I went to a brew-pub today with my family. We sat down, we got menus, ordered and then – we waited, and waited. As I was sitting there I thought about patience – is it a vice or a virtue?

It is obvious from our everyday lives that patience is needed. We need patience to drive to work safely, to explain, to motivate, and to allow people to learn. Our friends and family need patience with us, we often forget that. It is a lot easier for us to remember when we wait for somebody than when the opposite situation occurs and our friend is on their second drink by the time we finally show up. Almost everything that is important takes patience – our friendships, our family, our personal growth and compassion – and even the stock market. Clearly, patience is a virtue.

But, I have been increasingly convinced that patience can also be a vice when it comes to entrepreneurship. In fact, I have seen more entrepreneurial efforts fail because of too much patience, than I have seen them fail because of too little patience. Entrepreneurial success requires a sense of urgency, a commitment to get started now and to put scores on the board, now. I have seen great ideas squandered because their originators got distracted. Often, they talk about how it takes patience to get to the goals. I totally disagree in many cases: what are you waiting for? It takes a healthy impatience to start running when everybody else still walks or sits around. For entrepreneurs, patience can be a vice.

Patience is a crucial aspect of a successful academic life that can become a real problem for university-based entrepreneurs. In fact, patience is one of the most important aspects of fundamental research: MESSENGER, a NASA spacecraft carrying a Michigan-built instrument, (FIPS) is flying by Mercury in approximately one week. MESSENGER will get into orbit around Mercury in 2011. This is a project I have worked on for over ten years – and just now are we getting the long-awaited results back. I have been there from the beginning – I was a lot younger then. Such long time-scales are not uncommon in research; we can provide many examples.

I consider that tension between the time-scale of research and the time-scale of entrepreneurship to be one of the most important challenges we have to overcome as we are developing into a research organization that is supportive of entrepreneurship. The speed of entrepreneurship is faster than, for most of us, the speed of academic research. The challenge we are facing as a University, and especially the challenge that I am facing, is to address mismatches of our work and support systems in which patience is a vice, with the potential to kill the very thing we want to support: entrepreneurship. We have to be sure that the University of Michigan can deal with the healthy impatience of entrepreneurs. There is nothing wrong with that!

After waiting for over 30 minutes for my sandwich, the food finally came. The nachos were soggy, the burger burnt. I am glad we were patient waiting for the food and staying friendly. But, patience was a vice for the staff of this brew-pub: I will not go back there in a long time.

We had a great party on Friday evening. There was lots of press about it:  D-PAN (http://www.d-pan.com) launched their first DVD. We also launched our “Feel the Music Competition (http://www.feelthemusiccompetition.com). Well, that’s the easy thing to write about. But, I can only try to describe how moved our University of Michigan group was during this event. Half of the people in the room were deaf and hard of hearing. So many deaf came over and told me how much they appreciate that the University of Michigan is doing this, and how important this competition really is. The University of Michigan team walked out of this event committed to do the best we possibly can to come up with innovations and solutions.

I thought I would share the speech I gave that evening, to communicate what this is about:

“Dear friends of D-PAN – I am happy to be part of this concert and the launch of D-PAN’s first DVD.

Music is about community, music is about culture, and music is about how we feel. These are all truly important aspects about our being. It is therefore crucial to think of music in other ways than just sound – sound is therefore merely a vehicle to deliver these crucial elements.

It is therefore obvious that we should try hard to find ways to communicate music. I learned that from Joel Martin whom I consider my friend and who has a passion for music I have not seen often in others. I see the same in Sean Forbes whom I also have gotten to know and who is an inspiration for me and hundreds of our students who have listened to his talk at UM and continue listening to him on the web.

We are launching the Feel-the-Music Competition based on that collaboration and commitment to find ways to communicate music to all of us. We will be successful if all of us – hearing or deaf – go to a concert together and carry the device that is being invented as part of this competition we are launching right now.

We have a bunch of professors who are taking personal responsibility – like Greg Wakefield, who knows more about sound-generating devices that I will ever dream about. Jason Corey is a Professor in the Music School and is currently setting up our first University-wide Feel the Music concert. Our student organization, MPowered, is also represented here – they will be the “wheel on the bus”.

I thank you, Joel Martin and Scott Guy from D-PAN for involving us. We are passionate about “Feel the Music” because you taught us to be. And, I cannot even imagine what ideas and technologies that will be proposed. I will commit, however, that we will do our very best to achieve the goal at hand: To communicate music to make it accessible to all of us.”

Check out
http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/09/20/music_for_deaf/ for more details.

Today we are announcing along with the UM Music,Theater, and Dance Department, the College of Engineering, and the Deaf Performing Artists’ Network (D-PAN),  an exciting competition called  “Feel the Music” (http://www.feelthemusiccompetition.com).

It has been a great ride here during the past few months. We’ve seen and accomplished a lot. For me, the three major highlights have been the students, the small companies we have gotten to know and the partners we have found to collaborate with. We’ve met well over 1000 students who are pursuing their entrepreneurial goals or have participated in our events just to see what the buzz is all about. We’ve seen a great team generate exciting new ideas. We’ve participated in the beginning of new companies and gotten to know companies at all subsequent stages of their development – we’ve even seen how some of these companies managed to attract funding. And we’ve appreciated all the partners we have found within the University of Michigan, such as our friends from the Zell-Lurie Institute, or from the broader community, such as Ann Arbor SPARK, the Michigan Opportunities and Resources for Entrepreneurs Program, and many more. We’re currently getting ready for the next academic
year, during which we’ll add to all of those highlights.