Stanford Educators Corner (lots of videos!)

Setup by Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the Educators Corner is a free online archive of entrepreneurship resources, paid by sponsors.

Compared with TED, their set of lectures seems to be more down to earth, and practical for most people in today’s entrepreneurial world. Streaming is as expected to be not as good as video sharing sites, but pretty comparable with TED.

Among the top 20 videos, we get to see the likes of Guy, Larry and Eric. Here’s one editor picked video that left an impression on me:

That resonated on why I’ve been writing my music solely in the realm of music arrangement, instead of trying to figure out something new, like a totally white sheet of paper. Moreover, it’s very often where I’ll take up a job for the pleasure of the constraints, for example limited instrumentation, mixture of good and bad players (identifying them can be hard), lead singer’s key (especially those projects where some random famous singer comes perform with a 100 man band), etc.

With these constraints, it becomes easier to bring something that you know will be successful, as a “product”, rather than having to sell to the world how important your creative work is. This pragmatic view of innovation has wide implications in the technology world because many products are created from R&D labs looking for a problem to solve. That’s good in some sense (the gung-ho-ness of research I guess) – but not practical for people investing money into you!

Check out more lectures and pick out some interesting ones 🙂 I have barely watched 5 (including an hour long lecture…zzz)!