In the Georgia Tech community, “creative friction” between collaborators leads to better solutions.
BY: ERIN PETERSON
ILLUSTRATIONS BY: CHARLIE LAYTON
ANIMATIONS BY: MUTI- FOLIO ART
We live in a country that reveres the myth of the lone genius: tinkerers who work tirelessly in labs or launch tiny startups from their garages, waiting for their eureka moment. The only problem? It’s exactly that: a myth. A peek behind the curtain shows that true progress typically happens through collaboration. It’s rarely seamless and it can get prickly, but those who find the right collaborators—people who push one another to think bigger and to find solutions beyond the status quo—are pushing the world further, faster.
Jhillika Kumar and Conner Reinhardt had spent countless hours amid hectic senior year schedules—and a good portion of their personal savings—to build Mentra, a mentorship app designed to support job seekers with autism.
They had backgrounds that seemed to all but guarantee success: Kumar, CM 19, was an insightful and tenacious disability advocate. She had delivered a knockout TEDx talk at Georgia Tech in the spring of 2019 that called for a more inclusive approach to technology to support people with disabilities. She wanted to build a company that could bring life to her big ideas—and one day create an inclusive world for her autistic brother and the more than 80% of people with autism living in the U.S. who are unemployed.
Reinhardt, IE 19, a methodical industrial engineer who’d honed his skills in a supply-chain role at Tesla, resonated deeply with her vision and joined her with an eye to building game-changing technology that could make measurable improvements for the neurodiverse community.
Together, they’d completed entrepreneurial development programs, including one at Tech’s startup incubator, the Advanced Technology Development Center. They’d built a prototype of the app, which matched members of the autism community with mentors who could help walk them through the steps of a job-hunting process.
They hoped a meeting with the leader of Microsoft’s autism hiring program would lead to more opportunities for their fledgling startup.
Instead, they received a decidedly lukewarm response: The idea, while good in theory, didn’t address the urgent need that companies like Microsoft had hiring people now. What companies in the space actually needed was closer to something like LinkedIn for neurodiverse job seekers.
It wasn’t what the pair had been hoping for. Their company needed to make a major pivot. But could they find a path forward?
Reinhardt, for his part, was thinking about the big picture. “We had to ask ourselves: Was this something we wanted to shift to in terms of our business model? And if so, how could we leverage our understanding of neurodiverse individuals to build an inclusive platform that would truly underscore their value? We were entering a completely different market than we set out to address, and by no means were we experts.”
Kumar, meanwhile, was zeroing in on the users that the platform aimed to serve. “One thing human-centered design principles always emphasize is how important it is to understand your users,” she says. “Right when you think you want to start developing a solution, hit ‘pause’ and go spend some more time to better understand your customers.”
It was in their divergent approaches—Kumar’s vision and unwavering commitment to building an inclusive workforce, Reinhardt’s clear-eyed analysis of the next concrete steps they could take to create economic value—that they were able to make a meaningful shift. “We came to the conclusion together that we were going to build a digital ecosystem that disrupts the traditional hiring processes that systematically exclude individuals with cognitive disabilities,” says Kumar.
One year later, they’re ready to launch just that. Their new app, still called Mentra, helps connect neurodiverse individuals with employers who can make the most of their talents.
Greg Gibson, a professor in Georgia Tech’s department of biological sciences, isn’t afraid of pessimism. “I’m not exactly known as warm and fuzzy,” he says, with just a hint of self-deprecation.
It’s a personality trait that one might not choose as a strategy for making friends and influencing people. But in the fight against Covid-19—particularly in the early days, when politicians and others offered unrealistically rosy projections of the virus’s trajectory—Gibson envisioned the worst-case-scenario. His mindset turned out to be undeniably valuable.
Gibson was aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the virus as early as last February. He and Joshua Weitz, also a professor in the department of biological sciences, sometimes crossed paths in a local coffee shop and speculated about what might be ahead.
Within weeks, both were working on important but separate Covid projects. Weitz was working on models to understand the potential spread of Covid, among a handful of projects. Gibson was working with a team to solve challenges closer to home: deciding on the right testing approach for Georgia Tech, and overcoming legal and logistical hurdles to do it effectively. Early in the summer, Weitz joined Gibson on the team that was developing Tech’s campus response to the pandemic.
Gibson had long advocated for simple saliva tests. “The science is dead-easy,” he says, and the cost felt within reach. Still, the scale that he had been advocating for—about 200 tests a day for Georgia Tech’s community of about 15,000—seemed daunting.
When Weitz joined the team, he immediately saw the potential in Gibson’s insistence on pursuing a saliva-based test. “It’s a lot more pleasant than having a Q-tip in your brain,” Weitz jokes.
But Weitz worried that the scale that seemed formidable to Gibson was not ambitious enough. While Gibson’s expertise as a geneticist helped him see the best option for testing, Weitz’s knowledge of quantitative bioscience modeling gave him insight on the levels of testing that would be essential to fight the growth in cases. “I had developed models that showed the potential value of using much-larger-scale tests as an intervention,” he says. “Greg and I started talking about whether it was possible to scale up from hundreds of tests per day to thousands.”
The self-proclaimed “Mr. Skeptic” had his doubts about the necessity of this type of scale. But then he sat down and did the math. “When I did the calculations myself, I was like, ‘Yeah, he’s right,’ ” Gibson says.
