 And with that, we'll move on to one of our wonderful speakers. So we're really excited to have Neesh Atariya here today. And let me tell you a little bit about Neesh before we get started. So Neesh has an amazing background. It is pretty impressive. So let me get that information up. So Neesh leads the Equal Innovation, an organization that collaborates with leading universities, governments, foundations and companies to assist them to integrate innovation and entrepreneurship with their impact-focused strategy. Neesh is also a senior fellow with the Clinton Foundation and a contributor to Forbes and the author of the India-U.S. Partnership One Trillion by 2030 by Oxford University Press. Neesh previously served as Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Commerce for the Obama Administration. And as Executive Director of the Deshpanad Foundation, a prominent American philanthropic foundation on innovation, entrepreneurship, and also he served in the Administration of President Bill Clinton as well. He has been quoted prominently worldwide in the New York Times, the Economist Newsweek, Economic Times, India Today, BBC Bloomberg, and NDTV just to name a few. So everyone, Neesh Atariya. Thank you so much, Monica. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to this group. I've had the chance to speak to XPRIZE a few years ago and about global innovation and particularly innovation in the developing world. And then it worked with New Profit for many years as somebody based in Boston and also New Profits here in Boston and been a real big fan of the venture philanthropy concept. So I'm very pleased to speak here. And as it turns out, I know some members of some of the teams who have reached out to me on LinkedIn. And so that's been great. And so hopefully my remarks won't be redundant to some of them. I wanted to touch base on a few things today. Just a little bit about innovation in this space and then talk a little bit about some of the challenges in terms of the skilling space and how difficult it is to achieve change, you know, beyond your innovation, but also then tell you two examples of programs that have worked at achieving some sort of scale with their programs and talk a little bit about why those pathways and those broad based partnerships are so important. And that journey is so important from innovation to scale up. And so hopefully at the end, you know, I will have been helpful in thinking about this broader skilling ecosystem for you and I appreciate the opportunity to speak. Next slide. So, without advertising just a little bit about the work that I'm doing, I run an organization called equal innovation. And we're really focused on the fact that there are so many startups now around the world that are focused on mission and impact and so there's about 5000 accelerators around the world now these are tech transfer centers innovation centers accelerators. And there's two interesting points to note about them. Most of them are not in San Francisco and Boston in New York they're really spread around the world and so as our speakers were saying earlier XPRIZE believes anyone can innovate and successful innovation can come from everywhere. We really need to do a better job of doing that because the venture capital is still in those three cities, even though we know great ideas are everywhere. And we also need to think about the challenge you know, when you look at skilling for example, there's several billion people in the world who need skilling support either skills, because they're younger and haven't entered the workforce, or re skilling, because they are, you know, been moved out of one industry and so you know the four things that we're really focused on are that idea of inclusivity, the idea of equality that every good idea deserves a chance that ecosystems and communities are really important the old saying it takes a village. And then commercialization must happen faster and more efficiently, again going to this area of skilling. If several billion people around the world needs some sort of skills development education or re skilling. It's not going to be the, you know, the one founder wins model it's going to have to be multiple startups multiple technologies all winning a little bit in different parts of the world and so if we move to the next slide. So I wanted to share just a little bit of the challenge in the skilling and re skilling space it unfortunately does not happen at the speed of innovation, and I thought I'd bookend the last 20 years. As we talk about the internet era. So in the early 2000s, you know it was becoming clear that in the American economy, young people needed to develop the skills for working in technology and the job opportunities were with companies like Microsoft Cisco which are still around sun systems which some of you may remember and some of you might not. But the example here I use is the sun but pretty much everybody went through this where they actually invest a significant resources and developing curriculums for high schools community colleges, colleges, all sorts of nonprofit organizations to train young people in in Java programming language, but the way the American system works, it took. The way their grants were were organized actually took two academic years before students could take those courses and right in the middle of that son announced that they were going to outsource several thousand Java programming jobs and so you can imagine your high school principal and you're saying do I offer this Java programming class or you know they just announced all those jobs are going to India, Philippines and elsewhere and as you can imagine. So it didn't take off and so the speed of technology the speed of globalization was happening so fast that you know it just didn't take off as a proper training activity in American schools and you know as a result a lot of, you know, the programs would continue to be abroad, or programmers coming into the United States on programs like h1b. And this wasn't just son Microsoft had this problem with its own work, and then Cisco had an incredible set of networking academies to train young people in the Cisco technology and how to use it, but went through a lot of those similar iterations of launching something and by the time curriculum is developed. And for those of you listening who think that you know well that that was 20 years ago, technology now is much better we have AI we have this and that. We know that that's not the case because there are still structural impediments to reskilling quickly right so right now one of the biggest is that financial aid through FAFSA and other programs is really only available for the largest online providers and. And so the Coursera and others you can use your Pearson loan you can use others, but the government is a little bit wary of for profit providers and it's only those large ones that have gone through the process of making making it available to students and so we most