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Stefani H  0:07  
Welcome to another episode of creative distillation. Your hosts Jeff and Brad from the University of Colorado boulders lead School of Business, discuss entrepreneurship research while enjoying fine craft beverages. Previously on creative distillation, Brad and Jeff conducted field research at the burns pub, a truly authentic British public house. Located in Broomfield, Colorado. They tasted some fine whiskies and other spirits and had an illuminating conversation with founder Johnny OD. This time, Brad and Jeff are still at the burns, where Brad tricks Jeff into discussing his own research a first for creative distillation. Jeff tells us about an unpublished working paper that explores a public private partnership addressing climate change through entrepreneurship, right here in beautiful Boulder. Enjoy and cheers.

Jeff York  1:06  
Welcome to Creative distillation, where we're gonna steal entrepreneurship, research and actionable insights. I'm your host, Jeff York, the research director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder, and I'm joined by my co host.

Brad  1:21  
Hi, Jeff. It's Brad again. I am Brad Warner. I am faculty director at the Deming center. And I am thrilled to be here today it's kind of like old school day.

Jeff York  1:30  
It is old school taking it back to the old school like Oh, fool, I love ya. So while two weeks have gone by, for you, people if you're listening to this regularly, mere minutes have gone by and Brad and I are now going to attempt to go back to the future here. We're going to do an old school version. If you've not listened to our original podcast, you really should go back and listen to episodes, one through 50 Odd something and give them five stars every time you listen to them. Because that actually really would help us out we'd appreciate it. Let's think about

Brad  2:01  
this for a second. We're almost on episode 60

Jeff York  2:04  
Are we close that stuff? So if you want to hear how much improvement we've gone through, then don't listen to this episode. Go back and listen to the old ones. Because what we originally did, we started the podcast, the whole podcast was generated when our research director, the famous Eric Mueller, and by the way, I'm gonna continue with my Halloween actionable insight sounds just because you know, it's not Halloween yet for me. Although for you people listening, it's well after Halloween. Just Just bear with me. I love Halloween. I gotta I gotta keep it go. I gotta go. I gotta go. Thanks. I appreciate that Brett. And our famous Executive Director, our boss, the man who says, Brad don't cut so much on the podcast, says, Jeff, you know, you really should maybe not drink so much whiskey. Those kinds of

Brad  2:48  
things. By the way, I love the feedback because the feedback starts one of my family members listen to

Jeff York  2:55  
know it starts with I made one of my family members. Choice. feedback I got the feedback was actually helpful. Yeah, that was there was a very helpful we'd love any feedback Write to us at CDI guest at colorado edu. If you out there are researcher or not, and just want to come on the podcast. Or if you'd like whiskey, or if you like whiskey or beer, or if you're gonna have a pulse. Anyway, we started off this podcast, the famous Eric Mueller. We were sitting at a coffee shop, he said what would you guys actually be excited about doing for the very committed boys he has like Brad nuts. And I was like, you know, I'd like to do is I'd like to do a podcast where Brad and I go have a drink and talk about research. Because we had had several conversations, we weren't really good friends them. But we had some some really interesting conversations about like, you know, research where you would say that sounds like the biggest load of crap I've ever heard. And I would try to explain why it was useful. And then sometimes I'll convince you a little bit. And throughout the podcast, it's been the same pattern. Sometimes you're somewhat convinced sometimes not so much. And that's fine, you know, but the goal was to actually say, hey, what if we talked about research to someone who's not particularly interested in the research, other than what's useful about it? And that's what led to this. And so it's kind of cool. And I would be the guy doing it, then COVID happen? Yes. And we said, oh my gosh, it's much better if we have guests instead of Jeff, which I wholeheartedly agree with. But today, we're going to try an old school episode where it's just me defending a paper.

Brad  4:23  
Let me ask you this as a research, I don't mean this. Yes. As a researcher, are you thinking that when I finish up when you when you guys should be writing research, or doing this? When you're considering research to do? Is the goal, the research to get published? Or to actually have an insight for someone like me that may be looking for it?

