Silicon Valley applies its innovation to start-ups

Lee Redden, 26, a Ph.D. student in engineering at Stanford, recently decided to shelve his education and help found a start-up company. His skills lie in a couple of red-hot niches of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning. Yet he is not applying his talents to internet search, online commerce or intelligence surveillance. Redden's ambitions are further afield — in farm fields, actually. His company, Blue River Technology, is developing a robotic weed killer for organic farms, which shun chemical pesticides. The new venture is "a great way to bring this technology to agriculture". The start-up here points to the latest stage of evolution in Silicon Valley, the world's epicentre of innovation. Over the years, the region has shown an unmatched economic dexterity in jumping from one industry of opportunity to another, from military electronics to silicon wafers to personal computers to the internet. But the business of the Valley today is less about focusing on a particular industry than about a continuous process of innovation with technology, across fields. The trend reflects the steady march of that most protean of technologies — computing — as it makes further inroads into every scientific discipline and industry. Clean technology, bioengineering, medical diagnostics, preventive health care, transportation and even agriculture are part of the mix these days for the Valley's technologists and entrepreneurs. The pace of discovery has quickened, not only for technologies but also for the process of finding out what companies will succeed. "What's different in the Valley is we've found a quasi-scientific method for reinventing businesses and industries, not just products," said Randy Komisar, a partner in a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University. "The approach is much more systematic than it was several years ago." Lean start-up The preferred formula today is often called the "lean start-up". Its foremost proponents include Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur and author who coined the term and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School, and Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford. The approach is to quickly develop "minimum viable products", low-cost versions that are shown to customers for reaction, and then improved. Flexibility is the other hallmark. Test business models and ideas, and ruthlessly cull failures and move to Plan B, Plan C, Plan D and so on, "pivoting", as the process is known. The National Science Foundation is betting on the new model to improve the rate of commercialisation of the university research in finances. In October, the foundation announced the first series of grants for what it calls the NSF Innovation Corps. The 21 three-member teams selected from across the US will receive $50,000 (Dh183,667) each for six months to test whether their inventions are marketable. It begins with a swing through Stanford and courses taught by Blank and others, followed by online classes and mentoring. Each team is expected to constantly test its ideas and products with customers, to experiment, adhering to the lean start-up formula. "It's all about how to apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification," said Errol B. Arkilic, a programme manager at the foundation. "And that is exactly why this method is the one the NSF selected." Arkilic, who worked for seven years as an engineer at start-ups in the Valley before joining the government, said the foundation plans to award 15 or 20 Innovation Corps grants every quarter. "We can't replicate Silicon Valley elsewhere," he said. "But we need to figure out a way to take some of the best practices in Silicon Valley to deploy elsewhere." The Valley's lean start-up model is influencing mainstream business education. This spring, the 900 first-year students at the Harvard Business School must start a business as a required course. In teams of six students each, they will be given $3,000 and told to create a startup that pulls in revenue by the end of the semester, explained Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor who will oversee the programme.