use both quantitative and qualitative methods—getting smarter from both data and human insight to frame the problem to solve.

This means abandoning a dogmatic adherence either to human-centered design or data analysis as the exclusive means of problem discovery. The popularity of design thinking as evidenced by an increasing number of design science courses and programs, on the one hand, and of data science pedagogy, on the other, have led to a headlong rush to embrace one or the other set of tools.

Whereas data might reveal where gun violence is occurring, only talking to those with relevant professional know-how as well as police, victims, and families will reveal why it is happening. Students across disciplines must develop both sets of skills. In the Open Seventeen program, a partnership among Tsinghua, NYU, and the Universities of Zurich and Geneva, global students from computer science and informatics, design, history, policy and more, received online project coaching from the Governance Lab and learn to apply both human-centered design and data analytical methods to advance projects that respond to one of the 17 SDGs.k

From design to implementation. Fourth, we need to teach students the undervalued and more challenging task of implementing solutions, not just designing them, by assessing feasibility in the context of real-world institutions. Even public policy schools, where one would assume this is taught, says Francis Fukuyamal “train students to become capable policy analysts, but with no understanding of how to implement those policies in the real world.”

Tackling social problems requires a deep understanding for engineers and computer scientists, too, of how to work with institutions to take advantage of their power, reach, and resources. Thus, to develop their lifelong clinical problem-solving capabilities, the would-be public entrepreneur must learn a deep understanding of how bureaucracy and politics can be harnessed for impact. This is why at Purdue the Engineering Projects in

 

k http://openseventeen.org l https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/francis_fukuyama

Community Service (EPICS) projectm offers students the opportunity to learn about the social context of the projects they do. More than clever ideas and ingenious gadgets, our ability to solve problems depends upon people with the willingness and wherewithal to deliver and spread impact.

From social enterprise to public entrepreneurship. To be sure, most schools today offer some kind of program in private entrepreneurship. Yet the pedagogy of problem solving taught in those clubs and classes has critical limitations.6 Private entrepreneurship focuses on the ego of the individual and the ability of a person to devise their own original solution, launch an app, or start a company.

But true public problem-solving demands solutions that are legitimate as well as effective. This means that, rather than learning to develop solutions oneself, students must learn participatory and democratic methods for defining problems and developing solutions with rather than for communities.

Take the example of Indian public entrepreneur and biophysicist Samir Brahmchari, former director general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of the Government of India. In India, thousands of primarily poor people die every year from tuberculosis. Yet there has been no new TB treatment developed in 40 years and resistance to existing drugs is increasing. So Brahmchari became the chief mentor for the Open Source Drug Discovery project,n a crowdsourcing effort to “provide affordable healthcare to the developing world by providing a global platform where the best minds can collaborate and collectively endeavor to solve the complex problems associated with discovering novel therapies for neglected tropical diseases.” By recruiting college students, academics, and scientists from around the world and across India, most in remote villages not elite universities, Brahmchari created his own inexpensive army to collect, annotate, and extract information from the scientific literature on the TB pathogen. With a $12 million grant, he coordinated the incremental contributions of 7,500 participants from 130

 

m http://www.ijee.ie/articles/vol21-1/ijee.1549.pdf n http://www.osdd.net/

countries and began clinical trials for a new experimental drug at 20% of the cost of a traditional drug in 2014.1

Brahmchari is paradigmatic of the new public entrepreneur who works differently, taking advantage of new technologies, especially the tools of big data and collective intelligence—but also the convening power of institutions—to take on difficult and seemingly intractable public problems.

Complementing traditional university education in computer science and engineering as well as law and policy with public problem solving in multidisciplinary teams to design and implement workable solutions with public institutions would allow us to cultivate more such public entrepreneurs, transforming how we educate while producing the leaders and problem solvers committed to improving people’s lives that we so desperately need.

 

References

1. Ardal, C. et al. Open Source Drug Discovery in Practice: A Case Study National Center for Biotechnology Information (Sep. 20, 2012); https:// www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447952/

2. Boydston, J. John Dewey: The Later Works 1925–1953, Vol. 8 1933 Essays and How We Think, Revised Edition. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 1986.

3. Cech, E. and Sherick, H. Depoliticization and the structure of engineering education. In International Perspectives on Engineering Education (2015).

4. Farra, H. The reflective thought process: John Dewey re-visited. The Journal of Creative Behavior (Mar. 1988): https://doi-org.proxy.library.nyu. edu/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1988.tb01338.x

5. Getzels, J. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem Finding in Art. Wiley, New York, 1976.

6. Giridharadas, A. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, 2018.

7. Jonassen, D. Learning to Solve Problems: An Instructional Design Guide. Wiley, New York, 2003.

8. McGuinness, T. and Slaughter, A. The new practice of public problem solving. Stanford Social Innovation Review (2019); https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_ new_practice_of_public_problem_solving#

9. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The Growing Gap in Life Expectancy by Income: Implications for Federal Programs and Policy Responses. The National Academies Press, Washington DC, 2015; https://doi.org/10.17226/19015

10. Noveck, B. Smart Citizens, Smarter State: The Technologies of Expertise and the Future of Governing. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2015.

11. Savin-Baden, M. The problem-based learning landscape. Planet (2001); https://doi.org/10.11120/ plan.2001.00040004

 

Beth Simone Noveck ([e-mail]) is
a professor in the Technology, Culture, and Society
department at New York University’s Tandon School
of Engineering and director of The Governance Lab,
Brooklyn, NY, USA. Her new book Public Entrepreneurship
will appear with Yale University Press in 2020;
see https://www.publicentrepreneur.org/.

Copyright held by author.