 has to change, and we have to become uncomfortable with what we are trying to do. We tend to be afraid of risk, because Congress will smash us as an agency, we will get smashed by our constituencies. Why are we doing this? But the greater risk comes that if we do not try to find novel ways of improving the number of lives saved, of people of ending hunger of dealing with disease, if we do not try to do that experiment, those opportunity costs may be actually a greater risk, because if we do the same thing and expect different results, we are taking a risk in being able to do that. I do believe, and it's interesting that my colleague here is from the Mars Innovation District. I encourage you to look at it. It's really cool. But it made me think of another example I like to give, which is the fact that we have put a VW-sized rover on the surface of Mars and used a crane hanging from the middle of space on an alien planet to lower it onto the surface of that planet. If we have got the ability to do that, then we have got the ability to address some of these other problems. One complication is NASA doesn't have to deal with humans, which is why social science, anthropology, economics are a critical part of science as well in solving these problems. But we have got the ability to do and take new approaches to solve these problems. Thanks. Thanks, Alex. Here, when I took away from your comments where this issue of the new solvers and these new collaborations, I think, Ilse, your new life at Mars is, I think, indicative of this, the Mars Discovery District. I noticed that Rich has a BlackBerry. I just wanted to do a quick product recognition given that BlackBerry is from RIM and RIM is a Canadian company. So I think it's very appropriate. You had a past life in venture capital. You also have a deep private sector background, so I particularly appreciate you making the trip down to be here because I think we've talked about science and pure research and the importance of it in the way it's evolving, but also the importance or the central importance of commercial applications to this. And so I think that, I suspect that was part of the premise for the Mars Discovery District. So please share with us a little bit about Mars Discovery District and also how should, and I hope you'll also take a little bit of time to think about Canada's in the process of thinking about multi-sector approach to science and technology and applying it to development, how in your mind should Canada be thinking about this? How should Canada bring in its universities and research institutions? And so if you were advising the Canadian aid minister and supposing he was in the room or just down the hall or maybe watching this, what would you advise him on this as well? So also the floor is yours. Thanks. Thank you, Dan. And thanks to Richard and Alex. It's fantastic to be part of a conversation where we all share the enthusiasm of the capacity of science, technology and innovation to make change in the world. And maybe, maybe let me focus as you say a little bit on sort of our window from the Canadian science and technology and academic engine. And I think I want to just in the context of development policy make a bit of a plea that we do not lose sight of the importance of partnerships with academic and other research institutions around the world. And I think to Richard's point, the science enterprise is becoming a lot more collaborative and we're seeing such extraordinary growth in the participation from emerging economy players. And I think in that context it's often easy to think that the researchers are entrepreneurial and they'll find their way in terms of partnering or universities will set up the collaborations that make sense for them. But I think it's really important to take a long-term view from a development perspective of the role of academic institutions and the entire spectrum from basic research to applied research as a capacity builder for future innovation and future trade collaborations. I'll just give you one small personal story. I grew up in South Africa, left South Africa and went to do graduate work in the UK and then in Canada. But in the late 80s I was invited by the then head of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to come back and look at their material science programs and make some recommendations going forward. What was interesting about that in South Africa and what was interesting about that time was political change was clearly in the air and the institution wanted to get ready for some of the tough decisions that needed to be made. And so we looked at the internal programs, the partnerships with academic institutions and industry and so on. And through a really quite amazing set of leadership attributes at the time, decisions were made to sort of deepen and maybe narrow some of the basic research there, build partnerships with local and international academic institutions and then begin to very specifically focus on applied research challenges that were relevant to the local environment. And because I became so interested in that, I've been tracking what happened out of that, what seems like a fairly modest piece of interaction and frankly, extraordinary solutions for health and environment, extraordinary companies that are now providing solutions across Africa. And the most important piece actually to me is the lineage of talent and scientific leadership talent that took advantage of those decisions locally but then also mentored a new generation of science