Innovation Comes from People Viewing Things from Different Angles

Co-Founder and VP Product Management at LinkedIn, Allen Blue was also Co-founder of SocialNet.com in the 90s. In a conversation of the Executive Chats series with Rector Gianmario Verona, he spurs students interested in entrepreneurship and social media to learn how to code, to develop exclusive knowledge in order to take alternative perspectives to the discussion, and especially to make things happen.

«There is still room for entrepreneurship in the web», Allen Blue says, if only because much of the good things that have reached consumers haven't yet come to the enterprise.

Silicon Valley, according to Mr. Blue, is made of two main parts: the many people who founded companies, failed, and started again recombining their knowledge, and some very large and successful companies, the likes of Google and Apple, which have become examples of training excellence. Other innovative ecosystems, such as Berlin, are rich of the former, but still lack the latter.

Social media were thought for human beings to talk to each other, he explains, in almost private conversations. The press too often however magnifies such communications, giving them excessive visibility. «It's not that we are not good enough at using social media», he says, «but the press needs to develop its own antivirus».

The chat ends with some advice to students who want to be entrepreneurial in tech. «Innovation comes from people viewing things from different angles», he says, «and thus you have to develop exclusive knowledge and take alternative perspectives to the discussion».