 So, I'd like to start with the topic that Manuel touched upon at dinner, that we heard from Deborah on the last panel, and that has to do with education and skills. And what is it that we need to think about to do to prepare our next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators? And Fiona and Manuel, if I could ask both of you to reflect on this. Oh, look at that. Politicians first. Politicians first. You're putting me down, Fiona. I'm elevating this. Wow, what a journey this conference. So, I would like to say the following. The word, the term inclusiveness, it was mentioned in the previous panel, not enough throughout the conference. Now, inclusiveness, in my view, and I will come back to your question, is not just kind of something that it would be nice to have because we have a social orientation. But I think it's a sine qua non for innovation to really take off, particularly in Europe, connecting to what I said last night, because we need to take advantage of everybody. And Deborah, the survey that you presented strongly confirmed that. I mean, the fact that most companies mark the lack of skills as the main impediment to innovation. Skills is not something abstract. It's people that don't have the necessary skills to contribute and to be part of the innovative process. So, clearly, that goes through education at all stages. Let me say a couple of things about that. I mentioned yesterday the early age. Let me refer now to higher education. Higher education needs to be transformed to reflect the needs of this time and age and this generation. We don't need, I think, for most people, for most young people to acquire degrees, academic degrees in the structure rigid way that we were conceived, you know, generations ago. The college, the MA, the PhD, and nothing in between. Nowadays, young people, particularly in the U.S., but not only, they take these MOOCs, you know, these series of courses that they can take online. They take sequences. These sequences become, for them, kind of the entry point into the labor market, and they are very flexible. They can update it and so forth and so on. What would that do to higher education? Big question, because there are issues of funding and so forth, but we should be going into that direction. One more point, and I'll let Fiona go on with this. In order to change institutions such as higher education, the most powerful level is policy of promotion. Because, you know, the people that make the universities are the professors, the professors react to incentives, particularly to promotion. If, in the promotion policies of the best universities, you will take into account not only the papers published in the best journals, but also the extent to which you get patents, the extent to which you get startups and the extent to which you contribute to online education. Believe me, that, you know, things will change very fast. Fiona. I'm going to try and be fast. I have Anne's voice ringing in my ears about you've got 20 seconds to have your thought. So I think I might be paralyzed at this point, but let me see what I can do. So I think in terms of skills in education, I think it's really important that we think about making sure that we give young people the right sets of skills. And I just sort of want to reflect back on that discussion about, you know, traditional car manufacturers, BMW, Tesla. If you just actually look at who's Tesla hiring and what are they looking for, you know, they are looking for lots of material scientists. And they're looking for people who understand energy storage technology and batteries and this and that and design and so on. Some of those things I think are deeply overlapping with the kinds of skills that are being given to young people in European universities who are then going to end up being the workforce of the future that BMW and others are going to hire, but I'm not sure that we are keeping up with the ways in which we see this changing skills composition and that we have universities that are structured to be sufficiently flexible to do that. My experience in coming from a traditional British university to the United States was that there was a significant amount of additional flexibility and at the moment that flexibility is constructed around taking portfolios of courses in different schools and departments. But I think Manuel is exactly right that that portfolio is going to look even more different as things start to come online and so on. I think we also have to think really hard about the way we teach. So when you think about incentives, it's much easier for a faculty member to stand up and give the lecture that they gave, you know, 50 years ago and just give the same lecture again and again and again because that requires no preparation. What is more challenging, I think, is this more problem orientation of teaching. We like to say that our students no longer want to come and solve problem sets. They come because they want to solve problems. So that means you have to create a problem-centric education where you start with toy problems, problems that are sort of a simplification of reality all the way through to real-world problems where you're immersed in what we think of as problem-rich environments. That's a very different way of teaching. That is something that is harder to do. It requires the people doing the teaching to think about things in very, very different ways. And it requires them to sort of orchestrate an educational experience in a fairly open-ended way. And I think we have to ask the question as to whether or not our current education or structures, even at the highest end, actually let us do that. And do they allow people to have these kinds of problem-oriented experiences so that when they get into the workforce, they're actually fit for purpose? They can do these sort of exciting new things. They can solve these interesting problems and they can be out there in the ways that they want to be. I think we also need to think about education in terms of diversity. And so I don't think it's enough to have a classroom where every single person in that room is studying the same subject or the same discipline because you end up with very narrow communities of practice and people. One of the things that I've seen work really well is when we set as an assignment a particular project that's happening in a real lab and we ask engineering students and science students