THE IMMIGRANT EXODUS: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent

THE IMMIGRANT EXODUS: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent

My book on immigration is releasing on October 2 along with a research report that I co-authored with Dean AnnaLee Saxenian of UC-Berkeley and Prof. Dan Siciliano of Stanford Law School. There is no good news. The research shows an alarming drop in immigrant entrepreneurship–just when the U.S. needs a tremendous boost. Below are a synopsis [...]

Forbes: The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry

Forbes: The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry

There is great concern about China’s real-estate and infrastructure bubbles.  But these are just short-term challenges that China may be able to spend its way out of. The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble. By offering subsidies, cheap labor, and lax regulations and rigging its currency, China was [...]

Washington Post: Ethics in the age of acceleration

Washington Post: Ethics in the age of acceleration

A 63-year old Vietnam veteran who was rendered completely disabled during service to his country was able to travel again because of a custom-made mobile-assistive device. But in October 2009, as he travelled from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, the 450-pound device was damaged in the cargo hold of the plane. As a result, [...]

Foreign Policy: Insourcing

Foreign Policy: Insourcing

America’s real outsourcing crisis isn’t the one Obama and Romney are arguing about. It’s the talented immigrants who are prevented from setting up shop in America. The U.S. presidential election quickly seems to be turning into a battle of “who-outsources-least.” President Barack Obama has taken to referring to Republican candidate Mitt Romney as an “outsourcing pioneer” during [...]

Forbes: Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History

Forbes: Why I Believe That This Will Be The Most Innovative Decade In History

Many people believe that we’ve run out of ideas and that the future will be one of bleak shortages of food, energy, and water. Billionaire Peter Thiel, for example, argues that despite spectacular advances in computer-related fields, technological progress has actually stalled because the internal combustion engine still rules our highways, the cancer death rate [...]

Washington Post: Peter Thiel sings siren song to America’s youth

Washington Post: Peter Thiel sings siren song to America’s youth

Attention high school graduates with dreams of becoming a doctor: That’s a bad idea. Instead, become a plumber. You’ll make more money. If you think that sounds crazy, that’s because it is. But that’s precisely the message noted investor and Libertarian Peter Thiel intoned on CBS 60 Minutes Sunday. It was only the latest blast [...]

Washington Post: My Wasted Day on Capitol Hill

Washington Post: My Wasted Day on Capitol Hill

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 hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship chaired by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), [...]

Washington Post: America, keep rewarding your dissidents

Washington Post: America, keep rewarding your dissidents

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 data wrong when it came to India and China’s advantages in engineering education and R&D, that we didn’t understand how to build innovation centers, and that our assumptions about [...]


Recent Articles

LinkedIn: How To Go From Being a Disaster—To a Great Speaker

Tarun at EconomistWhen I saw my son Tarun forget his lines and freeze up on the big stage at the 2011Economist Ideas Economy: Information Summit, my heart sank. I wanted to rush up and give him a big hug and say “it’s okay son, it wasn’t a big deal, don’t worry about it”. Tarun had worked day and night to be prepared for his first big talk. He memorized every word of a 12-minute long presentation. And then he forgot his lines. I won’t forget the anguish on his face.

Tarun managed to fumble his way through the talk. The moderator also came to his rescue—knowing that any 23-year old would have difficulty speaking to an audience of 400 business executives and academics at one of the most prestigious conferences in the world.

Tarun’s mistake was that had no notes in his hand and no PowerPoint to remind him of the key points that he wanted to make. He thought this would be like giving a speech in high school—which he did very well. (more…)

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Washington Post: Not happy at your job? Your company is paying for it in innovation potential.

istockphotoA Nov. 2011 paper from European Union-backed academic institution evoREG makes the case that happiness is both integral to the innovation process and oddly enough simultaneously misunderstood. The authors find happiness to be both an input factor as well as an output factor of the innovation process. In other words, happiness leads to more innovation, and when directed properly, innovation creates more happiness for societies.

