Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?
In Silicon Valley, engineers are honor students and everyone else is taking remedial math. Venture Capitalists often express disdain for startup CEOs who are not engineers. Silicon Valley parents send their kids to college expecting them to major in a science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) discipline. The theory goes as follows: STEM degree holders will get higher pay upon graduation and get a leg up in the career sprint. (more…)
President Obama has been touting patents as a way to create jobs and increase U.S. competitiveness. “These are jobs and businesses of the future just waiting to be created,” 
With the economy still in the doldrums, our political leaders are desperate to find ways to boost economic growth. Innovation and entrepreneurship are among the most obvious pathways to a solution. Both were the subject of a 
Guns. Drugs. Poverty. These three words sum up the view too many people in the U.S. have of Latin America. Fueled by media reports of 
The foreigners will take our jobs away! Only the Nicaraguans will come! You can’t build a Silicon Valley without venture capital.
How many of the hundreds of thousands of mobile phone applications seek to do truly great things, such as lift people out of poverty or improve health care for the poor?
New technology and DNA access promise a medical revolution.
On an evening under the stars on the Fox Studios lot last week, a 
Silicon Valley has led the world in innovation and entrepreneurship because of its culture of information sharing and mentoring. No other region in the world is like it. But things are changing. In my travels to countries like India, China, and Chile, I’ve witnessed a noticeable evolution in entrepreneurial culture over the past five years. Networking groups are emerging, and entrepreneurs are becoming more open. One of the most impressive examples of this is in 
Silicon Valley may be a garden of innovation, but many of the seeds were sown by Hollywood. Earlier generations of innovators were inspired by shows such as Star Trek, Lost in Space, and The Jetsons; later generations, by films such as Aliens, Terminator, and Avatar. Hollywood brought science fiction to the masses and gave people big things to dream about. And music spread the inspiration — it was a social network before social networks existed.
President Barack Obama 
Ever since I became an academic six years ago, I have been one of the biggest critics of U.S. competitiveness policies. I documented, for example, that we had our 