When oil was still spewing uncontrollably from the Deepwater Horizon well last summer, philanthropist Wendy Schmidt and the X Prize Foundation issued a $1.4 million challenge calling for better technologies to clean up oil spills. Aside from Schmidt’s concern for the environment, the need for innovation in this arena was dire. In 1989, teams cleaning up the oil from the Exxon [...]
A part of the Chicago Ideas Week, this debate is the first Intelligence Squared U.S. debate to be held live in Chicago. The herd mentality that assumes college is the only path to reaching one’s full potential is under fire. Student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt, unemployment for those with bachelor’s degrees is [...]
The ugly reality of engineering — one that no one wants to admit — is that it is an up-or-out profession. If a 40-year-old engineer is doing the same job that can be done by an entry-level worker, he or she is headed toward unemployment. This is the case in the most fast-moving fields of [...]
I recently returned from a visit to Chile, which launched an ambitious effort in 2000 to become an IT outsourcing hub. It did so in an effort to break its economic dependence on its mining industry. By offering massive subsidies, the Chilean government created an outsourcing industry that generated $800 million in revenue and employed [...]
The legends of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other high-tech entrepreneurs have fed a stereotypical vision of innovation in America: Mix a brainy college dropout, a garage-incubated idea and a powerful venture capitalist, stir well, and you get the latest Silicon Valley powerhouse. That’s Hollywood’s version of technological innovation; unfortunately, it’s also the [...]
A recent study provides one more argument against government officials who tout “industry clusters” as the Holy Grail of regional growth and innovation. The formula for creating these clusters is always the same: Pick a hot industry, build a technology park next to a research university, provide incentives for businesses to relocate, add some venture capital [...]
Silicon Valley is like the United Nations. The level of diversity in the Valley is unlike anywhere else in the world. But look deeper and you begin to notice that something is missing: Blacks and Hispanics. According to the San Jose Mercury News, as of 2008, blacks and Hispanics constituted only 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent, [...]
When I came to the U.S. in 1980, I was young and naïve. I used to think that corruption and ethical lapses were just a third-world ill. Eventually, I became a tech CEO and learned the harsh realities of American business. Yes, standards are much higher, and breaches are punished, but the temptations are just [...]
Washington Post: In Latin America, a new day is dawning
BusinessWeek: Want More Startups? Learn From Chile
Washington Post: In Chile’s slums, a lesson in how to make apps for social good
ASEE Prism: Engineering Our Health
Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Silicon Valley and Hollywood: Rivals or Kindred Spirits?
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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 massacres in Mexico, Maoist rebellions in Peru, and grinding poverty in the hillside favelas of Brazil, this view of Latin America is ingrained in Americans’ collective conscious.
Except, of course, this view is no longer valid. (more…)
The foreigners will take our jobs away! Only the Nicaraguans will come! You can’t build a Silicon Valley without venture capital.
These were just a few of the arguments from opponents of a government program I helped create in 2010 to boost local entrepreneurship in Chile. The program, called Start-Up Chile, seemed crazy at the time. Give $40,000 to startups led by foreign entrepreneurs to move and set up shop in one of the most magnificent countries on this planet for six months—no strings attached. The government would also provide free office space, help them settle in, and connect them to investors and mentors. (more…)
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?
The App Economy, to date, has largely touched the lives of those living in the developed world. This is due, in part, to the high cost of smart phones but also because app development has lacked real vision and purpose. I have found that Silicon Valley, generally speaking, doesn’t build apps to save the world or lift people out of poverty. It builds them to sell Angry Bird t-shirts and generate lots of virtual currency.
The folks at Centro de Innovación in Santiago, Chile, aim to change that. (more…)
New technology and DNA access promise a medical revolution.In 2000, scientists at a private company called Celera announced they had raced ahead of the U.S. government in decoding the DNA of a human being. Using the latest sequencing technology, plus the data available from the Human Genome project, Celera scientists created a working draft of the genome. These efforts cost more than $1 billion. Today, a complete genome sequence costs about $3,000 and takes about a week. One company, Life Technologies Corp. in Carlsbad, Calif., just announced that it will provide the service for $1,000 and in 24 hours. At this rate, within three years, the cost will be less than that of a simple blood test and the results will be almost instantaneous.
This type of data opens up an amazing set of possibilities.
