Silicon Valley International Innovation Institute

Founders do not need to be a Force of Convergence throughout the entire lifecycle of an enterprise, but they must be adaptable enough to know when to adopt this role and when to pivot to others. In the early stages, founders often function as a Force of Divergence, exploring ideas and experimenting to find a product-market fit. As the entity gains traction, convergence becomes more important for focus, execution, and resource allocation. During scaling, convergence intensifies, requiring operational efficiency and organizational structure, often distributed across leadership teams. In the maturity stage, founders must balance convergence and divergence to maintain efficiency while fostering innovation, often transitioning to strategic roles and delegating operational convergence. The most successful founders navigate these shifts fluidly or bring in leaders suited to each growth phase.

An Open Source Institute model for SVIII could effectively balance the Forces of Convergence and Divergence.

An Open-Source approach inherently fosters divergence by encouraging a wide range of ideas, perspectives, and innovations from a global community. By embracing a decentralized, collaborative model, SVIII could leverage diverse cultural and intellectual inputs to explore unconventional solutions. This approach would also encourage iterative development and experimentation across a broad network to accelerate innovation. It would also attract creative outliers and innovators who might otherwise be excluded from traditional, closed systems, ensuring more inclusive participation in innovation.

To harness this divergence productively, SVIII would need strategic convergence mechanisms, including curated curation to select and refine the most promising ideas in alignment with SVIII’s mission and goals, modular integration to allow diverse contributions to form cohesive solutions, and governance models that maintain quality, compatibility, and strategic direction. Strategic considerations involve choosing the right open source licensing model to balance openness with intellectual property concerns, guiding and inspiring the community to maintain a delicate balance between divergence and convergence without stifling creativity, and utilizing scalable digital collaboration tools to enable global participation while preserving coherence and strategic focus.

Conclusion:

An Open-Source Institute for SVIII could maximize global creative potential by operating as a Force of Diversity. Carefully designed convergence mechanisms would channel this diversity into impactful innovations. This balance could redefine international innovation ecosystems, positioning SVIII as a pioneering force in the digital age.

When founded in 2005, SVII was arguably the first public innovation institute. For our twentieth anniversary, now that the business model no longer requires much investment or collecting fees to attend and have dinner, it makes sense to open the doors wider and to become the first Open-Source Innovation Institute.  

One caveat is Open SOurce does not necessarily mean crowd sourced as the group mind may be smarter than a single mind, but it is not clear that it is more creative. Creativity, vision, and insight can be synthesized much more rapidly by a small group than a committee.

Remember, if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.

Day 023 Week 04 Q1 Thursday, January 23, 2025

music

Something generally happens between achieving critical mass and the tipping point, and that is the launching point. When you have determined that you have a critical mass to act, it is time to go out into the world and do something. This almost always occurs well before the tipping point.

You may have had tipping-point dreams and a critical mass for a long time, but that doesn’t mean you were really ready to do something. You may have a family to support, a mortgage to pay, or both, and this time in life may preclude there ever being a launching point.

After all, it may not make any sense at all to launch. In that case, you will never reach the launching point unless, of course, you are crazy enough to launch, even if it does not make any sense because you have launched before and become addicted to the process of launching. Have you ever heard the phrase, serial entrepreneur? Those of us who have done this have become addicted to the process of bringing things into the world that we weren’t there before. Some people may be addicted to the process of having children as the way that they bring things into the world that weren’t there before. Others may bring ideas into the world that we weren’t there before. And others still may really like founding enterprises. I fall into that category.

I like creating new departments, programs, and all sorts of intrapreneurial activities, as well as starting companies and founding enterprises as an entrepreneur. I am addicted to bringing new things into the world. I do this daily as a composer, author, and image generator, having accumulated roughly 1,000 blog entries, most of which are accompanied by music and images.

Is this innovative? I have no idea, but I like launching, so I do it a lot. Who knows, maybe some of it will achieve the tipping point. Even if it does not, I think it’s still fun and worthwhile for me., so I do it and occasionally launch new manifestations of my insights.

