Any Benjamin Franklins in Asia (Part 2)? Reflections from the Story of Linkabit-Qualcomm and the Inverted U-Curve of Singapore/Asia
February 2, 2014 Leave a comment
Dear Friends and All,
Any Benjamin Franklins in Asia (Part 2)? Reflections from the Story of Linkabit-Qualcomm and the Inverted U-Curve of Singapore/Asia
Without Dr Irwin Jacobs, Sam Walton most probably cannot scale up Wal-Mart with the VSAT technology enabling Captain Sam to solve the inventory management problem that comes from scaling up at the VSAT-network of distribution centers and to video-call his managers to give pep talks for Saturday meetings; and San Diego will not be able to transform from a sleepy West Coast town to a successful innovation hub. That was one of the many insights that the Bamboo Innovator had gotten after hearing the presentation on Driving Growth Through Science and Innovation on 23 January at the Singapore Management University (SMU) by the billionaire inventor-entrepreneur of the CDMA technology that makes over 3 billion cell phones possible. Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi and five others have founded Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) (to deliver “QUALity COMMunications”), a super-compounder up over 130-fold to a market value of $125 billion or over 40% of the GDP of the country Singapore, and the fact of its scale and continued business model scalability has eluded most in the audience. Not surprisingly, Jacobs was told then that his big idea of CDMA digital wireless technology that creates a unique code for each call and so allows greater sharing of the airwaves simply violated the laws of physics. Thankfully he and his like-minded partners preserved. Qualcomm, through a combination of technological superiority, cunning business acumen to build an innovative business model that collects 3% of the price of virtually every handset sold in the world as royalty, and sheer tenacity, has become the undisputed standard by which telecom companies now measure themselves. Qualcomm’s rise mirrors that of the cell phone: Both are ubiquitous, both continue to evolve rapidly, and both turned the status quo on its head. Read more of this post
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