State of Innovation

Dale Halling will be speaking at the Night with a Futurist event at the Da Vinci institute on April 5, 2010 at the Madcap theater.   As a patent attorney, Dale Halling deals with start-up entrepreneurs on a daily basis.  He began noticing a significant difference between the types of projects his clients were involved with in the 1990s and 2000s. Clients, in the 90s, would come into his office with plans to build businesses that were disruptive or revolutionary.  The technologies underlying these companies held the potential to completely redefine a market.  Some of the ideas would increase the available bandwidth by 10x for minimal costs or allow data searches that were 10-100x faster than existing technologies.  It was very exciting talking with these entrepreneurs.  Their energy was infectious and the potential implications of their work was mesmerizing.  However, the tech downturn of 2000-2001 changed all that.

After 2002, the start-up companies he came into contact with were all looking for narrow niche markets.  Instead of trying to make dramatic changes to technology and go public, these companies were looking to develop incremental changes and be bought out by an existing company.

He started wondering if other people in the tech world were seeing similar trends.

Recent innovations like the iPod, the tremendous amount of money Intel was spending to build their next microprocessor plant, and the social media industry are certainly innovative, but they are not capable of altering the entire economy like the Internet of the 90s.  The Internet in the 90s affected almost every business in the U.S.  It drove PC sales, retail, electronics, telecommunications, professional businesses, marketing, newspapers, and much more.  It also redefined whole areas of life, with email, online shopping, and online advertising. It was impossible to escape the effects of the Internet unless you crawled under a rock.

The personal computer revolution of the 80s had a similar effect.  The iPod has been cool, but hasn’t affected the whole economy.

So what’s behind all this? The changes have seemed subtle from the outside, but the ripple effects have been huge.

Join us as we take a hard look at how the face of innovation has changed, and what we can do to turn it around.

EVENT: Night with a Futurist
DATE: April 5, 2010 – Monday
TIME: 6:30pm-9:00pm
WEBSITE: http://www.davinciinstitute.com/events/433/night-with-a-futurist-monday-april–5-2010

LOCATION: MADCAP Theater, 10679 Westminster Blvd, Westminster, CO 80020
DIRECTIONS: Driving Directions

COST: $25, Members: Free, SuperMembers: Free
REGISTER: Register here

PHONE: 303-666-4133

TOPIC: “The Decline and Fall of the American Entrepreneur: How Little Known Laws and Regulations are Killing Innovation”
SPEAKERS: Dale Halling, Allison Taylor, Catharine Merigold, Gene Branch, Mike Schmidt, Thomas Frey