Where is China's "Musk"?
Author | Liu Jingfeng
Edit | Yang Zhijie
In 1960, Augustus Braun Jinzell, who had just joined the Joint Commission of American Engineers, came up with the idea of creating a college of engineering dedicated to serving engineers, as the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) did in the field of science. Previously, he served as an engineer and research director at United Carbide Corporation in the United States, and was well aware of the confusion of the American engineer community at that time.
At that time, the vast majority of engineers were in the front line of enterprise research and development, or in enterprise research and development positions, and rarely as full-time researchers in universities or research institutions. Although engineers have been founding members of the National Academy of Sciences and nearly one-sixth of the academy's membership for nearly 100 years, there is hardly a prestigious institution to serve them. As a result, while engineers have brought a huge boost to scientific progress, their sense of presence in the public eye has been weak. For example, only about 30 of the 675 members of the National Academy of Sciences at the time called themselves engineers, which somewhat suppressed the sense of identity and enthusiasm of engineers.
On December 5, 1964, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) was finally established, and Kinzer became the first president of the National Academy of Engineering. Although the NAE was originally formed as a "purposeful compromise" in response to NAS's concerns about engineers expanding its institutions, the move is seen as "an important milestone in the history of american science-engineering relations."
Today, the National Academy of Engineering has become the top academic institution in the field of engineering, one of the four major national academic institutions in the United States - the other three are the National Academy of Sciences NAS, the National Academy of Medicine NAM and the National Science Foundation NSF, and it is also one of the most influential engineering institutes in the world.
Even as an academic institution, the National Academy of Engineering still produces academicians by academic standards. In fact, judging from the composition of the first members of the National Academy of Engineering, many of them are technicians or business leaders who come from the front line of the enterprise. For example, Kim Zell, a former engineer, and Simon Ramo, the father of the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system and vice president of Hughes Aircraft Corporation.
Since then, almost all of the national academy of engineering academicians have been represented by technology entrepreneurs: Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Apple founder Jobs, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder and CEO Bezos, Microsoft current CEO Satya Nadella, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
In a sense, the emphasis on the community of engineers and the encouragement of tech entrepreneurs have also greatly stimulated the rise and development of American technology companies over the past 50 years.
People's attention to Musk's selection as a member of the National Academy of Engineering is also an expectation for the next Chinese "Musk".
1. "Undergraduate Academician" Musk
If you only look at academics, Musk can become an academician is definitely a big joke.
An unremarkable transfer student who went to a school chosen for the sake of being a girl (Musk chose Queen's University in Canada because of the number of beautiful women), only got a bachelor's degree, did not publish a professional paper in any core journal, and did not have any inventions.
Isn't this just a mediocre wandering youth?
However, after graduation, Musk not only successfully started a business and achieved financial freedom early, but also changed the situation of us space development with one person's strength.
Before the rise of SpaceX, the U.S. commercial space market was almost dominated by established giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin — who banded together to inflate the price of rocket launches for their own benefit, not only leaving NASA (NASA) suffering from the high cost of space launches, but relying on former military rival Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to deliver people and supplies to space — it is said that the United States bought the Soyuz. The price of tickets for spacecraft has risen from $21.8 million in 2007 to $81.1 million in 2018; it has also brought the entire U.S. space industry to a standstill, and a number of small and medium-sized commercial space companies have been suppressed by giants, including SpaceX when it was founded.
At its most desperate, SpaceX's three rocket launches ended in failure, and the atmosphere of failure enveloped everyone in the company; Tesla was also in a production crisis, and someone specially opened a column called "Tesla Death Countdown" on the Internet. In December 2008, SpaceX CFO Deepak told Musk: "The book money can only last for 3 days. ”
But even so, Musk brought SpaceX back to life in his own way — a successful fourth rocket launch, which gave SpaceX $1.6 billion in NASA funding and a new phase of development.
"Koshi Lightyear" has previously written an analysis that SpaceX can beat its American rivals - Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbit technology company at a staggering low price, while the rocket launch cost of these companies is still maintained at a price of 200 million US dollars / time, SpaceX's cost per launch has dropped to 60 million US dollars; the reason why the price can be reduced to such a low level is because it has greatly reduced the cost of rocket and spacecraft launches through the development of recyclable rockets and recyclable spacecraft.
Although recyclable rockets and recyclable spacecraft were proposed decades ago, it was Musk, the space layman, who really realized them.
