Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Kaizen 11 — The Judy Estrin interview

The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship has published the eleventh issue of Kaizen [pdf], featuring my interview with Judith Estrin. The interview’s theme is Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies. She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). I met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.

The issue also features two recent guest speakers to Rockford College — Joshua Hall and Jerry Kirkpatrick — and congratulates three student prize winners: Erin Filak, Kristy Luck, and Elliott Welsh.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or at CEE’s site here.

Politics and Innovation

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I am re-reading Judy Estrin’s Closing the Innovation Gap, in preparation for an interview I will be doing with her for Kaizen.

Estrin is a successful Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and is currently on the board of directors of FedEx and Disney.

She is worried about the U.S.’s culture of innovation, believing it to be in a (not irreversible) decline phase, and she discusses the many elements that drive innovation: education, tax policies, time horizons of investors, cultural beliefs such as religion, and so on. In discussing government’s role in crafting science-and-technology-friendly policies, she makes this striking comparison of the United States with China:

“Currently, eight of China’s nine top leaders are engineers, and the ninth is a geologist. Contrast this with our own legislature: less than 5 percent of the members of Congress list their occupation as being in medicine, science, or engineering, while 40 percent are in law.” (160-161)

So here’s a series of questions prompted by Estrin’s observation:

1. How relevant is politics to a culture of innovation?

2. If we look at the leadership of the science-and-technology-relevant branches of government, e.g., the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and so on, do we find the same non-science-and-technology backgrounds?

3. If we shift focus from the federal to the state government level, do we find the same pattern of lawyer-dominated politics?

4. Does the U.S. government’s system of appointing expert boards in the relevant areas (art, science, education, etc.) ameliorate the problem?

5. Do the differences identified in the quotation portend a relative rise for China and a decline for the United States over the next generation?