A PhD Fueled by Purpose: Michael Aguilar’s 16-Year Doctoral Journey

This December, thousands of young grads crossed the Kohl Center stage to accept their diplomas from UW–Madison and begin careers across a wide range of industries. However, one grad in particular won’t be entering the job market and will take his expertise back to the company he founded in 1996.

At 71 years old, CEO and founder of Innocorp, ltd., Michael Aguilar graduated this December from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication with his PhD in Mass Communication. He hopes that his research findings will advance Innocorp and spread its traffic safety message to more people.

“It has always been a goal of mine to really understand how to apply what I’ve learned to the company. I am very appreciative for this experience and for all the support and friendships,” Aguilar said. “It’s an indelible part of who I am now and I have been basking in all of it since my defense.”

Aguilar graduated with a computer science degree from Missouri University of Science in 1976 and Technology and, following his love of entrepreneurship, went on to receive an MBA from St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa in 1989. In 1993, after relocating to Verona, Wisconsin, a drunk driver changed Aguilar’s life forever. He came home from a business meeting to find that a drunk driver, just minutes earlier, had veered off the road in his neighborhood into the yard where his 5-year-old son David and his son’s friend Tyler were playing. The car narrowly missed David but hit Tyler, who survived after spending a week recovering in the hospital.

Through this tragedy, Innocorp, ltd. was born and Aguilar debuted his prototype set of Fatal Vision Alcohol Simulation Goggles at the Wisconsin Governor’s Conference on Highway Safety in September 1996. While Aguilar began assembling these first-of-its-kind goggles at his dining room table, today, Innocorp has expanded to reach thousands of customers in more than 100 countries with a wide variety of innovative products and educational materials to encourage safe driving habits. As the business grew, Aguilar decided that a PhD from the SJMC was the next step in advancing his company’s mission.

“It was just shocking that anything like that would happen in our own front yard. Even after the [media] attention passed, it was always in the back of my mind,” Aguilar said. “In 2009, I decided to apply to the PhD program at UW because we were getting a lot of questions from folks about the efficacy of the goggles and changing behavior and I couldn’t answer them. I thought ‘If I’m going to be in this business, I better figure out these answers.’”

Aguilar’s dissertation, “Adoption Drivers of Outreach and Prevention Tools (ADOPT) Framework: Explaining and Enhancing the Adoption of Digital Innovation in Public Safety and Health,” aims to answer those questions. His research examined how factors such as participant engagement, live demonstrations and observable outcomes influence decisions to adopt impaired-driving awareness and prevention tools. For Fatal Vision Goggles, participant engagement and live demonstrations made the benefits visible to potential adopters. In contrast, digital e-learning platforms faced greater challenges in making their benefits immediately observable to decision-makers who influence product adoption. From these findings, Aguilar established the ADOPT framework to inform mass communication strategies for facilitating innovation adoption.

Unlike traditional students, Aguilar balanced not only his family life with his school work, but his flourishing business as well. For 16 years, he took one class each semester and steadily pursued and finetuned his research questions with the help of his advisor, Jack M. McLeod Communication Research Professor Dhavan Shah.

“Dhavan gave me great advice that no matter what I work on in my dissertation, to make sure it’s relevant to me and what I want to do and my business. I really took that to heart,” Aguilar said.

For Shah, it was just as rewarding to work with Aguilar for over a decade and to see him evolve not only as a scholar but also as a business owner.

“It is inspiring to me as a nearly 59 year old. [Aguilar] started his doctoral program when he was just a few years younger than I am now. I think it is remarkable to take on a challenge of that magnitude, while running a business you founded, with dozens of employees, and doing so at a high level of capability,” Shah said. “Michael is a role model to non-traditional students.”

As a non-traditional student, Aguilar appreciated the network of support from both the SJMC and his family that propelled him to complete his degree. Now armed with a PhD, Aguilar is excited to bring his learnings over the past 16 years to Innocorp and continue to advance their mission of empowering safety and prevention advocates with tools that engage communities, build awareness and empathy, and support life-saving prevention efforts.

“My wife has been one of the biggest supporters in helping me get through this,” Aguilar said. “A key part of making it through a journey like this is having the right people supporting you.”

To learn more about Innocorp, ltd. visit their website.