Day 022 Week 04 Q1 Wednesday, January 22, 2025

music

So, let us assume that you have the critical mass to begin to innovate, whatever that means in your particular situation. Let us say that you have begun to innovate, meaning that some people are willing to adopt what you are offering based on your insight, probably accompanied by charismatic cajoling or the power you can wield over them.

Until the innovating has begun and some traction has been achieved, there’s not much of a point thinking about widespread adoption, also called scaling. Yes, I know every entrepreneur wants to talk about scaling. But most people talking about this do not even have traction yet; they have not necessarily delivered value to anyone. And you need to do more than deliver value. You need to deliver value profitably to achieve a tipping point, which indicates a self-sustaining reaction, meaning you don’t have to continue to put more energy into it. Still, it generates energy due to the positive or negative things happening.

When people talk about something going viral, it has passed the tipping point. The process has taken off, and Innovation generally requires significant adoption, not just a couple of people here and there, because the tipping point is exponential, and a few linear followers adopting your idea do not translate into scaling.

The tipping point is so important because it signifies that something is happening even if you don’t continue to push it. You have started a reaction, and a process is now underway. This means that you have been transcended and might not even like that, but if you want to scale, you must be transcended. If you create a situation so dependent upon you that it is not scalable, you have not passed the tipping point.

When you are a young entrepreneur, and investors tell you they’d like to give you some money, and when the company gets to a certain size, fires you, or more gracefully retire, you might find yourself resisting this process. What if you like what you’re doing and don’t want to retire and do something else? Well, then, you better not take other people’s money because the moment you accept an external investment goal is scalability, and unless they believe that you are the one who can scale, they’re going to get rid of you. 

Can you start a business if you don’t want to have a tipping point? Of course, you can, but it will not be that likely that you can sell that business. So, if you want to create a job for yourself as a consultant because you were the only one who could do what you did, that’s fine, but it’s not scalable because there cannot be a tipping point.  But can you be an innovator in that situation? Well, sure you can. You can have multiple enterprises adopt some of your ideas, and they may scale them up. They may even need your assistance and scaling them up.

What if your goal is simply to create a practice you serve, and when you stop, the practice stops? Does this mean that you are not an innovator? No, it just means you probably don’t have a business you can sell. And that is fine. Most doctors, lawyers, accountants, architects, and other practicing professionals never build something they can sell. Still, they can have a terrific life and earn a lot and what they’re doing every day. They may not want to be acting in ways that are uninterest to them to be able to sell the business later. They may be perfectly content to have a lucrative practice. And their practice may even support them innovating in other ways. Most creators and inventors earn a living doing something other than creating and inventing.

Day 021 Week 04 Q1 Tuesday, January 21, 2025

music

Critical mass can be referred to as the number of customers you need to have a business, the amount of uranium you need to create a bomb, or the number of friends you need to have a party. It can refer to very many things when there is a number below, which you simply can’t make things work. For example, if you have only written 100 words, you can’t publish a book yet. And this is the issue. The issue is yet. Critical mass assumes that there has been an ongoing process. I wish the number of something is increasing before there isn’t enough, and after sometime, there is enough. People think they need different amounts of different things to get where they want to go. Some never have enough to get started and are always preparing to start for their entire life because they don’t want to get into a feedback loop with external reality and can’t fail if they never tried.

This is much more common than you would think for every person who starts a company. There must be at least another 10 who said they wanted to but never did. And it was quite understandable to avoid failure, which is why most people don’t do anything new. After all, if their life works, why should they invest their political, physical, or fiscal capital to do something that might not work? 

I am not talking about the infinite number of ways critical mass can be achieved or not achieved. I am talking about the critical mass of being an innovator. Becoming an innovator is not something that you can wait for permission to do. You do not need to raise capital, and you do not need people to tell you that you can do it. You have to begin, psychologically, with the belief that you can make something happen, and this is something that you tell yourself before you tell anyone else or that you never even asked because you got so carried away by your idea that you were already in motion before you consciously start to contemplate taking any steps. 

