Most schools don't understand intrapreneuring

 A challenging title, don't you think?   Two decades ago, virtually no university taught Entrepreneurship, although some (e.g. Stanford and MIT and Berkeley, to name a few) inspired students to think in terms of starting their own companies.   And then it became codified, and even ritualized.  Now it is de rigueur.

But what about intrapreneuring?

The word was coined, most say, by Gifford Pinchot III, in his book, Intrapreneuring, 1985   https://www.amazon.com/Intrapreneuring-leave-corporation-become-entrepreneur-ebook/dp/B07NNTPM1Y

Basically, the theme was how to embrace and encourage innovation inside a corporation, while working for that corporation instead of working to leave it and start your own with 'presumably' your ideas, often hatched within the corporation.   Now, granted, ofttimes corporations classically thwart creativity within their ranks, and who can blame someone for leaving due to frustration that their ideas are ignored?

But I just attended several IEEE Milestone events, led by the energetic, nearly peritpatetic IEEE volunteer Brian Berg, that celebrated truly 'earth-shaking' pioneering engineering efforts that shaped our current world, and I was struck overnight by the fact that more than half of them were team efforts within a company structure rather than an innovative start-up.   True, Bob Metcalfe's efforts to establish Ethernet resulted, among other things, in his highly successful 3Com company, but the work was done at (and the Award went to) XeroxPARC.   TCP/IP for Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf was indeed a university effort; the networking standard IEEE-802 was a team effort by many people, and significantly, was originally proposed by a triumvirate of XeroxPARC, DEC, and Intel.   David Liddle, not Metcalfe, was the original sponsor at PARC; Gordon Bell (who passed away last week) of DEC, and the unheralded Phil Kaufman at Intel organized the group that turned to Metcalfe's original suggestions.   The list of presenters for the ceremony was long, pedigreed, and clearly represented many organizations and multiple roles--hardly an Entrepreneurial activity.  Most definitely a monumental Intrapreneurial activity.  Why don't we recognize that?

Importantly, the IEEE Milestone program honors only companies, not individuals, and the work must have originated more than 25 years prior to nomination.  https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Main_Page

PageRank as an invention was at Stanford, akin to the TCP/IP work--later, of course, it was the basis for Brin and Page (eponymous) to start Google, decidedly an Entrepreneurial activity.  No argument that the Milestones for the first Laser Printer, and the first "PC" (the XeroxPARC Alto) both were company contributions, where neither Starkweather nor Thacker ever started a company with those ideas.

So, while we do celebrate Entrepreneurs as such, we fail to celebrate Intrapreneurs as such.  Why?  

It wasn't just U of Utah

 I mentioned in the previous post ("Ah, Yes, those reflections . . ." 4/25/24) that 'our display' was used at the University of Utah for a lot of their early computer graphics work, never mind that they didn't mention it for their IEEE Milestone award.

And for the last session of the AMW 50 meeting, Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar, showed up to describe his great book, Pixel, and how the Pixar company came into being.   Brian Berg, the AMW chair, and the head of the IEEE Milestone selection and presentation committee, introduced Smith.   

Berg said, however, that: "Smith was a key member of the U of Utah team".   Smith promptly corrected him to say, "No, I never worked there.  Yes, I visited, and I worked with them, but I was at the New York Institute of Technology for years (actually 1975-1979).   This followed his PhD at Stanford, and time at XeroxPARC.   Recall as shown in the plaque at the last post, that the award for U of Utah was for 1965-1978 work.

The excitement for me was the attached picture that Alvy Ray displayed for the AMW talk:

The HP 1310A succeeded the HP 1300A, circa 1971 or so, in a project led by John Riggen.  I had moved on to start the Logic Analyzer Operation.

It is described in the HP Computer Museum (Australia) at the following link:

https://www.hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=756

The original HP 1300A was a 14" diagonal screen; the HP 1310A was 19" diagonal.  Selling price went up from $1,900 to $3,000.   The story for the original HP 1300A development and technology is best told in the "Inside Story of the HP 1300A X-Y Display":

https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/writings/hp1300a_00.htm

By way of postscript, the 17,769 large-screen displays cited in the Medal of Defiance in that article included all the large-screen versions, including the 1300, 1302, 1308, 1309, 1310A, and 1310B.  And the users--including Dr. Denton Cooley for the first true artificial heart transplant--became world-famous (the article mistakenly ascribes the medical 'first' to Dr. Norman DeBakey at Stanford.  Here's the 50th anniversary picture for Cooley's work, with the eight-channel HP 1308A proudly displayed:

I no longer have a copy of the video for the Jane Pauley Today Show.    Who knows, might get it someday.