This morning I attended TechNet’s Annual Innovation Summit at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. TechNet is a bipartisan, political network of CEOs and Senior Executives that promotes the growth of technology and the innovation economy. The summit is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. It consisted of two discussion panels hosted by Charlie Rose. It was free for the Cal community, which includes me by proxy through the business incubator.

The event started with an introduction by Professor Paul Wright, Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). He breifly discussed the history of innovation as related to energy at UC Berkeley and in California at large. He was followed by Lezlee Westine, President and CEO of TechNet. Lezlee introduced the panels.

The first panel was titled Charting a National Innovation Policy for the Next Decade. The panelists included John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco; John Chen, Chairman, President and CEO of Sybase; and Laura Tyson, Professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The panel focus was on the US Innovation Economy, that is, the US economic dominance based on innovation and technology, and how it can be maintained. Some of the discussion revolved around some of the current barriers to continued innovation. One of the main contributors, as pointed out by Professor Tyson, is the poor quality of the education system, especially K-12. Another problem under discussion was immigration, but not the usual how to keep immigrants out, but rather how do we retain the best and the brightest, especially those trained at US graduate schools (which still rank highest in the world). John Chen addressed the immigration issue though his own experience as an immigrant from Hong Kong. Government investment, or lack there-of, was another concern. While many of the recent technology booms: computing, the Internet, etc., were funded by the Department of Defense, DoD spending has become narrowly focused on the military and security. It seems other departments need to pick up the slack. John Chambers believes the US can once again achieve productivity growth of 3-5% as in the late 1990’s rather than the typical 2-3%. He believes like the Internet in the 1990’s, broadband interaction will drive this new productivity spike in the next five years. Of course he also happens to be Chairman and CEO of one of the largest broadband infrastructure suppliers, Cisco Systems, so he may be a bit biased.

The second panel was titled Green Technologies: Driving Sustainable Global Growth. The panelists included John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun Microsystems; John Melo, Chief Executive Officer of Amyris; and Dr. Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org. Dr. Brilliant (great name!) discussed some of the green philanthropic projects being sponsored by Google such as their solar and plug-in hybrid projects. He envisions a day in the near future where end customers will be able to make dynamic choices between “black” and “green” power. Jonathan Schwartz talked about Sun’s advances in reducing power for data centers, which account for some 5% of the nations energy use. He suggested that we need more policy requiring energy and emissions monitoring as well as defining Energy Star type requirements for data centers. John Melo described Amyris’ foray into synthetic biology. They are developing a modified microbe that can turn sugar into diesel. He claims it is much more sustainable than corn ethanol, and that the current administrations’ policy encouraging corn ethanol is flawed. John Doerr mentioned that there are huge opportunities in sustainable energy and that the US needs to step up and lead the world in this area. When asked what he thinks is the primary reason why the US is not currently taking the lead, he said it’s because of “500 votes in Florida.” I guess there’s little question who he voted for in 2000.

I’m really glad I got the opportunity to attend the summit. It was great to see some of the top executives stand up and say what needs to be done to get this country on track with innovation and green technologies. Hopefully their broad reach through their organizations will really start to make a difference. Only time will tell, but hopefully not too much time…