Churchill Club Innovation Evnt
Sept 16, 2011 - Santa Clara, CA - As part of the 25th anniversary celebration by the Churchill Club, they had a day long event focusing on innovation. The event was split into three acts - innovation in the Silicon Valley, innovation in America and around the world, and future ways to address innovation. The list of speakers in engaged in both presentation and fireside chat style discussions was both highly esteemed and diverse. The speakers list consisted of :
Shubber Ali, Innovation Lead - Silicon Valley, Accenture
Dave Blakely, Head, Technology Strategy Practice, IDEO
Curt Carlson, CEO, SRI International
Russ Conser, Head of Game Changer Program, Shell
Gordon K. Davidson, Firm Chairman & Partner, Corporate Group, Fenwick & West
Richard Dickson, Partner, Fenwick & West LLP
Ricardo dos Santos, Senior Director, Business Development, Qualcomm
Steve Hoover, CEO, PARC
Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm NewMedia
Randy Komisar, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
Geoffrey Moore, Author, Speaker, Advisor
Will Price, CEO, Flite
Sudhakar Ramakrishna, EVP & GM of Unified Communications Solutions, and Chief Development Officer, Polycom
Roy Rosin, VP Innovation, Intuit
Paul Saffo, Managing Director of Foresight, Discern Analytics
John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar, USC; Independent Co-director, Deloitte Center for the Edge
Vivek Wadhwa, Visiting Scholar, UC-Berkeley and Columnist for the Washington Post and BusinessWeek
Ann Winblad, Managing Director, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Eric Young, Partner, Canaan Partners
An interesting energy was developed at the event, in that all the speakers had passionate opinions about innovation & change, that did not always agree. The general theme was in agreement that innovation is still strong in the valley and around the world, the heated discussions were on the details of why it has centralized in the Silicon Valley, and how it will be manifested in a global marketplace.
Some of key points that were made were (per se) - don’t be afraid to be powerful, -what does power look like? It is not control it is orchestration of assets and resources, - communication is a key for orchestration it consists of the proper information in the proper tone, so you need to control your voice.
The discussion came up on who is driving innovation - the large companies or the small companies - the discussion centered on it is the individuals who are driving this activities not the companies. The issues of goals, capitalization and venture capital focused on the trade off between long range and short range markets. Electronics and cloud technologies are short term, and are financed as such due to the high degree of change in the end user markets which allows for quick adoption. Energy and life sciences are long term issues, as they involve regulation, politics and slower adoption cycles for new technology. Both are viable returns but with different visions, Currently China and India are investing in long term assets that are infrastructure builders as the US did back in the 50's and 60's. The challenge for governments and companies is not traditional unemployment of just relocating jobs to a new place, rather it is CyberStructural Unemployment (CSU) which is the elimination of job which are not being replaced anywhere, and hence to provide employment you need new industries and education to retrain people for new types of position.
The sessions were summarized in graphic format by an artist and visual communications specialist. The graphics are included for your review.
Churchill 25 Innovation breakout Drawings (36)