and management students to work together to understand whether there's a commercial application there. They really wrestle. The engineering students wrestle with how to deal with soft data of marketing and customers and design and what people want. And the management students wrestle with the complexities of understanding new materials or Vladimir's organic LEDs. But it's when they work in those teams that I think they learn a completely different set of skills. And so even at the very highest ends of our education I think we have to do completely new things. And then I think as we sort of move across the spectrum we have to find ways of imparting these skills to people in different ways and that's a combination of online apprenticeships but things that are actually flexible and allow people to think about their career as a portfolio of experiences and competencies. And I think we have an incredibly long way to go to do that and I know there are policy levers that can help us but I think that demand has to come in some ways also from the young people themselves and frankly given the high rates of youth unemployment in many parts of the world but certainly in parts of Europe I'm not sure why we wouldn't want to run the educational experiment we have relatively little to lose to choose to educate some fraction of our young people completely differently because if there are other alternatives for unemployment we just run an experiment and educate half of them one way and the other half another way because if we're in such a complex and dire situation let's try something different. Thank you. And I was wondering if you could comment on that and kind of give us a lens into is this something that has to happen at the local level or do government agencies like the EU and the ECB have a role to play? Very good. Thank you so much. So I actually thought this morning because this is a session about the policy lessons what are for me one of the lessons and one lesson I learned last night over dinner when I sat next to a representative from a Spanish region who said to me you know it was very interesting but at this stage in Spain you know many economic problems I have to tell you innovation is not for us because we just don't have the money and I was very surprised and actually a little bit depressed because if we make such a pronounced link between money and innovation I think we're really doing ourselves a disservice and I think for so long because we've been pushing for the R&D unless you spend a lot on R&D you cannot be innovative this is now the perception that people have is we don't have the money we cannot be innovative that is devastating because that will essentially mean that those that need innovation the most at the regional level as you just said at the local level think we cannot have it and I think that that's not an empowering message and certainly not one that should come out of this conference but let me also say that I think and I see this all the time operating in the policy world innovation is ultimately a euphemism because innovation suggests success and every policymaker wants success but what they have to learn is to get to the success you will have many many failures way more failures than success and I can tell you from working with politicians and policy makers for pretty much all of my life professional life they don't like failure and they don't embrace failure so I think we need to do a much better job of saying that innovation requires failure and on the policymaking side what that will mean is we need many more approaches of trial and error where success is embraced of course but also failure more sort of pilots more beta versions of policy where maybe at the regional level you look at something and then if it works you can scale it up either nationwide or Europe-wide the third lesson I learned is the importance of technology adoption and diffusion this was a big theme yesterday but did you know that only one out of five companies in the EU are fully or highly digitized one out of five so I'm asking you how will the rest these four out of five that are not fully digitized how are they going to be successful in this world and I think linked to that and it came out this morning in the discussion we had on user centricity is the importance of data as a driver of innovation because innovation today is very much about customization is about connectivity and that is completely enabled by data but how often do we sit and really have a discussion about the importance of data and innovation not often enough and fourthly and with that I end is I think we urgently or let me go back to the digitization because one of the points I want to get across is I think we need better benchmarks yesterday we had a discussion on how to measure all of these things and we had we announced this in Europe for a long time the 3% R&D target this is we had we had national targets we had European targets we had tax incentives for R&D we had a whole infrastructure for R&D what do we have in place for digitization I just mentioned one out of five companies fully digitized but is that good or bad how does it compare to the United States how does it compare to Japan if we say it's bad then what are we working towards I really feel like we need better benchmarks on this because on digitization Europe unfortunately really is a little bit behind and I think partly because we have not sensitized enough and we don't have benchmarks lastly this is my last point since we are speaking at the ECB I think we need to better connect the macro and the micro because I mean Frank this is no offense to any macroeconomist in the room but I remember discussions about a decade ago when there were a lot of people scratching their heads about the Googles and the Facebook how are they going to make money if they don't actually charge their users no one would be asking that question today so we have been very slow on identifying new business models new value creations and I'm really urging a better connect the macro and the micro this is very very important I'm just delighted that the ECB is starting to focus on this because not just at the ECB but across policy making we need to do a much better job of linking up the macro and the micro and for the Europeans in the room think of also the governance because if you look at the importance let's say of a body like the euro group and the ecofin where