 What we're going to talk about is the mechanisms that build partnership in digital ecosystem to mainstream digital entrepreneurship. I think all of us have been talking a lot about the entrepreneurship and all of us have been talking a lot about the digitalization. And our main goal is just to figure out how can we have our entrepreneurs became first of all maybe a small or medium-sized company owners and later on how they can grown up. And another I would almost say buzzword is the ecosystem. But if we go deeper and if you would like to find what does it mean, how can we connect the ecosystem together because ecosystem is just only one ecosystem. We have to find the connection between innovation, entrepreneurial ecosystem and technological ecosystem. And how can we use this knowledge? How can we use this connection? Because if we don't use it, if we stay in silos, it means we are losing. It's obvious. So today we're going to give you very good practices and very good roles. And I'm very happy just to intro my panelist partners for the next one and a half hour. And I would like to ask all of them just to intro themselves a little bit and their organization. And if you don't mind. So first, Mary, would you be so kind and start it? Sure. Absolutely. Thanks, Marta. My name is Mary Alcantana. I'm the accelerator in residence at the input program based in Budapest, Hungary. And my background is with running programs. So accelerators incubators I have experienced both in the US and in Hungary. And I bring that kind of to to the input program. So I wanted to say just a little bit about input. So we are a high priority EU funded program. And our mandate is to support Hungarian startups with international expansion. And to do that, we have basically five pillars of activity. We have a business development team that helps with one on one customized sessions. We have different trainings that we organize workshops on topics that our startups need. We have a really global recognized mentoring program recognized by the UN actually. We have a nationwide startup coordinator network. So we have people in every different region of Hungary. So we don't just focus on the capital but the countryside as well. And we have an international soft landing program. And this is my responsibility at input. So I'm trying to grow this program to be really a global success story. And we've actually developed a separate brand with an input called the smart landing program. And we've launched our first flagship location in Canada. So I'm also on the board of the smart landing program Canada. And I'm excited to talk to you a little bit about some of the lessons we've learned along the way. And this is topic is very near and dear to my heart. So thank you for having me and I'm looking forward to meeting the other panelists and enjoying the discussion. Thank you, Mary. And first of all, congratulations because I think it's very just a very wide program what you can offer. And I'm sure that all of our other panelists has a similar very interesting and wide program. And that's the reason why we can talk together and we can share our best knowledges and best practices. So Salma, would you be so kind and continue this intro section? Thank you so much, Martin. I'm very happy to be here. So I'm coming from Tunisia. I'm from a member of a national initiative which is called Startup Tunisia. And it is implemented by a company which is called Smart Capital. So our objective and our vision is to pin Tunisia in the region, in our natural region. So the North Africa, a minor region, but also all the Mediterranean shores. And to make Tunisia a place where it's good actually to launch startup and to make them scale and develop. And it is applicable for local startups, but also we'd like to offer an attractive environment and ecosystem for also the regional startups. And why not the international one? Thank you. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Salma. Next lady, Magda, would you be so kind and enter yourself and your organization, of course? Yes, of course. Hello. Hello, good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation. It's great honor to be here with all these representatives of similar sectors, but different regions. I am coming from Poland. I represent a lot of special economic zone, which is an economic entity aiming at attracting investors, both local and foreign to the region, creating new workplaces and building new production plants or having more services companies in our region. And to do that, we need to be more competitive on the market because we have a lot of special economic zones in Poland and in Europe as well or worldwide. And that is why we are we introduced in our zone a lot of different services, helping investors to boost and grow their business. So when they decide to invest in what special economic zone, they can count on HR assistance, some technical and vocational qualifications. We have our own technical school, educating young people for our investors, networking, finding business partners and my responsibility, the access to technology. So since 2017, we are running different acceleration programs, combining startups and technologies and innovative projects with business partners with mature business industrial partners, mainly. And the startups are creating, developing different solutions and testing them, verifying them in real business environment using real production surrounding. And we of course do that to scale the SMEs, the innovative SMEs and help our investors so this mature business to become more digital and more innovative. So that's my background and thank you for being here. Thank you very much. We go forward. Hello from Bangkok. My name is and the executive directors of national innovation agencies or in a way, we are in the ministry of higher education, science research and innovation. We mainly focus on grooming enterprise, ranging from social enterprise startups and also SBE to work closely with a large national concomitant rate in Thailand. And then we act as a accelerator and also granting agencies or firms, mainly, and also work closely with venture capital ecosystem on investment being a bridge between a government money and also private money. And we work on international collaboration and a joint investment on big projects on innovation with an international international concomitant rate that would like to land and work with an innovative company in Thailand. We run the biggest startup ecosystem in the country, so called startup Thailand. And at the same time, we have the specific programs on my head innovation Thailand, mainly focus on developing talent brands regarding to innovation. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, we go forward to be opening the world as well. So we arrive to Pradeep. Martha, thank you very much. It's really a pleasure to be here in the midst of so many people who are running innovations. In my work, I serve as the director of the Office of Innovation at UNH and I run the health innovation exchange, which is a platform which works with countries in identifying their pain points and delivering healthcare. And then works with innovators who have solutions. So many of you have solutions that might be very relevant to the pain points that the ministers of health and countries are facing. Often what happens is that there is a lack of trust between the political leadership and innovators. So we play that trusted partnering role where we try and introduce based on the challenges and the identified solutions. And often these solutions, although I work on many of these solutions lie outside the health sector. Simple thing, I mean, at the infrastructure level, 50 to 70% of health infrastructure doesn't have access to energy. So we end up working with energy solutions we work with. So we work on solar off grid solutions. We work with innovators and bringing diagnostic technologies, treatment, all kinds of things. And then we also work with investors to make sure that we are able to take investments, public, private, as well as development capital to scale innovation so that we can reach healthcare access. One of our biggest challenges, one out of two people globally don't have access to healthcare. And that is the problem that we are trying to solve and the innovations and technologies that can really help us to scale that is what we are after. So real pleasure to be here and look forward to the conversation. Thank you very much. And if somebody has any, any, you know, what's questioning about what we are going to talk about it just listening the intros immediately we can understand why we are here together and how can, how can connect these different areas and different parts from the ecosystem can connect it to each other. We have been talking and learn about the political leadership plus innovators, investors side, industrial side, technological side, mentoring. So many parts like a puzzle, and I think our role is in this ecosystem just put everything together and create a real network and real help for those who are on this, on this globe and want to, want to achieve something. So we go forward and we would like to give some real examples and, and, and real programs, you know, part of the programs what any of us or, or listeners or audience can use it in the later. So, and thanks God, or next panelist. Trevor has joined to us. I hope, and you have heard us quite well, but I cannot do for you. Ah, yes, hi, here, Trevor. Good to see you and thank you for joining to us. And before we go forward, please in give a little intro about yourself and about your company and what your organization, just how can we, we can we would like to see you how can you fit to this global conversation. Turn, I still probably maybe not listening or hearing us. It means that he will join to us later on. So, as I mentioned, turn, can you hear us? It's muted. Maybe, turn, please try to turn and try to unmute yourself. Try to unmute yourself because we cannot hear you, Trevor. It's getting better, right? So one more time. Hi, good afternoon, Trevor. Would you be so kind and introduce yourself? I think we had some connection program. So we go forward and hopefully Trevor will hear us and can join in a later form. Okay, so Mary, going back, so in, as you mentioned that you're working with national program that support startups globally because you already mentioned that you get a connection with the, with Canada as well. So would you be so kind and explain us which kind of programs can you deal with and how they allow the innovators and entrepreneurs to find resources, mainly this is very important, and to achieve their scale up and high goal of businesses. Sure, thank you for the question. Yeah, I think, as many of you have mentioned, I think, you know, we have similar roles in the ecosystem, but our main role at input is really as a facilitator. So we don't want to replicate what any of the other players on the market are doing. We don't have our own program. We try to connect our startups with the relevant experts or other programs or investors or corporate stakeholders, whatever they need to actually get their business to the next level. And I think, yeah, we also really believe in a custom approach and I think this is also one of the challenges, you know, figuring out how do you really do this in a scalable way because, you know, we can we can do a really great job for a few companies but if we try to do the same thing it doesn't work always the same for everybody, as I think everybody knows. So one of the things that I've been working on is how do we create some kind of a structure and some kind of a program that can scale or replicate our previous successes in a little bit faster way. So I wanted to talk about two short stories, two little success stories. So, two, two and a half years ago we