The University Perspective

Failure - the Podcast

Welcome to Innovation Blab, a new series of podcasts (…keep fingers crossed…) offering the B-side to Failure - the Podcast. Yes, Mark will be back, and we hope to put up both Innovation and Failure posts in the coming days (months, more likely), but as they say about the alleged clandestine romantic relationship surrounding appointment of the special prosecutor in the Georgia election interference cases, we shall see.

Can’t say that much has been made of the B-side of late. Baby boomers are probably the last to have given it much thought, but in its heyday, the B-side was pretty much the tomalley of 45 RPM, 7-inch vinyl records. (Don’t know tomalley? Ask a lobster.) Aficionados looked forward to it. Everybody else, not so much.

The B-side could grow on you, though. Take Elvis’s “Hound Dog,” the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The list goes on. So does the beat.

To the armchair intellectual, the A-side and the B-side are like yin and yang. There’s no need to drag Eastern philosophy into an LA marketing gimmick, though. Two sides of the same coin is more like it. The only philosophy here is KISS: keep it simple stupid.

Speaking of innovation and failure (were we?), maybe they’re like yin and yang. We asked ChatGPT, and we got a qualified “sort of.” It felt a little like the prize every kid gets at soccer, win or lose. Yes, the AI said, innovation and failure can be complementary forces, but no, they are not interconnected and interdependent opposites. Just to check that, we asked the electric savant the same of Donald Trump and the news media. We pretty much got the same answer. Consistency doesn’t prove correctness, but it’s a start.

So what does any of that have to do with today’s podcast? Have a listen and judge for yourself. Our guest is Stefan Koehler, director of therapeutics licensing at the University of Michigan. We didn’t ask him about yin and yang, nor about failure — though, he did give some insights into licensing that would make Jim Harbaugh proud. (Sorry, Stefan, wrong department, but you catch our drift).