Conversation with Paul Citron, Medtronic

I had the pleasure of speaking with Paul Citron who is the retired Vice President of Technology Policy and Academic Relations at Medtronic last week. I found some of Paul's comments about how to think about innovation and the innovation pipeline to be particularly insightful and relevant to our times. Though he made his comments with respect to innovation in medical devices, he made some terrific points that any innovator (and manager of innovators!) will do well to keep in mind.

Paul pointed out the importance of recognizing the mix of incremental vs. break-through innovations in a portfolio, and being mindful of how R&D dollars are effectively invested. He stressed the importance of recognizing that a larger R&D contribution does not necessarily mean that more dollars are going towards research, and that executives would do well to be aware of the actual contribution. A lot of the money is spent satisfying regulatory requirements and jumping through hoops instead of on research iteself.

He also pointed out how the lay person who is allowed to decide the fate of innovation (by being allowed to preempt FDA approvals and decisions per recently proposed bills in the congress) is often not best equipped to make the judgment. He felt strongly that the power to make such decisions must be removed from state courts and vested with the federal courts, where the people involved tend to be more sophisticated about these issues that affect science. He pointed to patent law as an example, and mentioned that there's a reason why patents can't be attacked/defended in state courts and must go only through the federal system.

Another excellent point Paul made: the scientists and researchers working on the breakthrough innovations we depend on for progress as a society are not fools - when company management/society consistently refuses to back their science in the name of minimizing risk and regulating them, they become progressively risk averse. This effectively stifles best-in-class, breakthrough innovation that we have come to rely on for progress.

In all, much food for thought for innovators, and manager of innovators.

My conversation with Dan O'Malley, CEO, PerkStreet Financial

Last week, I had the pleasure of having breakfast with Dan O'Malley, the CEO of PerkStreet Financial. He had a very fascinating story to tell as a first time entrepreneur who closed his first round of funding within 6 months of starting, and an uncommon passion and willingness to walk off the edge of a cliff in order to pursue his dreams. That really resonated with me.

Dan was a senior executive at Capital One before he launched PerkStreet last year. At Capital One, he successfully introduced the decoupled debit card. A decoupled debit-card is is so-called because the cards are issued by Capital One but they are linked to checking accounts held at other banks. When he then came up with the idea of offering a debit card with rewards, there was a conflict of interest within Capital One that prevented the idea from being pursued, even though he had the backing at the highest levels inside the organization. Something Dan said at this point put things I was pondering in perspective for me:

"Regret is a powerful emotion. I did not want to regret not taking the chance and watch someone else build my product".

That is the passion a founder must feel! When he said that, something cleared in my head and I knew the choices I had to make. An entrepreneur must feel that kind of burning need to act on his vision in order to have a chance of successfully navigating the challenging, arduous path to the finish line.

Dan also said something else that really stuck in my mind. I asked him about the highs and lows of his entrepreneurial journey so far. He offered a philosophical response - it's dangerous to be swept to the peaks of happiness or be overwhelmed by setbacks, because higher the peak and lower the trough, farther the fall to the bottom. The key is to maintain a somewhat neutral steady-state, that allows you to wake up each day and roll with the challenges the day brings.

How very true! Dan said this so much better than I ever could have, and the point really struck home.

It took me forever to learn this lesson, and I am still working on trying to maintain a steady-state at all times. Some times I am more successful than others, but I suspect it's a very important lesson for me to learn and master in my journey as an entrepreneur.

Pattie Maes @ TED

Dr. Pattie Maes of the MIT Media lab and her doctoral student Pranav Mistry rocked TED this year with their presentation of this game changing sixth sense technology. Check out the talk. Now, this is very cool technology, even better than the stuff in the Minority Report movie that it's being compared to. The elegance of the solution appeals to me - it's systems engineering at its best, using several interconnected subsystems to achieve the intended effect.

What stands out in my mind:

(1) It was built with off-the-shelf components, nothing fancy, costing $350. So, anyone could have built this.
(2) The "device" consists of a phone, marker caps of different colors, a camera, a projector, and a mirror. That's it.
(3) It makes sense of natural gestures.
(4) It's mobile, unlike the minority report technology.
(5) The processing power is from a regular cell phone, no extraordinary parallel processing or computing resources required
(6) Totally fabulous application for someone with a really poor memory for names like me: display person's name when you see them!

I hope to meet Pattie Maes on Thursday after her talk at the Media lab, so either shoot me an email or post a comment with any questions you may have for her.

A woman in technology that I admire..

A woman in technology I admire greatly is Helen Greiner of iRobot. Helen is the co-founder of iRobot and holds a Bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Masters degree in Computer Science from MIT.

To me, she represents a unique and rare combination of technical skills and business savvy, and is a tremendous role model for women who aspire to be successful engineers and businesswomen. She gave a great speech at last year's Women of Vision awards where she won the 2008 award for innovation. The speech beautifully summarizes the challenges of becoming (and staying) a woman in engineering, and for that, I tip my hat to Helen.

Dear Readers based in the US,

I would be most appreciative if you could spend 30 seconds of your time answering these two poll questions I posted on LinkedIn:

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/27232/xoocp

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/27234/eqpyt

Many thanks!

Part 2: Boston start-ups

Continuing as promised:

Pongr is a mobile software start-up that provides real time price comparison for shoppers. The team includes a couple of MIT PhDs who seem to have cracked the image recognition problem. A cell phone picture of a book cover is enough to automatically launch the search engine to find the closest stores carrying the book!Very impressive. They have other very interesting offerings in the pipeline that I cannot blog about at this time unfortunately.

uLocate brings the promise of location awareness using GPS to real-world applications. Their technology enables widgets for local search, family/friend finders, maps & directions. Interestingly, it's also offered as a platform which offers easy access to GPS data enabling developers to go to market with location based applications.

Boston area start-ups

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit these cool Boston area startups:

Skyhook wireless, ThingMagic, Pongr and uLocate.

The technophile in me thoroughly enjoyed it while the entrepreneur in me mostly went "Why didn't someone think of this before, it's about time!"

It was fascinating to talk with Michael Sheen and Steve Solari, the CEO and COO of Skyhook. I first heard of Skyhook when Steve Jobs mentioned them in his Macworld keynote last year, with reference to this cool technology that uses wi-fi networks to determine location. When Michael and Steve talked about how it felt to be on the receiving end of a call from Steve Jobs (who said he wanted to work with them!) I got to hear the other side of the story. Very interesting start-up story. I hope to write another post soon with the details.

ThingMagic totally grabbed my imagination. The first iteration of my first start-up was built around the dream of a RFID solution until technical challenges forced me to adapt and switch to another technology. Therefore, when I heard that the technical challenge that had prevented me from building my prototype had been overcome, it was super-exciting to say the least! Hearing Yael Maguire, co-founder and CTO of ThingMagic speak was fascinating. They've partnered with Intel to build their RFID chip and Yael's description of how they solved the challenges of full duplex communication was educational. Having designed and built a prototype for a semi-duplex communication chip, I could appreciate the technical challenges. On the business side, it was interesting (and inspiring!) to hear about yet another start-up that was bootstrapped until very recently, which is when they took in their first round of funding. When ThingMagic CEO Tom Grant (a former VC himself) talked about how they carefully thought about whether or not to accept outside funding and the criteria they used to decide to take in extra money, I found myself nodding in complete agreement. As the founder of a bootstrapped start-up, I couldn't agree more that bootstrapping is the way to go if at all possible and that taking in VC money should be the last resort, not the first, like most first-time entrepreneurs tend to think.

To be continued.