A Quote by Nicholas Negroponte
Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.
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When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.
Monsanto will not come empty-handed. Monsanto will come with a big bag of money. And because these governments are poor, when they are shown money for their research institutions, for their universities, for their professors, they are very quick to say yes, and I can tell you that when Monsanto came to Kenya, they were able to be given permission to do research in one of our research institutions, and yet there was not a single law to control such research.
I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
It used to be that the only ones with access to cutting-edge technology were top government labs, big companies and the ultra-rich. It was simply too expensive for the rest of us to afford.
Exploration, of course, is going to new places, but I don't think we go to new places just solely to say: "Well, we've been there," and come back, interesting though it may be. To me, each time we go farther into space we should use that to do basic research - basic research that can't be done before you go there.
I want to invest in research. Research is great. Providing funding to universities and think tanks is great. But investing in companies? Absolutely not.
A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.
The interests of big corporations have so permeated government that its major decisions are indistinguishable from the boardroom demands of the leading companies in each commercial sector.
If it were not for government regulation of big corporations, executives at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, they could have cheated investors out of millions.
If we want to identify the great success of American research universities, and that success goes far beyond Harvard, we have to come back to the question of governance. Excellence requires a firewall between trusteeship, or government ministries, and the academic decision-making process. This American concept of shared governance wherein the faculty are engaged in running the university as part of a collaboration with the other stakeholders.
Big companies are often in the process of laying off workers. Small startup companies are the ones that are hiring. The statistics prove that's where job growth is going to occur.
New Yorkers have been fortunate to have Andrew Cuomo as our Attorney General - protecting working New Yorkers against the banks, insurance companies and big corporations.
Halcyon people have put aside and left their homes, their million dollar salaries, full professorships at major universities, and fully seed-funded startup companies to be part of this effort.
Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research.
Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it's over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment.
Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.
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