Building Bridges Across Disciplines

Recalling his early years in northern New Jersey, Joseph P. Bailey describes a teen wearing gold chains, a mullet haircut and plotting for a career to make a lot of money. “I blended right in to the 1980s cultural scenery,” he says.

Bailey enrolled at Carnegie Mellon to study electrical engineering, then pursued that field in a public policy context as a Stanford graduate student. Eventually, as an MIT PhD, he added telecommunications to the mix and co-authored the seminal 1995 book “Internet Economics.” That road led to him leading the Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) Honors Program, based at the University Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. The program's mission is to engage undergraduate students from different disciplines in study focused on quality management, process improvement and system design through teamwork and co-curricular programming.

Reflecting on the journey, Bailey says an especially memorable experience at MIT was participating in a conference in which one of the presenters initially appeared to be “just a guy from Illinois giving a dog and pony show about something new he was building – a work-in-progress he called the Mosaic Browser. It turned out that the presenter was Mark Andreessen, who would go on to found Netscape and become one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capitalists.

Arriving at Smith in 1998, Bailey says he was reluctant to assume the QUEST role, as he was focused on his research stream, including his dissertation exploring Amazon’s marketplace entry and disruption of Barnes and Noble’s business model.

But taking the opportunity to lead QUEST “reinvigorated my career in terms of the way I approach problem-solving and research,” Bailey says. “I’ve found these undergrads to be incredibly ambitious — maybe a little green. But they really work hard as a self-selected group that wants to create bridges across different disciplines.”

While directing QUEST, Bailey’s internet commerce expertise also led him into patent litigation as an expert witness. “As the dotcom bubble bubbled along, a lot Internet startups were filing patents while not aware that the government had actually built the internet and that the technology predated their patent applications, he says. “It was fun to get that experience, but I never thought this activity would intersect with what I was doing with QUEST.”

That intersection led to a 2015-16 sabbatical at the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office. Bailey bridged his machine learning-based QUEST projects with his patent litigation work to successfully propose to the patent office a study into machinery algorithms for patent research.

Looking back, Bailey says the sabbatical reaffirmed that learning across disciplines is needed throughout organizations and the economy. "It also deepened my perspective on training and educating students and about designing experiential learning projects in this regard,” he says.

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