Talk highlights the importance of exploration and discovery

Groundbreaking technological advances such as 5G, blockchain and artificial intelligence should be embraced, not resisted, because they can help solve problems and usher in a brighter future, author Gary Shapiro said Tuesday night in a fireside chat with Mason President Ángel Cabrera at the MIX@Fenwick.

“Technology is simply a tool,” said Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association and author of “Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation.” “It’s not good, or it’s not bad. It’s like nuclear energy or power. You could use it to light up the world and use it as a relatively safe source of energy. Or you could use it in nuclear bombs. It depends on the user.”

Shapiro inspired budding entrepreneurs in the audience by emphasizing their ability to nimbly adapt when developing their ideas.

“Big organizations spend too much money going down the wrong direction,” he said, adding that larger companies now want to partner with and invest in smaller companies rather than ignore them. “Well, if you’re a startup or a small entrepreneur, you adjust quickly. You don’t waste a lot of money. You don’t stay on a path that’s unsuccessful. You adjust in the marketplace.”

That point registered with sophomore Alex Hughes, a bioengineering major with an entrepreneurship minor, who emerged from the chat even more determined to pursue his innovations. He is president of Hypernova Solar Racing Team, which designs solar cars to compete in international competitions.

“If I’m not working on this every single day, someone else is going to beat me on it,” said Hughes, a Manassas, Virginia, native and Mason Honors College member who attended Governor’s School on the Science and Technology Campus while in high school. “It kind of gives me that sense of urgency that I need to continue working on it and not just wait for the world to reach that point. I need to be the one leading to that point.”

Shapiro said that 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or children of immigrants, an observation that inspired senior and information technology major Dolica Gopisetty, who moved to the United States from India and graduated from a Virginia high school.

“He really talks about different kinds of innovation and how innovation doesn’t only mean building something,” Gopisetty said. “Many people tend to misunderstand innovation as a tangible thing. In reality, a small thing like a different shade of light can also be an innovation.”

Shapiro served on Mason’s Board of Visitors from 2001 to 2005 and noted his admiration for the university’s “incredible, fast growth” and “amazing focus on entrepreneurship, the little robots running around campus, the cybersecurity focus, the partnership with the local business community.” He also said that Amazon locating near Mason’s Arlington Campus will have “a halo effect for the whole area.”

Both Cabrera and Shapiro serve on the board of the Northern Virginia Technology Council, whose president and CEO, Bobbie Kilberg, attended Tuesday’s talk,  as did other members of the region’s technology community.

“There has been really a constant in American culture from the very beginning that continues to attract people like many of us in this room, including me,” Cabrera said, “who choose to come to this country [because of the] sense of ingenuity and optimism about the future, that nothing is impossible and that when you get the right people in the room, magic can happen. I think we need constant reminders that that is the case.”