 Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Knight Management Center at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, or GSB is what we all call it when I was applying. Of course, I didn't get in. I paid my tax, like everybody else. But it's a beautiful day. They had a cool event here, really talking about innovation, big social issues around diversity of the workforce and our robots going to take all of our jobs and who's going to lead in the future. So we're really excited to have really Silicon Valley veteran, Steve Szczenski, who's now the president of SRI International, also teaching some classes. Steve, great to see you again. It's been a little while since we last crossed paths. Jeff, good to see you. Absolutely. So let's jump into it a little bit on your panel. So you're really talking about leadership and leadership, that's why these schools were formed back in the day. It's a really important topic of evolving space. We're talking about ageism. Now, what do you see from your cappered seat about what's happening in the leadership as we move this economy down the train? So a lot of the talk these days is leadership and innovation. Who's going to be the leader in innovation over the next 20, 25 years? Silicon Valley has kind of had the core of all of that. This is where the center of innovation is. We have a lot of what we call innovation tourists come from all over the world, spend a few days here, sometimes a couple of weeks here, and expect to go back to their home territories and develop a big innovation center. It doesn't really happen. So we spend a lot of time talking about is Silicon Valley going to continue? Is it going to be still the center of the universe 20 years from now? Or are there other areas of the world that are going to be taking the lead in this whole area? What we've seen, of course, is that Asia PAC is really coming on strong. It's no longer, it seems like it's Europe, but it seems like it's more in the area of Chengdu, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, and China, of course, we now have Japan who used to be, who has been very, very good about creating IP, but not very good on innovation and entrepreneurship, but now they're coming along. We have Singapore who wants to be a leader in this whole area. And so these are the newfound growth areas where venture capital is moving in. There are great universities, research centers, and entrepreneurship happening. And we seem to think, or at least I seem to think, that that's an area that is going to take strong leadership as time moves on. So one of the flip side of the coin of innovation is disruption. We were just at Ford earlier this week, and Bill Ford talked about his time at eBay on the board and getting a taste of Silicon Valley culture that Clayton Christian, I better disrupt my own business or somebody else is going to. And we also hear that Foxconn and some of the traditional kind of low-end manufacturing in China, they're laying off people. So are you seeing the kind of disruption play in these innovation centers? Because as he defined it, disruption is really changing the game, reorganizing the chess board, putting a different lens on a problem, and that's what allows something like Uber or Airbnb to completely flip an industry upside down. Yeah, we are. We're also hearing the term and using it a lot, digital Darwinism, as it's called. So we're seeing, we partner up with at SRI, at many organizations, companies, who realize that they may be the leader in their industry now, but they're very, very fearful. The C-level suite, people are very fearful that that's not going to last forever. As you might know, Jeff, 52% of the Fortune 500 companies since the year 2000 are no longer part of the Fortune 500. They've either gone out of business or they've lost their market share or they've gotten acquired or something along the lines. They've missed the product cycle in innovation. And many of the executives of the current ones, as well as large companies, don't want to have that happen to them. So they come to Stanford for executive training. They also come to SRI for technical innovation ideas. One area, for example, that we're spending a lot of time in is in the whole transportation area. As you know, automotive is part of that and I'm sure you've been talking to your viewers about that quite a bit. The whole construction industry is ripe for digitization for sure. Areas like safety and security and so on. We see a lot of older technology and eventually we'll be seeing some new technology, biometrics and the light coming out and changing that whole industry around. And the Darwinism just keeps happening. I mean, the most recent example being EMC swallowed up by Dell, years ago, I'm sure they would never have considered Dell a competitor and it was the same thing before talking about, they'd never thought about Uber as a competitor. They were looking across the street at GM. So that's really the danger. You're going to get taken out by someone you don't even have in your radar. Well, so the situation for these global 2000 ilk of companies and there's a lot of them, there's 2000 plus, right? They're all trying to figure out should we do an aqua hire of a young 20, 30 person organization that is maybe composed of computer scientists from Stanford or other top-notch schools or should we do a merger with maybe someone, a heavyweight in that industry you mentioned EMC and Dell, should we do a merger? And maybe we end up in second place in that merger but at least we're still alive or should we partner up with an SRI because they have some interesting computer scientists or physical scientists or what have you or should we try to do it ourselves? And more and more we're finding are not able to do it themselves because the technologies have changed so rapidly, they don't have, their scientists are not with it in terms of what's really happening now. Right, and this whole concept of co-optition which I don't know if it was founded here in the