Teknekron Corporation

Last updated
Teknekron Corporation
Company type Private
Founded1968;56 years ago (1968)
Headquarters,
United States
Website teknekroncorp.com

Teknekron Corporation is one of the world's first technology-focused business incubators. [1]

Contents

Teknekron was founded in Berkeley, California, in 1968 by Harvey Wagner and several UC Berkeley professors, including George Turin, D.Sc., a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences who served as vice president of technology. By 1991 it had grown to $225 million in revenue, a 40% annual rate of growth. [1]

The company is registered in the tax shelter of Incline Village in Nevada. Although Wagner had a small office there near his Lake Tahoe house, [2] most of the company's operations are in Berkeley, the San Francisco Peninsula, and the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

Theoretical and policy research

During the 1960s and 1970s, Teknekron was awarded numerous research contracts by the U.S. government, including the transfer of technology from NASA's space program to civilian uses, [3] the dispersal modeling and generation forecasts of noxious gases from power generation, [4] [5] urban effects of drought in San Francisco, [6] mental health services in California, [7] durability of manufactured goods, [8] and public perceptions of highway safety. [9]

Contracted research for private clients included Workers' compensation. [10] Some of Teknekron's research was performed in partnership with UC Berkeley. [11]

The stated goal of the company is: "New Teknekron ventures do not take the traditional course of developing, from the outset, a standard product for the end-user market. Instead, they concentrate on developing products for inclusion in other, generally larger companies' product lines, and on delivering customized integrated systems for such companies' internal use. It is only after years of working with client companies on specific projects that a Teknekron enterprise might condense its market-honed technologies into generic "core products." This market approach has distinguished us from venture- capital partnerships, which tend to focus on funding companies that ab initio develop products for the end-user market."

Incubated businesses

By 1991 four companies had been spun out as separate public companies or sold off, one had failed and six were running as "affiliate companies." [1]

Partnerships

Teknekron partnered with external firms as well. In 1991 it signed a co-marketing agreement with the Belgian microelectronics research partnership Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre. [19]

Sources

  1. 1 2 3 Peters 1991.
  2. Clark 1988.
  3. Aerospace 1970.
  4. Barse 1977.
  5. Altshuller et al. 1980.
  6. Hoffman, Glickstein & Liroff 1979.
  7. Koran & Meinhardt 1984.
  8. Lacy 1985.
  9. Arnould & Grabowski 1981.
  10. Jewell, Johnston & Leavitt 1974.
  11. Jewell 1971.
  12. Securities and Exchanges Commission 1999.
  13. Files 1999.
  14. "OpenTV wins early round". Alameda Times-Star. 2003-01-10. Retrieved 2012-10-04.
  15. Files, Jennifer (1999-04-22). "California software firm agrees to buy IEX Corp". The Dallas Morning News (3rd ed.). pp. 2D. Archived from the original on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2012-10-04.
  16. Clark 1992.
  17. Smith 1993.
  18. Evenson 1993.
  19. Segers 1993.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Network effect</span> Increasing value with increasing participation

In economics, a network effect is the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products. Network effects are typically positive feedback systems, resulting in users deriving more and more value from a product as more users join the same network. The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users and also the enhancement of other non-users' motivation for using the product.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oliver E. Williamson</span> American economist (1932–2020)

Oliver Eaton Williamson was an American economist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Elinor Ostrom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Information asymmetry</span> Concept in contract theory and economics

In contract theory, mechanism design, and economics, an information asymmetry is a situation where one party has more or better information than the other.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SRI International</span> American scientific research institute (founded 1946)

SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.

