San Francisco Seminar 2008
Day 1

Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Service Design in Silicon Valley

Illustration of a stack of books used as a symbol of knowledge, learning, academic exploration, and reflection. The image represents how insight is built layer by layer through experience, research, literature, and the sharing of knowledge—core values in the work of digitalization, innovation, and professional development.

Introduction and Context

The first day of the San Francisco Seminar 2008 set the tone for the entire week. The theme was innovation as both a process and a culture, and how value creation in Silicon Valley is not just about technology, but also about networks, learning, and the open sharing of knowledge.

The seminar brought together academics, business leaders, and innovators to reflect on what creates the world’s most dynamic ecosystems.

Several presentations highlighted service innovation—the idea of taking a holistic approach to user experience, design, and business models—as the new driving force behind competitiveness.

This was the year when concepts such as open innovation, business model innovation, and customer co-creation had truly gained international momentum.

Program Overview

Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley – March 31, 2008

Jerry Engel: Silicon Valley – Best Practices and Emerging Trends
Helen Bulwik: Entrepreneurship and Innovation – Service Innovation
Jim Baty (Sun Microsystems): Open Architecture Network – An E-Community for Innovation
Workshop: Business Model Exploration
Group Work and Reflection: How to Apply Silicon Valley Principles to Nordic Organizations

Watercolor illustration of the classic Sears Fine Food restaurant in San Francisco, known for its small pancakes and long history in the city. The warm evening scene captures the atmosphere of the seminar trips—early breakfasts, professional reflections, and encounters between people, culture, and innovation in the heart of San Francisco.

Key Topics

Innovation and Strategy

Engel presented Silicon Valley as a living model of entrepreneurial ecology—an interplay of capital, knowledge, risk-taking, and networks.

He emphasized five key components that characterize the region:

Entrepreneurial culture – Failure is part of the learning process.
Access to capital – Risk-tolerant venture capital connected to academic and professional communities.
Close ties between academia and industry – Particularly Stanford and Berkeley.
Cross-functional teams and high mobility – People move between roles and continuously build new skills.
Open sharing and learning – Competitors inspire one another; innovation takes place across organizational boundaries.

He pointed out that the DNA of innovation in Silicon Valley lies in the ability to combine technology, creativity, and business expertise in an environment that encourages experimentation.

Serviceinnovation – Helen Bulwik

Helen Bulwik focused on how service innovation had become just as important a driver of value as product innovation.

She described how many companies had shifted their focus from what we make to how we deliver value.

Bulwik introduced a framework for service design thinking that connects customer insights with process improvement and showed how it could be implemented in practice through:

Customer journey mapping
Using prototypes and pilot projects for testing
Measuring emotional value, not just financial results

She emphasized that the competitive advantage of the future lies not in technology alone, but in how customers experience the service.

Open Innovation and Community – Jim Baty

Jim Baty presented the Open Architecture Network, a groundbreaking digital initiative from Sun Microsystems.

It was an early precursor to platforms for the global sharing of innovation projects—a form of open source applied to service development and sustainability. The project illustrated how open innovation could be used to address complex societal challenges.

Through a network of companies, academics, and volunteers, new ideas could be tested, improved, and scaled more quickly than within traditional corporate structures.

Watercolor illustration of a classic San Francisco cable car moving through the city’s steep streets in the soft morning light. The scene captures the calm and timeless atmosphere that characterized many of the days during the seminar visits to San Francisco—a city where technology, history, people, and innovation come together in the same urban landscape.

Case Studies

Several examples were presented to illustrate the ideas in practice:

IDEO and Apple as pioneers in user-centered innovation.
Sun Microsystems’ open platform for social entrepreneurship.
Nordic SMEs experimenting with new business models based on insights from the San Francisco innovation ecosystem.

These cases showed how lessons from Silicon Valley could be applied in other contexts—but that success requires both structure and cultural change.

Reflections and discussion:

The discussions that day centered on the question:

“How can we bring the Silicon Valley mindset back home to Norway?”

Among the responses:

Create room for experimentation in both public- and private-sector organizations.
Give teams greater autonomy.
Build closer collaboration between academia, business, and the public sector.

Several participants emphasized that Norwegian organizations often have the resources but lack the ability to execute and the willingness to take risks—a recurring theme in later seminars as well.

