Vivek Wadhwa

• How driverless cars are a perfect metaphor for our anxiety over where technology is headed
• What conditions make services or sectors ripe for a giant leap into the future
• Which industries stand to benefit most, and which will be upended
• Why Artificial Intelligence is both the most important breakthrough and the most dangerous technology ever created by man
• When, and if, society will accept robotic caregivers, housekeepers , and even warriors
• Whether cyber security can begin to keep up with our ubiquitous connectivity

1. trillion dollar opportunities happen at the intersections of exponential technologies
2. disruptions are happening in every industry where technology can be applied
3. entrepreneurs can now do what only governments and big corporations could do before
4. if they don’t disrupt themselves, they will be disrupted by startups from other industries.

The legends of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other high-tech entrepreneurs have fed a stereotypical vision of innovation in America: Mix a brainy college dropout, a garage-incubated idea and a powerful venture capitalist, stir well, and you get the latest Silicon Valley powerhouse. That’s Hollywood’s version of technological innovation; unfortunately, it’s also the one that venture capitalists try to fund and government planners seek to replicate. But these individuals are not America’s typical entrepreneurs and that is not the way to build innovation systems.

In this talk, Wadhwa will dispel some common myths such as:

1.  America’s typical tech entrepreneurs are in their 20s
2.  Entrepreneurs are like top athletes: They are born, not made
3.  College dropouts make better entrepreneurs
4.  Women can’t cut it in the tech world
5.  The way to build an innovation system is to create a tech park next to a research university and to add industry subsidies and venture capital.

He will detail the extensive research that his teams at Harvard, Duke and UC Berkeley have completed on what makes an entrepreneur, and the grand experiment that he helped launch in Chile to create an innovation system there.

Build a magnificent technology park next to a research university; provide incentives for chosen businesses to locate there; add some venture capital. That is the recipe for harnessing higher education and industry in order to spur economic growth that management consultants touting the “cluster theory” developed by Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter commonly prescribe.

Hundreds of regions all over the world have spent billions on such efforts; practically all have failed.

All of these well-intentioned efforts to build Silicon Valley–style technology hubs are based on the same flawed assumptions: government planners can pick industries they want to develop and, by erecting buildings and providing money to entrepreneurs and university researchers, make innovation happen.

It simply doesn’t work that way. Innovation takes people who are knowledgeable, motivated, and willing to take risks. Those people have to be connected to one another and to universities by information-sharing social networks.

Vivek Wadhwa helped design the world’s most successful government-sponsored innovation-development effort: StartUp Chile. This focused on bringing talent to Chile and cultivating ties between entrepreneurs. It was so successful that The Economist dubbed it “Chilecon Valley”.

In this talk, Wadhwa will discuss what it takes to build a regional innovation system and dispel some of the myths about entrepreneurs, such as:

• venture capital is a prerequisite for building an innovation hub
• America’s typical tech entrepreneurs are in their 20s (rather, they are in their 40s)
• entrepreneurs are like top athletes: born, not made
• college dropouts make better entrepreneurs
• women can’t cut it in the tech world
• to build an innovation system, create a tech park next to a research university and to add industry subsidies and venture capital.

Our laws and ethical practices have evolved over centuries. Today, technology is on an exponential curve and is touching practically everyone, everywhere. Changes of a magnitude that once took centuries to occur now happen in decades, sometimes in years. We haven’t come to grips with what is ethical, let alone with what the laws should be. The same technologies that are making it possible to solve humanity’s grand challenges—in education, water, food, shelter, health, and security—are also creating new nightmares.

Consider the question of privacy. Our laws date back to the late 19th century, and there is no consensus on what information should be public and what should be private. Our smartphones track our movements and habits. Our Web searches reveal our thoughts. With the wearable devices and medical sensors that are being connected to our smartphones, information about our physiology and health is also coming into the public domain. Where do we draw the line on what is legal—and ethical?

Then there is our DNA. Genome testing will soon become as common as blood tests, and it won’t be easy to protect our genomic data. But we have yet to come to a social consensus on how private medical data can be collected and shared. The technology to edit genes has also advanced to the point at which Nobel Prize winners are calling on scientists to accept a self-imposed moratorium on any attempt to create genetically altered children until the safety and the medical bases for such a step can be better understood.

Artificial Intelligence is advancing rapidly and making amazing things possible in health care, transportation, technology, marketing, and practically every other field where data have to be analyzed—and decisions made. But the advance of this super intelligence has scared even tech luminaries such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking. They fear it will be humanity’s last great invention. Should we stop it; can we stop it?

We will have similar debates about self-driving cars, drones, and robots. These too will record everything we do and will raise new legal and ethical issues. What happens when a self-driving car has a software failure and hits a pedestrian, or a drone’s camera happens to catch someone skinny-dipping in a pool or taking a shower, or a robot kills a human in self-defense?

Thomas Jefferson said in 1816, “Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.”

A common belief is that the sun is setting on the U.S. empire and that China is about to leapfrog the U.S. in economic terms—and in innovation.  In addition to economic disadvantages, naysayers have long cited graduation data purporting to show that the U.S. is falling behind in mathematics and science education and have predicted that the U.S. will lose it global advantage because China and India graduate more engineers than does the U.S.

China, India, and the rest of the world are now innovating as never before. But it isn’t their governments or education systems that are giving them the advantage—it is their nascent entrepreneurs.  They are leading the way in innovation and helping the countries transform themselves.

And contrary to popular belief, America is getting further ahead in innovation, it isn’t lagging. The U.S. is reinventing itself, just as it does every 30 or 40 years.

In this talk, Vivek Wadhwa will explain how Exponential technologies are about to cause major disruption in several U.S. industries—but they will wreak havoc on the economies of countries such as China and Russia and the Middle East. That is because manufacturing is once again becoming a local industry and is coming back to the U.S., thanks to robotics and 3D printing; because energy prices, which fell temporarily because of fracking, will fall permanently because of advances in alternative, clean energies such as solar, wind, and geothermal; and because advances in artificial intelligence and computing are automating knowledge work.

Some countries will win in a big way and others will lose. Wadhwa will discuss his research on education and innovation in countries such as India and China and put this in the context of today’s exponential technology advances.  He will discuss the opportunities and perils for countries that these technologies are introducing.