A full panel of Stanford academics and successful entrepreneurs unanimously affirmed optimism about the potential of entrepreneurial thinking in solving global problems, but disagreed about the importance of strong institutions in facilitating innovation.
Entrepreneurs and those interested in entrepreneurship tend to arrive early it seems. At 4:10 PM, 20 minutes before the start of E-Week's "The Role of Entrepreneurship in Solving the World Problems," students, professors, conference attendees and the occasional wayward blogger were already being asked to fill in rows to the middle to make way for more attendees.
John Hennessy, Stanford's high-rolling President, set the stage reminding us that the sort of global problems on the day's agenda are normally approached with big bureaucracy and not innovative thinking.
Tom Byers, the Faculty Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program bounded up to begin moderating, introducing a panel of six, which including his brother, Brook Byers, a General Partner at venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers.
Panelists' preoccupation with the importance on harnessing entrepreneurial spirit in the developing world to showed itself from the starting gun as Byers and Paul Yock, director of Stanford's Biodesign Program, stressed the importance of innovations in medical technologies in making health care delivery more efficient.
Yock noted that on an international level lifestyle diseases like cardiovascular ailments will soon become the greatest killers. Since, developed world technologies for treating cardiovascular disease are so expensive, he said, its also important to look at and learn from how those technologies get redeveloped in an international setting.
Kavita Ramdas, founder of the Global Fund for Women, agreed.
"The creation of new technology by definition must be done across counties," she said.
"The US should be putting in to place policies that will allow it to be a happy countries among other happy countries not those that will continue to make it a superpower."
The conversation shifted to energy. KR Sridhar, the CEO of Bloom Energy, a solid state fuel cell company (that, incidentally, Brook Byers' firm is invested in), stressed the importance of innovations that increase energy efficiency and provide above all for individual initiative.
For a small farmer in Bangladesh, he said, the process should be as follows.
"I have a box. That box generates electricity. I can sell it. If I want clean water I buy it from the lady next door. Everyone is an entrepreneur."
"But you need someone to enforce property rights!" said Chip Blacker, director of Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
At Blacker's admission that he is a Democrat because he believes in strengthening global governance, Sridhar shot back to muffled applause.
"I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I am a capitalists who believes you can do good and make good," Sridhar said.
Blacker responded that he does not believe that entrepreneurship should be associated with Americaness, at the same time policy architecture plays a big role.
"Why has entrepreneurship been so successful in this country? he asked. "Can you say regulatory policy? The system rewards people for taking risks."
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