the finance ministers meet versus the competitiveness council where all of the other ministers actually deal with competitiveness there's a world in between and I think we need to close that gap and the finance ministers themselves need to focus much more on all of these questions that would be for me one of the key policy lessons out of this thank you thank you so much Christian let me turn this over to you and ask just two follow up questions if I could it feels to me a bit like there's potentially two different models one might take at a very high level towards innovation policy and one is around as Anne was mentioning the development of benchmarks and moving towards set goals and the other draws on your work which is using cluster based analysis or other systemic approaches to enable regions to pursue a differentiated strategy as opposed to benchmarking themselves against a more objective measure is there attention there are those substitutes or compliments I guess is my first question and then my second which is not entirely related but something of interest to me thinking specifically at cluster based policy how do we use that not just to help frontier regions or frontier clusters move forward but to help other regions that might be in the average or lower category thank you for that question and I think these two issues are actually connected so if you look at whether there are two different models and whether there is a tension between the two I would say on the data side there absolutely isn't because I think when we work with regions and we work a lot with the European Commission which is investing a lot in data and indicators and all kinds of scorecards that's exactly the type of information that you need to figure out what do you stand as a region who are you rather than adopting one simple recipe that will work everywhere be more educated I think the challenge that we are practically different and there might indeed be a tension that a lot of our work tends ends up often with saying well but at the end of the day there is this one model at the end of the day we all want to have a university like MIT or Harvard and at the end of the day we would all like to support the new Amazon.com or the new Twitter or whatever in our region and I think that is very harmful and it actually relates a little bit to the point that Ann made I mean you talked about innovation is money and innovation is R&D and that's scaring people off. It's also scaring people off that they have to compete with Boston and Silicon Valley and these other leading locations or startup nation and Israel and so on I think we need to find both a better language and better policy instruments that really kind of target the average firm that target the average region and kind of give them a better sense on what needs to be done and that permeates a lot of the policy areas that we are talking about. This focus on venture capital I think this is important but we also have to recognize that that's a very small part of the distribution of firms that are targeted there. Education totally agree that we need to do much more there but we need to be careful that we not talk just about the 1% that you and I educate what's happening with the community college the entire education system and Manuel Manuel made that point. I'm actually a little bit worried after these two days there were a lot of great ideas and initiatives but I think we still talk a little bit too much just about the top end we need those top firms as well but we need to move the distribution and I think that might require quite different policy instruments some actually not as sophisticated some simpler ones that could be there. I want to make a second point and that's both an observation which I really like from these two days and I think something that we in Europe need to think very hard about and innovation and entrepreneurship is clearly very important somebody ought to do something about it and I want to focus a little bit on the first part there's somebody who is really that somebody what I really appreciate with the REAP program is that you kind of don't do traditional consulting you come in with great ideas but you empower these regions to do something more I know in the European Union we try that with smart specialization strategies it's hard, it's difficult but I think that's exactly the right direction that we need to go and in that context I think for Ann maybe in your work we need to think a lot about what are the goals that European institutions need to play there are a lot of problems that are European like digitalization but that doesn't automatically mean that the solutions are European level or that the European institutions are best place to do it because by their nature in Brussels we'll always see the average rather than the specific things so thinking more about how can we maybe take the inspiration from REAP and say how can we inspire the regions that need it most and there is no perfect model for that yet but I think more experimentation and moving in that direction I think that would already be a big step forward Can I ask you to comment on that and in particular to pick up on themes that both Christian and Ann raised which is the need for focus and policy on solutions that are more distributed and more inclusive both of you touched on them and connecting the macro and the micro Yes absolutely I am glad that both Ann and Christian made these comments we talk the object we are talking about is really truly very sophisticated both what Vladimir does in the lab and these systems and somebody asked the question of these ecosystems are very complicated so it sort of logically follows which is not true that policies have to be very sophisticated that you have to look for that lever to pull and so forth and it's very hard to admit that the reach of government policy to really affect the source courses of these is limited and that you can do a lot by acting up on much simpler things which doesn't mean that it's easy to succeed we talked about the location let me touch on something else that hasn't been discussed and that is social norms innovation means change change means disruption and you cannot have innovation true innovation without the ability to cope with the consequences of disruption and to celebrate that and that's part of social norms if social norms are very conservative this doesn't matter how much money