Posted by: JaredFurtado on Dec 6, 2011

With a Leaner Model, Start-Ups Reach Further Afield
By: Steve Lohr

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Lee Redden, 26, a Ph.D. student in engineering at Stanford, recently decided to shelve his education and help found a start-up company.

His skills lie in a couple of red-hot niches of artificial intelligence, computer vision and machine learning. Yet he is not applying his talents to Internet search, online commerce or intelligence surveillance.

Mr. Redden’s ambitions are further afield — in farm fields, actually. His company, Blue River Technology, is developing a robotic weed killer for organic farms, which shun chemical pesticides. The new venture, he said, is “a great way to bring this technology to agriculture.”

The start-up here points to the latest stage of evolution in Silicon Valley, the world’s epicenter of innovation. Over the years, the region has shown an unmatched economic dexterity in jumping from one industry of opportunity to another, from military electronics to silicon wafers to personal computers to the Internet.

But the business of the Valley today is less about focusing on a particular industry than it is about a continuous process of innovation with technology, across a widening swath of fields. The trend reflects the steady march of that most protean of technologies — computing — as it makes further inroads into every scientific discipline and industry. Clean technology, bioengineering, medical diagnostics, preventive health care, transportation and even agriculture are part of the mix these days for the Valley’s technologists and entrepreneurs.

The pace of discovery has quickened, not only for technologies but also for the process of finding out what companies will succeed.

“What’s different in the Valley is that we’ve found a quasi-scientific method for reinventing businesses and industries, not just products,” said Randy Komisar, a partner in a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University. “The approach is much more systematic than it was several years ago.”

The newer model for starting businesses relies on hypothesis, experiment and testing in the marketplace, from the day a company is founded. That is a sharp break with the traditional approach of drawing up a business plan, setting financial targets, building a finished product and then rolling out the business and hoping to succeed. It was time-consuming and costly.

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