George Kozmetsky: American Innovator - University of Washington ...

George Kozmetsky:
American Innovator
A LIFE AT THE INTERSECTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND IDEOLOGY
By Kenneth D. Walters
Professor of Business, UW Bothell; Research Fellow, IC 2 Institute, University of Texas, Austin
12 UW BUSINESS
GEORGE KOZMETSKY
1917 – 2003
FEATURE
George Kozmetsky (BA 1938) — UW alumnus, co-founder of Teledyne Inc., business
school dean, and mentor to countless students, faculty, and entrepreneurs — died April 30
at the age of 85 after a battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He is survived by wife Ronya;
son, Gregory; daughter, Nadya Scott; seven grandchildren, and four great grandchildren.
George Kozmetsky started over 100 high-tech companies; authored 23 books and countless
papers; served on numerous corporate boards and was a sought-after public speaker
nationwide and internationally. He was the first recipient of M.I.T.’s Entrepreneurial
Achievement Award and in 1993 President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of
Technology. Recognizing Kozmetsky’s insights and achievements into technology
entrepreneurship and innovation, Professor C.V. Ramamoorthy, computer science professor
emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, coined the term “the Kozmetsky effect”
in 2000 to define the convergence of knowledge-technology-transfer phases in developing
new knowledge and its path to successful commercialization.
BEGINNINGS
Kozmetsky was born to Russian immigrants George and Nadya Kozmetsky, in 1917. As a boy he unloaded fishing boats
on the Seattle docks, earning as compensation fish that he would bring home for the family. When he was five his father
died, but not before admonishing the young Kozmetsky, “You must go to college.” That advice — strongly reinforced by
his mother — apparently stuck since education, coupled with business, became his twin lifelong passions. He graduated
from the UW Business School at just 20.
FALL 2003 13

Professor C.V. Ramamoorthy, computer science professor emeritus
at the University of California, Berkeley, coined the term
“the Kozmetsky effect” in 2000 to define the convergence
of knowledge-technology-transfer phases in developing new
knowledge and its path to successful commercialization.
It was at the UW that Kozmetsky found a true mentor
in the form of Professor Grant Butterbaugh. Butterbaugh
recognized Kozmetsky’s special gifts and took a strong
interest not only in his education but also in his personal
and cultural development, introducing the eager young
man to ideas and experiences outside the formal business
curriculum.
“Professor Butterbaugh gave me my first piece of art,”
Kozmetsky recalled in 2001. In appreciation for
Butterbaugh’s mentorship, Kozmetsky endowed the Grant
I. Butterbaugh Professorship at the UW Business School
in 1968. Kozmetsky’s own prolific mentorship was a way
of saying thanks to people like Butterbaugh.
Among his many protégés was Michael Dell, chairman
and chief executive officer of Dell. “It was a stroke of great
fortune to have Dr. Kozmetsky on our team,” said Dell.
“There’s no question that his guidance was instrumental
in our early success.”
MILITARY SERVICE
At UW he enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training
Corps, and quickly enlisted in the Army after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, where he was assigned
to the Army Medical Corps. After D-Day in June 1944,
he was sent to the front lines in France. Though he rarely
spoke of those experiences, he earned a Bronze Star with
an Oak Leaf Cluster, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart for
assisting injured soldiers and conducting surgery on the
front lines.
After World War II, Kozmetsky enrolled at Harvard
Business School, earning his MBA and later a doctorate.
After teaching at Harvard and Radcliffe he became a
member of the founding faculty of the new Graduate
School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Tech
(later Carnegie-Mellon) where he published important
works with Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon.
PARTNERSHIP WITH RONYA
Kozmetsky insisted that no proper account of his business
and academic success could overstate the importance of
his wife Ronya, whom he married in 1943 just before his
battalion was shipped to Europe. Together they raised
three children and authored the popular book “Making It
Together: A Survival Manual for the Executive Family.”
He believed it was their duty to inspire young men and
women to face the future with confidence and to embrace
leadership positions in business and society. Their commitment
to this principle was indefatigable. They served
on advisory boards at schools throughout the country,
spoke to student groups, worked for curricular innovation,
sponsored leadership conferences, and supported innovative
faculty research through the family’s RGK Foundation.
PROFESSOR TURNS ENTREPRENEUR
Despite young Kozmetsky’s academic prowess, the
burgeoning world of high-tech business beckoned. He
joined Hughes Aircraft Company as assistant controller
in 1951, leaving three years later to join Litton Industries.