you're going to pour into R&D or into skills innovation will not be tolerated by society can you influence social norms yes it's not easy can be that part of a deliberate government policy yes but very different from the notion of policies that we are used to think about them so that's something that's one two institutions the way they work and in particular you know in order to have innovation you need two things you need the one thousandth not one percent the one thousandth of the talented people that have both talent and entrepreneurial spirit you need to channel them into big challenges and with an output of resources into them that's MIT they attract one in one thousand one in one million because the whole world is kind of the game for MIT okay they present them this amazing slide you show this auditorium with one thousand two hundred and twenty six right students I will remember that number right so that's right and they are watching this amazing kind of ideas and you challenge them you can do it and when you teach Vladimir you are a vivid example of yes we can because there you made it right and so first and so on so you need that selection mechanism into this institution now let me say the following I think that in every country in every region you could have an institution one two like that you could it doesn't have to be at all that sort of MIT you won't have an MIT MIT is MIT because it's unique okay but you could have it could be an institution in the realm of agriculture or tourism or what not that is very prestigious that attracts young people with ambition that presents big challenges that have consequences for the community and so forth you could do that but it has to be deliberate you have to change the mindset of what constitutes policies that can really affect the base of that and one more point we engage a bit this morning on this when we think for example of Israel at the start-up nation and first of all it's not the start-up nation it's the start-up 10% nation because those engage in innovation in Israel 10% and has been for 20 years and it's not inclusive and really very critical of the system we have produced the ecosystem of Israel is not limited to Israel it includes you know Silicon Valley it includes New York it includes Boston I mean you know these people meet more often at the airport at the Logan airport than in Tel Aviv okay and so when we think about regions I want to encourage to think about virtual regions okay we need we live in a way that is intricately connected and it's these connections these networks that are extremely important yes you need the core which is geographically located but the extent of that core you know it's something to be seen because it varies and it has to have all these tentacles you know thrown into the wider geography so let's open our minds also in that sense Fiona I saw you taking notes can you comment that's what I do Kathy that's my thing well there are so many themes and so I'm just trying to think about how to weave them together in a way that even gives me some sort of mental coherence I think that I'd say a few things so the first is that I think when we think about innovation policy we are still in a world where we do want you know one lever and I think what we recognize is that there's not one and whether that's an obsession with a certain level of R&D spending that there are a series of small levers that need to be pulled and I agree with Manuel that those levers don't the policies themselves don't actually have to be particularly sophisticated sometimes but it is a commitment to pulling all of them and that is often very complicated because there is typically no such thing as an innovation department in a government it sits across all kinds of departments it sits across trade and investment across business, across education across immigration security and so on and so forth so I think we have to be willing to actually build bridges across different departments and pull those levers around innovation policy I think we also need to do the same thing in entrepreneurship and one of the things that I think is so intriguing about the policies to really support entrepreneurship is the fact that they're often less expensive even when innovation is less expensive entrepreneurship policies are often even less so and I always sort of think about David Cameron coming into government in the UK really right after the recession and having basically no money to spend and having to do something to try to push and jumpstart the economy and really making a series of small changes around entrepreneurship policy that included entrepreneurship visa capital gains, the real emphasis on tech city and identifying Silicon roundabout and then bringing entrepreneurs into number 10 and actually listening to them not actually putting them on posters and saying we like to have a few more of these but actually engaging them in the conversation and I think those were things that he was able to do that weren't actually hugely costly but really did send a signal and also led to sort of social change about what was acceptable, what was important so I think thinking about those two pieces of policy and recognizing that it's a lot of changes. The other thing I'd say is that at a top down level we might argue that quite a lot of those are going to be the same across regions. I think that the connection to the bottom up is this idea that then at the regional level we need to think about each region is going to have to do something different it is a little bit about smart specialization it's about being willing to have variation and variety. We know in a real biological ecosystem sense that it's variety and variation that leads to adaptation and strength and being willing to entertain the idea that we're going to have different programs that are going to solve and fit different regions and that we need a range of stakeholders involved in designing those I think is critically important and that means I think that it's very easy for us we talk about MIT partly because those of us who work there find the place extraordinary and it's an amazing place to work also it is an example but it's not, I don't think what we do is come and say we want one of those and I think Manuel's right in saying that actually it's both impossible because there's a path dependency to why we are the way we are but I think the question is you need one of