Ted Smith: Open Innovation for a Better Tomorrow

It is fitting that my interview with Ted Smith is at his office in Louisville Metro Hall. To the casual observer, the Greek Revival building is a grand, architectural statement with wide steps leading up to the large front doors. However, upon closer inspection, plaques redirect visitors to the Court Place entrance located in the alley behind the building. It’s dark, unwelcoming, and I hesitate every time before opening the door. After signing in, I am warmly greeted by Ted in the Mayor’s office. The experience fresh in my mind, I bring up the matter of the single, not particularly well-marked entrance. He laughs and tells me that he shared my confusion with its back-alley location. Then he tells me that not only has the issue been noted, but they’re also taking action to fix it. All the entrances are slated to be open because “it’s the people’s building and its beautiful spaces should be open for all to come and enjoy.”

I really shouldn’t be surprised: Ted Smith has had a long career of opening doors. His latest position is as the newly appointed Director of Innovation for Louisville Metro. If you’re unfamiliar with the position, it’s one of four newly created director positions by Mayor Fischer. This places us both in good company and makes us national pioneers – New York City, Chicago, and Boston share similar positions, and two cities of similar size to ours have asked for our job description so that they can create their own.

Perhaps it’s my own jaded perspective, but I share with Ted that while I’m enthusiastic about the position, I am uneasy with the term “innovation.” Back in August 2011, the Smithsonian Institute launched a new blog called “The Department of Innovation” complete with a new logo. In an unfortunate oversight, the logo featured three interlocking gears. The physical configuration meant that the gears were locked in place, unable to turn. Bloggers were quick to point this out and made the observation that it was the perfect symbol for the actual lack of innovation that they expected would take place. After the considerable amount of attention paid to it in the press, the Smithsonian Institute abandoned both the logo as well as the blog title. Instead, the blog is now called simply “Innovations” and the logo doesn’t contain any gears. The real tragedy is that a project full of optimistic potential was overshadowed by the baggage that comes with a loaded term. I ask him if he heard about this incident. “No, I had not, but I can understand why hyped terms make people cringe,” he chuckles. “Did you know that Boston calls theirs the Department of Urban Mechanics and that there are four of them in the department? I’m not sure that’s any clearer than the term innovation. It is what you make of it.”

So what has been his approach towards innovation? Ted sees his role as one that interfaces between the government and community. “Innovation is the connective tissue between the public and private sector.” Bringing up “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age” by Clay Shirky, he points to the central thesis of the book that an unbelievable amount of extra capacity is untapped and that collaborative technologies will enable us to pool our resources for social good. “The great thing about politics is that we get what we ask for, and we ask for our government to be efficient, run like a corporation. For it to be cheap, smart, lean. But that’s a terrible entity to deal with the public. Thanks to social media (Twitter, Facebook), people are asking for things they never asked for before of their government, but we’re slow to address their needs. The Mayor gets all the credit for having a pioneering vision to create such a position.”
Prior to returning to Louisville (he lived here from 2000-2009), Ted’s career as a healthcare IT entrepreneur (co-founder of MedTrackAlert, later acquired by The Healthcentral Network) led him to Washington, D.C. After completing a successful exit from the company, the current administration approached him about joining the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Serving as Senior Advisor in the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology, he worked to celebrate innovators in the healthcare space. One such innovator is Dr. David van Sickle, a former Centers for Disease Control researcher in Madison, WI who studies uncontrollable asthma and asthma morbidity. Asthmapolis is the tool that he developed to track the usage of rescue asthma inhalers with a built-in GPS transponder to capture latitude, longitude, and timestamp whenever it’s used by patient. Ted immediately recognized the “tremendous value in the mashup between environment and public health data down to street block level.” The individual patient benefits by logging usage easily, the physician benefits by having more accurate usage data, and open, de-identified, aggregated data sets are made available to researchers.

Despite the rewarding work in HHS, Ted confides that when Mayor Fischer approached him to come back to be a part of the entrepreneurial community, it was appealing. In order for his children to attend good schools, the average drive time anywhere was 52 minutes and he felt penned in by the structure of the D.C. Metro environment. “I took the train in to work every day, walked a lot, and lost a lot of weight, but I also saw my kids a lot less. So I wanted to come back and be a part of Team Louisville. We don’t have to be relegated to a footnote in startup ecosystem.

Instead of returning strictly to the private sector, he wanted to continue contributing towards the public sector. “The only metric that I care about (in this role) is whether I have improved the quality of life for the community.” Asthmapolis became the perfect project for him to continue championing civic engagement as the Director of Innovation at a local level. Louisville Metro is known for having poor air quality and asthma is a big health issue here with many interdependent causes. Thanks to his previous role in HHS, Louisville Metro is in the running for conducting a pilot study and University of Louisville researchers are equally excited about accessing the technology. Currently, the Metro area has seventeen air pollution monitors and five pollen count monitors that display real-time data. However, the historical data sets available to researchers lag by three years and only represent data sampled in a few, fixed locations. By collecting and opening the usage data from the rescue inhalers, “we’ll now have a way to have informed discussion on the environmental impact on our quality of life.” He’s also coordinating with the 2011 Festival of Faiths, serendipitously themed “Sacred Air,” to bring together citizen groups who share an interest in the future of air quality into the conversation.

