As a venture capitalist, I am constantly on the lookout the next big innovation, the disruptive technology that will create a new reality and reinvent the mainstream of tomorrow.
  
Many of those technologies will be developed by students who are now, or soon will be, in top graduate programs around the world. Though great scientific breakthroughs need great minds and ambitious scientists; ambition alone won’t lead those experts. In order to truly succeed, scientists will have to know where to look. I believe that careful analysis of the tech industry will show that our future scientists are studying the wrong disciplines.
 
In the past, the tech industry focused its efforts on refining the IT industry and telecommunications. Innovations in those fields brought us the two big game changers of the past decade, the Internet and cellular phones. The brainpower needed in those fields was mostly electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and software coders.  Those three groups have been and continue to be the core of tech industry talent. Young student still flock to those departments looking to get a piece of the tech boom, or what’s left of it.
  
Yet as always innovation comes out of need, and recently there has been a shift in industry needs.
 
The IT industry has essentially plateaued. There is no longer a killer  must-have corporate application. The telecommunications industry has also dead-ended and is transitioning to voice over ip.
  
This reality is the key, that needs to transform our view of innovation. Innovation needs to solve problems, big problems. We’ve reached a technological dead end not out of a lack of good fresh ideas, rather out of a lack of problems in traditional industries. Our enterprise systems are efficient enough. Transactions are done electronically and at extremely low costs. There is no demand for systems to become more efficient, all of the extra costs have been grabbed.

To search for innovation we must search for pain. If people’s wallets aren’t hurting there is no innovation to be made or to sell.
The financial crisis is the largest problem facing the world right now and technology has the ability to solve part of the problem and ease the pain.
In health-care, there is a lot of pain, so we will see innovation.
   
But truly the most pain in recent years has come from the utilities. Volatility of gas prices, rising carbon emissions and general awareness of global warming have created big losses for the utilities.
  
Looking forward, clearly the most innovative ideas and the most disruptive technologies will come from the clean tech industry. That is the industry that has the potential to save people the most money.
   
But for new innovations in clean tech, there needs to be a new breed of scientists. To create a more efficient wind turbine you need an aerodynamic expert. Sure solar cell producers need semiconductor people, but there is a need for a wide range of experts in various fields alongside them. Battery’s need electro-chemists, a field that has yet to participate in the tech boom. More electrical and Mechanical engineers are not going to be the people that design the best wind turbines or harness the earth through geothermal power, geologists will.
   
For this to happen, there needs to be a shift in what people go to study. Smart minds need to realign their priorities before looking into graduate programs. The computer science departments at MIT and Cal Tech won’t be teaching the innovators of tomorrow.
   
The problem is not just that we have these problems, but we do not have the people to solve the problems.