In this sense, SpaceX single-handedly pushed the U.S. space industry into a new phase.
More critically, Musk is not a "hand-throwing treasurer". Although he is not an aerospace major, after running SpaceX for several years, Musk has grown into an aviation expert with strong self-learning ability. In the book "Iron Man in Silicon Valley: Elon Musk's Adventurous Life," the author commented on Musk after conducting extensive research interviews that "few CEOs of technology companies have the same level of expertise in their fields."
On February 10 this year, local time, Musk broadcast live the latest progress of the SpaceX starship program
Because of this, Musk is CEO and CTO at SpaceX, as well as an engineer. It has to be said that Musk does have extraordinary learning and creative ability.
In addition, Musk realized early on that solar energy is likely destined to be the preferred source of energy for humanity in the future. To this end, he founded the "Sun City" company and made it the largest solar panel installation enterprise in the United States. Sun City is more about his worldview than about business opportunities.
The National Academy of Engineering's evaluation of Musk's election as a fellow is that he has made breakthroughs in the design, engineering, manufacturing and operation of reusable launch vehicles, sustainable transportation and energy systems.
According to this standard, Musk's election as a member of the Academy of Engineering is indeed deserved.
2. Can an entrepreneur be elected as an academician?
An interesting phenomenon is that Musk's election to the US Academy of Engineering seems to have only brought a carnival to the domestic science and technology circles, and there are very few foreign media hype about it.
When the domestic media talks about "Academician Ma" with relish, it is easy to think that two years ago, a group of entrepreneurs and scientific and technological leaders in China were nominated as candidates for academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
In April 2019, the Chinese Academy of Engineering announced the list of valid candidates for the 2019 academician co-election. Of the 531 candidates, 114 were from the corporate world. Among them are Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, who is well known in the technology circle, Wang Haifeng, senior vice president of Baidu and head of the AI technology platform system (AIG), Wang Jian, founder of Alibaba's cloud computing business, Yang Qiang, chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) of Shenzhen Qianhai Weizhong Bank of Tencent Holdings, Shen Xiangyang, executive vice president of Microsoft Global, and Wang Chuanfu, chairman of the board and president of BYD.
These candidates are business leaders who have made significant achievements in various fields of technology and have good academic qualifications. However, the outside world has questioned this, the purpose of entrepreneurs is to obtain commercial value, and Baidu has moral flaws in the past due to the sale of false medical advertisements due to search bidding rankings.
The impact of this storm on the selection of academicians is not known to outsiders, but the final result is that Li Yanhong, Wang Chuanfu, Wang Haifeng and others were not selected, and among these people, only Wang Jian was selected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering that year.
By 2021, the selection of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering will be almost all researchers in scientific research institutes, colleges and universities, and large state-owned enterprises, and there are very few "businessmen" in private enterprises.
In fact, it can also be seen from the list of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in the past that it does not exclude private entrepreneurs, such as Yang Huanming, co-founder of BGI Gene in 2007, and Deng Zhonghan, chairman of Zhongxing Micro Group in 2009. But judging by the official attitude and the final result of the selection, they are not mainstream.
Can a businessman become an academician? If put in the past, this is a controversial topic. But from the perspective of the present, this has become a new era proposition.
Although the National Academy of Engineering in China and the United States is not exactly the same, there are many commonalities in scientific research.
The National Academy of Engineering was founded in 1964 by American engineer Augustus Braun Kinzer and served as its first president. Its academician candidates are proposed by at least 1 incumbent academician and certified by 3 incumbent or retired academicians. Selection criteria are based on the candidate's contribution to engineering research, practice, education, or the development of new technical fields, the development/implementation of innovative approaches to engineering education, the provision of engineering leadership for major projects, etc. This means that the source of academicians includes commercial companies. In fact, many of the first 25 academicians were from commercial companies, including Dean Kinzer, who was previously vice president of research and development at United Carbides, and Simon Rameau, another founder of the Academy of Engineering, who was first vice president of Hughes Aircraft and later Lamo Wooldridge.
Since then, almost all the members of the National Academy of Engineering have been represented by technology entrepreneurs: Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Apple founder Jobs, Google founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Amazon founder Bezos, Microsoft current CEO Satya Nadella, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
About 60 of the 111 new members and 22 international academician candidates released by the National Academy of Engineering on February 9 are candidates from companies, some of whom are company researchers and engineers, and some are CEOs and founders.
