💡 How We Talk About Ideas Is How We Treat Them

Widening the “Translation” Lens

Earlier this week, on a Zoom call with colleagues from Longwood University (see more about our work with Longwood below) we were working on some ideas related to Longwood’s new SEED Innovation Hub. The issues we were exploring had to do with policies related to managing intellectual property. 

As we developed policy ideas, we were guided by a simple but important overarching question: What message are we sending?

Because we weren’t just defining rights and responsibilities. We were crafting a signal—an invitation (or a barrier) to innovation. Were we encouraging people to take their ideas seriously, to share them, to build with others? Or were we inadvertently  telling them: “This is complicated. You probably don’t belong here unless you’ve already figured it all out.”

Focusing on that question crystalized something for me: when it comes to advancing innovation and impact, The right policies can help open doors—but the wrong ones may quietly close them. Policies and what they focus on shape culture.  

So how do we create a culture where everyone feels like they’re part of moving ideas to impact?

Building an Ideas-to-Impact Culture

In higher education, we often equate “translation” with commercialization—and commercialization with patents and licenses. But that frame can be too narrow. It tends to privilege the high-dollar discoveries of R1 labs and sidelines the powerful contributions of educators, other social scientists, humanities scholars, designers, and community-engaged researchers.

What we need is a broader orientation—one that sees value in many forms of impact and invites more people to see themselves as contributors. What if we were to widen our lens on translation from “technology transfer” alone to a broader effort at “knowledge transfer”? What if we created a culture of something bigger: the movement of ideas across boundaries—from research to real-world application, from classrooms to communities, from insights to action.

At its heart, this is a movement toward “ideas to impact.” Not a new university function, just a broader orientation—an ethos that asks:

• Who gets to be seen as an innovator?

• What kinds of knowledge count?

• How do we create conditions for people to act on their ideas, no matter the focus and domain of potential impact?

This isn’t about devaluing tech transfer and commercialization—IP management through patents and licenses is essential for realizing the impact of many of the kinds of ideas and knowledge born at universities. But it’s not the only approach to moving ideas to impact, and it only works for certain kinds of knowledge. If we want a truly vibrant innovation culture, we need listening alongside licensing. Flexibility alongside protection. Curiosity alongside compliance.

And most of all, we need to widen the invitation.

That means designing systems—and cultures—that engage not just the inventor in an engineering lab creating a new recycling technology, but also the faculty member in sociology studying social trust. The poet with a public health message. The community member with lived experience. It means naming creative work and the arts and humanities as central to a university’s idea-to-impact landscape—not ornamental extras.

When we do this, we move from isolated breakthroughs to ecosystem energy. We foster what Steven Johnson called, in his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, “the adjacent possible”—those next steps that suddenly appear when we shift our frame and open new doors.

Start the Movement Where You Are

We’ve joked in our work with Longwood about making a sign that says “Office of Knowledge Transfer” and taping it to a door—whoever’s door happens to be open to conversation, curiosity, and cross-boundary thinking. I actually think it’s not a bad idea.

What if every office on campus became an “Office of Idea to Impact”?

What if that mindset—of moving knowledge into action—wasn’t confined to one building, one budget, or one commercializable outcome? What if it showed up in how we teach, partner, design, reflect, and share?

Here’s a challenge for you: if you're up for it, make such a sign, with that message or a similar one. Print it. Handwrite it. Put it on your door or in your Zoom background. Let it spark a conversation. Let it make clear that innovation goes beyond what you study or which department you’re in—it’s about what you're willing to share, build, and move forward.

The culture we want starts with the signals we send.