Now in its 8th year, Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford 2008 is led by the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. To keep the concept fresh and challenging, we innovated by inviting Oxford’s finest together with enterprising European pioneers to gatecrash the prestigious Silicon Valley party in a series of debates, arguments, discussions, experiments and explorations.

Closing Session: The Universe, the Brain and Second Life

Elon Musk, CEO founder of Space X; Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford Professor of Neuroscience and Director of The Royal Institution; Philip Rosedale Chairman and Founder of Second Life

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford neuroscience professor, provocatively challenged and explored received wisdoms around Web 2.0 and virtual worlds in a lively panel exchange with Philip Rosedale (Founder and Chairman of Linden Lab, Second Life.) Rosedale’s face lit up when the audience posed wonderfully visionary questions around the virtual modelling of sub-conscious worlds and human-implanted silicon chips (could enable instant parallel immersions in real and virtual worlds.) A series of quiet groans and astonished laughter from the tech innovation crowd was the reaction to the rather eccentric audience questions on Shamanism and correlations between obesity and virtual world involvement!

From the ‘universal’ platform of the School’s Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, South African, Elon Musk spoke about his stratospheric venture to propel domestic flights to Mars…Space X. Only in America, I say, and only the Silicon Valley ‘can do’ culture could produce an IT entrepreneur with inter-planetary ambitions…

Although audience-panel interactions tackled the ethics of virtual worlds, the ethics of space travel investment in the face of debilitating earthly diseases and painful economic disparities between the Northern and Southern hemispheres were left untouched and unexplored…(admittedly it has been suggested that space research could provide answers to environmental challenges.)

The Chairman for this panel discussion, Ian Goldin (21st Century School Director and former Vice President, World Bank) praised the Second Life economy: I wondered how it would fare in the current recessionary climate. Rosedale’s target is another one billion Second Life residents: I wondered about the enthusiastic take up of social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn relative to the more tentative ‘virtual world’ domain – a topic to be explored in 2009 by another Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford star, Oxonian and CEO founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, perhaps…Regardless, Secondlife is truly ‘HG Wellian’ or ‘Aldous Huxleyan’ in its achievements.

A signal that the closing session had succeeded in its visionary and forward looking ambitions is that the ‘R’ word, ‘Recession’ wasn’t mentioned…no, not even once!

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Lunchtime panel discussion:

Saul Klein (Index Ventures Partner, Seedcamp Founder and former Skype Marketing Vice President) championed European entrepreneurs as better placed than Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to face the new world order. Interestingly, Chris Sacca (investor and former Head of Special Initiatives, Google) lamented the immigration barriers of the Bush era – a series of barriers disincentivising highly skilled tech teams in their attempts to relocate to the US and Silicon Valley. Sacca’s thoughts about the ‘European brain drain’ would be of enormous interest…?

One of the most powerful woman entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Pat House saw ‘positive’ in terms of the recession. With a new entrepreneurial venture under wraps and upbeat advice for overcoming or undermining the recession, she seems set to repeat the success of Siebel – sold to Oracle.

In contrast to Ms House’s optimistic message, Andrew Keen, author of ‘Cult of the Amateur: how the Internet is killing our culture’ predicted a recessionary climate of 10 years: ironic, provocative or intentionally controversial…the quantitative basis for this fatalistic prediction remains unclear. Worryingly, the neverending avalanche of gloomy financial news gives 10 years a subjective accuracy.

Oxford Union debate: “This house believes that the problems of tomorrow are bigger than the entrepreneurs of today”

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Will Hutton (leading Economics commentator) usurped the established arguments maintaining the incompatibility of government activities with entrepreneurship by attributing the success of American (and thereby Silicon Valley) entrepreneurship to the irreplaceable role of government in creating, developing, evolving or enforcing intellectual property laws, R&D investment, universities and schools, and transport infrastructure…the bedrocks of technological innovation. Arguments which happen to resonate with the 44th American President, Barack Obama:

“The Audacity of Hope: It should come as no surprise, then, that we have a tendancy to take our free-market system as a given, to assume that it flows naturally from the laws of supply and demand and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. And from this assumption, it’s not much of a leap to assume that any government intrusion into the magical workings of the market – whether through taxation, regulation, lawsuits, tariffs, labor protections, or spending on entitlements necessarily undermines private enterprise and inhibits economic growth…And although the benefits of our free market system have mostly derived from individual efforts of generations of men and women pursuing their own vision of happiness, in each and every period of great economic upheaval and transition we’ve depended on government action to open up opportunity, encourage competition and make the market work better. In broad outline, government action has taken three forms. ..build infrastructure, train the workforce, and otherwise lay the foundations necessary for economic growth…

…The Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the interstate highway system, the Internet, the Human Genome Project – time and again, government investment has helped pave the way for an explosion of private economic activity. And the creation of a system of public schools and institutions of higher education…government has helped provide individuals the tools to adapt and innovate in a climate of constant technological change…

Aside from making needed investments that private enterprise can’t or won’t make on its own, an active government has also been indispensable in dealing with market failures.”

Capturing the spirit of our times, Dr Ian Goldin, Director of the 21st Century School and former World Bank Vice President highlighted the limitations of the markets in solving world problems…global challenges which transcend the ‘profit’ motive. Finally, Dr Angela Wilkinson, ‘Scenario Planning and Futures Research’ academic expert based at the Said Business School met applause with a series of elegant arguments around the limitations of technological determinism and an attribution of the problems of climate change to motorcar entrepreneur, Mr Ford!

In opposition, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, stressed the pivotal contribution of entrepreneurial organisational structures to the efficient address of ‘problems of tomorrow’ and Reid Hoffman scored a home run with his smart linguistic analysis of the motion.

The motion ‘This house believes that the problems of tomorrow are bigger than the entrepreneurs of today’ was narrowly beaten by 20 votes (111: 91) by the Silicon Valley super team of Reid Hoffman, CEO founder of LinkedIn; Julie Meyer CEO founder of Ariadne Capital; Jerry Sanders, Founding Partner of San Francisco Science and Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter.

& beyond

Could Silicon Valley evolve from a geographical classification to a descriptive term for any high performing technologically innovative region? In 2009 we have our sights set on further dialogue with the Indian, Chinese and European entrepreneurial clusters in complement with Oxford’s network of accomplished and quite brilliant Silicon Valley innovators.