Weitz says that their unique perspectives helped push the project forward successfully. “We weren’t trying to make conceptual points,” he says. “We were trying to intervene to improve the health of our community.”
It took a heroic effort of many—late nights, sustained ingenuity, and a heaping helping of luck—but Georgia Tech was able to dramatically scale up its testing just as returning students began arriving back at campus. As of press time, positivity rates, after an initial spike, have hovered around 1 percent within Georgia Tech’s student community, with far lower positivity rates amongst staff and faculty, a success story by almost any measure.
Even Gibson admits being pleasantly surprised. “Everything that has been put together has far exceeded my expectations,” he says.
Weitz couldn’t help but be pleased by his colleague’s growing hopefulness. This past fall, he sent Gibson a T-shirt to acknowledge their work together. It was emblazoned with a single word: “Optimist.”
Collaboration and competition might seem like the opposite ends of a spectrum. But the reality is that for almost any successful project, there is a mix of both. Competition fuels a desire to succeed, while collaboration can open up new avenues to achieve big goals.
Two people who know this well are McKenzie Tuttle, BME 22, and her older sister, Allie, a master’s student at Emory University. They had spent a lifetime litigating the standard sibling arguments. Who got to decide what TV show to watch? Was it appropriate for one to “borrow” the other’s clothes without permission? They both admit that they’re headstrong and opinionated, and each had a full Rolodex of past gripes that they could access. It might not seem like a promising history for a successful collaboration.
But when they independently learned about a Covid-19 virtual hackathon sponsored by Emory and Georgia Tech, they immediately thought of the other as a possible teammate.
McKenzie, a third-year biomedical engineering student at Georgia Tech, was eager to focus her skills on an urgent public health issue. Allie, pursuing a master’s in public health in epidemiology at Emory, saw a clear line between her expertise and her ability to make a difference during a global pandemic.
They teamed up with four others at Emory and Georgia Tech to create CAPACIT, an app designed to help businesses keep track of Covid-related regulations and help consumers practice social distancing by alerting them to a store’s customer traffic.
If the pair’s collaboration occasionally had its downsides (“Our team members probably learned way more about us and our family this summer than they wanted or needed to,” Allie jokes), it also led them to appreciate one another’s strengths in ways that they hadn’t when they were growing up.
Allie, for her part, says she was delighted to see her little sister in a new way. “She’s always been a baby in my mind, so seeing the confidence and skills with which she took charge in some of our presentations and group meetings was really remarkable,” she says.
McKenzie, meanwhile, appreciated her sister’s persuasiveness. “To [do well at the hackathon,] you need to pitch your idea in a way that’s desirable to businesses so they want to support it and pay for it,” she says. “[Allie] was great at that.”
Whether the two would ever divulge their admiration for the other, though, was an entirely different question. “Have I mentioned [those strengths] to her? I don’t know that I have,” McKenzie muses. “Maybe I should.”
Still, for whatever sibling rivalry might remain, the two helped steer the project to success. The team was one of three to win a $10,000 prize and enrollment in the 2020 CREATE-X Startup Launch.
If there is a lesson to be learned in these stories of collaboration, it might just be that collaborators benefit not when they share identical worldviews, but when they are able to articulate—and eventually find commonalities in—distinctly different ones. Collaborators should agree on the big vision, but they should be particularly flexible when it comes to the path they use to get there.
For example, Georgia Tech physics professors Tamara Bogdanović and Laura Cadonati serve as the new leaders of the Institute’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. The pair both started in August (Cadonati as director, Bogdanović as associate director), and they work together closely to tackle wide-ranging goals to support initiatives linked to research, recruiting, and outreach.
Bogdanović’s primary training is in astronomy and Cadonati’s is in physics. Because of the duo’s distinct interests and expertise, they know they will come at problems from different perspectives and won’t make obvious errors as a result. “It’s always good to have a sanity check on your own thoughts and ideas,” says Bogdanović.
In fact, says Cadonati, the worst type of collaboration is when there is perfect alignment. “Diversity in training, opinion, and style is never a problem,” she says. “What complicates things is when people are too similar—they end up competing for the same resources and the same recognition.”
When Kumar and Reinhardt made the difficult decision to overhaul the Mentra app, they couldn’t have predicted what would happen next. But they did know that they had worked hard to carefully evaluate all of their options, lean on one another’s strengths, and move forward in a way that they could both (eventually) agree on.
The good news? It’s worked. Since they made their pivot, they’ve landed a grant from the Administration for Community Living, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. They’ve partnered with a Fortune 500 company for a small-scale pilot. And soon, they—and their growing team—will be ready to scale up. By 2025, they hope to get 100,000 more individuals with autism into the workforce.
Perhaps it makes sense: After all, Kumar and Reinhardt have spent years advocating for leveling the playing field for underserved communities. “When you bring different kinds of people together—maybe one is on the [autism] spectrum, maybe one’s not—they’ll approach situations in completely different ways,” says Reinhardt. “And when you work together, you can create something that’s truly novel.”
Indeed, he says, one of the greatest benefits of collaborating with people who bring different perspectives and expertise to a situation is that it’s easier to realize how many more possibilities exist. “When I took steps to go outside of the industrial engineering group, it was really useful to open my mind to the range and scope of problems out there,” he says. “If you don’t work with people who are in different areas, you can miss what really needs to be solved in the world.”