 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining us back here for the third issue briefing of this year's annual meeting of the new champions here in Dalian. Welcome also to our audience watching this live online at weforum.org. This issue briefing is about frontier research at the annual meeting of the new champions. We look far ahead into the future, into the disrupters of the disruptors of today. The title of this particular session is Ambitious Research, a key ingredient for Europe's growth I'm very pleased to announce my panel. On my immediate left is Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the European Research Council, based in Belgium. Carlos Moedas, Commissioner of Research, Science and Innovation of the European Commission and a co-chair of this meeting. Welcome back, sir. And very pleased to be joined by Professor Panayota Puirazi, Research Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the Foundation for Research and Technology in Greece. So a range of perspectives on European research. I'm going to start by asking Commissioner Moedas to give us your vision for frontier research in Europe and what it means, exactly. Thank you so much and thank you again for all of you to be here. First of all, I would like to say that how lucky we are in Europe to have the European Research Council. How lucky scientists are to have such an independent body that actually looks after researchers, takes care really of giving them the opportunity to do what they love, which is science. And so I'm very honored to be here just with the President and also the Vice President of the European Research Council because, for me, it's really one of the most amazing projects of Europe. And so when you ask me about my vision, the vision for frontier research, frontier science, curiosity-driven research, first my vision is that I hope that in the future politicians will give the right value to science and to fundamental science as the ingredient to innovation, as the main ingredient to growth. And for that, we'll have to have the scientists also helping us politicians to pass on that message, the scientists being more vocal in terms of the importance of the science they do for our daily lives. Because a lot of people in their day to day, they cannot relate to the fundamental science. They do not understand that science and they don't know that what they actually are doing, having every day in their lives depends or not on that fundamental science being done. Then my vision for science is that we would create the conditions at some point to have more and more politicians, one, lowering down the barriers for scientists to do science and secondly that science could have the same approach that we have in the ERC. Meaning for that that it's a total bottom up approach that scientists can pick what they love and what they want to do and then politicians will actually put the money for them to do it. And when I meet ERC grantees, they basically come to me telling me that this is the best thing that happened in their lives. Not because of the money, but because of the network, because of the experience, because of the people they meet and the opportunities that it creates for their lives. And so I see it as the model for the future. And then my vision, I'm not a scientist, I'm a politician, but I look at the future and what I see in terms of science and that's I think one of the subjects we should discuss here today is that science is more and more about an intersection in between different fields of science. And if we don't actually catch that opportunity of breaking the silos in education, that people can actually have the opportunity to work in different fields from humanities to science to social science to different parts and different disciplines, then there will be no new innovation, no science that will actually change the world. So I see it and that's one of the reasons that I'm here in this great country to actually try to make possible for Europe to work more and more with China to have more and more collaboration. And so I'm really happy that Professor Bourguignon was able to set up an agreement in between ERC and actually the Natural Science Foundation that will allow scientists to travel from one place to another to do science, to have and experiment different fields with different cultures and doing better science. So that will be just the introduction that I would make here today. Thank you very much, Commissioner. I just note for our audience here and online where the general tradition here for issue briefings is we ask one or two introductory questions, I guess, and then we open the floor to questions. We've also been curating questions and collecting questions from our social media audiences, so hopefully we'll have a free-flowing and interactive conversation. And with that on that note, Commissioner, that gave me a very good segue to the question I was going to ask that Mr President here regarding the globalization of science. You've recently concluded an agreement with China. Tell me about the globalization of scientific research. Well, first of all, I think the key point to make is of course that historically science has always been the international endeavour, and there were really no boundaries to the development of science. It's true that historically Europe has a very great tradition in science, but it would be a big mistake for Europe to close on itself and believing that you can just rely on this tradition. There are fantastic developments in science. Of course, America has been taking the lead in some areas clearly since the Second World War, but now Asia is also extremely developing at a fantastic pace, and China in particular, but not only China. I mean, Korea, Japan are really countries which now count very much in the development of science in many, many different disciplines. So it's very clear that because of the very nature of science altogether, but also in the way the scientists are functioning, in particular the fact that now it's available really technical tools to really share knowledge in ways which of course we are honoured of, and sometimes you had to wait for letters to arrive. Now you get it just the next minute on your computer, and so therefore we have to take this into account that this globalization has affected science very much, the circulation of ideas, circulation of documents, circulation of papers is going at a fantastic pace. And so from this point it's very clear that the European