Jeff York  4:45  
None of the above? What's the goal? The goal is for me, I don't think this is true for most researchers. The goal for me is, can I find something that I think is interesting that I could spend the next like, you know, two or three years There's like investigating and writing about. And then second is do I think it's actually important. So important to me is not necessarily defined by it's actionable for an entrepreneur, or it could be a broader question of policy, or understanding the emergence of an industry, or understanding why some people do some things, even if they're not particularly helpful to them. My goal is not really necessarily to help entrepreneurs do my research. It's more honestly to find things I think are interesting and important. That's really cool.

Brad  5:30  
So you said a couple things that resonate with me. Number one, spending two or three years of my life, we've had people here 11 years plus Oh, no, I mean, that's in the best case scenario, right. And then, actually forgot my second insight here. Here's my here's my second question. So my question to you, Jeff, is you have written many, many papers. That is true. How many papers would you say that you've published? Approximately? Over 20? I mean, which is in a researchers career, that's a big number, correct?

Jeff York  5:58  
I guess. So. I mean, some people publish. Okay, so it's interesting. There's sort of this. I think, I

Brad  6:03  
haven't finished my question. Well, you, my enemy answering your first question, but I haven't have a second. Because they depends. Okay, so think so think about your lifetime body of work so far. Yeah. And is there one that resonates with you most, you said, Oh, my God, I discovered this or found this. And this really, maybe is impactful to me, but was really impactful to you?

Jeff York  6:26  
Not impactful to you. But impactful either way, right?

Brad  6:28  
It doesn't have to be for me, but something that you found that was like, an aha moment for Jeff, the researcher.

Jeff York  6:34  
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I have this paper called converging winds. That's about the wind energy industry in Colorado. It's in the Academy of Management Journal. I can't remember the year honestly. I mean, I'm not. I say things like that. I feel like I generally, like I've just written a lot of papers, I can't remember when they're published. And, and the thing is, you, as you've heard from many of the authors on this podcast, you the papers done, like about two years. But it took like eight years before that. And that paper means a lot to me, I just because I think it's a really important question of when and how do these environmentally relevant industries emerge? And how do they emerge? And what we find in that paper, that's the most interesting thing, to me that I think is really an important insight, and that I actually plan to write about at some point for a more practitioner orient book, practitioner Orient, people that aren't researchers book

Brad  7:32  
with you, by the way, I,

Jeff York  7:33  
it wasn't that environmental movement suddenly became right, or that the industry suddenly became like, economically viable. It was that the environmental movements realized how to use economic arguments for what they were trying to do. And that was well before wind energy was economically sustainable. And once they figured that out through this process of going back and forth and evolving over time, then they started to win and actually push for the industry. And what's really cool about this is like once that industry emerged a little bit through policy change, you have to have policy to support a lot of these industries, because market failure exists for a reason market failure is when we have negative externalities for an industry due to inappropriate regulation. That's just why there's multiple market failures. That's one. That is the reason we're our world is going to hell in a handbasket as far as climate change goes, unfortunately. So once that's captured, you create a influx of new entrepreneurs, new businesses. And once that happens, all sorts of other kinds of coverage happens in the press about this economic opportunity. And then you start to see more investment in these industries. And then you start to see more positive policies that are more carrot and stick based. And once you get that virtuous cycle going, this will happen in Colorado, those industries will take off and be self sufficient. That's really cool. To me. That's really cool. The other thing about that paper is, I wrote most of it or not most of it, but a lot of it when my dad was in the hospital. And I just remember writing it as like, frankly, escape from really hard time. And, you know, I think writing is a often overlooked part of our research. Yeah. So it's for me, it's simple. How

Brad  9:16  
long ago did you write that paper? Would

Jeff York  9:17  
you say? Gosh, 2014, maybe 10 years? 10 years

Brad  9:21  
now. So looking back at that paper and where we are now in 2023? Was it predictive at all?

