Caltech and UIDP

UIDP, kinda rolls off the tongue, ehh?

UIDP stands for University-Industry Development Partnership, a consortium fashioned with a number of leading universities who have watched Silicon Valley emerge around the nexus of Stanford and Berkeely, or the Boston experience with Harvard and MIT.

Wayne Johnson, a peripatetic leader with time at HP and Microsoft as University Relations VP or Director, has been at Caltech for three years, spearheading their increasingly significant industry interactions.   Johnson shares our belief that while entrepreneurship is the current buzzword, that a sizable share of the truly important problems facing science and technology are better served in established corporations, provided that they can keep a spark of innovation going.

Ah, ha!  That's the question, right?  How do you do that?

Johnson has invited InnovaScapes Institute to present the opening Keynote address on April 16 for this august body of 150, who will spend three days at Caltech and its agenices (including world-famed JPL, and the Curiosity robot on Mars).

For the keynote, I plan to use the social network diagrams that we did at Media X (Martha Russell's fine work) to show the networks around Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, and Harvard, and how each has strengths and weaknesses.  Then contrast that with some data from the Presidential Roundtable and the Competitiveness Council -- data that curls your hair in terms of feeling good about American business leadership.  Close with some variant of the new thesis being promoted by Robert Atkinson at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, tying it to Judy Estrin's impassioned "Closing the Innovation Gap"

Should be a fun day.... and week.

Quite a privilege actually.  ISI is fortunate to have this opportunity.