I have spent almost twenty years working with universities, research libraries, scholarly information, and the people responsible for connecting researchers with knowledge.
I did not plan my career that way.
My path moved through ProQuest and EBSCO, two companies that helped universities organize and deliver access to enormous bodies of scholarship. I spent years listening to library leaders explain how research was changing, how technology was changing, and how the role of the library had to change with both, concluding with time as an entrepreneur in residence at the Boston University Libraries.
Later, I founded Skilltype because I became convinced that libraries could not navigate their future without a more intentional way to understand and develop the expertise of their people.
That conviction eventually led me beyond libraries. Annual Reviews has also influenced this reflection. The nonprofit scholarly publisher became an investor in Skilltype in 2023. Its mission is built around synthesizing the state of knowledge so researchers can understand what is already known and where the unanswered questions remain.
Today, my work at Nexus Louisiana places me much closer to entrepreneurs, investors, universities, economic development leaders, and the difficult process of turning an idea into something people can use. I now spend more time thinking about companies, capital, intellectual property, product development, and the conditions required for innovation to survive outside the institution where it began.
Taken together, these experiences have exposed me to different points along the same continuum.
ProQuest and EBSCO helped researchers reach knowledge. Research libraries helped researchers navigate it. Annual Reviews helps researchers make sense of it. Skilltype helps the organizations supporting researchers develop the talent required to do that work. Nexus Louisiana helps entrepreneurs turn knowledge and ideas into companies.
For most of my career, I treated these as adjacent industries. But I’m beginning to see them as parts of one unfinished system. The university is exceptionally good at producing research. It has developed sophisticated infrastructure to fund it, conduct it, review it, publish it, organize it, preserve it, and measure how other scholars engage with it.
But what happens next?
- Who helps determine whether a discovery matters to anyone outside the researcher’s discipline?
- Who identifies the entrepreneur who might see a product inside an invention disclosure?
- Who finds the community whose lived experience could change the research question before the study begins?
- Who translates a technical finding for a policymaker, clinician, manufacturer, school system, small business, or investor?
- Who notices that a patent sitting in one part of the university could solve a problem being experienced somewhere else?
These are increasingly the questions I find myself thinking about.
After spending nearly twenty years helping knowledge move through universities, I am beginning to wonder whether the next twenty should be spent helping it move beyond them. This is not some announcement that I’ve decided what the next chapter will be. But I am trying to follow the questions my work keeps putting in front of me.
The more time I spend around research libraries, scholarly publishers, entrepreneurs, and economic development, the harder it is to ignore the space between them. There is a gap between what universities know and what communities, companies, and institutions can actually use. That gap is not caused by a lack of intelligence, or a lack of research, or a lack of capital. Most times it’s caused by a lack of translation, matchmaking, relationships, incentives, and people who understand enough of several worlds to help them work together. And perhaps that is the work. Perhaps the next twenty years are not about leaving the world I have worked in. Perhaps they are about connecting its pieces.
This year, I want to explore that possibility publicly.
I want to think about how research libraries define impact, how universities move intellectual property, how communities shape research, how entrepreneurs discover academic inventions, and what new kinds of roles may be required. Most of all, I want to ask a personal question honestly: What have the first twenty years of my career prepared me to do with the next twenty?