Mary Lynn Realff was an engineering professor and associate chair of her department at Georgia Tech, with expertise in materials science. A few years ago, she joined up as a member of a cohort at the Center for Deliberate Innovation — the same organisation that Professor Merrick Furst had set up to advance the work on startups that he was doing after shutting down Damballa. Realff had an interesting problem that she wanted to solve: she wanted to spread a new educational program in universities — one that she had developed for her students. The issue was that nobody seemed to want it.
A couple of years before joining the Center for Deliberate Innovation, Realff had noticed that her students were struggling with team projects assigned to them. Realff was an engineering professor, with a degree from MIT but no professional background in the issues around managing team dynamics. She dove into the problem anyway. She discovered a field called effective team dynamics (ETD), which consisted of methods for getting teams to work well together. Realff spent a few years developing expertise in ETD, and started making novel contributions to the field: she adapted ETD’s techniques for use in universities, and developed training methods that were better suited for her context. Her innovations made a demonstrable difference: people who learnt her approach were simply better at working together.
The challenge was how to spread this approach throughout the university.
In the 2023 book The Heart of Innovation, Merrick Furst writes:
Looking around the university, she saw that the problem was widespread. A lot of cla ...
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