something what is the unique kind of powerful central set of educational institutions that really galvanize the next generation to think about hard problems and to solve them in their unique ways so I think every region has to think about or country that is going to look like for them rather than trying to make it a copy of something else and then I think the other piece is this whole piece of diversity and inclusion which is we are, we do talk a lot as Christian said about the sort of the top end if you like and I think one of the deep recognitions that we've come to in REAP is that there are a set of things that we do to support these high growth potential IDEs and then there's a completely different set of policies that we want to put into place to support the smaller medium size enterprises we focus on that particular top end of IDEs because that's where our expertise lies that's what we know about it doesn't mean that we don't think the rest is important it's just that we don't have the same depth of expertise in what we do there but I think there's a connection between the two and so there are some wonderful examples of programmes that sort of exist around Boston where some of the really sort of high end entrepreneurs for want of a better word happen to be working out in a gym where all the gym trainers are actually former prisoners who've basically been trained how to kind of become self-employed and become trainers and suddenly this community starts to interact and you find the wealthy venture capitalist who's there trying to do his press-ups or what have you giving advice to these people about how they might start their small business and I think we send our students into schools and other places to really say let's engage across that distribution so that we can actually bring some of that excitement and enthusiasm across the spectrum and not ask people to have to go and get PhDs but to rather say there are ways of causing this cultural and social change by really being much more integrated and connected across these groups and these communities I think that's a very important piece of this I'm going to ask now for audience questions and then copy your strategy which is at the end close with asking you each to give one short take away I'll give you 25 seconds a piece if you'd like and let's continue with the model that's been used of taking two or three questions before responding can you give the microphone over there please Thank you Michael Street from the NATO Communication and Information Agency we're always short of money as an IT organisation we're terrified about well not terrified but cyber security is a concern on Fiona's point about this mixing of technical disciplines in education we run a cyber security summer school for the last couple of years we started focused purely on technology people because we're a technology organisation we've now broadened that and I make sure that every year we have technology and legal and policy students there because I'm now convinced that no one of those communities can solve this problem on their own we need to have that interaction and I wish I'd learnt 20 years ago that interaction is really important I've also learnt the value of Ernest Rutherford who said it before Churchill but we run out of money now we have to think it doesn't matter whether you've got no funding whether it's the UK or regions of Spain you need to think about doing things differently and more economically and when you get back to Brussels will you ask the president if he can educate politicians on risk appetite and the acceptance that failure has some value thank you terrific there's a question over here if you could pass the microphone oh goodness thank you so much okay so we'll go there thank you in the grey sweatshirt and then over to the gentleman next okay thank you good morning my name is Benjamin Baumeek I'm from the renewable energy space you can say in wind energy and we have seen a lot of innovation in the last 15 years especially in Germany manufacturers having become very successful in multiplying the output of wind turbines for example and my question is that this has been fueled by incentive schemes it was very regulation dependent and regulation driven and now many countries in Europe are moving towards for example auction tenders to bring in some competition into the whole game so to say so my question is how do you see this moving forward under this is the innovation going to slow down in this sector what do you expect and this certainly goes to everybody maybe Ms. Mettler and Mr. Kettels may know some insight on that Peter Olsen the chairman of the executive board of the European Institute of Innovation Technology EIT and you asked in the previous session for a good advice on what you should tell Mr. Junker when you met him next my suggestion is that he should sort of interest himself a little bit more for one of the most interesting experiments that the commission is doing the EIT we started less than 10 years ago and over 7 years we have built Europe's largest innovation ecosystem network where we are linking now more than 1,000 partners in 30 hops and we are producing more than 1,000 new candidates coming out of that equation the core is the interconnectivity in these ecosystems where we link education, business and research very very closely together because of the recent Forbes 30 under 30 in Europe competition 18 out of the 30 most important entrepreneurs in Europe came out of the EIT ecosystems and that's why we are now facing the next challenges that is to get access to quality risk finance because now our portfolios in the ecosystems are booming we need money but we need them with a quality label that means knowledge about the sector the exact timing of where to put the money and speed. Thank you very much okay let's turn back to the panel and a couple of those questions were directed to you can we start with you there was the one on educating politicians on risk appetite which I think anyone can can weigh in on and how you help I guess support missions like EIT that do that type of work my experience with policy makers is what works best is it has to be simple and it has to be a story so I want to use my time to tell a quick story which was that I've been hearing amazing things about the city of Stockholm and I decided a few months ago in Stockholm to understand better what is going on there did you know that