Research Council, which is one of the vehicles that the European Commission has built to develop science in Europe, as Commissioner Moedars said, it's really the bottom-up programme of the Commission which gives fantastic freedom to the scientists altogether, but also fantastic responsibility to the scientific council to really make the choices how to spend the money, how to do the selection. So it was very clear that from this analysis of this globalization, we must open it, the programme is open to the whole world, but we should make it very well known and should create opportunities for scientists from many different countries to really participate also in the teams that the ERC grantees, I mean the grantees people who get support from the European Research Council really are building because the whole point of providing them with money is of course to enable them to really bring around them the right people to achieve the programme they set for themselves. And so it was very natural to start this search for collaboration with the United States on one hand and then the next country was Korea and then came Japan and then China. And I was very pleased when I took office just 18 months ago that we could actually achieve signing formally and really getting to putting in place agreements with both the National Science Foundation of China and also the Japan Society for the Motion of Science in a very short time because usually international agreements could take years to really be completed. In our case it just took not even nine months so it was very, I was very pleased. We showed the interest on both sides to get through and also the understanding for the various people who had to look into the technicalities to make it happen. So I hope these exchange programmes will be functioning so it will mean that Chinese researchers or Japanese researchers or Korean researchers will be able to participate in projects in ERC in ways which we hope will be also for them if they really appreciate the kind of very special system that ERC is that maybe they will become themselves principal investigators. And the way it is set up is you don't have to be Europeans to apply, you don't have to have a full-time position in Europe, you have to be at least half the time in Europe. So I hope this will be a very good basis for science to be developed by researchers from all around the world with a base in Europe but also with a foot and collaboration in other countries. Thank you. Paniota, you are a practicing researcher, I believe in the area of neuro-technology. Correct me if I'm wrong. Tell me a bit more about the prospects for people such as yourselves, young scientists, you're also I should say, proud to be introduced as a member of our young scientists communities. What are your prospects, breaking new science in Europe at the moment? So thank you for this question Oliver. As a young scientist myself, I would say that I feel lucky. I feel lucky because we live in exciting times for science. The advancement of technology in many disciplines like medicine, biology and engineering now allows us to answer questions that we couldn't even think of asking 50 years ago. For example, now we can tell which neurons in a mouse brain contain a particular memory and we can identify the mutations that we pass on to each one of our children. So it's really a privilege to be a young scientist in these times. The other thing that our generation has experienced is a massive growth in the worldwide size of the scientific community. More and more people continue their education in pursuit of a career in academia or the research sector. Unfortunately, in Europe in particular, we don't have the capacity to absorb all these people. Many of them are not able to fund their research, are not able to establish excellence and secure a job in the academic sector. And that's where the European Research Council comes in. And as the Commissioner Moeda said, it's an absolutely wonderful funding scheme in Europe because it supports young scientists in particular. Through the ERC starting and consolidator grants, young scientists are allowed to pursue their dreams. They are given their early-on independence and a long horizon of five years to pursue the questions that they are interested in. For me in particular, getting an ERC starting grant with, I would say, a life-changing experience. Coming from a country where the funding opportunities are very limited, I had to adjust my research according to where the money is. When I got an ERC grant though, I was finally able to do what I really wanted, what I loved the most. And I think this is really important, it's not just the money, it's the opportunity to pursue your dreams. And if you pursue your dreams, that's when the great discoveries come because you have to have passion for what you're doing. And it's really great to have been funded by the ERC and we need more of it in Europe and the world. So that's, I think, where we stand now. Commissioner, I have a message to receive reliable and clear more funding for young scientists. And now we'll just take a brief pause to see if there are any questions from the floor. Okay, well, we have a few from possession media. We like looking at what's hot and what's trendy and what's going to be big disruptors of the future. One of the questions we had, in fact many of the questions we had, were what are the key trends to look for in frontier research? What is exciting in terms of gaining traction for funding for new research? Perhaps Mr Bourguignon, you could give us an answer to this one. Well, I think, as it was said, I mean there are many, many areas in science which have been really transformed by the access to new technologies. But one has to be a bit careful with this, that is believing that technology alone is enough. Actually, what has really has been really transformative for the science has been the fact that new technologies allowed people to test new theories. So this balance between theory and experiment in a sense has also been moved forward in a very explicit way. In my own field, for example, which is I'm a mathematician, it's quite extraordinary to see the number of areas in which now mathematics is relevant and which was not the case some time ago. And of course it comes back to the discipline with completely new challenges that these problems people never thought about would become really extremely important to solve. And of course if you want just to have one buzzword which is clearly