Necessary Conditions: Supporting Entrepreneurship

In this PARC Forum talk, entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa will share his insights — and opinions (lots of them!) — on infrastructures for supporting entrepreneurship. These include: the role of education (elite institutions and networks? drop out vs. complete? liberal arts vs. engineering); efforts to create “innovation clusters” (and whether Silicon Valley entrepreneurs can think big enough to solve global problems); and other relevant issues (visas for startups, for example).

Presenter(s)

Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information; faculty member and advisor at NASA Ames' Singularity University; Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University (as well as Executive in Residence at the Pratt School of Engineering); Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School; and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University.

Vivek has led groundbreaking research projects and helped many students prepare for the "real world", as well as advised several startup companies. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, a contributor to the popular technology blog TechCrunch, and writes occasionally for several international publications. Prior to joining academia in 2005, Vivek founded two software companies.