people in the United States do require some sort of financial aid for their reskilling. And so if you can only do it through a few outlets. That is certainly a barrier that needs to be addressed. The other one is that most Americans don't go to elite for schools they don't go to four year colleges they take multiple years and they take their training at other institutions, whether it's workforce development boards or local nonprofits. And, and they are also not built to introduce courses with new technologies quickly it's it's not fair to take something that's really cutting edge technology like a, like some of the AI or VR stuff that many of you are working on and ask community college to turn it around really quickly and so that challenge remains as it was 20 years ago that how do you quickly get something approved. And again thinking that you know these courses, if they're offered in public institutions. It's only fair and responsible that they go through a vetting process where we know the technology works we know that learning occurs. And that it leads to positive outcomes whether those are jobs, or job opportunities, whatever the outcome may be but you're not going to just introduce something until it's proven. And so while we might cut the time from two academic years. It's highly unlikely we'll cut it to less than one academic years simply because of calendar and approval process and all that stuff and we may not like it but you know there's no MVP in this work it has to be a proven, proven solution in terms of learning focus. A couple of interesting other things that I would mention is, you know, Coursera now is launching and retiring courses in just 18 months. And so again this is a really interesting challenge for the reskilling space that we are seeing technologies needed in the marketplace. And go at a really, really rapid speed. And so what all of you are doing with your innovations becomes really important because if that's the case, then we know that this infrastructure of community colleges, nonprofits workforce investment groups just will never keep up. And so of course Sarah with its resources and the technology platform and the millions of users can't keep it going more than 18 months, then we certainly need to think about, you know what technology tools must we use and put into place. And the last thing I'll mention is just that micro credentialing which is sort of talked about in this space that you can reskill in a different setting get a micro credential, stick it on LinkedIn and go from there. The reality right now is that most large employers are not necessarily recognizing micro credentials, unless it's from a few specific institutions or online education providers and so you know the quality is very hard to rate quality is very hard to discern of a credential and unless it's a well known brand, you know, we don't know what that person actually learned or what credentials they have. Now you can say that that's the same for our higher ed system anyways, but there are more checks and balances there because it's been around for a while. And so all that is not to say that the technology is not going to be transformative. It's just that we know there are societal challenges, both from a regulatory side of how we approve content and skilling, but also from sort of a cultural aspect of how people learn and you know the resources they have to spend on learning. So these are all things that I think all of you are going to need to think about as you go into the reskilling space and are looking at your VR tools or your technology tools to rapidly skill up you know it's one thing to have a bunch of folks in a in an early trial I think 5000 is the goal here and that's amazing. But you know when will that translate into approval to go in the California Community College system which has hundreds of thousands of students at any given time so so some things to think about from your perspective. But there's been two models that I wanted to bring up where I think they have shown that you can be successful in reskilling at scale. If you put in the right time and energy in understanding the customer and understanding that the context both cultural, as well as economic right so the despondy foundation where I used to work runs a skills development program in India and and and actually started after I left so I had nothing to do with this program. Other than to know that it's there, but they really looked at the context in India where the economy is growing really really fast. And there's a need for lots of workers in the economy but there's no way that a country with a billion people is going to build lots of campuses and offer lots of multi year degree programs it just doesn't make sense and so what the foundation did like a lot of reskilling programs is focused on a couple of things that were clear needs in the economy so drivers, basic sales skills, hospitality industry, and then it customer service and over the course of the last decade, they went through this journey that really had four stages. The first was sort of developing the local knowledge and relationships in the communities they were serving so no matter where you are in the world there's sort of a cultural context. There's a reason people go to school or do not go to school, there's family pressures, there's other opportunities. And so they spent a lot of time and again this is not strategic, this is sort of what happened, if you will, I spent a lot of time, developing that local knowledge and relationships to understand what the context is around skills development so it turns out that driving is just not something people want to do, unless they're in big cities because it takes you far away from your family. It's hard to get married there's all these things that you don't think about when you're building a technology or designing a curriculum that turned out to be very relevant and so that's why the soft skills became very important as you know, real issues, communications, presentation skills, how you dress, all this sort of thing and we do the same thing here in the United States with, with a lot of our workforce programs and teaching this sort of professionalism if you will. Their next stage was to then experiment with what types of skills development was going to be useful and instead of jumping in on one specific thing. So we actually started with the idea of supporting entrepreneurs and finding brilliant young people, helping them start a company, and then they would become the employers in the region, employers who would then hire that hundreds of people 1000 people. And by supporting that elite leader, they would, you know, create jobs in the region. And that's, that certainly works in Silicon Valley works in Bangalore, which is the biggest city in India. That doesn't work everywhere else and so that idea of the elite fellowship program the entrepreneurship master's programs, they are important, but they didn't lead to large scale job