in many people's mind, you can think of big data as a new frontier. And of course it has a technical side because big data means having instruments which allow you to share data in a proper way. But it would be a mistake to believe it's a purely technical issue because actually the key element is of course to from this data that you are collecting, you need to confront them with new theories or new approaches. And again if you allow me to take my own discipline, of course it shows that the importance of statistics or of which has been sometimes a neglected subject which now is becoming again a very central subject for the development of mathematics. But in ways which is not separated from very deep and important mathematics, both from the part which is probability theory, the part which has to do also with combinatorics and the part also which has to do with geometry because a lot of the new statistics you have to deal with are actually statistics of images and nobody has been able so far to really come up with a good conceptual way of approaching statistics of images. So you see this, when as always to keep in mind that the development of science which always has been dependent on technical tools cannot go forward really in a significant way if it's not accompanied by new intellectual and sometimes very abstract challenges. Pallio, so perhaps yourself, your what's exciting. So I might be a little bit biased but I think the brain is the ultimate frontier. And if we're talking about frontier science we're talking about the brain. And this is already becoming evidence given the funding and the effort that has already been dedicated to brain research. I think for the next 10 or 50 years we'll be trying to understand how the brain works. And the other reason I think the brain is great is because in order to understand it you need many people to work together, many disciplines to collaborate. You need to develop the technologies in order to study it. You need to develop the people who will analyse the data so you need better statistics, you need better mathematics. You need the theoreticians that will model what we're seeing in order to get a global understanding of how the system works. So I think it's an area which combines pretty much all of the disciplines. It's still very far from being understood and it's also a reason for a serious economical burden in Europe and the world. And I'm talking about mental diseases. We can't really treat them because we don't understand how the brain works. So we have many incentives for going after the brain and I hope we'll see many discoveries in the near future. Commissioner, any strategic priorities for yourself? No, yes, but I just wanted to chip in here what Professor was saying that one of the major projects we have in Europe is actually about how you will map the brain. And it's a 1 billion euro, 10-year project. And so I just wanted to point that out because it's really, I agree with you, it's definitely one of the points and one of the major and important fields for the future. But you know, I'm not a scientist but what I see is that in the future you will really have a big opportunity that I would say it's big data but it's how you actually merge the big data with the physical world. And so you have been up to a point where you have amounts of data. You have amounts of information but so far actually the decision that you can take upon that data is not yet intelligent. Meaning that machines with machines are not taking yet the right decisions based on the data and the overwhelming data that we have. Why? Because probably we need more mathematics, we need more statistics, we need to get ahead to actually get basically to what we call going from the internet of things to the age of intelligent things. And I think that the frontiers would be in between these two worlds, the physical and the digital. But again, I think that you should listen to the specialists and the scientists and not to me because they know better. Okay, we'll take another pause if there are any questions from the floor. The gentleman, we have a microphone please, so could you just take the microphone and introduce yourself please. Hi, my name is Adrian from UCL, I'm one of the young scientists. And I'm just trying to connect the dots. I think I share your enthusiasm for the brain as a final frontier. I think there is some aspect to that endeavour which has intrinsic interest. But I wonder, just as a counterpoint, for those who would say we recognize that science is a global endeavour, a lot of people are interested in the brain. So somebody is going to investigate it and when we think about budget cuts for a particular area, how does one quantify the impact of investing in research on the brain in say the European zone and how can scientists contribute to the understanding of that economic impact from a purely financial perspective, why should a particular region invest in brain research? A very good question. And it goes a little bit back to what I said about the vision of having as a policymaker a more bottom-up approach than a top-down. Because at the end of the day politicians can make choices and have visions and look at the future. But I think that it's up to the scientists to tell us where they want to go. And so I agree with you that it's very difficult. It's probably one of the most difficult things as a policymaker is actually to decide on what are the fields that you should put your money. And so I think that one of the changes that we've done in Horizon 2020 is actually to go more into that field of having bottom-up approaches. And the ERC is the greatest example of that. But again, we in Horizon 2020, which is the big umbrella, we have an old pillar that we call the societal challenges. And those societal challenges is also a way to tell the scientists really tell us what you can do for those societal challenges and don't come up with an answer that is based on a discipline. Come up with a consortium of different disciplines to solve that problem. But absolutely that's what keeps politicians awake at night. That's that question. Okay, let's move on to the subject of public-private cooperation. I'm going to ask this question because we had another issue briefing this morning on the digital transformation of industries. And one of the comments raised was that whilst 80% of chief executives feared disruption, only 8% had a plan for it. And one of the other statistics we heard from one of the panellists was that too