organized one of our first trips to Canada and this is one of the first times when we were testing that market. And I think we brought three startups and after you know we tried to follow up with them we introduced them to lots and lots of partners and after about a year of going back and forth one of these startups was accepted into one of our partners at Prince Edward Island into this emergence accelerator. And that was a big success we were really happy they got the partnership that they needed to get to the next level they're trying to grow their business down Canada, but it took a lot longer than anybody was expecting, and this was even before COVID times right. Sorry, sorry, sorry, what does it mean longer because sometimes you know we are waiting for two months three months you mentioned it was much longer what does it mean. Yeah, so I think it was about a year by the time from the first point of contact to actually getting accepted and being part of that program. And I you know there was different priorities I think on both sides they weren't ready right in the beginning but you know my expectation is always okay you know within three months you can have a foothold and get a new you know presence in the new market and I think it just it always takes longer than this and I'm always impatient and trying to rush this forward. But then, you know, during the pandemic, obviously we couldn't continue this type of activity of organizing what we call study tours and sending startups to other countries to have that kind of immersion experience. So we were thinking about well how can we kind of replicate that or try to, you know produce some of those results online in a virtual way. And we came up with a concept that we call the pitch and bridge which is kind of like a startup competition, where we get, you know, several startups together, and we organize the introductions to one partner specifically so it's it's kind of a recruiting tool for our local partners in the new market. And we get we introduced them to, you know, six to 10 startups at once in a sector of their of their focus. And these startups are all ready to go they're excited about entering the new market. So we really prepare everybody. And then the winner of that competition would would get that fast tracked kind of admission into the new program. That was the idea. We've done three of these so far with different partners in Canada, and actually in all of the cases, more than one of the companies has had a longer term relationship with that with with the partner organization. And one of the stories I wanted to tell was we the second when we did was for a new program called the summer side exchange program in summer side Prince Edward Island and they were looking for innovations and energy and kind of sustainability solutions and we we produced a pipeline for them with 10 companies. And actually the top three winners were all selected to participate in their new program. And one of those companies just signed the first commercial deal in Canada, and that competition was in May and they've signed the deal now in October so that that only took four months to actually have a real concrete commercial outcome. So, from my perspective that's you know, obviously the you know the factors that are involved there are very different. But I think if we can try to accelerate our introductions and then the facilitation of actually you know holding their hand, really, you know staying active and engaged in those projects so I'm, it's not my program it's another it's our partners program. But I'm really in touch with our startup and the program and understanding the needs of both sides, and we were actually able to get this great result for one of our companies in a much shorter time frame. So I think that's what we're trying to do figure out ways to, you know, batch what you can stay and stay involved stay active, but you know focus on what's really going to have the biggest impact for the startups. And for this and one of the other things I learned is that this particular program, their whole focus is about doing commercial pilots, and I think that's also a real value at and I think the work that we do is really, we spend a lot of time with partner engagement and filtering through and finding partners that are actually going to be serious about supporting companies, whether it's investors who are actually going to put money into a cross border deal, or partners that really have a strong value proposition but maybe they don't have a lot of exposure about that internationally. So we do that work for our companies and then I think it helps them just, you know, we can really see you know it's kind of a really a better matchmaking than any sort of algorithm, maybe that you could do because we know both sides as well. So I've said a lot but I just wanted to share those stories that kind of show that we've been able to kind of accelerate our pace of impact into, you know, a lot shorter timeframe. Okay, I thank you Marie I think it's very important, you know message what you mentioned to us, first of all the expectation and the time limit and the ability just to join and to try new things as well because sometimes the way what we use before it doesn't work again. And we have to figure out for which company for which startups which way would be the best. And I asked you that how, how the startups accepted this kind of idea were they enthusiastic about for instance the beach and bridge and were they active in it. So was it was it really a good story for them as well. Yeah, actually we were really surprised and happy because the first one that we did was with the smart landing program Canada, we had no website, there was really no information, you know, no track record but but they believed in the value proposition enough to actually attend and really take it seriously. The second one was with the summer set exchange program, which was brand