International Perspectives

The presentations demonstrated how essential international partnerships are to innovation. San Francisco serves as a global melting pot for ideas, where cultural diversity, technology, and capital come together.

For the Nordic participants, it was inspiring to see innovation viewed as a globally shared resource rather than a national competitive advantage.

Watercolor illustration of a laptop and coffee cup overlooking San Francisco in the evening light, with the Bay Bridge in the background and the city’s warm lights glowing between the buildings. The scene symbolizes reflection, learning, and the long evenings during the seminars, when technology, innovation, and human connections came together in a city that inspired an entire generation of digital professionals.

What Do We Take Home with Us?

Innovation must be understood as a social system, not a project.
Culture and leadership are just as important as technology.
User insights and empathy must be integrated into the innovation process.
Openness and collaboration create momentum—secrecy slows development.

Relevance Today

What was discussed in 2008 seems almost prophetic today. Digitalization, service innovation, and customer experience are now core elements in both the private and public sectors. The same principles underpin everything from smart city strategies to user-driven innovation in healthcare. The seminar helped establish a mindset that continues to influence Norwegian innovation policy and business development.

Peder Inge Furseth

Peder Inge Furseth was a key academic driving force behind the San Francisco seminars and played an important role in making the encounter with Silicon Valley relevant to Norwegian and European organizations. Through his role as a professor at BI Norwegian Business School and as academic director of the program, he helped participants place the presentations within a broader context—one in which technology, innovation, business development, and people had to be understood together.

In San Francisco, participants met entrepreneurs, researchers, technology leaders, and investors from some of the world’s most innovative environments. Furseth’s strength was his ability to connect these experiences with practical challenges and opportunities facing Norwegian organizations. He helped translate Silicon Valley’s ideas and ways of working into a

Nordic context where collaboration, trust, and long-term value creation play a central role.

Throughout the seminar series, he served as an important bridge between research, business, and technology. For many participants, he therefore became more than an academic leader—he was also a mentor who inspired them to think differently about innovation, digitalization, and commercialization.

Learn more about Peder Inge Furseth here

From Studies and Seminars to Today’s Knowledge Hub

The studies, seminars, and academic trips documented on this page form part of the knowledge base behind The Invisible Capital. Topics such as customers, technology, innovation, digitalization, and value creation have been part of this journey for several decades — while these fields have continued to evolve.

At The Invisible Capital, we continue exploring these questions through dedicated knowledge series. Here, earlier theory, research, and experience are connected with newer knowledge, emerging technologies, and today’s challenges facing people and organizations.

Innovation

Innovation is not just about new ideas. Value is created when knowledge, technology, and ideas are developed into products, services, processes, organizational forms, and business models that are actually put into use. The series on innovation traces the field from Schumpeter to modern innovation research and explores incremental, radical, disruptive, open, and user-driven innovation.

→ Explore the Innovation series

The Customer

The customer is not simply the recipient of what an organization produces. In a competitive market, the customer is a decisive factor in whether an organization actually succeeds in creating value. The series on the customer explores customer orientation, customer insight, customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty, trust, and the human interactions that shape the customer relationship.

→ Explore the Customer series

Value Creation

What does it really mean to create value — and who creates it? The Value Creation series moves from economic theory and influential thinkers to a broader understanding of how people, knowledge and skills, institutions, organizations, and the public sector contribute to value creation.

→ Explore the Value Creation series

Digitalization

Digitalization has evolved from individual technologies into a fundamental part of how organizations operate and create value. The Digitalization from A to Z series traces this evolution through the internet, the web, e-commerce, search, UX, social media, mobile, omnichannel, cloud, data, platforms, and digital transformation — leading up to today’s AI-first era.

→ Explore the Digitalization from A to Z series

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence represents the next chapter in the digital evolution. In our dedicated AI knowledge hub, we explore how artificial intelligence works, how AI finds and uses information, how it evaluates sources and websites, and what this development could mean for people, organizations, and value creation.

→ Explore the articles on Artificial Intelligence

Business Model Generation

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur introduced a new and visual framework for how organizations develop, test, and renew business models. The book shows how innovation, customer insights, service design, and value creation must be viewed together in order to build sustainable businesses in a digital economy.