creation, or skills development through that. And so what then you started to see was this pivot towards basic skills development which is again driving sales, things like that but much more greater reliance on partnerships and and some sort of a model by which the person participating in the class in the skills development program had some more skin in the game than they did otherwise and so they introduced this wide ranging set of programs. They did it in partnership where the foundation was developing curriculum providing seed financing so vendor financing was essentially for the students to participate in the program, and then paid back over the course of their sort of income similar to a student loan, but the foundation provided the capital for that student loan because banks were not going to do it for somebody who's going to be a driver at a hotel, or, you know, do it customer service and so they found alternate sources of capital to do that so they figured out the model for partnership they figured out the, the lending model with the participants in the community. And then ultimately they were able to find corporate partners who worked with them to do specific tracks like hospitality or a lot of the big hotels would work with them to train workers year after year, or just general, you know, sort of community development where they were developing a skilled workforce and they were able to build out much broader ecosystem that looked at this stuff in a regional view, not just as a technology or a specific course. And one of the largest skills providers in the world in terms of skilling annually 8,000 people skilled some in a residential model, a lot of it in a in a virtual or satellite campus model that where local colleges provided the solutions. And I think what I want to leave this on is, it's the largest such program, but it has low rates of attrition but not insignificant rates of attrition and that's something to know that no matter what you do with a lot of these you know, these issues of culture, communications presentation are still real, and they somebody can work and get it, you know, an A in the course, and once they join the workforce they can still have, you know, challenges working with other real people, you know, working in office for the first time all these things are real challenges worldwide. And so even when you do something really really well, some of these other issues prevent us from getting us all sort of where we want to be. Next slide. More close to home here in the United States another program I want to highlight is the urban manufacturing Alliance, which is a partnership of the urban manufacturing Alliance Century Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. And it's really around called industry and inclusion. And their sort of journey was slightly different but you know again sort of building out what needs to be done, and the partners that need to go there so they were looking at the needs in the space you know I think the data shows that will need at least 2 million manufacturing workers in the United States over the next decade simply based on retirements attrition, growing, you know, growing opportunities and sectors that will stay in the United States such as that defense and others. But then you know we've also read these trends about supply chains, reshoring, you know some of the manufacturing to the United States or initiatives to bring new industries and keep them in the United States so maybe that number is bigger. We don't know. But we don't have the workforce to fill it unless we maximize the people who live in our community the workforce that is hiding in plain sight as some people are saying so people of color women, those urban areas or peri urban areas that can come into the city, and they're currently underemployed, but they've gotten a lot of them have gone through school and received an education so it's not similar to the Indian context where you're starting, often from scratch, this is where you provide some targeted training, and you have a large workforce potentially available to you and that's what they're focused on doing so recently they've their latest cohort they have 22 colleges nationally that have signed on and they developed this 18 month advanced manufacturing credential program and so as I was talking about earlier that some of the challenges with with the time frame and and what have you are there still, but in this case they feel that the advanced manufacturing areas, they're focused on because they're product based, because they're, you know, tied to patents and things like that. They're going to continue to be relevant for many many years and so they've tried to address some of the challenges I mentioned earlier that sun micro systems and Coursera and others have had. So they built this community network and then they really focused on urban areas, because as we know for better for worse urban areas have the power of the concentrated labor pool consumers infrastructure all that stuff and so it's made sense to focus on urban the makers movement is a is generally been around tech hubs and universities and so the next generation of products are coming out often of these urban areas and it's important to stay close and grab those workers when those products start to take off. And then one thing that's always been important to me, we don't think about 67% of American patents are related to manufacturing so when we think of patents and intellectual property. So these days we think of Silicon Valley we think of tech, but the reality is a vast majority of is really to manufacturing. So innovation plays into this, and the role of innovation and commercializing it in the United States, and having local workers, who can work in those industries and trained for it and so you know in this model they're really hitting upon a bunch of the challenges we have, and then trying to do it in a concentrated manner so we do need a rural manufacturing alliance as well. And hopefully somebody will think about that model and how to build that up and I know new profits done some work around a rural and small towns and so we need that as well, but the urban manufacturing one is really an interesting one to me because they're trying to connect the dots with innovation and workers again hiding in plain sight, who could join these industries so I think that's the end of my presentation and really just wanted to thank you for the opportunity and share a little bit about, you know how groups have been tying together the different, different, you know, different parts of the skilling ecosystem in order to have an impact but also how difficult it is, even when you're doing amazing work. So thank you. Thank you so much, niche we appreciate that insight. And I think it's really great to see what people have done before the current teams are competing and to learn from what has happened before them and institute some of those changes in those learnings and what they're doing now.