Stockholm has the highest concentration of unicorns on a per capita basis outside of Silicon Valley did you know that so did you know that Stockholm last year and also the year before grew by 5% 5% in a very advanced developed technology so very very impressive and I visited one of the unicorns Klana which is a unicorn in the fintech sector very very successful has now 1,300 employees engineers from over 40 countries and I met the founder who is was originally from Poland his parents took him over to Sweden assembled beautifully in Swedish society but there's also Spotify the music streaming company King, the games company how many people are addicted to Candy Crush I used to be so I have to make this confession and did you know also that computer programmer is now the number one job not just in Stockholm city but Stockholm county they cannot get enough computer programmers and I was trying to understand what happened in Sweden why in Stockholm, why did this happen so when I went up there I learned a couple of things number one is Sweden invested massively in super fast broadband in the 1990s a lot of that investment didn't only come from companies but the government invested as well secondly there was a tax credit introduced by social democrat government to buy a first computer and so this Polish founder who came from a poor Polish family that emigrated to Sweden his family was able to buy a computer when he was a kid he learned coding, he was on that thing all the time and he says it was really instrumental in making him what he is today a successful internet entrepreneur thirdly particularly under center-right built Sweden very much deregulated so this goes back to the point of deregulation and it's a very open international economy you start a company in Stockholm very likely that this company is born global they will immediately start internationalizing fourthly I learned that sort of networks were very important that these very successful entrepreneurs in the 1990s they mentored other entrepreneurs and they were investing in these companies so this is this ecosystem that we were talking about earlier today and I'm telling you this because I want to just illustrate how complex this all is when Sweden invested in super fast broadband in the 1990s I'm sure they didn't think that one day 20 years later this is going to lead us to this success but what it means is that someone like Daniel Eck the founder of Spotify had he been born in Italy or Portugal probably today there would be no Spotify because you needed the super fast broadband in order to stream music so these kind of stories in my opinion help very much to get policy makers to really wrap their minds around and when I asked what is the key bottleneck today in Stockholm with regards to innovation it was housing they have severe shortage in housing and taxing stock options which you know is very important for tech companies so a lot of this has nothing to do with R&D or a lot of what we discussed here but I think we really need to wrap our minds around how interconnected everything is how complex and lastly I have to say this is really tough for someone like me to relate to policy makers so we need sort of simple stories not too complex I mean some of these slides that I've seen here they would just I mean they would scare you know a policy maker who doesn't deal with innovation because we need to bring them along as well you know it's not just the Carlos Muedas he gets this but it's everyone else so I just and I hope this answers some of the questions that I heard because I think really we need to think more about what kind of stories we tell to bring every all the policy makers along not those who have responsibility for innovation Christian Thank you Stockholm is a wonderful city unfortunately the government is right now not making any investments for the next 20 years but we'll see what happens let me quickly answer the question or address the question on wind energy because I think it's a great example of where innovation happened because we created a market not because we provided capital necessarily or we kind of pushed it in innovation system where the market push was there we didn't pick individual companies there was enough competition that allowed these European companies to grow now I think now we are at a point where the production costs for wind energy are at a level where they should be able to compete with other energy sources without strong subsidies from the way that we organize our energy markets the critical point there is I think predictability that we need to make sure companies understand with their investments plans where this is going I think then things are moving ahead but this is always a balancing act between the companies that of course are used to the subsidies and making sure we're not cutting up cutting them up too much I wanted to add one more point and you know we talk quite a bit about risks and failure and that we need to deal with that as well I think we're actually doing a relatively poor job as policy advisors or policy makers from learning from our own failures and Manuel you mentioned the Lisbon agenda and you know we have this teaching case that I use at Harvard Business School and you know you look at the Lisbon agenda you look at the revamp of the Lisbon agenda you look at the 2020 agenda and if you look at the items that are on these lists it's a lot of the things that we talk about so if we really want to be more successful it will not work that we basically try to do the same things that we had on these lists before which are the right items but we need to think much more about how we do them and that's why I so strongly believe that we in Europe need to think harder again about what's the right roles and responsibilities here of different actors private public you know we heard about the example from automotive but also our different levels in government and I think there we are uniquely different from the United States I don't think necessarily the federal government in the U.S. is the right model for the European level but we need to think much more about how we do things rather than think that oh there is this magic new policy you know this new venture capital scheme or whatever and that's going to fix things thank you other questions thank you Enrique with MIT Open Learning so a lot of the conversations I've hovered around the skills gap and the lack