leaders both in business and in academia. And many of them are names that you know in the U.S. today. So it's amazing how important it can be and I would just encourage us not to assume that that part of the innovation food chain will take care of itself but to be cognizant of its potential for the long haul. Certainly from my window at Mars, the early stage start-up SME part of the innovation enterprise globally is also becoming a very critical piece. And there's no question that the global forces are very much part of driving what people do in science and technology ecosystems in North America, certainly in our own, because it's totally changing. I mean ideas are more mobile than ever, entrepreneurial talents more mobile, capital is more mobile, market opportunities are opening up in new places and frankly competitions coming from places where you wouldn't have normally expected it. And then global supply chains are becoming much more complex for young emerging companies to insert themselves effectively into that process. But when I look at how we think about entrepreneurial ecosystems in North America today, there's a kind of a patriotic thing. It's about growing local jobs. There's a big piece of that. I think through the lens of this conversation today, maybe we should start to think much more about that global start-up system as a multi-nation enterprise and focus on being brokers and celebrators of entrepreneurial talent and breakthrough companies, wherever they come from, and knowing that they will move as they need to and focus our important initiatives on opening up challenge for them to raise capital or to access markets here and elsewhere. Because that sort of builds on that assumption that the entrepreneurial lever is one of our most important long-term levers for driving change. And then as a geek, I love technology and science and technology and I certainly live in a world where the classic view of an important idea that becomes a product or a service that makes it into a market is a big part of the entrepreneurial thinking. And we often get trapped, I think, when we think about technology and science solutions coming to emerging markets to be fixated on the gadget, to be fixated on the cool thing. When in fact the challenge is to actually scale and diffuse those gadgets or those solutions into new systems. And that means that we need to think much more holistically about the system into which we innovate. And it becomes as much a social innovation challenge as it becomes a technology challenge. And the flip side of that, and we heard this a little bit from Alex and Richard too, is that the solutions that are being developed now for our big hairy challenges, and some of those are extraordinarily daunting, are forging new collaborations that are driven much more from where those problems originate. Have a new set of problem solvers around the table. And I think our challenge is how do we effectively insert ourselves and our knowledge and expertise into those issues. The question I'm particularly interested in is how do we insert the true breakthrough innovators in our small and medium sized startups, because they're often working at the bleeding edge of the solutions. But our systems don't really know how to accommodate them because they're a messy bunch, they're not represented by anybody. So how do we insert them into the process to get their best thinking into that? And then if we put on a trade hat, is those solutions will then migrate, I think, among emerging economies more so than from us to them. And so how do we become part of that solution set in the long haul? So these are very complex challenges that I think are in front of us, and we will need to rethink not just the way we do business, but how we bring new players to the table. One of the opportunities I'm the most excited about from our ecosystem is the role of the diaspora. And, you know, Toronto is a city of immigrants. We are seeing a huge shift in our startup companies, particularly in areas like health and energy and where they do business, because we don't have the luxury you have in the US of a big local market. So our startups have to be global companies from the day they're born. And Canadians have been, frankly, quite lazy, because we've had this big US markets out of the border, and you've had a great appetite for our innovation. But what I'm seeing now is, you know, as US markets and European markets have become a little more sluggish, what we're seeing is young companies designing products entirely for emerging markets. They're skipping over, you know, trying to even do anything in the US. And that is a huge opportunity by itself, I think, for Canada. The second piece I would say is we have a new generation of technology entrepreneurs who are also social entrepreneurs. And their contribution to development solutions that are science and technology based, but also have a mission to make a different positive difference to the societies in which they apply is an extraordinary opportunity that we need to try and tap more effectively into our more formal trade and development systems. Thank you very much. I want to take a couple questions. This has been a very patient and supportive audience. So I know I see some hands. I'd like to get some hands for the conversation on science and technology and innovation. I see a gentleman back there, and I see my friend over there, so that we're going to take these two folks. Yeah, if we've got a microphone, if not, we'll just speak up and I'll use