The high tech cookbook

One of the significant drivers of cutting-edge business and innovation in Silicon Valley is the dominating presence of Stanford University. Stanford provides a rich and abundant pipeline of dazzling ideas and outstanding talent to giants in the neighbourhood like Apple, Xerox Parc, Fairchild, HP,  IBM, Intel, Lockheed and Symantec.

And when the ideas are decidedly from ‘Out There in the Future’, spawning start-ups, hawk-eyed venture capitalists on Sand Hill — Sequoia, Matrix, Blackstone — bankroll the promising ones. It’s not an ordinary intersection of education, business and funding.

It’s not a mundane network of companies like Google, Cisco and Sun with Palo Alto the hub. It’s not a dusty crossroads for entrepreneurs, scientists, lawyers, bankers, incubators, students and professors. If anything, it’s a magical, virtuous cycle that needs to be studied and replicated. Can Bangalore replicate it? Can Bangalore produce a sort of Electronics City meets local engineering college meets Brunton Road VC?

Last week, addressing freshers at the PES School of Engineering on Hosur Road, not
a stone’s throw away from Electronic City,  Professor D Jawahar, CEO of the PES Group and a stalwart in the education space, made the connections between the IT Corridor, research done at the PES institutions that was critical to business and the massive funnel of talent that was being trained at the PES School of Engineering.

The 45-acre college campus is admittedly tiny when compared to Stanford. But the college is modern with wi-fi, air conditioned classrooms, tennis courts and a cricket field.

It has LCD screens in the corridors, networked computer labs and— yes, let’s be practical— modern toilets. If you look out from one of the upper floors of the college building, you can begin to believe that Electronic City is just an extended classroom. And one day, companies like Infosys, Wipro and Biocon will play the role that Apple, IBM and Intel did for students in Silicon Valley.

Electronic City with its global business culture has the ability to mentor talent and then absorb it, enable it and turn it into productive, valuable, human capital. It has the capability to shape education to respond to the global business environment, providing an impetus to innovation and  entrepreneurship  in and around Bangalore.

Over the next few years, we should find several more colleges laying their foundation stone along the IT corridor and creating the kind of synergy between academia and business that we have not had the opportunity to witness in the past. The question is: Can educationists like Professor Jawahar alone shine a light in Silicon Alley?

There are a couple of other examples across the world — precious few, actually, as it turns out — of similar environments. One of them is Israel with its Silicon Wadi, a fecund breeding ground for start-ups. Silicon Wadi is a knot of hi-tech companies around Tel Aviv and in the suburbs of Herzliya and the smaller cities of Ra’anana, Haifa and the university town of Rehovot.

Herzliya to the north of Tel Aviv on the coast, with its marina and deserted walkways, its immigrant population and upscale homes, is deceptively quiet. But the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), which sports an entrepreneurship cell and a center for Internet Psychology, amongst other departments, is producing kids that are building out the companies and ideas of the future. And right there, lurking in the neighbourhood, are a string of VCs from Bessemer to Cannan and Sequoia to Walden. You can see that Israel is closely following the Modern High Tech Business Cookbook.

So what is at the core of the business-academia-funding chemistry? Clearly, it all begins with the educational institutes that create technology that can be transferred into the corridors of neighbouring companies.

Alternately, seed capital needs to find ideas being germinated within the institutes at a very early stage, with the ultimate aim of creating business spinouts. And what is it that will help these colleges churn out the technologies, products, processes, ideas and patents that force VCs to open their cheque books with glee? It’s cheap space, modern labs, top-notch academic guidance and access to the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation in the neighbourhood. You see the virtuous cycle starting to build up and roll out? 

The crucible for the virtuous cycle is a hotbed of activity. Universities and colleges have the responsibility to ensure that the research being conducted is relevant, quality focused and business oriented. Ed McCracken, Chairman and CEO of Silicon Graphics, once remarked that his company depended on the research done at Stanford to start the company and noted that “we profit from continuing interactions with faculty and students.” Can Indian business build this level of trust in the talent that is being nurtured and shaped in their back yard?

The writer is a content and communications consultant