Jeff York  9:28  
I don't think it's predictive. I think it's prescriptive. Okay. I've talked a lot about it. I actually presented it multiple, like energy kind of conferences and other places like that. And I think it tells you, I mean, that was 100%. I mean, you know, one thing about we're talking there's research, it's always directional. It's never it's never like this is the fact right. Anybody that comes on here and tells us I think I'll I think you would acknowledge I'll challenge them as much as I don't think we've ever had. Well, we've never had anybody that unthoughtful which is awesome, right? But I think it does tell you Like, what does it take to actually get these things going? And the broader kind of insight that I would say comes from that paper and a bunch of my overall work is that like, entrepreneurship, as a mechanism, and as an ideology, is extremely helpful for getting people past their politically infused divisions. It's really hard for people to not be in favor of creating new businesses and creating jobs talked about that a lot. Yeah, I haven't talked about my homework about you and I have talked, but that's the message like, I mean, and I think, I think environmental movements, and pro business movements do themselves a great disservice when they try to create these divisions between people. I think that's really true. A lot of the problems we have in this world in this particular instance, I think there is huge business opportunity and climate change, and, and you'll get critiqued for that by the left as well as the right and I'm fine with that. That makes I feel great when my student evaluations, half of them say like York is like a really left leaning liberal and is like trying to make us all do these things. And that people they're like York's to like pro market and you hit it right down. I'm like, great. Okay, perfect. I'm really happy when that happens. Right.

Brad  11:08  
So let me ask one more follow up question, then we can get to the paper. No. So if you had to rewrite converging winds today, 10 years later, yeah. What would you do differently,

Jeff York  11:18  
I would probably simplify a lot of it, to try to make it easier for for people to pick up on the theme. So I think this podcast actually helped me a lot through the act of going through academic papers and trying to simplify them. I mean, I don't always present the papers I can go into today. Usually we have a guest, but I do read them. And I do try to think about what is the actual insight from it. And that's, that's heavy sledding. It's hard for me. Yeah. So I think about like, you know, someone who's actually trying to gain insight from our academic work. But the only way to change that really is within the academy is like, I mean, you can change a school level but that's very hard because you have to my friend Andy Hoffman says something I really like he's a

Brad  11:58  
comic. Was that was always any clone.

Jeff York  12:01  
Any Kaufman says a lot of things I really like, I loved him. He's just my favorite comedian ever, probably. But Andy Hoffman, who is actually a pretty funny guy, not in a coffee play, but but he's a professor of sustainability and business at Michigan, Ross School. And he says, We have a lot of full professors that are acting like assistant professors. And what he means by that is like you have to, as an assistant professor, you have to publish, if you don't publish, you will not keep your job, okay, you'll probably get a job somewhere else, eventually, you'll have a job. But like, you know, you're on a tenure clock. And, and that's why there's a lot of stress to publish, publish, publish, you have to do it. It's the it's table stakes. And Andy will tell you that he's like, You don't like that game. But it's what you got to do to be legitimate. But once you're granted the privilege of tenure, and certainly being a full professor, one would hope you would do something a little more.

Brad  12:53  
I think that's the point of tenure. Right? But right, but you're protected, right?

Jeff York  12:57  
I mean, yes, keep writing research, of course. But like, don't just keep publishing for the sake of publishing, like because, I don't know, I guess this is part of what I'm trying to do. Like, I mean, I know we get around a lot. But in all, in all seriousness, I don't think some people do listen to the podcast. And if you're one of them, go ahead, hit that five stars on your review, and make sure you subscribe. So I think trying to do this and like, you know, translate this organ, it's not so much the podcast reaches that many people but but it's training my mind to do something different in the latter half of my career. So what's next? Well, I'm trying to do meaningful research and publish things.

Brad  13:35  
Currently, right now. Yeah, I'm working on a bunch of stuff. So what is like what has your interest and maybe what has the interest of our listeners? Well, I'm

Jeff York  13:42  
working on thing with our former PhD student now professor at University of Kansas, Beth Embry. Yes, hard, hard not love, Beth. She's fantastic. And we're gonna thing about how the city of Boulder collaborated with entrepreneurs to address climate change. And they made a lot of mistakes, and screwed a lot of stuff up. But there's some things they got right. And it's it's very interesting take on what public private partnerships under uncertainty. So we usually think about public private partnerships as being very clear cut. We're gonna build a road to Broomfield. Okay, so, yeah, we do that, right. We contract them. This is how you create a public private partnership when you don't actually know the solution to the problem, which is what entrepreneurs are good for. Right?

Brad  14:24  
So that was my first entrepreneurial journey actually was a public private partnership.