My friend, author, Srikumar Rao, has been saying this for years, including in his book Happiness at Work. (more…)

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Washington Post: The next big national intelligence debate

 

NSA Phone RecordsMy iPhone keeps track of everywhere I go and everyone that I call. It knows when I sleep, when I wake, and how active I am. It has the names and numbers of all of my friends and access to all of my emails, social networks, and even to the health information collected by apps that I’ve installed.

Google has a one-up on my iPhone. It reads my emails before I do and knows what I am thinking by analyzing what I search for on the Internet and which Web sites I visit. It “knows” what other people think about me. If my friend and noted futurist Ray Kurzweil succeeds in his mission at Google, it will also understand my wants and needs. It will be able to predict what I want to search for, where I want to go, and what I want to eat. It will understand how my brain thinks and know me better than my wife does. (more…)

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Washington Post: What you and the Senate need to know about Canada

CanadaSenators should be aware of a critical fact, as they debate immigration reform: If we don’t want foreign-born talent in the United States, other countries are more than happy to take the talent, and the innovation potential that goes with it, off of our hands.

“I’m here to send the message that Canada’s open for business—we welcome the entrepreneurs that America is turning away” said Canadian Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney at Stanford Law School this week. His message to Silicon Valley’s immigrant entrepreneurs: “If you’re thinking of doing a start-up in North America, why don’t you come to Canada? You can do so permanently. Create the wealth there, create the jobs in Canada, bring your huge human capital to Canada, and contribute to our economy.” The Canadian government even purchased a large billboard on Route 101—the main thoroughfare between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which says “H-1B problems? Pivot to Canada”. (more…)

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LinkedIn: How To Be Happy At Work–Despite That Jerk Boss

shutterstock_95134207Companies often hire management consultants to find ways to improve productivity. They focus on process and procedure. But there is actually an even more potent ingredient for boosting productivity: happiness. According to author and business coach Alexander Kjerulf, the Danes have a word for happiness at work: arbejdsglæde (and if you want to stay happy, don’t try pronouncing that). Kjerulf says that this concept is deeply ingrained in the Scandinavian work culture. It’s about enjoying what you do; feeling proud of your work; knowing that what you do is important and being recognized for it; having fun; and being energized.

When workers achieve arbejdsglæd, the business benefits from higher productivity, because happy people achieve better results; from higher quality, because happy employees care about quality; from lower absenteeism, because people actually want to go to work, and from less stress and rarer burnout, because happy people are less susceptible to stress. Not surprisingly, all of this leads to higher sales, better customer satisfaction, more creativity, and higher profits for the business. (more…)

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WSJ: Don’t Confuse Investors with Mentors

WSJ WadhwaEntrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game. That is the value that mentors provide and the reason why you need to start building relationships with people who can help you when you are stuck.

That is why you need to find mentors with experience in different stages of company development. Mentors will not know your technology as well as you do and may not be able to tell you what the best path to success is. But they can surely tell you what pitfalls to avoid and what to expect.You will never find a mentor who can guide you through every level of your game. That’s because technology is changing ever more rapidly and continually altering the landscape. No one has built your exact company before. The good news is, however, that the basics of building a business haven’t changed. You start with a great idea and test it with customers to figure out what they want and need. Then you build your product, and market, sell, and support it. The skills required for each of these steps is different. An understanding of the challenges that lie ahead can dramatically change your product, distribution plans, and growth strategy. (more…)

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Washington Post: The way forward for FWD.us

Mark ZuckerbergSilicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla expressed his concerns about the lobbying tactics employed by the new advocacy organization FWD.us in a tweet, asking if the organization would “prostitute … values” to achieve its goals:

Will Fwd.us prostitute climate destruction & other values to get a few engineers hired & get immmigration reform? bit.ly/ZyIMHF

— Vinod Khosla (@vkhosla) May 5, 2013

Khosla isn’t alone when it comes to expressing disapproval with the organization started by Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Many others in the technology world expressed their outrage towards the advocacy group on Twitter, in public forums and advertisements. A number of liberal organizations have called for a boycott of the group, and one of the most prominent FWD.us members, Tesla and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has withdrawn his support for the organization. (more…)

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LinkedIn: Innovating Women Leaning In to Tell Their Own Stories

Innovative WonenThe technology industry has a gender problem. The vast majority of its Venture Capitalists are male as are the founders of its startups and its technology heads. Even the boards of its public companies are dominated by males.