He also has projects that are more focused on the private sector. Instead of a formal advisory group, he has assembled a Founder’s Collaboratory – volunteer entrepreneurs and venture veterans to identify the major barriers and opportunities for the successful growth of early stage startup businesses in any industry. “If I can help them create jobs, I can help Louisville.” For example, he has heard from a few startups about the lack of Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack talent in town. However, when he asks UofL and other universities why they aren’t we teaching the LAMP stack to their students, they respond that the major companies that are hiring aren’t demanding those skills. Why is there such a disparity in perception? Ted suspects that part of the problem is that we haven’t aggregated demand statistics well enough and the information collected by the Founder’s Collaboratory will help present a clearer picture. “Every day we lose the option to be innovative in tech space due to talent shortage. I have a bias toward tech, but only because it’s the least capital intensive. We could absorb hundreds. My job is to figure out if there’s a way we can support them as a city.”

This leads to another example of the intersection between the public and private sectors. Recently, three different startups have approached him about their business plans to make self-guided smartphone tours. “It’s great – these are people who are willing to take a risk on the market, but have an issue they’ve approached us with: How do visitors know such tours exist? The virtual world is badly disconnected with the physical world and the answer can’t be QR codes everywhere.” He notes that Google Goggles isn’t a mature product yet, and even if it was, he argues that there’s more value in a produced experience versus an accumulated one (anyone frustrated with poor Google search results can relate). “Should we create tasteful signage to let people know about these tours? We know that this product is good for the visitor experience. They are curious about Louisville, and we have interesting things.” The issue is designing signage that facilitates a market space for the startups to compete, and not being in the business of picking winners. However, he’s not worried about the challenge: “It’s an interesting time to be alive. The corporate era lasted for so long, but it has never been easier to pick a different track. My hope is to plant a seed and a better city grows up on the other side.”

At this year’s IdeaFestival, Aneesh Chopra, the Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. government said during his keynote speech in regards to Ted Smith: “Washington’s loss is Louisville’s gain.” Ted Smith may not be in the business of picking winners, but in appointing Ted Smith as Director of Innovation, Mayor Fischer has picked a major winner for Team Louisville.

– Grace Simrall

Cognitive Surplus

During our two hour conversation, Ted and I discussed many topics. The breadth reveals that he’s not only full of great ideas, but also at identifying the resources to execute them. Here is some of the surplus.

On the Paper’s previous maker profile on the topic of canning:

TS: Canning? It’s a trend?

GS: Yes, participation in community supported agriculture (CSA) and the rise in urban homesteading played big roles in the canning trend. People receive/produce an abundance of produce that they can’t consume in a week, and have turned to canning to extend the shelf life.

TS: My mother-in-law cans goods, but it’s a big production. Don’t you need a lot more produce than just what you get from CSA?

GS: No, that was the point of the interview. Canning can simply be an amount that you can consume in a one-two week period.

TS: Micro-canning.

GS: Exactly.

TS: I love it. What if the Louisville Science Center hosted a micro-canning workshop to introduce more people to it?

On supporting the entrepreneurial dreams of young people:

GS: Everyone remarked at this year’s IdeaFestival how wonderful it was that DuPont Manual students participated actively by asking questions and expressing interest in creating their own startups. But I wonder: where will they get the support they need to do so?

TS: True, many of them don’t have parents who are entrepreneurs and very few (if any) of their teachers have experience doing it. But every time a DuPont Manual student says she or he is creating a startup, it gets a little easier.

This is why I’m excited to be working with Ben Reno-Weber on putting together a leadership program, including our own Lemonade Day. Ben is a Louisville native who is a former bank consultant turned CEO of KY YMCA (the only one without a gym). Lemonade Day is a national initiative launched in Houston, TX by a wealthy philanthropist. The premise is simple – learn how to run a business via lemonade stand. We deconstruct business down to basic components: setting goals, creating budgets, securing funds, purchasing supplies, servicing customers. If you can’t run a business as simple as a lemonade stand, how are you going to succeed with a more complex business?

On his vision for a X-Prize contest for river freight craft:

TS: I also would like to have a X-Prize contest for river freight transit design. The whole industry has been commoditized down to giant barges, hauling cheap goods, for pennies per pound. Have we missed something? What about mid-sized, autonomous craft? It would have to haul goods that don’t require expedient delivery, but it’s eco-friendly, and the river would become a valuable asset to a host of mid-sized river cities like Louisville. The problem is far from solved, and a solution would give us economic advantage. Did you know that Cincinnati, Ohio is working on a drone freight airport? It’s thanks to collaboration with Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Why not Louisville and autonomous, mid-sized river freight craft?

On food trucks and hackerspaces:

TS: I couldn’t believe that in the short time I was away (from Louisville) that we would have both food trucks and a hackerspace (LVL1). What’s great about both the local food and maker movements is that they didn’t happen because government said they should happen. It was completely organic. So what role can government play? We can be super friendly to businesses and make it easy for them to conduct their business activities and investments. We could do our extra bit to make a bridge to the community. I want to get Dale Dougherty (founder of MakerFaire and Make Magazine) to come speak. LVL1 shouldn’t be a secret and the Louisville Science Center should serve as a bridge to LVL1.

There is a complete celebration of the arts that is a social blessing we enjoy, but I’m struck by the asymmetry in values. People put a big premium on the arts, but so much less on tinkering. Perhaps the intersection of art and engineering will be what engages people – it’s funky, creative, and technically hard. The future of America is high design, the last bastion of white collar work. Humans respond to aesthetics and irrationally value it.

Perhaps it’s my media background, but I’m allergic to things that don’t scale. Have you been to the Garage Bar? I took my kids, and they went nuts over the (kinetic) sculpture out front. It’s a very, very, slow car crash (one-eighth inch per hour and over the course of three months, the cars will move 3 feet into each other). So it’s impractical for everyone to have one in their home, but what about something miniature using Matchbox cars? If we held a contest to design a kit that replicated it at that scale without using hammers, or blunt force, the result would be a great celebration of engineering.

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