From Debs to Estrin and Palin

It’s Labor Day week, so I’m going to quote Eugene V. Debs. Debs doesn’t get quoted much or even remembered much so I’d like to do it.

In this country – the most favored beneath the bending skies – we have vast areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child – and if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest of all humanity…

Eugene Debs, labor leader, five-time Socialist Party candidate for president, dubbed “the most dangerous man in America,” said this just before being sentenced to 10 years in prison for speaking words powerful men did not like, in the midst of a wrong, stupid war that never should have been fought.

Anyway speaking of wrong and stupid, and ignoring the Republican Vice Presidential selection for now, lets’ talk about Judy Estrin’s new book, “Closing the Innovation Gap.� Estrin was the CTO of Cisco, whose innovation has long been the ability to acquire and integrate other people’s technology, which is certainly a skill, but not exactly the innovator’s mojo that makes Silicon Valley tick.

Estrin has credentials – she has founded successful small companies and serves in the boardrooms of successful big companies. I spent an hour at Kepler’s skimming her book and another session reading her book on Amazon. But despite the obsequious blurbage from local geek-celebs McNamee and Cerf, I didn’t really get her point, other than trying to sell mediocre management books.

She provides anecdotes and case studies from P&G, Pixar and HP Labs, amongst others, but it smacks of someone who has spent too much time in the Disney and Cisco boardrooms and has forgotten her startup garage roots.

Because innovation is alive and well in Silicon Valley, on Route 128 in Boston, in the Pacific Northwest, in Colorado, in Austin, and in tech clusters all over this nation. It’s just not where Estrin is looking for it. Maybe she’s looking for it in networking companies. Wrong place, I guess.

She speaks of Venture Capitalists not willing to take risks. But in greentech and  renewable energy markets, VCs are tearing it up. Cool Earth Solar uses balloons to focus sunlight – it’s a longshot but VCs are bankrolling it. SolFocus, A CPV startup, really was founded in a garage. VCs have not been shy about funding every algaepreneur (Thanks, Ed.) like Solazyme or Greenfuel or Livefuels with a new pond scum strain and the potential to create biofuels from the stuff. If anything, these VCs seem to be attracted to crazy ideas. Electric cars in really strange configurations are being backed all over the U.S. There have been at least 150 new solar power companies funded by VCs in the last three years.  That’s 150 new companies. Just in solar. (Contact me if you’d like that list).

Estrin also talks about impatient investors and and short-term mentality. She’s wrong again. Silicon Valley investors are investing in energy firms, knowing full-well that the gestation period for a solar firm or a biofuel firm is a long time. It’s not a software company where you lock 20 coders in a room with an espresso maker, a foosball table and 10 cases of Ramen noodles. These investors know it’s going to take a lot of investment and a long time to make a real energy company. Nanosolar was founded in 2002 and received its first venture round in 2002. It just recently closed another round for $300 million. None of these investors expected a quick turnaround.

What thwarts innovation are spineless politicians and the fossilized and corrupt government control of R&D spending. Recent examples are the ITC idiocy from our Congress and Senate. Nancy Floyd of Nth Power and Dave Edwards at VantagePoint could testify to the government’s shortsightedness in sabotaging the American wind industry with an on-again, off-again tax framework. Just ask them.

We do need lots more government sponsored R&D. And we need it to be controlled by technologists and entrepreneurs, not policy-hacks and bureaucrats.

We need a revamped educational system with an emphasis on science and perhaps a little less creation “science.� (See earlier Vice Presidential citing).

Lastly, technology like solar doesn’t always advance because of innovation, it advances because of political clarity and an informed and willful public. That’s the innovation we need.