Many innovators see that things could be better than they are. Some immediately set about attempting to make changes. Often, this does not go well because people in the situation say they want to keep things as they are. They may be right, and you may be wrong. For change to make sense, there must be a critical mass of justifications. How do you know when change is justified? The answer is usually simple. Change is justified when the current condition is unsatisfactory or unsustainable. People do not like to change until they have to, but sometimes they have to, and then they are ready to talk to the person who wants to propose change, even if they may be afraid of it.

When you can no longer resist innovating, it’s time to do it. It is that simple, and it generally does not occur until you have critical mass. If you do not yet have critical mass, get it because you’ll need it to go from thinking about something to actually doing something. By the way, critical mass is on the critical path to the tipping point.

Day 020 Week 4 Q1  Monday, January 20, 2025

The world of music has changed in many ways over hundreds of years, but especially in the last century. Instruments, audiences, business models, musicians, performance delivery, and storage mechanisms have dramatically changed how music is created and experienced, making it difficult to predict its future. I am calling this set of changing circumstances Music Futures. 

Most people think they know what the word music means, but not everyone knows what Futures are, so let’s start there and differentiate between Futures and Options. A futures agreement is a contract to buy or sell an asset at a specific price on a future date, often used for investments like securing equity in a company. In contrast, a stock option agreement gives individuals, typically employees or advisors, the right to purchase company stock at a predetermined price within a set time, serving as an incentive or compensation. While future agreements focus on securing future investments, stock option agreements are designed to reward and motivate individuals with potential ownership.

Music Futures are impacted by changing business models, technologies, and genres, which often come together as innovations. These domains’ intersection is a fertile ground for creativity and change, often bringing out creative outliers and their creations. 

As these creative outliers contemplate ways of expressing themselves musically, they look around and see what instruments and venues are available for them to deliver their performances. We have come a long way from the past, with shepherds playing flutes and church choruses accompanied by pipe organs. 

Pianos were cultural icons a century ago, symbolizing refinement and serving as the centerpiece of home entertainment in many middle- and upper-class households. They became more accessible due to the Industrial Revolution and were integral to music education, especially for children. However, pianos were not in every home, as their size and cost limited ownership to families with sufficient means. Those without a piano often encountered them in communal spaces, reflecting the instrument’s deep cultural significance during that era. I came of age in the ’60s and ’70s when almost everyone I knew was a self-taught guitar-toting band member. 

The guitar, being portable and affordable, is more popular globally than the piano, especially in genres like rock, pop, and folk music. However, the piano is strong in classical and formal music education, maintaining its relevance in different circles. As guitars became electric and keyboards electronic, relatively low-cost instruments became much higher quality because they were now manufactured instead of hand-made.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say I have seen the future of the guitar, which is an example of a significant Music Future. Due to new technologies and manufacturing techniques, performance-grade guitars range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars.

One mind-blowing example is a carbon fiber-bodied solid-body electric guitar that costs under $500. It contains a digital signal processing chip, an amplifier, and a speaker and has output jacks for connecting directly to headphones, computers, and conventional guitar amplification systems, called guitar amps.

Unlike wooden instruments, these instruments are extremely environmentally stable, as they are relatively impervious to changes in temperature and humidity. Their unparalleled connectivity makes them incredibly flexible for composing, recording, and performing, publicly or privately. In terms of value, conventional guitars will find it incredibly difficult to compete with these in the marketplace.

This is a great example of a Music Future: a commoditized, mass-produced, high-quality hybrid analog-digital instrument that is also high-value. Of course, purists will resist this, just as folk musicians resisted the electric guitar and classical pianists resisted digital keyboards. However, the value proposition permits new business models and performance capabilities, making competing in the not-too-distant future very difficult. It may take some time, but I am fairly certain. I have seen the future of the guitar, and it is here right now.

