For fifteen years I researched how theatrical experience is made — the kind that changes something in the real world. Today I run a centre that turns university research into implementations. The question stayed the same.
What I do
I run the Technology Transfer Centre at the University of Łódź — a team of nine, and about as many again across projects. Our job is to get a research result past the article stage and into a licence, a company, or a deployment inside a specific business.
In practice this means translating, every day, between worlds that speak different languages: researchers, companies, administration, lawyers, investors. It rarely comes down to the technology. Almost always it comes down to each side understanding the purpose of the meeting differently.
I also run PEREBEL — a University of Łódź Foundation project in which artists, researchers and business practitioners take on the crises together: wellbeing, technology, security, climate and communication.
Where I came from
I started as a dancer, choreographer and director. The performances I co-created were shown in Poland and abroad. Alongside that I researched creative processes — in Poland, Denmark and Canada — describing them with the tools of cognitive science, cognitive psychology and anthropology.
I am a choreographer and researcher who likes being in between tensions and conflicting perspectives, and I have my own ways of being there. That used to describe my work on stage. It describes my job now just as well.
Two books came out of that period: “Taneczny umysł” on the theatre of movement in a neurocognitive perspective, and “Taniec w badaniach performatywnych”, along with a dozen or so articles and chapters, mostly about what happens in the mind of a dancer and of an audience.
One question always interested me: what makes an idea work outside the room where it was born. It turned out to be the same question that sits at the centre of technology transfer.
How I work
The methods I use with teams, working on how they talk about their ideas, how they reach agreement, how they stand up in front of people, come from theatre and choreography. They were tested on stage, where you cannot pretend something worked.
Alongside them, research tools: performative research, action research, practice as research. Not to turn a workshop into a seminar, but to know whether what we did actually changed anything.
Formally
- PhD in the humanities
- Graduate of The Emerging COO: Driving Innovation and Operational Excellence, Stanford Graduate School of Business
- Certified business trainer (Kozminski University)
- IDEO U certificates: Business Innovation and Human-Centered Strategy
- Graduate of Master of Didactics: Tutoring, University of Groningen
- Lecturer at the University of Łódź and the Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź
- President of the Newer Theatre Foundation
- Author of two books and a dozen or so academic publications
Easiest to just write
You don’t need to know what you want yet. After the first conversation it usually turns out to be something other than we assumed.