of talent available etc and to me I'll preface the question with a comment is that the issue of the skills gap underestimate the power of the individual and individuals that you know conform a society make choices and they make choices based on their information they have and the knowledge they acquire through learning and also masks the private sector's reluctance to invest in developing workers so companies rather hire workers that are ready on day one then to kind of put them through a process and obviously that kind of depends on the kind of labor markets that you have but the tendencies for firms not to you know conduct that investment and countries are being pressured or kind of the public sector to not making those investments due to the balanced budgets kind of initiatives so the question is what do you see the role of online learning technologies blended learning technologies and helping individuals help themselves in opening up markets for labor mobility that actually are demand driven based on what they learn from the offerings that they have available thank you we had a question over there a suggestion for Ann you asked about or you said you need stories to tell your politicians tell them the story of the two salesmen one salesman found that he had to talk to 10 customers potential customers before he sold a car he was depressed and gave up the second salesman found that he got one sale for every 20 customers he talked to he became a successful salesman selling hundreds of cars a year there's a question could you pass the microphone down that way well first of all I have to apologize because my English is not the best I am a doctor of medicine and I am the companion of my two daughters they are invited here with other five explorers they won the Jugendfoscht contest of Germany last year and one of my daughters this morning said well mom we are just a frame program here nobody or nearly nobody takes notice of us and that's what I want to remark that's what we what we saw the last year one of our neighbors also won the contest in technology and he had very good ideas but there was no one who encouraged him and I talked to his parents they said well we should make a marketing we should have somebody who products this product he to make this idea real and there's no one who does this even if his father is a professor of university in Germany so it's the same with us I'm the only one in our family this is good my daughters we search something no one in the whole world did so far it's a biological relationship it depends on diabetes and one of my daughters is able to put biological relationships into mathematics formulas and she wrote an app and well but if I would not be the one who will say well this is good and the german diabetes society does the same and they always answer well when will it be ready no one would give support and you have here one of the best younger people but I don't know if anybody gives support to them and there's so much capacity which is not really get into well how I say into reality well can I yes you wanted to before we go on and thank you for clapping I was going to encourage everyone to clap and it came spontaneously thank you for your comments and thank you young innovators for being here during this conference I know that a number of our speakers were delighted to be interviewed by you and that people have mentioned to me how appreciative they have been of the opportunity to see your poster boards while you were here I know that is not the type of support that you were talking about but it is at least a type of support we've been able to show and I commend the ECB for bringing attention to your remarkable achievements so if I could just ask us all to clap one more time Manuel you also had and you got the story this is what you should tell the politicians I mean you know just that story tells of the failure of Europe to innovate because you see if these young people the most talented ones okay don't get recognition don't get avenues to channel the talents and to turn them into reality nothing good will come out so you know I mean it's just you know one single story that one okay and this conference believe me in my view was worthy just to hear that story can I add some to that it's not just about telling stories it's about doing it as managers as managers we have to who here in the room works with really young people I remember when I got my job I hired a really bright young Italian 23 at the time I made him my policy assistant people said you're crazy the guy is just out of university you know what today this young man is really a superstar he gets more invitations to speak than I do he is running the team really I mean he is so successful he is so good because I gave him an opportunity and this is really for everyone here to do not just to talk about the stories and celebrate and give lip service to the young people but to really empower them give them ownership give them responsibilities that's what I think we need to do can I continue the point yeah you know when we talk about policy and government we tend to think of it in an extremely abstract way you know there is policy and it doesn't work that way and when people talk here and you are about educating politicians you know it's very hard to educate and to change people's behaviors particularly if you don't change the incentives so let me say the following I think we need to rethink and in a way I think we need to rethink and innovate also in the realm of politics and government big time and let me give you just one example not an example but kind of a crazy idea that came out from talking over coffee with Rain Hilde she is not here right now so I take the liberty of revealing the conversation we said the following in order to innovate you have to be forward looking you have to think long term who in the population has interest in the long term those young ladies over there the young people the older people have an interest in keeping the status quo and preserving vested interest now the voting system doesn't allow for that for the expression of the long term of the young people because most voters are older so what if we waited the vote by 100 minus your age or one over your age okay so you give more weight to the votes of young people that single change which is crazy to think of it now but believe me it may become a reality if we put our minds to it and realize