Day 019 Week 4 Q1  Sunday, January 19, 2025

So you have more than a critical mass of materials, brought the plumber in by transforming yourself into the plumber, performed many experiments in content integration, and deployment, and are now ready to create what I think is the main road deployment. What I mean by main road deployment is there should be a single road into this land that branches off to all of the other roads to see all of the other content and the various ways I have chosen to deploy it now. Hopefully, in addition to myself, I will find others who might be helpful to engage me in a form that can be compensated. To do so, the material needs to be emotionally engaging, and for it to be emotionally engaging and emotionally relevant, it needs to be both of these relatively instantaneously because no one will take the time to explore material that doesn’t grab them right away.

We live in a world full of infinite sources of content. It is like hot and cold running water in every house; in fact, every house has multiple sources of hot and cold running water. There are even more media delivery devices than sinks in the average house. Each house has at least a sink in the kitchen and at least a sink in the bathroom, and probably more than one bathroom and perhaps another sink for some other reason, so there tends to be a minimum of four sinks in every house. Most people have more than one device capable of delivering content. We have phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and television sets, and some more than one of each. I am embarrassed to admit that I have at least a dozen devices capable of delivering content. If you only accumulate one new one per year and have been fooling around with these things for decades, you end up with a lot of stuff, even if you give a lot of it away, throw a lot away, and trade a bunch in.

Some people spend their lives communicating on their phones and others on devices with larger screens. This raises the issue of how much screen real estate is there and, secondly, how good are the speakers or headphones so that you can tell what you can deliver. 

Main road delivery is about balancing all of these different issues and more because not only do people have different devices and different detention spans, but they also have different proclivities toward different kinds of content, which is why adaptive content delivery will ultimately be the only way to go as not everybody needs the same kind of content delivered in the same kind of way. All of these are time to time-varying cause we are not in the same mood all the time either. This is where it gets fun because someone has to create the means to integrate, deliver, and deploy a ton of content.

Day 018 Week 3 Q1  Saturday, January 18, 2025

What are you do when the plumber shows up and you show them a five-string and a regular cello, plus an entire forest full of many varieties of guitars, including six-string, seven-string, baritone, bass guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, nylon string guitar, flatwound string guitars, round-wound string guitars, solid body and a hollow body and even a carbon fiber guitar and a ukulele bass guitar. 

Then, there is a 100-year-old truly grand baby grand piano, digital pianos, midi-controlled sampled and modeled instruments, thousands of music files, some of which are scores, movies, and audio files, and we are still in the sound domain not yet including images, photographs, videos, nor approximately half a million words of copy organized into books, columns, articles, and blog postings and more than 2000 minutes worth of extemporaneous real-time composed performances which you have recorded and saved the raw contributing elements to permit editing, mixing, mastering and multiple other kinds of signal processing alterations.

And what if you also have more than 30 different domain names, multiple hosting services, YouTube channels, and cloud accounts, providing a literally infinite number of ways to wire together, or to stick with the plumbing metaphor, pipe together into something which can be experienced in a meaningful manner?

You start conducting experiments and discover an infinite number of experiments that could be performed as well, making the integration project almost as infinite as creating all of the content within it. That doesn’t sound very convergent, which is where the plumber comes in. The plumber begins connecting different types of content to create experiences, many of which are illustrated.

PVC pipes are much easier to work with than metal soldering and welding. One can cut through PVC a lot faster than through conventional metal-based piping materials. We think we are going to convert the plumber into an artist as if this was not the case before he showed up. It would have to be the case because we would not have engaged this kind of plumber unless they could handle this kind of situation. Of course, this could be difficult to determine because I’m not sure this type of situation ever existed.  Being an involuntary innovator is the story of my life, and I not only do not shrink from the characterization, but I also embrace it fully because that makes me who I am.

The challenge is putting these materials together in a way that might be useful or interesting to someone besides me. As I have been told by people who love me, I can’t blame the rest of the world for not being me, for if they were, they wouldn’t need me, and all I can do is hope for a positive outcome for others. Still, I can guarantee an emotionally relevant and engaging experience for myself because I am the architect, plumber, performer, recording artist, producer, engineer, composer, writer of the words, and AI prompter of the images.

I am confident that I can create an experience that turns me on, and I hope that the fringe benefit will be that this body of work also resonates with others.

