Sunday, December 16, 2007

Business people apparently don't understand English words

What you said:
“Universities don’t innovate,” says Curtis R. Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a nonprofit research institute in Menlo Park, Calif., that bought what remained of RCA’s lab. “Innovation means you get it out so people can use it. The university is not going to take it to the world.”
What you meant:
"While universities do most of the innovation, they tend not to productize. Those innovations don't always turn out to be practical, cheap, scalable, or a thousand other things that a functioning product depends on, particularly in the time horizons that the short attention spans of MBAs like me can wrap their heads around."
We make orders of magnitude less money than you do; the least you could do is give credit where credit is due. You might have heard of a little company called Google? Care to guess whether that innovative little venture came out of a university or not? Want me to send you the list of companies that were started out of Stanford, Berkeley, or UW alone (nevermind MIT, Harvard, etc.)?

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