the implications of that in so many different ways then you wouldn't need to educate the politicians they will react straight to that and they will put their minds into the things we are talking about be it long term infrastructure or education or paying attention to this young talent thank you I wanted to end by asking starting with Christian and then I will wrap up so I think the key issue for me is really that we make innovation entrepreneurship relevant for everyone that we make it relevant for more industries for more people for more regions not only across Europe but especially here I think then we will have a higher chance of being heard rather than being kind of a minority topic that is interesting for the experts I want to go back to what I said before connect the macro and the micro imagine if we had gone into Greece with a very ambitious innovation policy helping the tourism sector to really improve be more innovative agricultural products bring some startups there invest in super fast broadband and I can tell you as someone who once lived in Greece it's a beautiful place you want to be an entrepreneur and live in a fabulous, sunny wonderful country I want to go to Greece Two points, one envy is not a good recipe for policy so MIT envy Silicon Valley envy don't use that as a recipe for policy Europe for all its misgivings it's a wonderful place on earth so celebrate that to restore faith in the idea of progress that started with the enlightenment we have forgotten it I just want to repeat what Manuel said about don't have MIT envy or Silicon Valley envy MIT suffered for a long time of having Stanford envy and I think when we got over that when we decided to try and be the best we can the things that we do differently and uniquely and I think the same goes for anywhere in Europe and anywhere else around the world is forge your own path and think about those things where you really do have the comparative advantage and the other thing I would say I believe strongly that we must challenge our universities and our educators and our students to actually push the system and to experiment and to demand a different way of being educated but rather than having that all be top down and those experiments be designed just by policy makers let's ask our customers ask our students how would they like to be educated what kinds of educational experiences do they think would actually fit them for the careers and the impact that they want to have in the world I think if we'd learned anything it's about asking our customer what they really want and I think that they have some extraordinary ideas and put the kind of energy and faith and progress back into the system when we really need it well thank you everyone I think over as I look back over the course of the day these two days and think about the really insightful comments that have just been shared what stands out to me is the power that can come from bringing an audience as diverse in terms of stakeholder groups positions industries represented youth to the more experienced the power that can come from the exchange of ideas and new collaborations like that between us and the ECB so please join me in thanking not only these panelists but the other speakers and as well yourselves for a great couple of days I mean the program says concluding remarks I suggest we just go ahead to launch directly it has been very long I think the conclusions have been wonderfully extracted by the concluding panel let me just add a couple of things we started with President Draghi recognizing that innovation entrepreneurship was very important but not at the core of monetary policy however I think it's also directly important because at the end innovation entrepreneurship are key to increase the natural directly important for monetary policy but also for the somehow notion of disrupting the policy debate in Europe I think the idea of this conference was to liaise with our natural counterparts the Commission and the European Investment Bank and then use the powerful beautiful catalyzer of which is MIT and somehow make an exercise in brainstorming on policy as I said I will not try to summarize but there are two lines that I cannot help repeating because I think they are very important ones and they are the ones that make me hope to think that we have exceeded expectations we want to achieve I think it has worked very well one of them is the notion of connecting macro and micro that was not really explicitly the intention I think it has become explicit but when I think of how we structure the sessions that is exactly what we have achieved so thank and we are putting the words and the other thing is maybe to also think what Manuel just said this notion is all paradigm of policy being a policymaker getting all the information having a budget and solving a problem that is very old fashioned that cannot be and my own reflection is that we have done here is part of policymaking is policymaking at the level of brainstorming in a way which is visible which somehow helps to make further progress and the last thing I wanted to say what is the notion of what we are doing here I would say it is not only concluding here it is not finalizing now at a minimum we will write up the conclusions, the discussions we will try to reflect the richness of the discussions in a write up in a volume perhaps we have to still discuss nonetheless you already have it webcast or if any one of you wants to somehow go back or maybe see what you know or tell a friend please don't hesitate to send the link and we will also reflect on not leaving it here perhaps with the Commission with the European Investment Bank hopefully still with MIT we do something more but of course that depends on the people you saw yesterday the board members of the ECB and I hope we somehow manage to convince them to go further, thank you very much can I say where we have to thank the organizers Cathy and Diego for doing a fantastic job of putting this together it's so different from everything thank you very much I thank you but I also have to do what Cathy did yesterday which is to thank the people who made this possible I will not say all the names, they know who they are they're sitting some of them at the end of the room also Nikola is not here but Alessandra, oh you're here sorry Nikola you're here I didn't see you, Alessandra, Silke from the MIT team thank you very much thank you very much