My first visit – a very beautiful campus and an institution which seems to dominate not just the region but the whole technology space. We were there visiting Chuck House, executive director of Stanford’s Media X – a university-meets-industry hothousing experiment designed to get multi-disciplinary solutions to industry problems. “We are focused around where IT intersects with people”, Chuck tells us as he struggles to get the complicated projection equipment to work. He seems genuinely enthused about getting many academic disciplines together to shed light on an innovation problem (anthropologists, psychologists, computer scientists) but also we get a glimpse of the frustrations of trying to align the short time frames of Wall Street-driven companies with the long time horizons of genuine break-through academic research. One collaboration was with IBM defining modern leadership through online gaming.