“When I walk around Berkeley I realize there are a bunch of kids who like technology. The more we can do to encourage them not to go to Wall Street but to stick with engineering and science, the better off we will all be. I think our kids feel a sense of responsibility, that they can make a difference by using their brains.”

—Yogen Dalal, managing director, Mayfield Fund

“I’m not sure you can teach someone to be clever or to be an entrepreneur. What can be done is to let students know that to be an entrepreneur is  . . . to understand how financing works, how marketing works. If you’re going to design a product, like we did at Palm, you need to balance all those things.”

—Jeff Hawkins, cofounder, Palm, Handspring and Numenta

“You can’t be an island. It’s not realistic to ask each member of a team to know everything, but you need to know . . . who your fellow travelers are and what they bring to the table and where your part fits in. I don’t know that engineers were taught that 10 or 20 years ago.”

—JoZell Johnson, manager of global higher education, Intel

“Power in an organization used to be determined by your title; now it’s determined by your networks.”

—Paul Saffo, futurist and consultant

“The practicing engineers of 2020 will have to be very good at the component and micro level, really expert at some particular discipline where they can make meaningful contributions, and also expert at systems. You have to operate at both the small and very large scale level.”

—Alfred Spector, vice president of research, Google