Although a large number of businessmen with non-scientific backgrounds are recruited, and the selected academicians are required to pay membership fees every year, this does not prevent the National Academy of Engineering from becoming the top academic institution in the American engineering community, and its academician title is also one of the highest professional honors in the engineering community.
The Chinese Academy of Engineering was established in June 1994, 30 years after the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. According to the Statutes of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, academician candidates can be nominated individually through academicians or relevant academic groups, or through the above two channels at the same time. The selection criteria are "major and creative achievements and contributions in engineering science and technology, love the motherland, upright study style, good conduct" and so on.
Although there is no relevant encouragement or restriction on the group of "businessmen" in the standard, the fact is that as mentioned above, the vast majority of its inductees are mainly researchers from state-owned enterprises, universities, and research institutions.
With the increasingly prominent role of private enterprises, especially Internet technology enterprises in scientific and technological innovation in the past decade, their entrepreneurs or core R & D personnel have gradually become an important force in scientific and technological innovation, so in 2019, the China Association for Science and Technology issued a notice at the beginning of the recommendation of academician candidates of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, clearly encouraging "to elect academicians from private enterprises".
This meant that private entrepreneurs were beginning to be encouraged to run for academicians and become scientists.
3. Open up the "last mile" for entrepreneurs and scientists
From the list of academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering over the years, it can be seen that its members are mainly scientific researchers, and the groups served are mainly scientific researchers. With the rapid development of China's technology industry, according to relevant statistics, the current mainland scientific and technological engineer group has exceeded 80 million, is the world's largest number of engineers in the country, they also encountered the same problem as the American engineers more than 50 years ago: the lack of a professional organization that recognizes and serves engineers.
Today, a "reverse" trend is happening - China's wave of science and technology in recent years has made a large number of scientists leave scientific research institutions and go to the front line of entrepreneurship. This means that scientists are actively involved in business. Some of them have succeeded, and they have founded super unicorns in a certain field; but more often than not, they have received mediocre responses or even failed.
Previously, "Koshi Lightyear" wrote in "Why 97% of Scientists Fail to Start a Business?" The article pointed out that the United States, a company specializing in the transformation of technological achievements, "Bastille", once did a survey: the failure rate of American college professors to start a business has reached an astonishing 96% to 97%, and therefore, when Bastille chooses partners, it will not list the entrepreneurial projects of university professors as the first choice.
Even Shi Yigong, former vice president of Tsinghua University, once said rather pessimistically: "The last straw that crushed the camel was to encourage scientists to start businesses." ”
One of the big reasons is that scientists have a deep understanding of technology, but a shallow understanding of products. A technology entrepreneurship project, if you do not know how to transform technology into something usable, you can not find the direction of the product, doomed to failure.
In addition to having corresponding entrepreneurial supporting services for them, it is also necessary for them to learn how to start a business.
At the "Jiazi Gravity X" Greater Bay Area Science and Technology Innovation Summit Forum held in April 2021, Liu Ke, a foreign academician of the Australian National Academy of Engineering, said that if a society wants to have an innovative atmosphere, it needs compound talents. To create an innovative society, the positive interaction between government, industry, education and research is crucial. "What can really link government, industry, education and research are entrepreneurs and scientists." Liu Ke said.
Entrepreneurs are better at solving difficult and complex problems, and their focus is not only for the company, but also for the whole society. Scientists are good at focusing on important factors and discarding insignificant aspects to analyze problems. They have their own strengths.
In the United States, CORPORATE CEOs and CTOs can be transferred to key government positions, university professors, or scientific research academicians. For example, a professor at Princeton University in the United States can become the president of the US Federal Reserve the next day; at the same time, the CEO of Goldman Sachs can immediately go to the university after becoming the secretary of the treasury. Liu Ke called this phenomenon the "revolving door system". "This revolving door system should be open to all the best people in industry, enterprises, and government, which is good for enterprises, governments, and universities." Liu Ke said.
Allowing engineers and business leaders to serve as academicians of the National Academy of Engineering is one of the embodiments of this "revolving door system".
This is also a kind of industry-university-research interaction that China can learn from, opening up the transformation path from entrepreneurs to scientists and stimulating an innovative atmosphere.
Scientific and technological innovation has become the inevitable road of China's development, while encouraging scientists to start businesses, it is also more important to let entrepreneurs with engineering capabilities become scientists, which will also be our scientific and technological dividends in the next era.