A genome map is the source code for the software that constitutes living organisms. Imagine doing a Google search on your own genome to learn the health predispositions and likely abilities of people genetically similar to you. You can learn about what medications or lifestyle changes may best prevent a disease. (more…)
On an evening under the stars on the Fox Studios lot last week, a panel I emceed addressed a question that seems to recur in both creative and technology circles. Namely, how has Hollywood affected Silicon Valley? The pat answer for lots of technologists in the Bay Area would likely be: “Not for the better,” citing the recently tabled SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) laws.
According to that worldview, SOPA and PIPA were ham-fisted attempts by Hollywood types and their buddies in the music business to commandeer the Internet and remove critical legal protections for search engines and hosting companies that may shelter pirates but also promote free speech and technology innovation. The common belief is that SOPA and PIPA represent yet another instance of entertainment industry greed trying to force people to pay up or face litigation—often for questionable trespasses such as viewing a movie they legitimately purchased on more than one device. (more…)
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 Campinas, Brazil—a small university town on the outskirts of Sao Paulo.
In June 2010, ten startups at the Softex incubator at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas decided to break free from the university incubator they were housed in and form an entrepreneurial co-op of sorts, called the Associação Campinas Startups. Instead of relying on local business executives and professors to guide them, the entrepreneurs decided to learn from each other. The university was very supportive, and business mentors went out of their way to share their knowledge and experience. But the advice was always too theoretical or geared towards big companies. In short, it wasn’t relevant to the leaner, fast-paced technology world. Instead, the entrepreneurs found the greatest value in brainstorming sessions and casual information exchanges with each other over lunch or drinks after work. (more…)
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.
These were some of the things we discussed at the Singularity University executive program on the Mulberry Street set at Hollywood’s Fox Studios, last weekend. Entertainer and technologist will.i.am, Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos, and Tesla and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, provided some amazing insights into the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. (more…)
President Barack Obama reportedly asked Steve Jobs what it would take to bring iPhone manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. to which Jobs replied, “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”
The exchange, according to a Jan. 12, 2012 report in the New York Times, occurred in Feb. 2011 at a dinner in Silicon Valley. The late Steve Jobs was right. Even though advances in automation, 3D printing, and the rising costs of labor in China will cause manufacturing to return to U.S. shores, we won’t need the millions of factory workers we needed in the past. That’s because the manufacturing jobs we need filled today are different from the ones we sent abroad. These jobs require fewer workers with very different skills. (more…)
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 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship were wrong. I have been particularly vocal about America’s flawed immigration policies. I quantified the amazing contribution that skilled immigrants make in the technology industry and raised the alarm about the reverse brain drain that is in progress. I testified, assertively, to Congress, and have been badgering our political leaders to act on these important issues.
My father, a retired Indian diplomat, called me on several occasions to plead that I tone down my criticism. He worried that I would anger U.S. government officials and they would find some way to have me deported. Indeed, this would have been the case in many countries, where I could have ended up in a Gulag — or worse.
But what happens in America? (more…)
Ali Velshi, Vivek Wadhwa, and Peter Diamandis discuss how innovations made by small business and entrepreneurs will be key to economic recovery in the United States.
Facebook’s IPO has raised hopes in Silicon Valley that the tech industry’s days of wine and roses will soon be back with hundreds of start-ups going public. Even President Obama seems excited. He recently proposed an “IPO on-ramp” to help young, smaller companies go public.
Sadly, everyone is going to be disappointed.
We are not going to see the flood of IPOs that happened during the late 90’s. The rules of the game have changed. The infrastructure to facilitate IPOs is no longer there, and the regulatory environment has changed. Joe Grundfest, a professor and a colleague at Stanford Law School, outlines four reasons why the path to the IPO has become so steep for aspiring companies. (more…)
Earlier in this series, I’ve discussed the myth of Silicon Valley’s meritocracy and the ignorance and arrogance of its gatekeepers. The problem is real: There are hardly any female, black, or Hispanic CEOs or CTOs in the tech world. Innovation thrives on diversity; by excluding more than half of our population, we are greatly limiting economic growth.
So what can be done about it?
First, let’s stop pretending that the tech industry is a Nirvana and admit that there is a problem. All of us have biases, whether we realize it or not. Research published in September 2011 by the Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI) revealed that hidden biases within the I.T. workplace caused women and blacks to have negative workplace experiences far more often than their male and white counterparts. They were more likely to say they had difficulty balancing their work and family responsibilities, had been excluded by cliques, or were bullied. Not surprisingly, this leads to lower job satisfaction and increased turnover among members of these groups, creating a significant cost for employers and a loss of talent for the sector. (more…)