In economics and commerce, the Bertrand paradox — named after its creator, Joseph Bertrand — describes a situation in which two players (firms) reach a state of Nash equilibrium where both firms charge a price equal to marginal cost ("MC"). The paradox is that in models such as Cournot competition, an increase in the number of firms is associated with a convergence of prices to marginal costs. In these alternative models of oligopoly, a small number of firms earn positive profits by charging prices above cost. Suppose two firms, A and B, sell a homogeneous commodity, each with the same cost of production and distribution, so that customers choose the product solely on the basis of price. It follows that demand is infinitely price-elastic. Neither A nor B will set a higher price than the other because doing so would yield the entire market to their rival. If they set the same price, the companies will share both the market and profits.

User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users or consumer users, rather than by suppliers. This is a concept closely aligned to co-design and co-creation, and has been proven to result in more innovative solutions than traditional consultation methodologies.

Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.

Northern Light Group, LLC is an American technology company that specializes in enterprise search technology, text analytics solutions and research engines that combine traditional search engine functions with access to non-web based publications. The company provides custom, hosted turnkey solutions for its clients using the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dynamic pricing</span> Pricing strategy

Dynamic pricing, also referred to as surge pricing, demand pricing, or time-based pricing, is a revenue management pricing strategy in which businesses set flexible prices for products or services based on current market demands. It usually entails raising prices during periods of peak demand and lowering prices during periods of low demand.

Tekelec, Inc. was a Morrisville, North Carolina based telecommunications company. It developed hardware and software for networks that are fixed, wireless, or packet-based. It provided IP services to help mobile carriers with network signaling, policy control, and subscriber data management.

Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.

High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic trading in finance characterized by high speeds, high turnover rates, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverages high-frequency financial data and electronic trading tools. While there is no single definition of HFT, among its key attributes are highly sophisticated algorithms, co-location, and very short-term investment horizons in trading securities. HFT uses proprietary trading strategies carried out by computers to move in and out of positions in seconds or fractions of a second.

Peter L. S. Currie is an American business executive who was the chief financial officer for Netscape from 1995 to 1999. Currie has been described by Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro as one of the "Silicon Valley wise men". He was among the advisors to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about business matters in 2009. He is an investor in Internet start-ups and serves on the boards of numerous firms. He is president of Currie Capital and was a charter trustee of Phillips Academy; from July 2012 to June 2020, he served as the president of the school's board of trustees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheldon Axler</span> American mathematician (born 1949)

Sheldon Jay Axler is an American mathematician and textbook author. He is a professor of mathematics and the Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University.

The history of California bread as a prominent factor in the field of bread baking dates from the days of the California Gold Rush around 1849, encompassing the development of sourdough bread in San Francisco. It includes the rise of artisan bakeries in the 1980s, which strongly influenced what has been called the "Bread Revolution".

Robert Stephen Pindyck is an American economist, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Professor of Economics and Finance at Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University, Harvard University, and Columbia University.

KX is a privately owned software company that sells a time series database kdb+, used for financial modeling and data analysis, and its associated proprietary programming language q.

Margaret E. Slade is Professor Emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and was a council member of the Royal Economic Society from 2004 to 2008. Slade is best known for her work on Industrial Economics, serving as the President of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE) from 2001 to 2003.

Dennis Eugene Breedlove was an American botanist, herbarium curator, and plant collector. He is "best known for his collections and floristic studies in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and his ethnobotanical work in that state with various collaborators."

The San Francisco Bay Area has the second-largest Indian-American population in the United States after the New York metropolitan area. The Bay Area Asian Indian population is primarily concentrated in the Santa Clara Valley, with San Jose having the highest population of Asian Indians in raw numbers as 2010, while Cupertino, Dublin, Fremont, Pleasanton and San Ramon have the largest concentrations. The South Bay-based 17th congressional district, represented by Indian-American Ro Khanna has the largest Asian Indian population of any congressional district in the United States. In 2010, Indian-Americans were the fastest growing minority population in the Bay Area. The Indian population in the city of San Francisco itself is still small compared to other Asian groups, but grew by 109% during the 2010s.

References

Fisher, Lawrence (18 December 1993). "Reuters Is Buying Teknekron" . Retrieved 11 October 2013.