Re: What is driving today's innovation explosion?

Description: The reason Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley is Stanford.

Transcript: Well I think a huge part of it . . . There have been two huge . . . There have been two huge contributors to it, I think. And I actually believe . . . This may be a little different than the last giant cycle of technological innovation when I think things were a lot less formal in America. One huge cycle has been education – high quality institutions of higher education. Now it’s not always true. We’ve gotta remember, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – who are probably two of the most famous high tech figures of the last 30 years – are both college dropouts. Michael Dell, who is not really a technology figure but runs a big technology company, is a college dropout. And even Sergey Brin and Larry Page who founded Google – while they are certainly not college dropouts, did drop out of their PhD programs and never finished their PhDs. Having said that, it’s obvious that the last several waves of innovation in digital technology – that kind of thing that I write about – have been generated by higher education institutions of high quality. The pre-PC era, a reason that a lot of those companies were clustered around Boston was MIT. We still have companies being spun out of MIT today. You may have heard of I Robot, you know, which makes __________ vacuum and a bunch of actually military robots. They’re an MIT spinoff. There is a company spun off by MIT that are working on, you know, basically electronic paper and a number of other things. But the PC revolution, Stanford played a much bigger role in that. So a lot of, you know . . . Yahoo, Google, quite a few other of those Silicon Valley companies . . . The reason Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley is Stanford. Obviously not everyone went to Stanford, but it has been a huge catalyst; an area that at one time – I think as recently as 30 or 35 years ago – was primarily a fruit and flower growing area, and now it’s called Silicon Valley.

Recorded on: 9/13/07