A Conversation with Fulbright Canada Chair Daved Barry

Daved Barry is a Professor of Innovation at Clarkson University (Potsdam, New York). He was the Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair at the Sprott School of Business during the 2021-2022 academic year. We recently chatted with Daved to learn more about his experience at Sprott, the research that he worked on and how the pandemic impacted his plans.

How did you decide to apply for the Fulbright program?

It all started back in 2017. I’d been living in Scandinavia for quite some time having left the USA in 1993. I’d spent time working in New Zealand and Europe and I was in Sweden where I was a faculty member at Jonkoping University when the then Dean of the School of Business at Clarkson University recruited me back to the USA. I’ve had several colleagues who’ve been Fulbright Scholars and they were encouraging me to apply. The Dean at Clarkson University also encouraged me and she was telling me how much she loved Ottawa and had a place up there. I came to Ottawa and met with a few faculty members at Sprott to talk about potential research collaborations but it was with Troy Anderson that the research ideas really clicked and where a partnership started to form.

Can you tell us about your background and what you were hoping to achieve during your time as a Fulbright Chair?

I’m known for arts and design-based approaches to innovation and for my work in building business studios. I’ve done that around the world and one of my papers, “Discovering the Business Studio”, won a few awards including the Roethlisberger Award for best contribution to management education. When I think about a business studio, I think about an arts studio and enabling creativity and innovation. Coming into the Fulbright, I was interested in public sector innovation as I’ve only ever done business innovation prior to that. Since Ottawa is a predominantly government town, I had this idea of working with high-level government innovators. I would interview these innovators, whether they were innovating in policy or implementation of policy, and I would look at the narrative structures behind their successes and their failures. And Troy is well connected in the public sector so it seemed like a good research idea at the time.

Did your research plan follow through?

The COVID-19 pandemic did delay my plans and I did end up deferring the Fulbright by a full year. By the time I started in Fall 2021, there wasn’t much happening in high-level government regarding innovation and there wasn’t much access as people were busy and dealing with the effects of the pandemic. I was attending an innovation event at Kanata North and the then director suggested I look into community innovation. It’s something I hadn’t thought of before but it’s a very interesting area of the public sector and it’s more grassroots with lots of interesting people.

How did you end up finding an organization to work with?

I was teaching a course at Clarkson University called ‘Portraying Innovation’ and I was experimenting and I had my students do a documentary on student innovation at Clarkson University (this was the peak of COVID-19 and they had to do it all through Zoom). The students interviewed Clarkson University alumni who made all these inventions and commercialized them and were now living all over the world. I had never done anything like this in my life and it turned out really well. Documentary research is hugely different than any research that I’ve ever done. Normally I go into things and I have a pretty good idea of what I can expect. With documentaries, you never know what it’s going to be and you’re not going to know what the theme’s going to be until you start looking at the footage.

I learned a lot in that experience and I was teaching the course again during my time as a Fulbright Chair and I had the idea to try another documentary. I turned to my students for help and they found The Laneway Project in Toronto which ticked all the boxes in terms of grassroots innovation and success. The founder of the project had this idea of flipping the laneways in the city, which were at the time dark, unsafe and crime-ridden. She wanted to make them community based and community run and turned them into these public, beautiful spaces. We contacted the people that were running the Toronto laneway project, asked if they would be interested in doing the documentary and they said yes. So off we went with our student-led camera crew and started interviewing those involved with the project.

What were some of your key findings?

One of the biggest findings was methodological. When you’re doing a documentary like this, it completely changes turning on a camcorder. And the reason for that I think is because people feel like it’s a production and that creates a very different dynamic. They’re prepping a lot more, thinking more about what they want to convey, and about their story and other people’s stories. There’s this high public visibility that’s just never there in any other kind of research. And they’re having to deal with studio lights and studio cameras and a crew of people handling these professional devices. I wasn’t in front of the camera myself but I could visibly see that this hugely transformed every single person that sat in the interviewee’s seat or when we were out in the field doing the interviews.

One of the professional documentary makers in Toronto that I was talking to said that we should ask the question, “What was most meaningful for you?” And as soon as you ask that question, everything changes as well. People become much more sincere, they become much more soul searching. There’s this movement from showing up and trying to look good to suddenly just being genuine and diving into it and we noticed those distinctions as well.

Methodologically, I was getting material that I never would have gotten any other way. Period. And I’m still looking at it and analyzing it from a narrative perspective. I think that some of the stuff that’s pretty cool is that if you’re looking at grassroots public sector innovation, you need to have this Joan of Arc type character who is almost critical to making the innovation work. The founder of The Laneway Project had to constantly adapt when working with different communities from all socio-economical backgrounds. From dealing with active resistance to speaking with policymakers and having to constantly change her style. It was a very different approach than the government sector.

How was your experience working with Sprott and our faculty?

The whole experience has been really great. From the research side, having somebody who wanted to continue to work together who had the same interests was really critical and I’ve found that with Troy. He has really been the gateway to everything and he’s been so generous with his time. What we’re looking at right now is this whole intersection between place-based and creative experiential teaching. We both do that quite a bit and I have a formal studio set-up whereas Troy is having to improvise a lot. We’re looking into co-writing an article about it for a journal. I didn’t know what to expect going into the Fulbright and there were lots of hurdles to jump through with residency requirements and COVID delays but I’m really happy with the whole Carleton University connection and what we were able to achieve with the research.