I used to live in the Boston area, then in Colorado Springs for a long time and now in Silicon Valley. While there are breakthroughs waiting to happen in real tough areas like better Natural Language understanding, better speech recognition, video content search, better user interfaces in small form factors, money is being pissed away on social networking sites for second cousins and yet another site for kids to put up their silly pictures and gossip about who really really really likes whom!

You don’t want to be Silicon Valley, especially when it is at the edge of high real estate prices coming down like a ton of bricks, companies getting started here with employees in India and an education system that has lost its way!

Unless a really huge next big thing like the Internet happens, Silicon Valley will be the stuff of memories!

Step 1)

The University hires a new administrator – probably into the top job. This will be someone with a world-class track record in bringing in large quantities of money. The right person can start to succeed here quickly – the first tranch of new money is available in about one year.

Step 2)

With money in place, the University begins to hire top Professors (including a few Nobel laureates) from all over the world (Harvard, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge etc.) – the lure for these guys being the fantastic new funding they are offered for their research. The plan is simple – to make the academic superstars offers they can’t refuse.

Step 3)

The injection of new world-class talent into the area, creates a new culture. The new Professors bring significant proportions of their research groups with them when they move. Over three to five years, the University starts to become a super-attractive place for super-star Assistant Profs, Post-Docs and PhD students to go to.

Step 4)

A proportion of the people emerging from these world-leading research groups will be entrepreneurs. They will have grown attached to the geographic location where they lived while in their academic careers, and their network will also be based around the University. Start-ups will begin to spring-up, and forward-looking VCs will engage with the Universities to help create new entrepreneurs.

Step 5)

Ten years out, the entrepreneurial culture is thriving. There have been successful exits from the first rounds of start-ups, and many millionaires have been created.

Step 6)

Twenty years out, a few of the companies have broken out of the box: after successful IPOs, they they have continued to thrive and become leaders in their areas. Making large profits they invest back into the University to ensure the talent pool available them continues to grow and be renewed.

The core reasons:

(1) In leading US universities, law and medicine connect well
with practice, but engineering mostly does not. Good medical
schools show that it really is possible to have high quality
in research and education with close connections with
practice.

(2) University engineering education is very much stuck in
some old patterns quite separate from a successful
entrepreneurial community. E.g., the main purpose of MIT has
been US national security, not financial results in business;
connections between MIT and Winter Street are weak. The
contribution of Stanford, Berkeley, and UC Davis to Silicon
Valley is quite indirect. A desire and an effort to have a
more direct connection could do wonders for entrepreneurship.

(3) The Silicon Valley entrepreneurship community nearly
uniformly laughs at research in engineering and refuses to
attempt to exploit it. The exploitation of engineering
research by the US military is the best in the world; by
analogy, the engineering in Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is
mostly that of a third world country military.

There are powerful valuable unexploited results on the shelves
of the engineering research libraries, and but connections
with practice are weak. Doing better, mostly just given the
goal of doing better, should be no more than routine in its
difficulty and should be spectacular in its financial results.

The US military has gotten what it wanted from engineering
research mostly because there are several additional layers of
organizations between the research universities and actual
battlefield applications. These layers are enormously costly
an inefficient, but such is war. US business does not have
such layers and mostly has not been able to bridge from
research to practice.

If medicine were run like engineering, no one would go to a
hospital no matter how bad the pain. E.g., the halls of
teaching hospitals are crowded with nonacademic customers with
real problems looking for real solutions, but the halls of
engineering graduate schools have nearly no nonacademic
customers at all. Commonly engineering school faculty members
just laugh at any concept of business applications; in
simplest terms, such applications do not count for promotion
and tenure and are regarded as neglect of an academic career.
Having engineering borrow from medicine could do wonders for
engineering and its connections with entrepreneurship. The
university endowment fund managers have adopted the view that
engineering research has no value in business and that some
new research results and a dime will just cover a ten cent cup
of coffee; a lemonade stand with earnings is a better
investment than an engineering Ph.D. with a prototype.

For engineering in a research university to contribute
effectively to entrepreneurship, high quality new engineering
results are essential, but so are solid connections with
practice.

The opportunity, then, would be for engineering research to
take entrepreneurship seriously and for entrepreneurship to
take engineering research seriously. These are not difficult
concepts, are less difficult than the martingale convergence
theorem, Banach space, P = NP, the implicit function theorem,
the chain rule, freshman calculus, high school plane geometry,
heap sort, two phase commit, AVL trees, LALR parsing, or high
school algebra. The US cannot be confident that, in
engineering, all the rest of the world will seek to emulate
just MIT or Stanford and fail to see the opportunity for high
quality engineering research and education well connected with
valuable applications and successful entrepreneurship.

I don’t know what specific things to do, but I suspect encouraging diversity is key. Last year I joined the Naturally Boulder Task Force, which has almost no overlap with the tech community. It was eye-opening to learn about this vibrant, passionate community in our midst. (Or maybe it’s we, the newcomer tech companies, that are in *their* midst.)