Ferrier is associate dean for innovation, research/creative activity and graduate studies and international program at Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University in Athens.

DL: Talk to me about what you do.

Ferrier: I will talk specifically about the innovations stuff because I think that’s what directly touches journalism and communication. In my bailiwick, I’m responsible for a couple of key programs that we have existing right now. One is our Game Research and Immersive Design Lab; that’s a laboratory with projects that are initiated by faculty that look at anything from serious games, to data visualizations and animations, to Oculus Rift and immersive design. It is very broadly defined. It also is a space that has operated as a pre-incubation space for student startup teams. Student startup teams are small in number; there are normally two to three per semester per year that are interested in taking an idea from a class and moving it further on, but they are not far enough along to move them to one of the other structures on campus like the Digital Media Incubator or other spaces. They’re still students, and we created a space where they can still use university software and other things.

The other entity is the Scripps Innovation Challenge, which is a student competition that we started about two years ago to introduce students to media entrepreneurship. We pose a set of media/news/journalism challenges and ask our students to create innovations around those that help solve those problems. We go to media entities and ask them about a problem/challenge that they may have internal teams working on. We pose those to the student teams to come up with ideas around them.

Part of the other piece of my work is expanding two other entities. One of them is Scripps Survey Research Center, which kind of falls under the innovation/entrepreneurship area. [The other is] the development of a new innovation center, as yet to be defined. I have my own loose ideas, but we are beginning to engage faculty in conversations about how that center might be shaped and primarily looking at our own sweet spot out of all the other labs and centers in the world.

I think I needed a good year to immerse myself to figure out what those competencies were, and now we are moving forward with some initiatives that will get that innovation center off the ground. My role is not only to enhance those existing activities but to find ways to infuse entrepreneurial thinking and skills throughout our curriculum. A lot of that work is informed by research, very similar to what you are doing now, which did end up in publication in Journalism [and Mass Communication] Educator , called “Media Entrepreneurship: Curriculum Development and Faculty Perceptions of What Students Should Know,” published [in September 2013]. It looked at faculty who were creating courses around this general theme. How do they introduce entrepreneurship as a pathway to their students? What were the types of skills and knowledge they expected their students to know and do? How did they explain the landscape and describe and help students see and anticipate opportunities in the landscape? And all the way to not only innovating within legacy media companies, but also starting up their own media enterprises upon graduation.

The paper looked at and talked to educators in the U.S. and Canada and looked at the skill sets and challenges the faculty faced in mounting those types of courses. Was there pushback from students or administrators or committees as they engaged in the work that engaged in both the scholarly and creative activity, and how did they demonstrate the value of the very intensive work it takes to build the relationships to do this curriculum right? That paper really helped me not only see what people were doing within the classroom, but the real need of support outside of the classroom for these kinds of students.

There’s a real need for a larger environment. These students are very self-motivated. They felt out of place in an environment where people were focused on getting a four-year degree. These were students that were focused on getting a degree but also starting a business at the same time. That’s how I approached my own dissertation research. When asked why I was getting a dissertation, I said partly for the degree but also because I would like to start a business out of the ideas that I generate from that dissertation. They would look at me sideways, but I recognized that there were two pathways for the kind of work I was doing. These students do, too, but there are fewer supports for them to be able to do both.

Part of what I’ve been doing over the last year, as well as looking beyond the classroom environment, is looking at ways through our challenge, through hackathons, through co-working spaces and the pathways we already have and shoring those up, allow the students to really feel an entrepreneurial ecosystem. I like to let people know we aren’t trying to crank out the next Mark Zuckerberg. Students need to know what I call the “art of the hustle.” It really is anything from “I need to make some money, and here’s a lemonade stand” to “I see a problem in my current job, and how do I initiate conversation to spark interest around what I see as an opportunity?”

I have been both in academe and on the professional side as well as having been an entrepreneur starting my own businesses and innovating in those spaces, and when I looked back at my zigzag career path, I would go from professional life to academe to study an issue and then go back to professional life to implement that idea, and then back to academe to study something else or start a business. I bounced back and forth because I felt the need to practice and study what I was practicing as I was developing these technologies. I really saw a need to build out that larger environment for students to provide them with ongoing and consistent messages that it’s OK to experiment and to let them know that in this dynamic environment, even as newspapers may be closing or laying people off that there is still tremendous opportunity for the skill set they have, and we are providing them with an additional skill set that will allow them to innovate both inside and out in their own startups.

DL: You’re talking about infusing curriculum, journalism in particular, with entrepreneurial ways of thinking, knowing, being and doing. How do you do that in the academy?

