What a Day! The Bond University Silicon Valley Study Tour kicked off with a visit to RocketSpace and a chat with CEO Duncan Logan. Such gems as “stay strong to your True North”, “all the money in the world will never beat the best people” and “there’s a shift from capitalism to talentism” will stick in the minds of our students.

We sampled some of SF’s best coffee and headed to the Australian Trade Commission for an informative session on the ways in which government supports innovation in Australian companies. Viki Forrest from ANZA Technology Network succinctly explained the differences between small markets and big markets, while Aussie entrepreneur Jindou Lee from Happy Inspector explained what life was like for a startup with Series A funding.

Our day finished with an old friend Don Hoffman giving us the inside scoop on his experiences at Tesla Motors, 4INFO and Twitter.

What an amazing day. The students are busy producing their nightly video blogs, reflecting on how their experiences today have expanded their understanding of the course readings. Stewardship theory talks about an involvement orientation: how clear it was today! Timmons talks about tolerating short-term failure. We heard about it in spades today. Chesbrough talks about open innovation, and we heard numerous examples of how Twitter benefits from this innovation system.

Surely this is experiential education at its finest…. and it’s only day 1 of 5!