Jeff York  14:29  
Right. But you probably had a very clear contract, right? No. Oh, well, there you go. See, this is not the case. We usually talk

Brad  14:34  
about No, not not at all. Actually, it was very, it was very random. And there were goals that were that were put in front of us that we created our own KPIs. Right. But if they were just guesses, yeah, I mean, that's

Jeff York  14:48  
cool, though, that we should talk more about that sometime. Because that's really interesting. That's not what we normally think about when we say public private partnerships. Yeah. So

Brad  14:54  
so let's go back to your research that you're doing with Beth though because I specifically the town of Boulder and And we know boulders trying to do the right thing. But well, we try. Yeah. So where are you in the process of writing your paper? So

Jeff York  15:10  
Beth got a job out this paper, which is already good use of the paper, right? She's presented how my goodness, she probably presented like half a dozen schools, right? I've probably presented it like three or four places. So we've actually gotten all the feedback at this point. Usually papers complete. No, not even close. A draft of the paper is complete. Okay. So and best, but I realized it was funny, because that was going out. This is kind of embarrassing, but what the heck, that was going out during a job talks. I'm a PhD supervisor. And I was like, Oh, so you're presenting this? She wrote three papers for a dissertation. I assume she was presenting one of those. Is that normal, by the way? Yeah, that's normally what you would do. You would go out and like, you know, roadtrip, a paper from your dissertation. And she's like, No, I'm doing the boulder energy challenge paper. I'm like, really, that paper is like, pretty bad. She's like, Well, I'm not presenting. I'm presenting like, where I've gotten to in my thinking about it since our initial draft. We hadn't really updated it yet. She but she her she's so smart. She had like, kind of thought through where the paper needed to go without actually writing it. Yeah, I saw a presentation I watched it. I watched a recording of whatever presentation was like, Oh, that's so much better than the paper. So I started working on the paper. And so now, it's actually in my lap. And I'm trying to trying to get it totally revised to reflect her presentation. And then I'll go to her and then we'll probably submit it hopefully by the end of the year.

Brad  16:33  
So is there a takeaway that the Boulder City Council could use listening to our podcast today, from this paper, or the one that we were the one that you and Beth are working on? Well, they

Jeff York  16:42  
already know because we've been informing them the whole time. But like, do they? Are they receptive, though? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, it's been, it's been good. We probably need to go back. I mean, the paper Oh, my goodness, the data was collected back in 2013, or something. Oh, my God. This is how long these things take, man. I mean, the big takeaway was like, when the Boulder City employees started to understand how entrepreneurs think and work, they were able to collaborate and way more meaningful and impactful ways than they previously had been able to when they thought of themselves as giving a public private grant. So they were contracting with all these. It's a long story. I mean, that's an example. I'd love to hear this will be a podcast in of itself, this podcast. Okay, fine. So you're just a railing me now? That's fine. Okay. Well, that's fine. We'll talk about that, if you want. So, so So this paper. So long story, I'll start at the beginning. Basically, the City of Boulder decided, well backup the City of Boulder put in place a tax. And we should have Beth on to actually talk about this paper when we publish it. Well, we gotta wait till we publish it. And it'll probably be much different than the story I'm going to tell today. Because that's just sort of how it goes. The things that are interesting, come out in the review process are often different than what you think they're going to be. That's really cool. Actually, it is kind of cool. Because like you're you engage once you in the review process, you're actually collaborating with really smart people. You're not always happy with what they have to say. But you do respect them. At least I do. So there was a saying they created this thing called the Climate Action Program tax, okay. And the city of Boulder implemented a sales tax, that would go into something called the Climate Action Program. Well, they start collecting this tax, right. And they didn't do anything with the money. It just sat there. There's so you have a pool of money. Now, this pool of money that's just sitting there got up to a pretty big number, and they didn't know what to do with it. Well, they weren't doing anything with it. They're busy running the city and doing other things. And then the city got audited. And the auditor, I mean, voluntarily audit, it wasn't like, it was just sitting waiting. That's just what cities do. And the consultants like you guys have, like almost half a million dollars sitting in this pool of money you're not doing so you got to do something. So the city council got together, they said we should have a climate innovation program. And they did not declare what that would consist of, but they said we're gonna have it. This is all very ancient history. So it doesn't reflect on the on the current city, but this is this boulder staff, or is this boulder cell count. So then the Boulder City Council decided that they would appoint us boulder staff member to go implement their climate innovation program? Okay, she was a government, you know, sort of administrator. And she realized very quickly, like, I have no idea what the heck this is supposed to be. I care about climate change. It's important to me, which is why she got the gig. But no good deed goes on published or does go on Publish to actually in our field. But so she started, she reached out to a bunch of people, including myself, and another professor at the time was like, Hey, will you come be on the steering committee for this thing? And try to figure it out because of your expertise at the university? Right. So we agreed to be honest, the agreement was will be on it if we can record and document every email every meeting everything. So now you're measuring Yeah, so now we're just collecting all these data. And so I collected these data. I was on the steering committee for several years. First. And you know, I can't write this paper because I was on the steering committee like, I can't be like, here's my here are my reflections about the steering committee that I was part of you're the Muppet in the row. And then Beth was here. Yeah, exactly right. This much like we are the challenge. And so then I met, Beth was a student, I was like Beth, you know, you're she's very gifted, very hardworking person. Like, I got this data, I can't write it. The other guy that was gonna write it, he didn't get tenure. So I was like, you want to write this thing? She's like, Sure, I'll do that. And so she wrote a draft. And then they did a second cohort, which was also on the steering committee for and best start to conduct interviews with all those entrepreneurs thing. So tell me, so is this really going to be the podcast here? Because like,

