Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, and partner in Polaris Ventures, moved from Boston to Austin in January to become Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at The University of Texas at Austin. He recently spoke with Texas Enterprise editor Renee Hopkins about his plans for fostering innovation and entrepreneurship at UT.

Q. Do you consider “innovation” an actual discipline to be studied?

A. I think of innovation as a system that includes research professors, graduating students, scaling entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, strategic investors, and early adopters. My theory is that groups of people form these fiercely competing teams that then accomplish innovation.

For example, Cisco, a company just like the system I described, built the modern Internet. I believe this is the most productive innovation system we have in the U.S., which is somewhat controversial. I’m writing a paper about that, which will list hypotheses about things that need looking at in the care and maintenance of this system. Actually, it’s really not a system, since it wasn’t designed. It’s more an ecology, because it evolved.

As the UT motto goes, “What starts here changes the world.” I’m in the “changes the world” part of the business. The Deans of the McCombs School of Business, the Cockrell School of Engineering, and the College of Natural Sciences wanted me to come here to help erase the boundaries of the different schools and colleges at UT, since those boundaries encumber our ability to create ideas and get our ideas to change the world.

Q. You’ve said “Professor of Innovation” is your fifth career. How did you get from your last career, which was in venture capital, to here?

A. I’d been innovating in every career. As a VC, as a publisher, as an electrical engineer, as an entrepreneur  –  all these roles involved innovation. I'd like to go “meta” on innovation, to make innovation itself a study, itself susceptible to innovation. In order words, innovate on innovation – look at this ecosystem that I've enjoyed for some decades and critique it, make it better.

Some years ago I wrote an article for MIT Technology Review magazine, “Invention is a Flower, Innovation is a Weed,” to draw the distinction between this hothouse thing that you do in a lab and the way innovation happens in the real world. Invention is very persnickety. You invent things but then when you try to change the world with them, you become a weed because nobody actually wants innovation. You have to be resilient and persistent like weeds are.

Read the whole story at Texas Enterprise.

Bob Metcalfe will speak on “Enernet: Internet Lessons For Solving Energy” on Wednesday, Feb. 23, at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center as part of the Texas Enterprise Speaker Series.