your big room voice. So go ahead. Can we start with, can we start with our verbiage and stop referring to the industrialized countries as donor nations and call them partner nations? Second question is with regard to USG being the lender of the last resort of becoming comfortable with the idea of making very difficult decisions about lending and accepting risk. My observation is that there is a staggering lack of competence among federal agencies for analyzing business risk. There is a great deal of understanding of the need for it, but what we end up with are iconic examples like CELANDRA, in which there are a successive series of decisions were made, which in retrospect, a businessman probably never would have allowed. And so I'm wondering if there should not be some consideration given of how you balance the interest in being willing to lend the money with the expertise it takes to actually monitor the business as it goes along. Okay, so let's get a couple. I'm here for my friend up front here, Maggie, this woman up front, please. Good morning. My name is Barbara Simmons. I'm Dean of International Education at William V. S. Tubman in Liberia. This was, this panel is just, all I can say is wow, because you touched on all the points. Last week, we hosted through the constituency for Africa at the Microsoft Innovation Center, a session on African and African-American universities, the diaspora stakeholders and STEM. And people were so enthusiastic. What we want to do now, and what I'm asking of you, is how do we get started on implementing or moving forward some of the ideas of bringing people together, being inclusive, and then mapping out a way that we can go forward. Thank you. Thanks very much. I'm going to take a third. If we've got a third hand here, this gentleman here, then I'll do another round. Thank you. My name is Frank Barone. I live here in Arlington, Virginia. I have been in science and technology myself professionally for some 40 years after graduating from Berkeley with a PhD in chemical engineering. I have seen, as you have Richard, many, many generations of evolution. Recently, I have gone back to the Bay Area and have been a significant investor and founder in what's called the Tech Shop Movement, part of the Maker Movement, which is encapsulating a significant number of what you've all talked about today. One of the things we are experiencing here is that we are observing people who are artistic, who are finding a very easy path to transition to S&T and I as opposed to the inverse for the S&T and I element to transverse into the artistic. It was brought out to me one day by one of the art students that was there from San Francisco State College that Picasso effectively created art first and then used the technologies of enabling the materials, secondly, to create a preservation product such as Michelangelo did. So our thrust of the Tech Shop in San Francisco, which we've propagated it now to Arlington, we have one over in Crystal City, a Tech Shop, which we put right in the artistic community, right in the underground in Crystal City, I invite any of you to come and see it. We're actually working hard to change the STEM to steam. We believe that the common denominator between science, technology, engineering, and math centers around art, which is the enduring human aspect of civilization throughout many histories. So I'd like to ask your opinion, if any of you have a thought on that, just what your personal observations have been, is where does art fit in the midst of the STEM? Okay, let's get Joana Nessa, the title here. Maggie. Joana. Hi, I'm Joana Nessa. I'm with Chevron. And I wanted to ask you to comment on something that each of you mentioned, which is really technology transfer and the fact that there's a lot of technology in existence. There are a lot of current innovations that haven't been picked up. I think about this a lot in the ag sector. And a lot of that engagement has to be around people-to-people interaction and extension systems. I think there's an interest in scaling up, but the fact is that people don't often pick things up until they learn about it from another person. And I wanted to ask what your thoughts are in terms of how you reinvent that exchange of information and ideas and adoption of technology. Well, these are some great questions. Richard, I'm going to have you go first. We'll just go down the path. I think Ilsa, anywhere where there was a US centric question, I'd like you to answer that in the Canadian context, if you would, please. Richard. Sure. Terrific questions. Thank you for picking up on some interesting issues. I'll briefly address the issue of terminology. This is certainly the dead hand of the past that still controls a lot of the terminology. And much of that is multilaterally driven. We still have something called official development assistance, for those of you in the room who know ODA. And believe it or not, people still believe that that is a critical defining factor in terms of determining both outputs and outcomes in development. I don't agree with that, but I ran at that particular windmill some years ago and got beaten off. So secondly, re-raising the issue of risk, which Alex had highlighted as well. This is actually a very crucial issue as a context for S&T to play any serious role in particularly US bilateral assistance. But I think it also affects the private sector. And to me, it's been a great concern of the extent to which large companies have been dismantling and outsourcing their R&D