In 1960 he and Litton colleague Henry Singleton
founded Teledyne Inc., taking the company from startup
to a Fortune 500 powerhouse, encompassing 130 operating
companies spanning the world of high-tech in aerospace,
electronics, consumer products, and insurance, in a
mere six years. At Teledyne, Kozmetsky and Singleton
were integral in creating the fast-paced, technology-driven
environment that characterized the Los Angeles aerospace
and defense industries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Indeed, Kozmetsky’s enthrallment with all forms of
research and development never abated. “The world is
driven by two forces — technology and ideology,” he said.
“Regions have a choice of getting smaller, getting poorer,
or getting smarter.”
FROM ENTREPRENEUR TO DEAN
Following his spectacular business success in California,
Kozmetsky took his vision of high-tech economic development
to Texas, a state built on agriculture and oil.
Son Greg Kozmetsky says his father left Teledyne
because “he felt it was time to bring academia and the
corporate world closer together,” a conviction that
His goal was to build a “think tank/do tank” to study
complex problems, improve capitalism, and to actually design
and build new programs and institutions to accelerate the
transfer of innovations to the marketplace and society.
endured throughout his life. “You can’t have a government
that doesn’t trust business, you can’t have business that
doesn’t trust government, and academia can’t proceed on a
tangent that has no reference to business or government,”
Kozmetsky said.
Kozmetsky’s leadership as dean of The University of
Texas at Austin’s College of Business Administration
went from 1966-1982, a 16 year tenure during which he
catapulted the regional business school into a national
powerhouse.
AMERICAN VISIONARY
During the 1970s Kozmetsky became concerned that
American capitalism was stagnating. In 1977 he founded
the IC 2 Institute (for Innovation, Creativity, and Capital),
devoted to research and innovation on the intersection of
business, government, and academe. His goal was to build
a “think tank/do tank” to study complex problems,
improve capitalism, and to actually design and build new
programs and institutions to accelerate the transfer of
innovations to the marketplace and society.
The experiments launched by IC 2 were ambitious,
starting with scores of conferences, books, and research
projects on a wide range of complex problems in business
and society. In the 1980s these expanded to include
specific initiatives: an incubator, an angel capital network,
research parks, a graduate degree program in technology
commercialization (delivered over the internet), research
centers, mergers-and-acquisitions activities, IPOs,
and a host of startups spawned in Austin and later
brought in from around the world. The cumulative
impact has been transformational. Austin has become a
“technopolis,” a high-tech center of research and new
business development.
Kozmetsky was not provincial or proprietary with his
ideas. He took IC 2 successes and research findings to the
world, spreading a message of innovation and technology
entrepreneurship to everyone, including, at the end of the
Cold War, nascent and emerging market economies such
as Russia and China. Ambitious partnerships were started
in Mexico and the Caribbean. When the NASA-AMES
laboratory, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, wanted to
start a business incubator to commercialize NASA research
they looked to IC 2 for a partner and for guidance.
Kozmetsky was also particularly enthusiastic about
following spinout companies from University of
Washington research. He received continual updates on
new UW-related ventures and new developments in UW
technology transfer. He was especially pleased to see that
his vision of the research university as a central factor in
economic development in the “technopolis” was being
implemented in his hometown.
THE 21st CENTURY
Kozmetsky saw the future and, while he knew the
importance of specialization in a high-tech world, fought
for trans-disciplinary approaches and collaborations.
Recently he wanted to know why business schools
weren’t teaching courses on nanotechnology, genomics,
biotechnology, advanced materials, and all the new
telecommunications technologies. Like all great teachers,
he kept discovering, learning, and experimenting. Failure
was no sin; stagnation and self-satisfaction were.
Visionaries sometimes become discouraged, but not
George Kozmetsky. His overriding perspectives were
persistence and optimism. His expressed belief in young
people and fundamental brightness about the future set
him apart from those experts who foresee a dark future
for America.
“Today’s generation must understand that its legacy is
to chart its own course. This generation must understand
and accept that there is no existing road map for its
future — and embrace the responsibility to develop its
own. The generational resource is science and technology,
which needs to be nurtured and better understood,”
he admonished.
For some, it is enough to say they have seen the advent
of space travel, the creation of the Internet. George
Kozmetsky more than existed in history’s most innovative
era, he lived at the intersection of technology and ideology.
Adapted with permission, Northwest Science & Technology Magazine,
Autumn 2003, pp. 45-47
14 UW BUSINESS FALL 2003 15