valley but it's certainly very aggressive where you're competing and partnering with the same company through different departments and that's just the way that business gets done. Very different than the old day where it was me versus you in a zero-sum game. Well I think that's been a hallmark of Silicon Valley for actually quite a while. We talked about it in actually a number of our panels today around the openness that Silicon Valley has had among startup companies and you know, you're a startup executive, I'm a startup executive, maybe in the same or similar industries so you and I have coffee together, we're sharing information, we're guarded but we're still sharing information. You walk away with benefits, I walk away with benefits and both of us have minimal costs involved. I think that that is starting to spread around more where it used to be, as you mentioned, old line industries were very, very closed mouth about what they're doing and now people are sharing more about things. Right, so give us a quick update on SRI. You know, it's been around for a long time, it's kind of mysterious over off middle field, a lot of research, a lot of hardcore technology so for people that aren't familiar with SRI or kind of what you're doing today, what are some of the things you can share? Sure, a little snippet about SRI, we're celebrating 70 years in business this year, we were founded in 1946 by Stanford University as a Stanford Research Institute, changed our name in 1970 and became an independent not-for-profit organization. We're now almost 2000 people strong, 20 locations across the US and internationally. We do about $500 million a year in contracted research including our subsidiaries. What we're known for is, of course, our innovations, we were the first connection to the internet, the folks, Doug Engelbart and others invented the computer mouse. We actually helped Walt Disney out with his selection of Disneyland and Anaheim so people think we do everything from the computer mouse to Mickey Mouse. That's a good range. I don't know whether that's a good joke or a bad joke. That's a good one, I like it. You know, of course we're known for SRI, we're spun out of SRI. Every, you know, a lot of people use Siri these days as part of the iPhone, but it was spun out as an independent company, snapped up by Steve Jobs before he passed on. Intuitive Surgical, which is the DaVinci robotic surgical device. In fact, robots and robotic technology has been something that we've been focused in on for quite some time. We spent out robotic companies last, just in the last six, or excuse me, the last year, year and a half, there've been something like five or six robotic companies that we have spun out. One of which is sort of interesting, it's called SuperFlex. It is an exosuit, you've heard of exoskeletons. Right, right, right. And so forth. We watched Aliens, we know the drill. So exosuits are not very noticeable. They almost look like normal suits, but they've got actuators, batteries, lots of technology, software and so on that help elderly walk around, that help kids with muscular dystrophy and other disabilities get by and be able to actually walk by themselves and so on. And eventually our technology, this company will also have the ability for high-stat, high-caliber athletes and weekend warriors like you and me get therapy even quicker. So lots of different applications. So the whole idea behind SRI is to do good for society as a not-for-profit to make the world a better place to live in, more productive, healthier, better educated and so on. You must love your weekly updates from the team leads. I'm like a kid in a candy shop. I walk into SRI nearly every day and I can walk into any lab, I can talk to any researcher. It's every day at SRI is a good day and I love to do speeches on behalf of SRI representing our great research that's going on because we have a 200-person strong education group. We have a biosciences group, first cure from malaria. We're doing a lot of work on infectious diseases. So I can talk for a long, long time, much more time than you have, Jeff. Well, we'll have a follow-up, but if I let you go without talking about another institution that I know you're very proud of and also like to talk about, and my boss, Dave Vellante, would be very upset with me, is Union College. I know you guys share that as alma mater. Give us a little update on Union College. It's not Stanford, it's on the other coast, so if you're not really a West Coast guy, you want to go East Coast. That's the place to go. Union is the place to go. So we're a strong 2,200 typical college back east, lots of, you know, Williams, Amherst, Trinity, Vassar, these kinds of colleges are back there, typically between 1,500 and 2,200 students. We're division three in every sport, except for hockey. Hockey is big back east, and we're division one hockey. And a couple of years back, we actually won the division one, beating Boston College and the University of Minnesota. Collectively, you had something like 11 D1 crowns over the years. Collectively, they had something like 100,000 students. We have 2,200 students. We beat them in one weekend and won the division one. The frozen floor. But we're much more than athletics. My president would be very upset with me. We just got listed as one of the hidden ivies. We're a very talented group of engineering, about 15% and liberal arts about 85%. So thanks very much, Jeff, for asking me about unions. One of my favorite topics to talk about. And we'll have a follow up at SRI. I'd love to come over, bring the crew, you know, peek in on some of those projects. Plan for a long time. Plan for a long time. We'll be there for all weekend. There's a lot to talk about there. All right. Steve Szazinski, thanks for stopping by and really appreciate catching up. Jeff, thank you very much. Absolutely. I'm Jeff Rick. Steve Szazinski. We're at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You're watching theCUBE catching next time. Thanks for watching.