operations because, in fact, the risk involved in the rate of return on that would detract from their bottom line. And so risk has actually now been sort of almost ghettoized into a startup world. And many of the VCs don't even want to fund sort of the first stages of research because it's unclear it doesn't meet their probability tests about success. So as a society, we have an issue about risk. It's not just USAID. Although I must say that that is critical and I know one of the first sort of startling comments I heard from the current administrator when he took office was that he thought a central challenge he had was to persuade his overseers that, in fact, risk was not a dirty word. And I can't say they succeeded because, in fact, the systems that were in place then are still in place. And despite Alex's wonderful efforts in creating the development lab to try to create a different aura for possible acceptance of risk in an official US government agency, which I hope pay off. But it is truly a cultural challenge we have because the fact is that by never describing what it was for all my years as an assisted administrator, I was able to put $20 million a year, and that was real money then into looking at malaria vaccine research that never produced a vaccine. But the research is absolutely crucial for exploring pathways, for learning more about the organism, and laying the foundation for what will one day produce a really good malaria vaccine. But if anybody had known about that, if any congressman ever asked me to testify about it, it would have been dead, because it did not produce a success in their terms. So risk, I think, is a big issue. And one day we will figure out as a society and as a government how to deal with that. And examples like Cylindra do damage that. But I differentiate in the sense that Cylindra was a technology choice. And the government does not show itself being very good at that. Further upstream, in terms of funding research, I think that the scientific community has an excellent job of sorting out, in fact, what should be invested with an appropriate level of risk. Actually, the only thing I'll pick up in the other question, because I don't want to take too long, is that I think tech transfer and extension and adoption of technology remains a key issue. Although I think it's much easier today with communication systems and so forth. And I think we should have very high expectations for much more rapid adoption of new technologies than we may have experienced in the past. Yeah, a lot of things. The first question is to partner nations, I totally agree. You look at the Pew polls and the number one thing the United States is respected for above everything else, above naked dating or looking at us from the outside is science, technology and innovation. One of the things just to recognize is if we take that framework of partner nations, we'll recognize that reverse innovations actually can be really useful. We spend 10 times the amount on healthcare as other countries that have the same outcome. So what could we actually learn from innovations that are better designed, worked for achieving some of our goals in the developing world and how do we bring them back and the US, the development labs that USAID funded in places like Duke and the Duke Medical Center system, which is one of the biggest in North Carolina and one of the best in the country are actually looking at how they can take those innovations from the developing world and put them back into our healthcare and I think that's really smart. In terms of business risks, the one thing I would just say is people bring up Selindra and there's a great story of Secretary Chu when no one was paying attention to him, the crowd wouldn't quiet down, just decide to say the word Selindra, Selindra, Selindra to get people to listen in which they immediately did. But we don't talk about how many actually good ideas, good programs and great things are funded where we did take risks. How many great corporations and startups have we had? And the fact is there is a real serious problem when institutions like the National Institute of Health is well known when I was a grad student in terms of the applications, you have to have 70% of the research done to actually get accepted was the mantra and now our acceptance rates on those institutions are really low. So people aren't taking risks, which means we're not advancing the science and the way you set up an experiment, whether it is a development program or anything else, the way you set it up is so you learn either way. But there's ways we can think about innovations that we can borrow from the private sector, which is, you know, 70% of your work is your core work. 20% is in an adjacent space and 10% is allowing you to take those approaches to rethink assumptions. The last thing is I just think we don't learn enough from failure and there are ways to mitigate that risk by partnering with other places. So almost every single thing my former office in the US Global Development Lab did was in partnership with other institutions around the world, DFID, Gates, anywhere at private sector, Duke Energy, which was a way to actually get the benefit and the advice of them looking at these programs and to share the risk across many. Barbara, Dean Simmons, there is a great, I totally agree about the diaspora as well. Just for the US, 30% of our startups in California are funded by people who are foreign born. So that diaspora is important for our security in the United