In the right environment, chance encounters in the
workplace can yield brilliant innovation.
On a cold afternoon in the fall of 2005, Todd Menkhaus,
Ph.D., was learning the ropes during his first week on the job. The young
assistant professor of chemical engineering at South Dakota Mines was climbing
the stairs towards his new office when he came across Hao Fong, Ph.D.
“He was going one way and I was going the other,” Menkhaus
says. “He stopped me and said, ‘Oh are you new to campus?’”
The normal small talk that ensues when two new colleagues
first meet quickly turned into a discussion on each other’s specialties.
Menkhaus came from the pharmaceutical industry with an expertise in the complex
manufacturing of anti-cancer drugs. Fong was pioneering research on a new type
of filter, made of thousands of tiny randomly crossing nanofibers where each
individual fiber is many times smaller than a human hair.
The pair of researchers began to connect dots. The chance
encounter in the hallway turned into an intense discussion that lasted a few
hours. “When I started thinking about all the things you could do with Fong’s
nanofibers, I realized they could be used to solve a lot of problems I had been
working on in the pharmaceutical industry over the previous five years. I had
the problem, and he had the solution,” says Menkhaus.
That single encounter opened the door to a 15-year
collaboration that resulted in a revolutionary new type of filter, which
significantly reduces the cost and manufacturing time for lifesaving vaccines
and medicines. The pair of professors turned their idea into a start-up
company. In 2020, that startup, Nanopareil, was acquired by Gamma Biosciences,
a subsidiary of the global investment firm KKR.
It’s a wild success story that may have never happened in
the world of remote work. “If we were relying on Zoom you would never go
through the university directory and just randomly find someone to connect with
and say, ‘Oh are you new to campus?’” Menkhaus says.
But it’s not just about fostering random in-person connections;
it’s about creating the kind of space where safe and informal conversations can
turn into idea generating dialogue.
“There is just no substitute for this kind of interaction,”
says Mike Boucher who finished his master’s degree in computer science at Mines
in 1991. Today, Boucher is a co-operator of Boulder New Tech in Boulder, Colo.
“If you have a chance to design your office space, make sure you dedicate an
open floor plan with break rooms or coffee stations that are welcoming and
comfortable spaces that can spur these types of conversations.” Boucher, who is
an Entrepreneur in Residence at South Dakota Mines, has seen the power of
random office connections create solutions time and time again in his career.
Today he is working on his third tech company start-up, Scripta LLC. His first
two start-ups, Dakota Legal Software and Dakota Scientific Software, were
acquired by Fortune 500 companies. In the late 1990’s, Boucher spent time at
Sun Microsystems as a software engineer. He says his time at Sun also taught
him the importance of one more addition to every break room: a whiteboard.
“If you put three or four whiteboards in your break room,
what people will do is go to have coffee or lunch and then get to talking. The
problems they are working on will naturally end up on the whiteboard. What this
does is advertise to everyone in the building what they are working on. And
that invites and fosters collaboration and new ideas,” says Boucher. “Someone
else will see the whiteboard and add in their own notes or solutions. And later
when another person comes up with the same problem, they will remember, ‘Hey I
saw this person doodle about this on the whiteboard so I can go to them for
help,’” says Boucher.
Today, Menkhaus is continuing to lead research at his
company, Nanopareil, and he is creating the space where ideas can flourish.
“You can’t always plan how success will happen. But you can create an
environment and culture where teams of people can come together and solve
really difficult problems based on their combined expertise,” he says. “The
work that we do, it’s very hands-on laboratory work and just being able to have
scientists working together and talking together all the time has brought so
many ideas that would not have evolved in another environment.”
At South Dakota Mines, students are encouraged to innovate
from day one. The 2021 fall semester will include a full array of student
organizations and activities. This means classes that incorporate science and
engineering teams who are tasked to tackle problems with in-person hands- on
collaboration and cooperation. Mines programs like Center of Excellence for Advanced
Multidisciplinary Projects (CAMP) gives student teams hands-on engineering
experience. CAMP actively encourages participation, personal growth, emotional
intelligence, organization, and leadership starting in the freshmen year.