The Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) cordially invites you and your guests to an invitation-only roundtable with two research pioneers at Stanford University on drivers for innovation and entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley.

This roundtable is designed to bring together a small circle of the Valley's leading executives, entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, and Stanford faculty for an in-depth, off-the-record  conversation.  Your participation and insights  will inform future research at Stanford on topics relevant for the future sustainability of the Valley.

CHARLES EESLEY Assistant Professor Department of Managament Sciences and Engineering Stanford University Charles Eesley, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Management Sciences and Engineering, Stanford University

SHAI BERNSTEIN Assistant Professor of Finance Stanford Graduate School of Business Shai Bernstein, Assistant Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business

8:30AM: Welcome and Introductions

8:40AM-9:30AM: "Stanford University’s Economic Impact via Innovation and Entrepreneurship"

Topic for discussion:

• How do various key institutions of the Valley's ecosystem, such as Stanford, contribute to real economic outcomes in innovation and entrepreneurship?
• How can they be measured? What has been Stanford's economic impact?
• How has it changed over time? What light does this new analysis shed on changes and vulnerabilities for the Valley going forward?

Charles Eesley will share the results of a newly-released study that puts into perspective the sheer scale of Stanford's economic impact. In this systematic survey of Stanford alumni and faculty conducted by Eesley and SPRIE co-director William F. Miller, it is estimated that companies formed by Stanford entrepreneurs generate world revenue of $2.7 trillion annually and have created 5.4 million jobs since the 1930s. In addition to quantifying Stanford’s economic impact, the report examines Stanford’s role in fostering entrepreneurship and describes how the university creates an ecosystem that encourages creativity and entrepreneurship across schools and disciplines.

Moderator: William F. Miller, SPRIE Co-director; Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Discussant: Dixon Doll, Co-Founder and General Partner, DCM

Roundtable Discussion: All

9:30AM - 10:20AM: "Does Going Public Affect Innovation?"

After going public, how do firms perform in innovative activities, such as internal innovative projects, inventors' turnover, and reliance on acquisition of external technologies? Is the overall"IPO effect" positive or negative for a firms' innovation? Why? What implications does this have for innovation strategies in Silicon Valley?

Shai Bernstein will share his new findings on the "IPO effect" by comparing the long-run innovation of …firms that completed their filing and went public with that of …firms that withdrew their filing and remained private due to exogenous reasons. Using standard patent-based metrics, the results illustrate that the quality of internal innovation of public firms declines by 40 percent relative to …firms that remained private. He will discuss the reasons why and public leads firms to change their strategies in pursuing innovation.

Moderator: Henry S. Rowen, SPRIE Co-director; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Discussant: Bob Pavey, Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures

Roundtable Discussion: All

10:20AM-10:30AM: Wrap-up Discussion

All participants should RSVP by Wednesday, October 31.

Any further questions, please contact Yan Mei at yanmei@stanford.edu, or 650.725.1885.

Each year an interdisciplinary cohort gets together in the Design School of Stanford for a course on Designing Liberation Technologies.  Students work with NGOs in Kenya to identify pressing social issues, especially in Nairobi’s largest slum – Kibera, for which they come up with mobile applications during the course.  This week, five teams will present their ideas to deal with problems such as women’s safety, finding the best source of water, helping people who lose vital documents, etc.

The presentations include three fresh projects and two projects where work is on to implement the project on the ground.  This seminar is especially a good opportunity for students who are considering the course in the next season.

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, and Estonia. His latest book is Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. He is currently working on a project in collaboration with James Fearon on civil wars in the past half-century. From that project, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" has appeared in the American Political Science Review. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

About the seminar

Does labor mobility matter for innovation more in some countries than in others? Based on theoretical considerations of the economic systems literature we argue that labor flexibility has different innovation effects depending on national-level institutions. This talk further argues that institutional constraints may be encountered by creating functional equivalents. The analysis is based on career histories in the videogames industry. The videogames industry is structured differently between the best performing countries U.S. and Japan. This raises two issues on human capital diversity: How does composition of human capital affect innovation? How do people react towards institutional constraints in the labor market? Contrasting approaches on the systematic relations between the structure of labor markets and the dynamics of innovation is first introduced, the seminar will then present an empirical case which is based on the career histories of 39.439 videogame developers between 1999 and 2009.

This talk is part of the seminar series hosted by by the Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) at Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and sponsored by The Miner Foundation.

About the speaker

Cornelia Storz is Professor for the Study of Economic Institutions and East Asian Development at the University of Frankfurt, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, and affiliated to the Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies (IZO). She is associate researcher of the EHESS, Paris.

Her research focuses on comparative institutional analysis, innovation and industry emergence. With scholarships of JSPS, JILPT, BMBF and others she has been invited to the University of Tokyo, the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, the RIETI at METI, the Hitotsubashi University, the Stanford Graduate Business School and others. She was granted research funds by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Wolfgang Ritter Foundation, the Japan Foundation and others.

Recent papers have been published in Research Policy, ZfB and Social Science Japan Journal. She is co-editing a special section of Research Policy on “Path Dependence and Emergence of New Industries” and a special issue of Socio Economic Review on “Asian Capitalism” (both forthcoming). She is co-author of Institutional Diversity and Innovation. Continuing and Emerging Patterns in Japan and China  (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Institutional Variety in East Asia. Formal and informal patterns of coordination (Edward Elgar, 2011). She is co-organiser of the SASE network “Asian Capitalisms” and member of executive committee of the European Research Network EJARN, based at the Stockholm Schools of Economics.

Abstract
At the end of February 2012, the number of mobile subscribers topped 1 billion in China, an average of around four out of every five people, and this number never stops increasing. What are the consequences of such popularity of a communication technology in China, the largest authoritarian state in the world? Among many things, the ubiquity of mobile phones in China, as in other authoritarian states, dramatically changes the way people experience and cope with everyday communication activities, offering unprecedented opportunities for them to expose discontent, air grievances, and coordinate online/offline collective resistance—in short, nourishing changes in political culture and power structure.

My study explores how people appropriate and use their mobile phones to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective resistance and popular protests in contemporary China. Specifically, my presentation will focus on mobile phone rumor as an emerging form of public resistance at the grassroots level in contemporary China. By focusing on several concrete case studies with 80+ in-depth interviews, my study observes that the low-cost and user-friendly mobile device lowers the average protest threshold, creating an opportunity for people, especially those without complicated communication skills, to organize or participate in resistance. The mutual visibility of meta-communication through mobile network greatly increases both credibility of information and sense of security for participation. Additionally, the synchronous mobile communication accumulates rumor discourse into resistance in a very short time. As a kind of contentious politics, rumor communication via mobile phones shows the opposition to government censorship and control of communications, and most important, the resistance against the use of the accusation of “rumor” by authorities to stifle any different voices.

Finally, I will highlight that both the Party-state mass media and the Internet in China tend to focus our gaze too much on “public” communications flows and their related public sphere, ignoring invisible but relevant interpersonal communication as well as the fact that the motivation and actions of human beingsare rooted in the experiences of everyday life.

Jun Liu just finished his Ph.D. study at University of Copenhagen and is currentlya visiting researcher in Stanford University. His research interest covers the relationship between media, contemporary culture, and political and social change in China with particular attention to the importance of new media andcommunications technologies including the Internet and mobile phones. He has a Ph.D. in Chinese studies. He has articles published and forthcoming in several academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.