States. But there's great programs that we set up at AID. Peer is one of them, where if you have an existing NIH or NSF grant, USAID will connect an American researcher with a researcher in the developing world. Canada has been doing these kind of programs for a very long time. The GCDs and the whole purpose of things like DIV was to actually make that was a recognition that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Does it go that what is DIV? DIV is a development innovation ventures, which is now this larger collaborative US Global Development Fund. It is really opening up the doors to people around the world to co-solve and co-create these problems, which gets us to the tech transfer issue. And I don't think it's tech transfer. I don't think it's one way anymore. I think it has to be a multiple directions. It has to be around co-creation. We need to look into networks and network science, and there's a great field in biology called coupled human natural systems that has done that. But looking at human behavior and what it means to be able to transfer and help people share information better and I don't think we've done enough of that in terms of thinking about scale and demand. Again, there's a lot we can learn from the private sector. I used to work. I created the first National Park in Afghanistan. This year, they just created the second one there in a place called the Wachong Corridor. And one of the things, Wachong is really close to something called the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility. It is so remote that it is the most remote place. Six weeks by Yak is the usual round trip. Kid you not. No roads. This is the Silk Road. You're coming along some of these places and you come across a place selling Pringles. So how in the hell they get the Pringles there and why can't we use that for global health? Honestly. And that's understanding demand. That's understanding scale. That's understanding local people and that's understanding knowledge. And that's what we should tap into for tech transfer. Last two points, which are sort of extraneous points, going back. The problem with universities and right now I'm the first David Rubenstein fellow at Duke. They've now created a fellowship to help the university think about how it addresses big global challenges. I'm there for a year. It's a phenomenal place. The problem is our university's relevant is research how we actually have it relevant. And it's not unless we think about how we translate that. And how do we actually cut across the disciplinary boundaries that are there. And that comes to changing tenure and promotion. And how do we actually evaluate people. And that's got to be part of it. In the developing world, we've got a bigger problem. Those people who are in charge of the universities and who are sort of at the upper echelons of the universities may not be the most innovative have the most capabilities to actually solve this problem. I saw this at McCary University. It was unbelievable that there was a student there who developed a cell phone app that he had done a million dollars of sales on that was an auction site to do arbitrage between people within the remote communities in Uganda and people in the city to sell fruit back and forth. And completely he was at the university come up completely ignored by the university. And that's where some of these solutions are going to come for the last very, very, very last thing. I think that they're we're not recognizing that there's these huge changes that are going on. And part of it is because these communication tools right it's now 700 million cell phones in sub Saharan Africa right took 20 years for the first 100 million it took three years for the next 200 million that 20% of our smartphones that's doubling every year. So the penetration is is is is unbelievable in terms of the access that is infrastructure as much as roads are those are pathways into education pathways into finance ways of leapfrogging failed financial infrastructure. And they are also ways of new economic opportunity. And you see this now we're seeing a separation of work and geography around the world. There is a global community that I work with to get me products from my company that are based in Philippines and Pakistan and a lot of places I wouldn't have expected people to be doing design and innovation and tech work for me in the past that I now have access to because they now have access. And I think that's really significant. Also, if you could welcome your response to these questions, but I also want to put an additional question to you, which is given this conversation. What does this mean for DFATD? What does this mean for Canada? Just give you know, this is a I'm all ears. I'd like to hear, you know, I suspect you have something to say about this. So answer some of the questions, but I'm going to come back to you and say, tell me what is this? What does it mean for for our friends in in in Canadians, Canada's foreign affairs, a ministry? Yeah, but that's a that's a tough question. But just to show you some of the I've never heard the word donor nations until today, so it's not in use in Canada. This the second the second comment I would make is is just around, I think, following up on on Alex and I think what we're talking about here today is we are absolutely in a time of extraordinary transformation of both the global science enterprise, but more importantly, our institutional capacity to deal with it. And I think the challenge for all of us is going to