Interview: U.S. entrepreneur says technological innovation needs to root into real problems

NEW YORK, March 6 (Xinhua) -- Technological innovators need to keep an eye on local ecosystems and real problems without mimicking others, according to an entrepreneur and head of a start-up incubator.

"If you root your initial innovations in your initial ecosystem and into those real problems, that are very tough and very complicated big problems, you will find a lot of innovation being done that way," Fernando Gómez-Baquero, director of Runway and Spinouts at Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech, said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Gómez-Baquero stressed the focus on the problems that are predominant prevalent in respective cities and communities, which would stimulate a lot of learning as well as new technologies and approaches.

Would-be hubs of scientific and technological innovation should not try to imitate what's going on at those very large cities like Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York, or even the Start-up Nation (Israel) and China's Shanghai, according to Gómez-Baquero, who is also the founder at Besstech LLC., a lithium-ion component design and engineering company based in New York State.

"It's quite impossible to replicate what the city (New York) has built because the technology development is not detached from their history. So you're not going to basically replicate the problems that New York has, you're not gonna replicate the kind of the ecosystem and the financial ecosystem that New York has," said Gómez-Baquero.

In order to build a science and technology innovation center, there needs to be an ecosystem of people that are always trying to connect these young ideas and scientific research with real life problems that are happening out there, according to Gómez-Baquero.

"Getting those scientists out of the lab, or getting them to really interact with people, understand the problems, it is extremely beneficial for a society that wants to create an innovation ecosystem," Gómez-Baquero said.

Even if the scientists cannot solve that problem, it roots their thinking and their scientific research into something that is more applicable or immediately applicable, added Gómez-Baquero.

Gómez-Baquero noted that New York City has a lot of old issues with transportation and basic infrastructure buildings and it's tough to catch up to modern times. At the same time, it's a big business opportunity and motivates a lot of innovation.

Gómez-Baquero also emphasized the importance of global vision which implies application of innovations in other places of the world.

The processes of scientific and technological discovery, technological development and entrepreneurship, and then economic growth work as a continuum that fits by itself, added Gómez-Baquero.

As resources are limited, each country has a responsibility to stimulate innovation activities that come back to build the things that help taxpayers and continue to grow the economy so as to form a virtuous cycle, according to Gómez-Baquero.