Grade A Entrepreneurs

Earlier this week at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, I was the keynote speaker at the second annual Conference of Women@theFrontier founded by Susan Fonseca-Klein, also founding architect of Singularity University, an interdisciplinary university based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley whose mission is to educate and inspire leaders to [...]

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Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant founded the 1M by 1M(One Million by One Million) program, “a framework for Capitalism 2.0,” she says, and which she “envisions as a distributed, democratic capitalism.” Here is what this means: Not everybody can, or even needs to, come to Silicon Valley to create a company. There are creative entrepreneurs [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis
Practically Radical, by Bill Taylor, the co-founder of Fast Company, is about transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself. Now, where do you start? Not from a vacuum: the times for dreams of starting from a clean slate and building up utopias are long gone. So, be practical. Yet adopting [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
The Mesh, an old word meaning the “opening between the threads of a net” got its technology flavor with the concept of mesh networking generally defined as “a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router.” For Lisa Gansky, in her book The Mesh, Why [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
Chatting over breakfast the other day at Il Fornaio with Nilofer Merchant, whose book The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy I discussed in a former post, I realized that a “new how” often starts with a “new me.” This “new me” can be triggered by unforeseen events – events that [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
From the science of automata to love stories with androids: Think about Wilhelm Schickard’s “calculating clock” in 1623 and, almost two hundred years later, of Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computer, the difference engine, and about the many inventions in between: Pascal’s Pascaline (1642), Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner (1672), the dozens of mechanical calculators [...]

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By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis
We just celebrated thirty years of lectures in Stanford by French Academician Michel Serres (left with Robert Harrison on his right). The party was organized by Audrey Calefas-Strebelle at the residence of Brigitte et Jean-Louis Gassée in Palo Alto, and included very closed friends of Michel, celebrated philosopher (and also from the [...]

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One day, Russell Willis Taylor, the President and CEO of National Arts Strategies told me this:  “Many towns look alike. There is a Starbucks at every corner. There is a Walmart in every town. But you know where you are by the art that is being enjoyed and created — that is what gives us [...]

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In a recent powwow, I was asked about my takeaway for entrepreneurs from the Winter Olympics. As I was starting to discuss the make-up of a champion, mentally ranking key characteristics, I changed gears and realized that what struck me the most, ultimately, was the victory of Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo in pair figure skating. Not [...]

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Alain Calefas, Serenity Valley founder, with Michel Serres at DBF, a networking organization for French entrepreneurs, on November 2, 2009. That day, Alain Calefas was interviewed by Jean-Louis Gassée (who co-founded DBF in 1994).
Alain Calefas graduated from the French Ecole Polytechnique, arguably one of the most elitist schools in Europe. To get in, you have [...]

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