow me, you know, almost like I'm, I can be a leader because people will follow me. And, you know, I'm much more about leading from the back than the front, you know, with an understanding that, I mean, they know so much more than I do. And collectively we can go so much further. That's right. When I think.
01:06:59
Speaker
And then finally, I think I used to put the project first and I put the people first. Because I realize nothing's gonna happen without that. And I think most recently, it's like I wanna make sure that every interaction, the person feels better about themselves. And I think in the past, it would be, I would want that person to feel better about the project or something like that. And I realize that's not sustainable. you have to leave it with them, you know, because if you're able to make that person feel better about themselves, then they are going to accomplish more, you know, by accomplishing more than, you know, we get further in life, right? We become more sustainable, right? More innovative, right? More global.
Closing Remarks
01:07:46
Speaker
Well Ellen this has been a pleasure. For me as well. I really appreciate your time. I feel good about this. Thank you. I hope so. So thank you so much for your time. Of course. Thank you for coming here. Yes I know that was a long trip for you. So I appreciate it. All right. Thank you.