Recently my husband and I traveled to the heart of Silicon Valley to meet my new nephew. While for me the baby was the star attraction, my hubbie was more enthralled with the wheeling and dealing of my brother-in-law, a senior lawyer in a law firm that has assisted such tech heavy-hitters as Google and Sun Microsystems with their IPOs and acquistions.

And so, between baby coddling sessions, I managed to tear myself away from our adorable new nephew long enough to join in their candid conversations about the lessons of Silicon Valley.

Having lived in Vancouver, my brother-in-law was passionate that Vancouver has all the critical ingredients to become a booming Silicon Valley itself – yet has not developed the spark to ignite the mix. Like the San Francisco Bay area, the Lower Mainland has great universities and colleges, is a great place to live, and has a thriving economy with sophisticated investors ready to go. In spite of this, the leadership and long-term thinking have not emerged to integrate these resources sufficiently to achieve the hotbed of technological business seen in Silicon Valley.

Ultimately, the key ideas that emerged from our discussions were relevant for businesses of all sizes to thrive. Here are the top three themes:

1) Blur the Lines

In Silicon Valley, Stanford University maintains close ties with the venture capital community and encourages research and development with practical business possibilities, spawning such companies as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Google and Yahoo!. While the mentality is changing in Canadian institutions about the many benefits (for students, businesses and society) of such collaboration, in the past these links were often discouraged due to an academic purist view that considered research tainted if it was skewed towards business spinoffs.

While scandals in the pharmaceutical industry illustrate the importance of separating research from business interests to some extent, purists often lose sight of the fact that without business-funded research, much of the life we take for granted today would not exist. Rather than advocating all-or-nothing approaches, business, government and academic leaders need to become more comfortable with diving into the gray zone and, in so doing, leverage the highest benefit for the common good.

2) Compete – Together

In a global economy, larger businesses are conscious of the economic necessity of looking beyond their borders in a literal sense. Closer to home, however, small and mid-size businesses need to stop focusing solely on developing internal skills and expertise in order to become more competitive in their industry. They must learn to adopt a wider view and identify long-term strategic alliances by asking which other organizations have a complementary mission, vision, product or service and challenging themselves to think about collaborating to maximize the strengths of all concerned.

3) Be Willing to Fail

The final thing that stood out for me about Silicon Valley was that, while there are many successes, there are even more failures. My brother-in-law had numerous stories of friends and acquaintances on their second or third attempt at startups. In fact, stemming perhaps from a ‘debugging’ mentality shared amongst truly geek entrepreneurs, business failures were considered necessary steps towards success, creating learning to be implemented in the next version – Business 3.0, perhaps?

Entrepreneurial success is not just about good ideas getting adequate funding – it requires commitment, passion and ingenuity on the part of the entrepreneurs to follow through to success. Of course there are those “lucky” ones who were in the right place at the right time, but business success still comes from a unique vision combined with the courage to persist until the dream is realized. In the end, the main source of “financing” any dream is still the currency a person holds in his or her own heart.

Andrea Jacques

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