Ferrier: Right. I say “infusing the curriculum,” but I’m also looking at ways to find extracurricular activities like our challenge that will engage students outside of the classroom, because I don’t believe you can be an entrepreneur for a couple of hours. You’re either an entrepreneur or you’re not. Outside of the classroom environment, they need that continuous support to keep them motivated and focused.

What do I mean by “infusing the curriculum”? I was part of the [Arizona State University] inaugural class that went through their Scripps Howard Journalism Entrepreneurship Institute. That fellowship was obviously not my first exposure to entrepreneurialism. I have actually started several media projects and companies both inside and outside of them. In 2000 or 2002, I launched one of the first multimedia classes in media entrepreneurship where students developed their own businesses. That was a while ago. The institute was designed to bring those of us that have done or are doing this work to look at building a course. The challenge was to leave the weeklong institute and create a course. People implemented in all kinds of ways: a core course, an elective, only for seniors as a capstone or earlier on in the curriculum. I had played with a variety of different models throughout the years in ways I have introduced entrepreneurship and began to see while there are all these flavors, but if it’s an elective, someone can miss it. If it’s only offered the senior year, the student doesn’t have a runway to continue that idea or have a way to get a degree in business or entrepreneurship or a certificate. When I say “infusing,” I think both within the classes and through some other curricular and extracurricular devices we tested last year.

DL: Devices as in technology?

Ferrier: I had to ask someone that question, too. This past year, I developed, with some outside experts and reviewers, a mobile module, which really was a module that looks at mobile. Most of our prior year challenges show that most of the innovations that students were developing were around mobile, mobile devices and mobile applications, and yet they had no conception beyond downloading them to their phone about how to make them, who makes them, how to make money off them, how to integrate them into a larger business idea, how to submit to the Apple store, etc. The students had no concept of the landscape or the players.

The mobile module was a two-week module. We worked with an external developer who had done mobile application development to help us work through the curriculum that we wanted to design, and he developed that curriculum for us. This was my sell to the faculty: If you implement the mobile module in your class, this two-week module, I would have an expert come in and teach that module in your classroom. I am not delivering PowerPoint slides to you and asking you to deliver this new content. I’m going to bring in an expert to teach for two weeks across four classes, the same module in each class, and let you sit back and be a student and learn from the expert so you are able to teach it the next semester. It was implemented in six classes; two professors felt they could teach the module content themselves. We hired an external expert that had written a book on designing for iOS [Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system], and she was willing to leave her business for two weeks to come to Ohio to teach these classes and the content. Four professors, for those two weeks, really sat as a student in those classes.

In terms of students, we were able to touch about 500 students. We reached first-year students in an introductory class with entrepreneurship ideas, and we reached seniors that were in capstone classes that were already participating in the innovation challenge who got the just-in-time learning that they needed in order to be able to implement their mobile ideas for their solutions. I really liked that model to be able to go back and ask if this year we want to expand that model, do we want to provide a two-week introduction to entrepreneurship that can be deployed across any of our courses or do we want to deepen around a specific technology like Oculus Rift or immersive design or augmented reality and have students understand where the opportunities lie to teach them those skills.

DL: Is there a core skill set around entrepreneurship or intrepreneurship that every student or successful professional should have?

Ferrier: Yes. I do think there is a core set of skills, even though we typically shy away from that in the J-school. There is a financial aspect to that and understanding the business side of the business, but there are other skills. Pitching ideas, teamwork, being able to do an environmental scan to see where opportunities are—and I don’t think most programs set out to teach those kinds of skills for students. [When students learn the entrepreneurial way of thinking,] they are able to analyze content in front of them, they are able to look forward to see opportunities and are able to position themselves, their companies or a startup in a place so it can be successful. That’s really lacking. I think that a key skill entrepreneurs develop is the constant scanning mode where they are looking for potential for growth and development. Another key skill is environmental scanning: Is your idea viable? How do you test an idea and continue to iterate? It’s not just about having an idea, but it’s about evolving an idea. A lot of our students are trained to do the assignment, get it done, turn it in and get a grade.

DL: What level of exposure to these kinds of ideas is sufficient to actually have any lasting impact on a student’s understandings of the world?

Ferrier: That’s why I now go with the mantra “early and often.” Just one module or one class isn’t enough. What I’m trying to build at Ohio University is an ecosystem of entrepreneurship and innovation. I’m very cognizant of the challenges of students coming out with debt and having to find a job, so I’m not saying that every student should graduate and start their own business. I do think that students need to understand that in today’s economic environment—not just in journalism, but the broad-base economic environment—I really hold to the mantra that everyone should have five revenue streams. I’m thinking most people have a job. One revenue stream, if you make enough at that job to save a little to invest, that’s another passive revenue stream, so there’s two, so where do the other three come from? Ever since college, I’ve always freelanced and done consulting work. I’ve always had that mindset to create that additional revenue on the fly. I think, especially in today’s economic environment, we do our students as a whole, not just journalism students, a disservice if we don’t help them reimagine both active and passive income generation tools, and part of that is understanding the entrepreneurial and creative pathways that can allow them to create the space and revenue for themselves.