new same situation no website, you know, but I think it was, you know, our team our business development team I have to go a lot of credit you know they did a great job, really explaining and making it clear like okay this is what you know the potential here. And I also think personally that you know it's not a big ask to spend, you know, come to a two hour pitch event and you get you know all this potential upside. As a founder, you need to be pitching your idea all the time anyway, at the worst, it's just a great practice opportunity at the best, it's a great networking, maybe you get into this, you know, program that can take you to the next level. But we also tried to have a lot of people in the audience to and we had a facilitated networking as part of the event so that they could actually meet other experts or other people so and we and we have found that to be really useful to so even, you know, not, not just the winners could also go home with some really useful new connection and take away. Yes, good to hear it because I think it's very important take away as well does not only one can win this kind of competition exactly and get something from it. Thank you for sharing these stories. And somehow we asked you that the key strategies of the governance because we have seen the organization size and maybe the governance used by your organization to achieve the ecosystem coordination impact stories. How does it work or which kind of method they were the ease. So that's for the question. Actually, it's a, we guess it's a key success factor for us. But let me just explain what we're doing in in a glimpse. Actually, it started with a with a with a voice with a scream of the ecosystem. In the startups few influencers investors startup support organization have raised their voice, and they asked for for a more encouraging legal framework. And they started working on it in 2016, and then it lead to it led to a law voted in 2018. And then the question is, was going to manage this law. And the, the start of that said, oh, please, we don't know. It's, it's a very revolutionary law. It's called the startup act. It's like the expression of the startup expectation ambitions, etc. We don't want it to go into the very traditional way of doing in Tunisia with public administration, we need it more in a PPP in private public institution. And that's why we created smart capital, which is leading. So very different activities, but all very important to build the ecosystem. So smart capital is leading the startup act implementation. So now we're very happy to count 600 startup that are benefiting and accessing to the tax and social and legal incentives that are provided by the law. And it's a great like it's a very big wind of change in Tunisia in term of a shift in mentalities in the in the mindset of young people very talented in engineers, engineers, etc. To go to that kind of careers and to ask to build and to create to experiment through that law actually because it's, it's offering a lot of a lot of incentives that help them do the big leap but also develop the startups. This is the first thing that we are working on in smart capital. The second thing we are providing a new investment landscape because we are putting in place the first fund the fund in Tunisia and in the region actually. So the fund the fund has the main objective is actually to catalyze and to modernize and to develop the investment landscape in Tunisia the VC investment. Because in Tunisia we counted, like we have been doing for years, like two or three investors that are very specialized in VCs and they know how to talk to startups how to assess startups how to invest into startups. And in order to really catalyze and to accelerate our ecosystem, we needed to work and to provide a systemic systemic mechanism that can really provide that acceleration in very short time. That's why that's why we have the fund the fund. It's a we targeting we're targeting 200 million euro for the fund the fund. And in five years we are targeting to invest in 16 VC funds from different stages, seed stage, late, like series a late stage, etc. And those new funds, or that those funds funds that will have been strengthened by this fund the fund will invest will would invest in 350 startups in Tunisia, which is like a big impact is expected from this activity of funding and investment. And third activity third pillar that is also holding the roof which is started Tunisia as a national initiative is how actually to support the ecosystem and how to act in some like some gaps and some challenges that we cannot handle through the startup act which is the legal framework and also which with the investment. So in the startup ecosystem pillar, we are working on three missions we are driven by three missions. The first mission is the first mission is to support the ecosystem actors through grants, when it's not possible or it's very hard like to invest in it. And very high risky startups in very intensive innovation startups that needs more support financial support to help them actually go forward into their endeavors. So this is the first mission the second mission which is very important and grows closely to the objective of this panel is connection or connectedness. We're truly convinced and that connectedness is one of the like hidden. Power is empowerment to the ecosystem, wherever we are. It's very important to cut to open the doors and to build bridges locally between like different ecosystem in one country. For example, for the startup ecosystem with the universities or academic academic ecosystem with the corporate ecosystem. This is very important to do it like internally but more important it is to do it externally so within different countries, different like national ecosystem or cities, because now into the startup ecosystem we're talking more about cities than about countries. So we need to build bridges between different cities