Brad  20:45  
tell me about the entrepreneurs. What does she who she talked to?

Jeff York  20:48  
She's talking to all the I mean, so I don't have the paper in front of me like, because I'm not I wasn't prepared to talk about this. But she's talking to all these entrepreneurs and the second cohort? Well, anyway, there's a lot of it's a very complex thing that goes on and on. But like, basically, what she figured out was, there was two kinds of sets of entrepreneurs in the second cohort. And half of them were like, more kind of almost social movement organizations. They were really interested in say, creating a place for people to share climate change insights, like a message board in Boulder County. Or we're going to have this like, you know, climate awareness thing where people can get insulation in their house like, next door for for insulation. Yeah, exactly. But this was 2015 or so there was no next door at that point. And then another half of them were actually trying to start businesses. Like for example, one's called Evie. Well, no, it's not Evie, go. Got some space in their name? Well, it's probably best because we anonymized it. But basically, what they were doing is creating a Uber for Evie, charging stations. That just sounds brilliant. It was pretty clever, actually. Because, you know, what's the stressor about having an Eevee charge? And I gotta go, I gotta go. I gotta give me Joel and Brad burns pub, they came in today, right? And I have no idea where to charge? Well, ideally, you know, we could go find a charging station, we could lease it out to us, we could charge the leaf and then drive back, although we'll be okay. So anyway, they're actually like creating a real business and what you would think like, so there's this whole literature on these things called institutional logics. Now, institutional logics are just belief systems and instantiations of those beliefs that happen around different ideologies. Okay. So it's not enough that there be an ideology, like we have a free market ideology, we believe the market will solve problems, and we should support free markets and not restrict trade. Right. And it's messy. That's not a logic, a logic is, we believe that within the way we're looking at is within a geographic region or within a sector. We believe that but we also put in place policies to instantiate as, for example, if boulder was the exact opposite of what it was, it would say like we're going to have very low taxes. It it'd be different, right? Boulder has a very strong pro environment logic. Yes. Which is, well, that's great. We love businesses, but we'll pass something called a climate action tax, even though we don't know what we're gonna do with it, we're gonna tax business, people will go for it, because everybody wants us, right. So that's an instantiation of that logic. But the only reason it works is because the pro environment belief is as strong and bolder. Right? So what we're doing in this paper is we're measuring the degree to which these ventures fall into different logic categories, okay? And some of them are these hybrids of a pro environment and pro market logic. For example, the Uber for Evie, charging stations, yes, they want to solve the environmental problem. They want people to use EVs more, but they're trying to make money and create an actual business around this. On the other hand, you and I are going to have like a block party to promote installation of insulation. We don't want to have any plan to make any money off. It's just a great thing to do. Yeah,

Brad  23:56  
so it's Tupperware for so Now, which

Jeff York  23:58  
one of these do you think the government's gonna get along with better? Oh, so

Brad  24:01  
for sure. The cocktail party?

