USF CLCE Podcast

[R]: Ryan

[J]: Dr. Jenkins

Innovation In Leadership

[R]:

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the CLCE podcast. I am Ryan Newton as you know Graduate Assistant in the Center for Leadership and Civic Engagement and I do have another very special guest here with me today, Dr. Jenkins.

[J]:

Well hello. I am Dr. Jenkins. I am adjunct professor of Leadership Studies here at the University of South Florida. Been teaching courses for the academic minor in Leadership studies since 2008 and we’ve got some interesting things to cover today.

[R]:

Yeah Dr. Jenkins comes highly recommended to us about some opportunities we are going to talk about today about leadership and innovation in leadership. And so we are excited to talk about some cool stories and some things we’ve heard about that might be able to relate to your lives and how you can become innovators in your own right.

[J]:

So innovation is a really, really important part of leadership as is creativity. In fact, everyone of ordinary intelligence has latent creative that can be enhanced by training and by favorable environment. Basically, you can’t afford to not do new things. And I was reading some news online recently and came across this really interesting article where some online gamers cracked an AIDS enzyme puzzle. And you might ask well how in the world would some online gamers that were previously playing Call of Duty or Second Life crack an AIDS enzyme puzzle. So, this article came out on September 18, 2011 we found that online gamers achieved a feat beyond the realm of D and D. They’ve deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that have thwarted scientists for decades. The exploit was published in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology where exceptionally in scientific publishing both gamers and researchers are honored as co-authors. Their target was a manometric protease enzyme, a cutting agent, in the complex molecular tailoring of retro-virus a family that also includes HIV. So, figuring out the structure of proteins was really vital for understanding the causes of many diseases and developing drugs to block them. But the microscope only gives a flat image of what to the outsider looks like a plate of 1-dimensional scrunched up spaghetti. Pharmacologists though need a 3-D picture that unfolds the molecule and rotates it in order to reveal potential targets for drugs. And that’s where this new organization FOLDIT, F-O-L-D-I-T, comes in. Developed in 2008 by the University of Washington, It was a fun for purpose video game in which gamers divided into competing groups competing to unfold chains of amino acids the building blocks of protein using an online tool. So to the astonishment of the scientist the gamers produce an accurate model of the enzyme in just 3 weeks.

[R]:

So that’s, that’s really incredible. I mean that’s, for those of us that don’t know a lot about Biology and science it’s really science heavy, but ultimately, these video game creators came up with a game that allowed gamers to possibly crack the code on some kind of cure for AIDS or, or maybe some other diseases and things that might help the human race.

[J]:

Absolutely and that’s where the leadership and innovation really comes together. Innovation creates successful interaction with people, you know, between leaders and followers, to creating conversations with new people, groups, and stakeholders. Just bringing together, and fusing, and synergizing people that may not work together usually and finding those strengths that both can basically supplement and complement each other is one of the most important things that effective leaders do. And so what happened was cracking the enzyme really provided new insights for the design of anti-retroviral drugs and its believed to be the first time that gamers have resolved long-standing scientific problems. So hey, we’re not just playing Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, we’re also solving enzyme puzzles. So , Firas Khatib of the university's biochem lab at the University of Washington said hey “We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," and "The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems. And you know, what else could these gamers solve going forward? Who knows? People have spatial reasoning skills that computers are not yet good at. And really games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans. The results in that paper show that gaming, science and computation can be combined to make advances that were not possible before. And how about that? You know, what, what are you doing to create innovative conversations in your organization. What will you, when will your group crack the next AIDS enzyme puzzle.

[R]:

And I mean that’s really incredible because like you said, Dr. Jenkins, the coolest thing is you know these two totally unique groups came together and created something that worked for them, and created their own little niche that, that developed into this innovative and hopefully incredibly resourceful and useful tool that will help the entire science and medical industry altogether. So, I think some of the most successful people in life have found ways to do that to carve out their own niche and it’s really incredible to see that and the results of this and what they’ve been able to do which is a little bit of innovation.

[J]:

Yeah, definitely. It’s all about bringing together people that wouldn’t normally work together. It’s creating new relationships and making conversations happen

[R]:

Cool. So we are going to ask you “what are you doing to be innovative?” and “how are you going to find your innovation in leadership” so what are you doing and how are you going to be innovative? We want to thank our guest for coming on today. great conversation. It’s really exciting and I hope that you’ll go on and look up some more about innovation and leadership and start to really think about how you can be a factor in this conversation. So with that we hope you’ll tune in next week and Go Bulls!

[J]:

Go Bulls!