Day 017 Week 3 Q1  Friday, January 17, 2025

When you have an infinite set of reservoirs, each chock full of material, including many pipes lying around to theoretically connect them, it’s time to get a plumber. Not because you have a leaking pipe or a broken toilet, but because you need to construct something new, and the plumbing is complicated. You have to stop thinking about all the different things. You’re trying to connect them, and you put some energy into thinking about different ways to connect them.

The world of Content can also require a plumber. But a different kind of plumber because what is being connected here is multi-dimensional. We have music, compositions, music performances, articles, columns, blog postings, and even books, not to mention images.  And we are not talking about small quantities here. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of words, thousands of minutes of music, and hundreds of images, all accumulated in the last couple of years, as well as way more than 10 hours of recent videos.

There is also content from 20 years ago, when I founded the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute and traveled the world, giving talks in places like China, Hong Kong, and Japan. There are also many videos of me online speaking, not only abroad but also at the University of Chicago, Stanford, Berkeley, and San Jose State.

There is a ton of content representing many aspects of innovation, which is the beat. I had been on for almost 25 years when I came up with Aesthetic Engineering and vaulted into Innovation management at Cogswell Polytechnical College, which consequently turned into the University of Silicon Valley. In part, as a result of these programs, I founded and taught until starting the Innovation Institute, which probably would not have happened unless I had begun teaching acoustics in academia. 

Teaching would not have occurred unless I had 20 years of experience as an innovator in industry and as an entrepreneur. So, I am combining a lifetime of being an innovator and a founder with teaching innovation.

This content represents a body of work covering decades of professional life. It calls for a very special kind of plumber who is comfortable with multiple kinds of content, as well as business, teaching, and administration. This work was performed in industry, academia, and government. It also leaked out of the containers into becoming a performance artist who performed original music thousands of times in every kind of venue.

This is why a plumber is needed first to brainstorm various ways of connecting multiple kinds of lessons and content to support each other in helping the world’s creative outliers progress toward becoming sustainable innovators.

The world is in flux, and changes are upon us. Not everyone is comfortable with the process of evolution, even though it is involuntary and inevitable. Not everyone is happy about the direction, which is why special skills are required to ease these transitions.

And the reason you need to get a plumber first!

Day 016 Week 32 Q1  Thursday, January 16, 2025

No, I am not talking about the actual heart of a person, but I am talking about replacing the furnace in a house during snow flurries. Have you ever thought about removing the beating heart of a house in the winter, which is its heat source could be a little bit complicated. Right now, it is 16° out in the middle of January, and we are about to do a heart transplant of our furnace. No, I am not the actual surgeon. There’s a company coming in to do this, and they need to remove the old furnace and replace it was a new one. During that time, we will not be very cold because the house retains heat well as it is excellently insulated, and we also have some electric space heaters to fill in the gaps around our toes when they get cold. 

If people can get a hip or a knee replaced and be walking by the end of the day, a furnace transplant seems a lot simpler. It is also, correspondingly, a lot less expensive than orthopedic surgery. Still, it’s a lot more expensive than going out for breakfast, which we cannot do because we need to be here while the project is going on. It’s not every day that you participate in a heart transplant, whether it be mechanical or biological, so I thought I’d use this as an excuse to do a few other things. The simplest of these things may be the need to prepare for the surgery by providing a pathway into the basement through the garage to remove the old furnace and bring the new one in. Considering it has been several years since the garage was empty enough to have a path through which a furnace can be transported, this was an excellent opportunity to clean the garage, find out what’s in there, and make enough room to put a car in. And since one of our cars is a 30-year-old convertible with a roof that leaks it made sense to create the benefit of increasing the lifespan of my little Miata at the same time I’ve increasing the lifespan of a warm house.

