Why Structure Is the Enemy of Innovation | Richard Dasher
About Richard Dasher
Richard Dasher has been Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center since 1994 and served concurrently as Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems since 1998. He holds Consulting Professor appointments in Electrical Engineering (technology management), Asian Languages (Japanese business), and at the GSB (with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship). From 2004, Dr. Dasher became the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving as an outside Board Director and then on the Management Council of Tohoku University until 2010. He serves on selection and review committees of major government funding programs for science, technology, and innovation in Canada, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong, and he maintains an active management consulting practice in regard to company creation and growth, strategic management of technology, and new business opportunity identification. He is on the boards of several companies and nonprofit organizations, and he is an advisor to start-up companies in the U.S., Japan, and China. His current research centers on innovation systems and technology-and-business forecasting. Dr. Dasher received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University and is co-author of the book ‘Regularity in Semantic Change.’ From 1986 – 90, he was Director of the U.S. State Department advanced training centers in Japan and Korea that provide full-time language and area studies training to U.S. and Commonwealth Country diplomats assigned to those countries.
Interview Transcript:
Alan
I want to move though in this last segment to talk about innovation at Stanford University as one of the hotbeds of innovation worldwide, what, what’s happened? What trends do you see,
Richard
Stanford has been a great part of Silicon Valley over the years. And you really have to say that innovation is bigger than any one organization, the university can create a lot of new technologies, we can do early stage incubation of things. But if it weren’t for the industrial sector, nothing would happen. And so for innovation to happen, what you really have to have is very close positive relationships between multiple sectors between the academic sector and the industry sector. That’s something we’ve been very proud of. We have a lot of industry speakers at Stanford, we have a lot of Stanford people going out and consulting companies and being board members of companies. And so I do think that we have developed a culture of innovation, that doesn’t pay too much attention to existing structures. So any kind of a structure, a company structure, can become the enemy of innovation, because you get so used to what you’ve always done, and satisfying the customers that you’ve always had with you that it becomes hard to disrupt that situation. And precisely because we have good relationships between the university and industry, we are able to consider new options for products and services that really are kind of independent of the way any industry has been structured. That allows us to begin to disrupt things. Now the big companies in Silicon Valley, watch what’s going on in this sector. And to the extent that they can, a lot of times they buy the innovations from the startup companies, including buying the startup companies themselves. It’s pretty well known, but Google buys maybe 20 to 25 startup companies every year. So you’re seeing two companies a month. The integration problems that that are causes are remarkable. And so I think that the flexibility, the kind of positive networking, outside organizations, and the university gives a lot of opportunities for that are things that help the valley to be still pretty unique. I look around and I see other innovation centers around the United States and overseas. But we have a scale that’s a lot bigger than other places. And we’ve also done a good job of maintaining this kind of openness, no matter what the macro economy is doing. In fact, sometimes you see the most interesting companies coming out of a downturn.
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Richard Dasher has been Director of the US-Asia Technology Management Center since 1994 and served concurrently as Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems since 1998. He holds Consulting Professor appointments in Electrical Engineering (technology management), Asian Languages (Japanese business), and at the GSB (with the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship). From 2004, Dr. Dasher became the first non-Japanese person ever asked to join the governance of a Japanese national university, serving as an outside Board Director and then on the Management Council of Tohoku University until 2010. He serves on selection and review committees of major government funding programs for science, technology, and innovation in Canada, Germany, Japan, and Hong Kong, and he maintains an active management consulting practice in regard to company creation and growth, strategic management of technology, and new business opportunity identification. He is on the boards of several companies and nonprofit organizations, and he is an advisor to start-up companies in the U.S., Japan, and China. His current research centers on innovation systems and technology-and-business forecasting. Dr. Dasher received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics from Stanford University and is co-author of the book â??Regularity in Semantic Change.’ From 1986 – 90, he was Director of the U.S. State Department??s advanced training centers in Japan and Korea that provide full-time language and area studies training to U.S. and Commonwealth Country diplomats assigned to those countries.
Alan is managing partner at Greenstein, Rogoff, Olsen & Co., LLP, (GROCO) and is a respected leader in his field. He is also the radio show host to American Dreams. Alan’s CPA firm resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and serves some of the most influential Venture Capitalist in the world. GROCO’s affluent CPA core competency is advising High Net Worth individual clients in tax and financial strategies. Alan is a current member of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (S.I.E.P.R.) SIEPR’s goal is to improve long-term economic policy. Alan has more than 25 years of experience in public accounting and develops innovative financial strategies for business enterprises. Alan also serves on President Kim Clark’s BYU-Idaho Advancement council. (President Clark lead the Harvard Business School programs for 30 years prior to joining BYU-idaho. As a specialist in income tax, Alan frequently lectures and writes articles about tax issues for professional organizations and community groups. He also teaches accounting as a member of the adjunct faculty at Ohlone College.