many businesses view innovation as digitising their existing business by not disrupting their own business and casting their mind into their future and reinventing their business. So, as an institution for public-private cooperation and as somebody who knows it's very close to your heart, how successful are you at fostering true collaboration between research and science and business and the policy space? Perhaps Mr Bourguignon. Well, I'm not exactly the right person to be asked this question, although we are quite keen at the level of scientific counsel to make sure that some of the researchers we are funding, ERC grantees, are really... We help them to get in this direction if they feel that they should do. So we have a specific programme which we call Proof of Concept which helps researchers if they feel along the way of doing their research that there is something they are doing which can branch off to either something more connected to industrial development or something more connected to societal challenges, we want to help them to look into that direction and to do it in a very simple way. And so, of course, the amount of money we dedicate to this is not so huge but what we can say it's much bigger than we thought we would be dedicating because actually quite a significant number of researchers are interested in this and we get a very, very good project from this and actually they are in the room some of the ERC grantees who have been very successful at getting the proof of concept grants and who are developing their companies and actually really passing to the next stage of really having a true industrial development or direct connection to industry for their development. So I think certainly the issue you are raising is a very, very important one because that's the connection between new knowledge and actually new economy and how do you make the link and how do you make the link successfully? And of course the only way it's well known is by taking risk and by trying a number of things and some of them develop fantastically well and some of them less well but it's very important that actually also on this we accept the concept of taking risk which for the scientific community is not so obvious because it tends to be conservative and wants to bet on the things which are sure and definitely that's why at the level of ERC we do encourage the evaluators to really take risk and look for ambitious projects. Yes, sir. Would you like to work more or less with the private sector? What's your view on this? I think if we look at the places like the US where they are very successful in incorporating the private sector into the economy, they have the scientists developing their way of thinking if you like towards what can be helpful for the society. So I think it's for the benefit of both sides to work together. Absolutely. What is a little bit risky I think with Horizon 2020 for example is to ask everybody to be in the same part. I think that what the ERC is doing is better so you have the basic research being developed first you have an idea and then you think about how you turn this into a product. You separate the two processes and I think that's more productive in the end than trying to do both things at the same time but definitely we would like to see more of the private sector getting interested about science and funding basic science with a goal to ultimately get a product out of it. And just to stay in your area please Commissioner forgive me there are obviously your folks from Neary technology but are there any industries that are seeing value in your research that you may not think are particularly obvious? Are there any? Well if they are I would like to know. How would I know? I mean there are many companies, big companies like Google for example who is investing a lot of money on artificial intelligence and understanding the brain speaking from my own experience. So there are these companies and I don't know really how how are the opportunities for people young people in Europe in accessing these companies I think they are very limited compared to people in the US or other places where this culture of collaboration between the industry and the academic world is much more developed than it is in Europe. So we have a disadvantage there that we need to work on. Commissioner. No I was just saying that's the crucial the 10 million dollar question or 10 million euro in this case of me which is basically how you create the conditions for the private sector to invest more in research and development. When you look at the target for research and development in Europe that was set as to get to a level of 3% of GDP invested in research and development. The idea is that 1% would be from the public side and 2% from the private side and what we see that is happening is that actually on the level of the public side I mean we're not that far but on the private side we are quite far and so what are we doing wrong? Why are companies are not investing more in research and development? Why are the European companies not somehow investing in hiring scientists? So that's the question that we have to answer which has a lot to deal with Europe that is actually on the making a Europe with a labour market that works better than it works today that is not fragmented in 28 different countries a product market, a judicial system that is more alike in between the different countries because in these age and time if you don't have speed and scale there's nothing you can do and so companies need that speed and scale and for that speed and scale they really need for a flexible way of looking at the market in general and so that's one of the biggest challenges we ever had but times are changing and I think that in Europe times have changed in terms of countries getting at least the awareness of the need for those reforms and those reforms are going ahead very quickly and the numbers yesterday from Europe show that Europe is growing that on the second quarter basically all the countries except for one that had zero growth all the countries are back to growth so something is changing Thank you and this meeting being itself at the intersection of business science and technology I'm hoping that we'll have more answers or insights into that very tricky 10 million euro question over the coming two or three days I'd like to thank you all very much for joining us here on the panel and thank you for joining us here in the room and online this issue briefing is now closed