Page 305 - DCAP404 _Object Oriented Programming

Object-oriented Programming

Notes In contrast to the approach adopted by many countries, the US model, as Segal describes,
has the private sector as the main engine of technological growth, funding more than two-
thirds of research and development, while the federal government funds most basic
research. He extols the culture of working closely together generally among academia,
industry, and government, despite ‘stove-piping (the failure to share information and
ideas across organisational boundaries), and turf battles.’
Multidisciplinary Research

An example of such collaborative research project mentioned in the book is Bio-X, a
massive multidisciplinary research programme in Stanford University working at the
intersection of medicine, science, and engineering. “People and ideas circulate freely,
through informal gatherings and the planned meetings that Bio-X hosts – cocktail and
coffee hours where bright graduate students can make pitches to the venture capital firms
clustered on Sand Hill road in Menlo Park.”
Elaborates Segal that what is critical beyond the free flow of ideas is the existence of strong
incentives to move inventions from the lab to the market. In the US, ideas can make one
rich, because intellectual property is protected and individual scientists are able to exploit
their breakthroughs for commercial gain, he informs. “The young entrepreneur has many
role models to emulate: the Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, and others who demonstrate the
massive rewards that come to those who execute good ideas well.”
Underlining the risk-embracing culture among scientists and entrepreneurs, Segal speaks
of how failure is seen as a badge of honour, an entrepreneurial rite of passage; and about
how invention and innovation are locally driven. “Yes, the federal government was the
driving force for large-scale projects such as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network), the predecessor to the Internet, but the tradition of the individual tinker and
the culture of making things in the backyard with a group of like-minded friends remain
strong.”
Brain Circulation

It should be heartening to read the portrayal of India as not being Delhi-driven but seeing
action in many public-private partnerships, such as in the form of IT giants training
thousands of computer science graduates annually, and their working with local colleges
to develop relevant courses for engineers.
Segal also finds that technology entrepreneurs and returnees to be especially important in
building a culture of innovation. He cites the Nasscom’s statistics that between 2001 and
2007, 35,000 IT professionals returned to India; and the findings of a survey of Indian
executives living in the US that 68 per cent were actively looking for an opportunity to
return home, and 12 per cent had already decided to do so.

This is ‘brain circulation,’ the way the Berkeley scholar AnnaLee Saxenian calls the flow or
returnees from Silicon Valley to China and India, writes Segal. These individuals, he says,
no longer represent ‘brain drain’ and a loss to their home countries, but neither are they a
clear-cut ‘brain gain’ since they often retain business and personal connections to the US.
Examples of the ‘new argonauts’ (Saxenian’s phrase for those travelling between two
worlds) that Segal lists are Rosen Sharma, with degrees from IIT Delhi and Cornell
University who lives in California and travels to New Delhi and Pune to oversee local
employees of Solidcore, a developer of security software; and Rajiv Mody, who founded
Sasken Communication Technologies in Silicon Valley and moved the company to
Bangalore, and now travels back to the US and pays US taxes.

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