DL: Is that something that journalism education should be focused on and incorporating? You are talking about a significant investment in training the trainers or educators so they understand it and then can teach it at the college level. Is that what you are suggesting? That should be a critical skill set that should be incorporated into every school?

Ferrier: Yes. I think yes. As I said, in my professional life, before I fled from layoffs into this opportunity, I went through four rounds of layoffs at my prior newspaper before I got my Ph.D. and left. A week after I left, they riffed my whole team. I’ve seen firsthand, not only that part of it, but also the need to innovate within corporations, and part of my research has been around hyperlocal online news and some of the players that have been cropping up in the cracks of legacy media. I’ve seen the lack of skills for people to be able to successfully navigate that new environment because of the lack of skills they have. They have tremendous skills, but they are lacking some key skills that could shorten their runway or make them profitable and make a difference in their communities.

DL: Can you connect the shortening the runway language to what you think journalism in 2025 will look like? Do you think that the legacy media places will no longer be relevant, or is this a skill set for every organization in every environment?

Ferrier: It’s a skill set everyone should have, regardless of whether it’s journalism. I think they need it particularly in journalism because as we look at the emerging media environment, many of the new technologies and cultural changes have direct relationship to communications and journalism. Because of the technology and the changes, our traditional professionals are ill-equipped to deal with those kinds of changes. As students, what they need are skills to navigate in a dynamic environment. And personal brand and reputation management, which is another area of my research, building their skill sets and personal brands and being able to, in this culture where you don’t stay anywhere for 20 years anymore, be able to self-market and get your skill sets and self and brand visible in a way to find opportunity where you are or create opportunities for yourself.

DL: So what do you give up? When I talk to faculty and deans and say this is a component part of what we should do, they say we only have 42 credits so what don’t we do?

Ferrier: Teaching software. I think teaching software can be done offline, and students should be taught how to evaluate and learn software. Students need to learn how software is structured, and they don’t get that in the first program they learn; they get it by the second program and by comparing it with the first, to see how they think. Students need to learn how to learn it on their own, because they’ll be doing that for the rest of their lives. Whether it’s a new camera, new software, new design software or analytics, they will have to learn how to learn it. Being systematic about how to learn period, but also in this specific environment of software will serve them in good stead. Instead of doing that online, we are going to teach you page layout software. The classes will focus on the theory of light and color and white space and things like that and demonstration of those skills, but the software aspects will be deferred to a lab or offline to let the students learn how to work the software and pull the levers. The class is reserved more for the theory and the output of software. I think that’s one area that could be reduced. That’s a big one, actually.

DL: It would free up a lot of time in the curriculum. There are a lot of people that still teach digital media courses.

Ferrier: I think there’s camera technique and other things that must be taught in a hands-on manner, and I’m not arguing those, but there are other places that could be scraped out of the curriculum. If we are going to be in the software certification business, or whatever you want to call it, there has to be another kind of mechanism to do that because people need just-in-time and updated learning and we aren’t designed for that.

DL: When you think about the landscape of journalism in 2025 related to this, what do you see it looking like? To what end do students need to know that? What will journalism look like, and why are these skill sets necessary and relevant?

Ferrier: In 2025, let a thousand flowers bloom while we continue to see the consolidation of the legacy side, at a great disadvantage to community. I think we are going to see more and more smaller, geographically or niche-located media that are serving the long tail in the marketplace. They are not going to be the big blockbusters that serve millions of eyeballs and going to attract the online audiences. I think we have already seen those and are now seeing the proliferation of the long tail. You can survive and thrive with a very small fan base. I think we have not taught our students the skill sets to operate in that space. They are used to getting a job at the legacy media and letting someone else worry about the problems of audience and market and growth and development, and we haven’t taught them how to operate in the long tail. I think that’s critical to what I see happening in 2025 and the viability of our students in the marketplace.

The ecosystem is going to evolve to, if I’m using the animal world, there are the larger predators and then those at the bottom of the gene pool that are one-cell organisms but that are still life. I think the media ecosystem is going to and has rapidly evolved into a variety of different forms. You still need the basic skills, and I probably shouldn’t say this on record, in terms of some of the requirements of liberal arts, if someone is looking to gain space within our curriculum, I think it should become part of the liberal arts curriculum for all students to take and therefore it’s not the issue of the journalism school. The issue of the journalism school is to narrow it to a media entrepreneurship focus and have the opportunities within our field available to the students. All students, liberal arts and otherwise, should be exposed to and understand how to analyze the environment and look at their own discipline as a site for opportunity and their own careers that way.