For whatever reason, the garage became full, with closing a business office and vacating storage units; there was a psychological barrier to sorting, cleaning, and tossing items no longer relevant to my current life. This included eight snow tires on rims for two cars we no longer own. And a currently inoperable riding lawnmower may need a transplant of its own or not. The combination of the house, heart transplant, and re-awakening of the garage also coincides with another overdue opportunity. As the remnants of the business office were sorted and re-examined and some in-operable business lines came back online yesterday as part of this mini-life overall, it appears that it is time to change the outgoing messages and launch the new enterprises, as there are two. They have also been psychologically avoided for whatever reasons.

This combination of a house heart transplant, Miata longevity intervention, and the ability to reboot back into being a business entity is a very exciting time. And I expect all of this to be done before the weekend. The convergence on an empirically validated morning routine makes all of the activity possible, which has been iterating for over a decade and has now become a full-fledged behavior management system that provides enough additional Lifeforce energy every morning to overcome all sorts of previously accumulated obstacles. There’s no point in analyzing why we become stuck when it is time to become unstuck. Just as a cardiac patient would be encouraged to improve their diet and exercise regime, I am choosing to use this house heart transplant to change my routine by sticking to what I already know to be an extremely powerful morning routine, raising and answering the question, is it worth spending or rather investing a quarter of your life to make the other 3/4 a lot better?

I think there is no contest here, and from now on, this will be my morning practice, which began today. Still, playing music for more than an hour before heading out in the dark to perform my firehouse watch duties of making sure that the fire department was ready to roll. as there was a light snow that needed to be cleared away from both the door for people to enter and the big ones for firetrucks to depart, I have already been inoculated in advance of the heat transplant, against the 16° weather we have outside.

It is glorious to contemplate having a new heart when a physical transplant requires a psychological overhaul. You might want to consider using external events as a provocation to pivot in directions that you have known for a while truly make sense. But to do so, you might need to establish a new set of behaviors instead of a new set of goals. Remember behaviors and eating goals for lunch, just as culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Day 015 Week 32 Q1  Wednesday, January 15, 2025

In today’s hyper-competitive market, many companies seem more focused on acquiring new customers than maintaining relationships with their loyal ones. This often results in a frustrating experience where long-term customers are treated with less care, and robotic scripts and clunky automated systems waste their time. This growing trend of disrespecting customers’ time is one of the most damaging things a company can do, and it’s one of the main reasons I’m increasingly “firing” companies from my life. After all, I have many choices. I vote with my wallet.

When a customer has a clear issue, and the company is simply reading from a script or sending them through a maze of automated responses, it sends a very clear message: “We don’t value your time.” This may seem like a small issue, but it builds frustration and erodes loyalty when it happens repeatedly. Customers who’ve been with a company for years or even decades start feeling invisible. And it’s not just the inconvenience of the interaction that’s the problem; it’s the realization that companies just aren’t treating us like we matter. They’re wasting our time, and that’s a message that no customer should ever hear.

This issue isn’t just a customer service problem. it mirrors what’s happening in the workplace as well, where many employees feel like their time is undervalued. People are increasingly leaving jobs and abandoning brands that take their time for granted. This shift is becoming more obvious, and the underlying truth is clear: loyalty is earned, not demanded. When companies or employers forget that, they risk losing the trust and business of the people they rely on.

The right use of AI can fix much of the damage done by overly scripted, impersonal service. When designed properly, AI respects our time. Instead of dragging out conversations with repetitive scripts, AI can understand the context, provide quick, relevant answers, and help customers get what they need without wasting time. For me, ChatGPT does just that. It saves my time and is respectful by providing efficient, personalized responses.

Imagine a world where companies focus on making customer service fast, efficient, and personal rather than turning interactions into long, drawn-out processes. Businesses can use AI to help ensure that their customers feel valued, respected, and understood. Efficiency and respect for time go hand-in-hand, and that’s exactly why Apple has succeeded. As a former Apple engineer, I knew people didn’t have time to waste. As a current Apple customer, I feel the same way.

Telecom and streaming services, among many others, must stop focusing on attracting new customers and begin investing in retaining the ones they already have. They can use AI to offer personalized, quick, and respectful service. This will build stronger relationships and keep customers loyal for years to come. Companies need to value both the customer and their time.