Jeff York  24:03  
Yeah. Right. You think like somebody? Right? So the government's in bed in this in this government, like, you know, what we would call a governmental logic, which is one of administration distribution of goods and services, how you actually take care of people, the less fortunate how you move them around, and you would think they would be more successful working together than the others. Right? Yep. Makes sense. We find the exact opposite. Really? Yeah. And that's what's cool about the paper, the pro government logic, well, they only work because they already did the first car. I'm not gonna talk about exit takes too long. But they've learned through this first cohort, right, which is great. And then they came in the second cohort, and they were like, Okay, we still want to do these, like community things. That's great. We love that. And we're gonna, we're gonna fund them. Now. I myself was on the steering committee with some angel investors and others who were like, what like this. Anyway, that's a whole nother story. That was interesting. So we're on this committee and And what we found was, the more market oriented the venture was, the more they benefit from the interaction with the government. And the more likely they actually persisted over time as a result, not solely of the boulder energy challenge. But those were the success stories. That's really interesting. All these other things were like, Yay, we did it. And that was it. Right? There's no business model. And so this implies a bunch of things. So the big findings of the paper number one, this idea that public private partnerships are only useful in situations where they're able to engage in contracting, this is a prevailing idea in the literature on public private partnerships. They're a methodology, they have to be really careful opportunism, they have to be sure they have clear contracting, because ironically, people theorize the government is going to take care advantage of businesses. I think the opposite happens quite a bit, too. But but that's what the literature says what we say instead, is that no, actually, the learning process of engaging in an unclear more entrepreneurial venture is perhaps more powerful for solving problems where we don't have a clear solution, like climate change, or I would say homelessness. I mean, there's another one, there's no clear solution to how you solve homelessness, it's emerging all these western cities, I think an entrepreneurial approach will be much more effective than a regulatory approach. And in many cases, second aspect that we learned from this was actually, you know, the collaboration for the government and the for profit business, when you're addressing social problems, is arguably better and more effective than trying to collaborate with add nothing against NGOs or social mission organizations. But the government already brings enough balanced that like you put the government with those kinds of organizations, they all look at each other and nod and say, Yeah, we're doing a good thing. And that's great use of the taxpayers money has Ha, whereas you look at this for private venture, they're like, Hey, can we partner with you, for example, we want to find all the Evie chargers in your government subsidized low income housing in Boulder. And we want to run a pilot of our software with those constituents. So we can market test our technology, like as an entrepreneur, that's freaking hard to do. Like, how are you gonna go find a bunch of people to market test this thing? Right now? It's a nightmare. Right? But that's awesome. But it's great. You get proof of service you that's actually one of the hardest things. Exactly. And that's the role of government can play. And that's the big takeaway from this paper, at an application level is like, if we're looking at solutions to problems with no clear solution, collaboration between entrepreneurs, not necessarily industry, but entrepreneurs who are trying to create for profit businesses, and government can be a much more powerful approach. And we're talking local government here. Yes. Small, local level, like Boulder City government is not big government.

Brad  27:47  
Right. But it meet but working in Washington DC to do a blanket rollout would be a mistake. No, no.

Jeff York  27:53  
Well, you could put federal funding into such programs, right. You could you could deliver it at a local No, no, no, it's much more delivered at a local level. And so so those are the kinds of the big insights that comes out of that paper. We think it's really interesting. I guess the people saw a bunch of people offered Beth jobs. I thought it was interesting. So yeah, so that's one of the projects we're working on right now. So what if I was not here, podcasting, I would be working on trying to write that in a clearer way and support it through the data. That's the problem. The paper makes a lot of sense. Beth Beth had like a lot of insight to it. It's not necessarily supported through the data in a very convincing way as of yet, not to say she just like made it up. It's just that she hasn't taken the time to go through and make sure all the data line supporting way it's very time consuming. To do that.

Brad  28:42  
I have to tell you that our listeners at Creative distillation are going to love hearing what your work are working on and have worked on. Well, this was this was very interesting.

Jeff York  28:49  
Do you think that was not what I intended to talk about at all? Yeah, that's good. We'll have to, I guess, come back to this paper. I was going to talk about which I'm introduced next time. Actually, you know what? This paper is so damn good. Let's see if we can't get one of the authors here. That'd be a lot more fun, actually. So okay,

Brad  29:05  
dude, that was awesome. Honestly, I really liked hearing what you're doing. Well,

Jeff York  29:09  
I feel very egotistical talking about but you tricked me. We had like this whiskey tasting. And then yeah, a couple of whiskies. I mean to talk about it. Yeah. We'll

Brad  29:16  
talk about iraf company next. Oh, no,

Jeff York  29:19  
actually, let's talk about the Phish concert. Really? I have some which one? Well, there's so many. And also have big plans coming up for Halloween. So awesome. So did I get actionable insight. So I don't know. I just saw

Brad  29:32  
an insight from your paper. Okay, that are less actionable insights.