to empower startups from perspective ecosystem that we are talking about, and to help them create more programs help them create more connections, maybe business together maybe investment together, or, or just only to share experiences to share to share the challenges, how they have let some of the stuff for example for Tunisia which is a very early stage ecosystem. We're very happy and thrilled. Each time we have the opportunity to talk to more developed ecosystems because we know that will be in their place in few years so it's very important to prepare ourselves with the right mechanism to be ready to face this challenges when they will be open to us. And the third mission to support the ecosystem is the promotion. We need actually as Tunisia is a small country in North Africa, no one maybe knows about us. So it's very important to like to bring a bit of spotlight about what we're having. So for example, we're for the first year in 2021. We are part of the startup genome, and we have been assessed for with among the 280 ecosystem in the world in the startup genome and we've been ranked in the region like second for the talent pool so we have very interesting assets to actually to put like to value actually at an international scale. We are very happy now to be to be the winners of an African competition, the ATU as one of the most empowering ecosystem for the startups. So this is the kind of thing that we do. It's, it's actually a benefit will be lived as an ecosystem as a whole but also to bring the light to the startups themselves. And we need to talk about Tunisia as a country that is providing maybe like AI startups that are really good or business software startups that are really good. We're not that far from Europe, but we have also a very deep understanding of the African market because we are also very close to to the African market and the media market as well. So we are now still at the very early stage support so we're very like a sector agnostic. We are supporting all the sectors we are supporting with these very big programs like legal investment and support in a very holistic way, but we see it with the collaboration of all the shareholders in the ecosystem that we go to each time that we need to develop a new mechanism to ask. So what are your new challenges now. How can we help you without interfering in your business how can we facilitate your job. What is next into the start of act 2.0 for example what we need to do in order to to meet your new challenges or your new expectations. This kind of things that we're doing to maintain that collaborative work and maintain a very like agile initiative that is really helping the startups. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you very much. I think we are, as I mentioned as I as I promised to you all of your audience that we will brighten up, we will brighten, we will show you a bigger and bigger picture as we go further and further and we have seen a very good example from Middle Eastern Europe and it's another very good example from Tunisian and thank you for for mentioning the legal framework and the supporting because in the new places and the new countries is also I would say new new in the ecosystem of course. I mean on the startup ecosystem. It's very important because this is the way how can you make valuable the country for the investors and what has happened summer after this legalization legal frame system as be it up with the investors behavior has changed. Was it more you know flourish country ready Tunisian, can you see the result already. Yeah, yeah, sure. Actually we're working each year we're working on a report to assess the impact and also to show and to share with everyone the challenges, the status. Here is at the stages of the ecosystem, what we can do to empower it and to make it move forward. And what we've seen is a better activity or a more intensive activity of investment, still very small tickets were still more into seed tickets and even into the seed tickets were not like we're not competing with the very big like fundraising that we see in the world, but we see more volume of numerous activity into investment and also we're seeing a better implication of business angels business angel before the startup act like it even didn't exist like it was few people that were doing today they are representing 25% of the whole investment for 2020, the year 2020 so we see that there is like an leash of different investment initiative in that in that ecosystem, and there is a need or an attraction to go and to be part of it. And this is really good and we, our role is to empower it and to make it always like desirable and to make it always very dynamic and very connected to what's happening in the world. Thank you and we will talk about later a little bit that how can you connect not just only the country on the country level but which kind of role can you play in regional because I think it's also very important then a good example then a good country can be kind of unicorn for the region as well. But go forward and we're going to talk about the innovation because the innovation agencies mainly is creating impact on the national innovation system. And just addressing this question to Punjab, but they are less active in a supporting entrepreneurial ecosystem and coordination with other stakeholders. How can you deal with it? If it's not just an innovation, it must be an entrepreneur side as well and see how business can go forward with the innovation but can stop after they got some very good price or something, but how can you turn it to the business side? I think for the past five years, Thailand national innovation system has changed a lot. In the past, we mainly focus on and relying on foreign direct investment. Prior to that, I think for more than 40 years, we are the hubs of automotive manufacturing and also electronic manufacturing as well. I think at this moment, at least