It isn’t that women are not up to the job. The problem is that they are discouraged and left out. During childhood, girls are often sent the wrong signals by their parents. When they go to school, girls with an interest in engineering and science are called “tomboys”. When they defy the odds and become scientists or engineers, women are often treated as inferior and passed over for promotion.

Sadly, the deck has always been stacked against women—right through the ages. For example, in the 1730s, a brilliant woman mathematician, Emilie du Châtelet, translated and popularized Sir Isaac Newton’s arcane Principia Mathematica, and created a foundation for Einstein to develop his theories. She inspired Voltaire’s writings. But she received almost no recognition and few have ever heard of her. Similarly, a century later, Marie Curie performed pioneering research on radioactivity for which she received two Nobel prizes, yet she is less of a household name than Kim Kardashian. (more…)

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Washington Post: Why we need a ‘plan B’ for comprehensive immigration reform

“Without a path to citizenship there can be no immigration reform,” said Senator Mike Bennet (D-Colo.), at the Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday during a panel discussion.

Bennet, one of the “Gang of 8” senators negotiating comprehensive immigration reform legislation, was adamant that we should not create an under-class that has fewer rights than American citizens.

(more…)

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WSJ: Debunking the Myth of the Dorm-Room Billionaire

WSJ WadhwaDuring the mid-‘90s, cardiologist and researcher David Albert had the idea to develop a handheld device that displays an electrocardiogram. He believed that this would save lives by providing immediate information to patients wherever they were. In those days, even the most powerful handheld computers didn’t have the needed capabilities. So Albert dropped the idea because it was impossible.

Myths abound about the young entrepreneurs who dreamed up crazy ideas while in their dorm room, raised millions of dollars in venture capital, and started billion-dollar businesses. But these are just the outliers. The typical entrepreneur is more like Albert—a middle-aged professional who learns about a market need and starts a company with his own savings.And then came the iPhone in 2007 — which has more processing power than some of the supercomputers of yesteryear. In 2010, at the age of 56, Albert started Alivecor with $250,000 from his savings. His goal was to build an iPhone case that performs an EKG. This device was approved by the FDA last December and now retails for $200—with a prescription. (more…)

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Washington Post: MOOCs, sensors, apps and games: The revolution in education innovation

India_Tibet_Monastic_Science-0b22eMassive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been touted by some as the breakthrough that will transform education. Top universities such as MIT, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley are scrambling to make their lectures available online. Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) described one such program — a trial effort between online course platform Udacity and San Jose State University — as being “about our society, our future and how we can all improve our skills, how we can exercise our imagination.”

Brown is right, but today’s online courses are just a baby step forward on education’s path to transformation, particularly early childhood education. Khan Academy founder Salman Khan will likely be seen in the near future as the modern-day equivalent of the radio star who first appeared on television, microphone in hand. (more…)

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PBS Newshour: Why Older Entrepreneurs Are Crucial, Even in Silicon Valley

Facebook likesFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg founded his social media website from his dorm room at Harvard University when he was only 19 years old. As Silicon Valley investors search for the next “Zuckerberg,” they increasingly maintain a prejudice against older entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa says the age discrimination in tech industries is a big mistake. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

A Note from Paul Solman: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa is a favorite contributor of ours on Making Sense and The Business Desk. His most recent contribution, on Silicon Valley discriminating against women, brought a torrent of spirited affirmations and denials.

Now, he takes on a theme we’ve been following since January: older workers in America. They too are discriminated against, he writes, and once again, in supposedly meritocratic Silicon Valley. It’s a big mistake.

Vivek Wadhwa: It wasn’t long ago that age was equated with knowledge. The apprentice learned from the master and the disciple from the guru. Older workers earned higher salaries because of their experience. (more…)

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