Jeff York  29:34  
Eric will appreciate this. We gotta go. Okay, here we go. actionable insight. If you are an entrepreneur that is working with local governmental entity, you might initially be attracted by the idea of funding that in fact was what we were doing in this program is giving out funding. And in the first cohort, many of the entrepreneurs thought oh, the funding the funding the funding, the funding didn't matter at all. I mean, it was nice to have it might have given them a month. More burn, right? But it was the ability to collaborate with the local government. That was just one example like access to the constituents access to testing and their facilities,

Brad  30:10  
feedback loops that you were able to develop are incredible. It's incredible.

Jeff York  30:13  
It just it really turbocharged those ventures. So that's an actual insight for entrepreneurs. And then I've got another one for actual government entities actually want to say number two would be if you're a government entity, and you're looking to solve climate change. Anyway, that's pretty spooky. I think actually thinking about working with local entrepreneurs who are used to particularly I think, looking to try to engage with serial entrepreneurs, and people that are passionate about solving climate change or other social and environmental problems, and giving them like, you ask them to pitch initial ideas. And they just saying, Yeah, let's let's run with it. You know, here's a little bit of seed funding, what can we do to collaborate? I think that actually is maybe as productive as creating a budget. It might even be more productive. And this is where my students say, you're so right wing like free market guy. It's not a political thing. To me. It's just what my research uncovered is effective. I'd love to see more of that. And I think the other thing is that crosses and then the third actionable lens, I actually have one more. Wow, you have a lot today. Yeah, well, I got a lot of actionable insights. I tried to write these things since we've been I mean, I try write them anyway. But when you're talking about solutions to climate change, specifically, whether you're in government, whether you're a business person, whether you're just, you know, just an environmentalist that like cares about this, the more you can talk about this as a, a yes. And instead of a no but right, the more you can say yes, that's great. And we can actually build businesses around this. And we can address these things through a pro market approach. And I'm not saying that's the only way to address it. If I had my way we would have draconian taxes on carbon tomorrow, that would be great. I'll happily pay them, I'll happily tell everyone that's complaining about they should be paying them that they they've had a nice ride, but now you got to pay for all the negative externalities we we produce in this country, unfortunately. But that's not going to happen, at least in my opinion. So what do you do? You've got to build the bridge between a market economy and solving climate change in a way that produces jobs, better quality of life and solves the problem. And if you take that approach, you get a lot you get a lot more people involved. At least that's what we saw on this study. And, gosh, I've probably seen in over a dozen studies I've done at this point bread. So

Brad  32:35  
that is creative distillation for my friend and researcher Jeff York. Jeff, nice having you on the show today.

Jeff York  32:42  
Really weird. That was really cool. I think we shouldn't publish this one. Yeah, I think we should. All right. Well, thanks. Cheers.

Brad  32:48  
Cheers.

Stefani H  32:51  
We hope you enjoyed this episode of creative distillation recorded on location at the burns pub in Broomfield, Colorado. Learn more at the burns pub.com Jeff's paper, converging winds logic hybridization in the Colorado wind energy field was co written with Deseret Pacheco and Timothy Hargrave and is published in the Academy of Management Journal. Check the show notes for a link. The trick paper they discussed about the boulder Energy Challenge is an in progress collaboration with Kansas Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and see you PhD alum, Beth Embry. It's top secret for now. Let's just keep this one between us. We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas email us at CD podcast@colorado.edu. And please be sure to Subscribe to Creative distillation wherever you get your podcasts. The creative distillation podcast is made possible by the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado boulders lead School of Business. For more information, please visit deming.colorado.edu. That's D M. ing and click the creative distillation link. Creative distillation is produced by Joel Davis at analog digital arts. Our theme music is whiskey before breakfast performed by your humble hosts, Brad and Jeff. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here for another episode of creative distillation.