The other piece of this, and the flip side of this argument, is all I’m doing is planting a seed. The student may or may not follow this pathway, or they may not follow this path until they are 50. There may be that time then that they say it’s time—that I can make this turn toward entrepreneurship. We want them to understand that pathway is available to them before they leave the academy so they can understand that they have flexibility and options.

DL: Is this a business strategy in terms of the academy? That expertise rests not in the journalism or media schools but in the business schools?

Ferrier: I think it’s in both places. Students should be introduced to it early and often within the liberal arts part of their curriculum. I did simple exercises when I taught my media survey class. The week we did magazine modules, I had my students do an exercise where they had to imagine a new magazine startup and do audience analysis and present their idea for content to the class. They had four days and a weekend to put together their slide deck and pitch it to the class. Inevitably, the years I used that exercise, one or two students at the end of the exercise wanted to continue their idea and wanted to know where to begin. I think we are not talking about huge investments. It can be something as small as that or something larger in terms of looking at a startup company and the amount of funding needs and types of investors. It can also be helping students understand they are in a creative field. They came in to the field because of the creativity on multiple fronts, and they have the creative energy and possibility to be able to explore skills for their own personal gain. That’s a different mindset than wanting to get a job at a legacy company. It’s understanding their own potential as graduates of our program … to be able to explore those potentials in multiple environments.

DL: The question is whether or not this is the purview of journalism schools. There are a lot of schools hooking up with engineering and business schools and pitching ideas that will never be more than a classroom project and pitch. There’s a lot of debate about whether students learn the kinds of skills you’re talking about and whether it’s the best use of their time.

Ferrier: I would say that entrepreneurial environments teach things that our kids don’t get in the classroom, and that’s how to fail gracefully and get back up and do it again. There are very rarely within the academic environment when a student can fail and learn something from that failure. In the startup and entrepreneurship environment, failure is seen as learning, from which you change your idea and pivot. We want to teach them that it’s not always taking a great idea and continuing on. We need to teach them that some ideas fail, and how do you figure out how to pick yourself up after that failure, continue to research the market and turn it into something that could be profitable. I can speak anecdotally, and the students come to me after the challenge and they say they learned a lot about themselves, how they work on a team, and how to make an idea real. Just because it’s not on Google doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because the idea wasn’t successful in the competition doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea. We teach them about failure and perseverance in the classroom. Learning how to fail is something new.

DL: Do faculty have the ability to teach that in a way to get the outcomes you want? It’s an entirely different kind of expertise, is it not?

Ferrier: Not entirely. I think journalism students have a basic set of skills. Interviewing people, analyzing data that work very well as entrepreneurs. They have some basic skills that put them in good stead. The other piece is that you are right. One of the outcomes of the conversation I had with faculty is that it became clear that I happen to be one of the few faculty who have done innovations inside and outside legacy media because I’ve tried startups on my own. Many have not done this at all. So there are credibility issues. Students are saying that faculty who have not been entrepreneurs can’t teach it because they’ve never done it.

One of the key learnings I got from other faculty teaching this is that, because they didn’t know the material and they hadn’t experienced it, they not only had the credibility gap, but when the students are in the weeds, because the process is not a linear process like most things taught in classes, a faculty member can get into the serious issue of not being able to help students get out of the space of not knowing.

Because this pathway of entrepreneurship is messy and nonlinear, students want to know what to do. But we want them to flounder in that space some, because that’s some of the mystery, adventure and feel of entrepreneurship. You really are the intrepid adventurer, and some are cut out for that and some aren’t. What has been key to the faculty who have been successful is the partnerships they’ve created with the larger ecosystem inside and outside of their institution. That is key to bringing speakers, new insights, judges for student work or the real-life litmus test, looking at new concepts for the classroom. That environmental scan and connection and networking is critical to the success and to the real learning of the student as well. Once you light them up and say to create this idea in class, then what do they do? Either they work in the university or push them externally to other entrepreneurs to move that idea forward. It does require key strategic partnerships with external partners that can help bring that environment to the classroom if you can’t create it as a professor yourself.

I think the key piece that is required to make this go at any institution is a faculty champion. A faculty champion cannot change the larger environment or water you are swimming in. Likewise, I don’t think you can wave a magic wand and make your existing faculty drink the Kool-Aid and believe this is important enough for students. I think what challenges me, and my understanding of what informs me, is not only have I been in the journalism environment and the startup environment and created innovations, but as a person of color, I’ve had to learn the art of the hustle.