be, you know, how do we rethink the way we partner? How do we rethink the way we we organize how we convene who's at the table in such a fundamental way that it's going to be where the strains are. I'm not so worried about our ingenuity and our ability to come up with with solutions. And that goes to the steam question. You know, I, I think our challenge is always going to be as you've you've heard from from Alex, some of these challenges are still so myopically specialized, that, you know, we need to continue to to build that sort of trunk of deep expertise and not ever shy away from that, but then get the integrators working and whether that's T shaped people or steam people. I think these are these are just inevitable and the the solutions will come from these adjacent spaces, but then, you know, are our formal institutions even including our academic institutions equipped to allow for that trans disciplinary expertise? I will just make one comment for you on tech transfer because we we're running an interesting experiment in Toronto, where we literally have in the downtown core, the University of Toronto, 10 affiliated teaching hospitals, some of the largest academic research centers you would find. Historically, each had their own tech transfer office. So if you came from Boston to Toronto, you'd have to visit 16 tech transfer offices all under resourced results, you know, terrible, even though we perform with some of the best in the world on the scientific output. So so about four, five, five years ago, we went through a process where we've in change that process to now have a single commercialization platform where all the IP from 16 academic institutions come into a single storefront to be bundled to be accessed. What was very interesting as this as the the steam part of of that solution was because you broke down the silos of these these proud institutions in this process, they were all putting their IP into a thing that didn't have their name on. That opened up a whole new process to bring other actors into the tech transfer and commercialization process from students who are often the vectors of of tech transfer to industry secondees to to other agents from law firms from other places. It's just fascinating how that single sort of decision changed the way the whole organism sort of does its work. You know, from a Canadian perspective and advice to the fact that I personally think that Canada Canada has a number of features. It's a small country in the scheme of things. It has a huge long history of being a active global citizen on a number of different levels. There's no question in my mind that the recent leadership from Canada on child and maternal health would not have happened if it wasn't decades of global health research in our academic institutions that go back before anybody had a name for it. That's just, you know, part of our global persona. And I think it's important for us to stick to that knitting of Canada as a broker and particularly leveraging our diaspora communities, which which I think is, you know, is a very powerful feature for Canada just because we're we're a little bit in the in the glue, you know, rather than than being a power broker at either end. In terms of risk and the the management of risk, Canadian governments are pathologically adverse to to making choices and choosing winners. So much so that our science and research economic tax credits, which is a very big system in Canada, we choose that over direct investment because we refuse to choose winners. Of course, you know, that that's a debatable debatable strategy. But I think we have no choice in this new world of public private partnerships as the only mechanism to do business at home and to do business in the world to create mechanisms where we can share not just the money coming from public and private sources, but actually the expertise, including risk management expertise. We're very active at Mars in the area of impact investing. And again, you know, very powerful sort of diaspora contributions there. But the reason why I'm excited about impact investing, one of the reasons is that it actually creates formal structures for public and private financiers to bring their expertise in terms of selecting investments, managing investments, and also mobilizing capital to that process. And the young talent from the traditional financial institutions are flocking to this field. So again, it's an opportunity for us to tap into that capacity. And the other thing that makes me really excited, it's full of women. So I think we'll also make different choices when we have more women making those investment decisions, which by the way, in venture capital, in Canada, in the United States, is still pretty pathetic. And, you know, it's great that we focus on child and maternal health, but women globally are stepping up in the innovation systems. And I think it's a really interesting challenge for us is, you know, what is what is Canada going to do to actually play a role in that part of the global female talent that's going to emerge on the global stage? Okay, folks, please join me in thanking the panel. We're going to take a 10 minute, but you have a promise you're going to come back in 10 minutes, a 10 minute coffee break, there's sodas and coffees outside, see it in 10, and there's also food. Food, if you wanted to grab lunch, you can grab lunch now or you can grab lunch after the keynote. We'll also do a brief break. But if you want 10 minutes, come back in 10 minutes. Thanks very much.