five years ago, the things already changed according to innovation system, key stakeholders mainly, we know that it should be entrepreneurial, right? But recently, we found that all sides, when we mentioned all sides, small and medium-sized enterprises start-ups, medium-sized to large and also large national corporations start to think about innovation capability in a specific direction. For example, for the past two years, Thailand ranked number one in the world on contributions and ratios on research and development, accounting for private and public sector, meaning that around 80% of R&D expenditures come from private sector. According to global innovation index, in that sense, it doesn't mean that Thailand spends a lot of money on research and development, but mainly it comes from private sector and it comes from large national corporations, meaning that a big company that's mainly a Thai national company starts to think about research and development. That's the first phenomenon. The second one we found that they are so diverse. Not only some specific so-called technology-oriented company, you can see from agriculture, food, banking sector insurance, you can name it. They start to have their own venture capital fund or even buy some specific company around the world, ranging from Canada, Israel or even Silicon Valley. The third one, I think this is quite unique. The most innovative sector is a traditional banking sector in Thailand. Why? Because one of the biggest banks in Thailand already changed their structures of their bank. Banking sector will be only one business unit for them, but they just announced last month they become technology company. Yes, it's very important. It's not the finance anymore because they use as much technology as possible and it's connected with everything. So I think it's absolutely a new trend. There's a mindset changing what you're going to talk about. It's sorry for this thing, but it's very important. I would say that defined or decentralized finance affects the banking sector in Thailand a lot. That's the third phenomenon in the innovation system. The fourth one, we have around 140 universities or countries. Around 40 universities already announced that they would like to transform themselves into entrepreneurial universities, meaning that they start to have their own holding companies investing on their own research and development and translate it into companies. Now we have around 40 in-campus university startup that investor, angel investor already invested. That's another phenomenon that we have very young entrepreneurs that learn from their one how to work as a team. And also they want to be the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. So that's become a norm in Thai University. And the last one I think last year, according to one international report, Thailand only have one deep tech startup company. We did a survey earlier this year, we found that we have around 60 deep tech startup companies. That's why at this moment we nurture around 60,000 university students to be entrepreneurs. And at the same time, we try to move into innovation hub in a provincial area, at least 12 cities in Thailand that we target to have around 2,000 to 3,000 new entrepreneurs and angel investors. So in that sense, when we mentioned about innovation, it doesn't mean that it should be technological innovation at all. Now we are talking at least seven specific new type of innovation. First one is business model innovation. That is very important because you can see that a Thai big company and concomitant, they mainly focus on creating new business model innovation. That's why we have quite capable large national corporation to transform and to move into the new futures according to business model. The second one I think because of COVID-19, we found that we have so many cases on two specific innovation types. The first one is on public sector innovation. Now you talk about goth techs and also civic tech, if you come from startup ecosystem. But now the government turned themselves from the users of innovation into the innovator and x-rayers by themselves because of the government procurement system. And the second one is on social innovation because the government or even private sector cannot support people at the bottom of the pyramids or people at need. So there are quite a few number of social entrepreneurs in Thailand that turn themselves from ordinary business people and also entrepreneurs and turn themselves into something called social enterprise, which is very new. That's quite phenomenal and I think we are moving into more intangible sense of innovation. The specific area that we found that they are quite unique, merely on the data driven innovation. Because in Thailand, I think quite similar to many countries when you mentioned a bus word, right? Data, machine learning, AI, what does it mean for innovation? So in that sense, we try to make it more sense through data driven innovation, both from the government data and also innovation. Informatics. So we try to make city of innovation and innovation district. Try to work with urban and planning department at the university so that they can develop the public and make digital map on entrepreneur innovations and supply chain. Now we can have around 12 innovation district in Bangkok, map in digital map and the near future, you can see that we are moving towards metaverse. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Panart, I just want to have some technical information because those who are listening us, those who are with us, the audience, we already got some questions. So the ladies already got some questions as Panart also, but I would like just to mention that they will answer this question after this first draw. So I would like to ask the other panelists just to finish this part of the conversation and after we will give answers and sorry, please wait. And then some many other very interesting aspects are coming up. Like we go forward and like the tech driven innovation we have been talking about, but how can it works in the public has. Pradeep, what can you do or how can you have the startups and innovations, innovators and small companies? How can they enlarge them? What is your role in this whole ecosystem? Thank you very much. It was fascinating to listen to the other speakers and also speaking about how to incubate and start thinking on scale, thinking at a national level. So it's very fascinating. So maybe in terms of the question that you asked, let me take a practical example and say how we work with some of the innovators to take some of these innovations to scale. I'll probably take one or two examples just to give a flavor of what we can do. And those of you who are innovators listening, if you have any solutions that relates to health, do feel free to connect with us. What we found in country after country is that ministers of health who are responsible for delivering health care, at least at the policy level and making sure that people on the ground get health care. They often have challenges, but they often will not speak to the innovators who have solutions. Because if you speak to any of the ministers, they'll say, we don't know which one to go with because everybody is trying to sell something to us. So that's where we come in. Okay. Here are your challenges. Here are the three to five solutions that are innovations which will really change your life. And I'll give you a simple example. One of the challenges in a particular country was if they train 100 nurses or doctors or healthcare workers, 80 of them will leave the country go to UK, Canada, US. And that's a problem that several countries are facing, right? Now what we did there was to say, if you set up a traditional medical school that is going to take you $100 million in eight years to set up. Most political leaders don't have that kind of runway. They'll think about three to four years. So we said, fine, let us look at alternate solutions. We've worked with several innovators. We looked at options. Then we identified a blended medical school, which was doing exactly the same thing, which is training people using blended medical education with COVID now that's become more or less the norm anyway. So we worked with them and we assist them and we found that the quality of doctors and nurses that they were putting through the course was comparable, if not better than the traditional medical school. So we worked with them. We introduced them to the ministry. The cost of setting up a blended medical school is between 4 to 6 million compared to the 100 million that a traditional medical school takes. It can be set up in six months and up and running compared to eight to 10 years for a traditional medical school. So we've become that interface that takes a neutral approach, works with the problem holder, finds the solutions. And then, of course, investment, where will the money come from? So we play a role in bringing investors, which many of you spoke to. Usually we work with growth stage companies. We don't really work at the very early stage because it's very difficult. We just don't have the capacity and that's why we work with several accelerators and cubators. We work with them to source innovations that might be prime time, that might be ready for scale. So we bring investments. We bring investments from development finance institutions. We help to bring investments from sometimes sovereign wealth funds, sometimes venture capital. We also work with several non-dilutive investors. So you're not always trying to sell a part of your business, but you also get grants which might help scale them. That's one. The second thing is, I think, far too often again, as the UN, the value that we bring is our ability to convene and the neutrality and trust that we enjoy. So for example, one of the biggest challenges in the health sector is the cost of drugs and diagnostics. Let me take diabetes as an example. One out of 11 adults suffer from diabetes and the cost of treatment for diabetes, insulin, which is a 100-year-old drug, it's still way too expensive for several people. So we work with manufacturers, with an innovator who's developed a different way of coming with the insulin. We work with them. We agreed on a less than 10 cents per person per day access initiative and we made that available to low- and middle-income countries. So it's a policy change. It's a trade negotiation. It can be innovation. It can be community-level innovation. And I'll probably take one more example and I'll stop there unless you want me to stop now and quite happy to answer. No, no. Just give us one more example if you wanted to say, no problem. Okay, we work. I spoke about these structural challenges earlier, which is that if between 50 to 70% of health facilities don't have access to electricity, then many of the innovations that are being developed. I mean, today if you look at, I mean, we spoke about AI. I mean, you can change the whole way we diagnose so many illnesses using artificial intelligence. I mean, this phone that we all work on, we, for example, we work on a simple diagnostic way. You just peek into the phone and we can tell whether people have COVID or we have tuberculosis or potential cardiac failures in the future. All those things. It's all machine learning and use of AI, right? But then if you don't have basic electricity, most of these solutions cannot be used. So we become much more of a integrator at a different level working with, for example, we are working with three countries. What is really exciting is we live in very interesting times. So you have solar solutions which can provide electricity for these health facilities. So operate. That's fairly straightforward. We have set up a fund with the International Solar Alliance which will invest in these solarization of health facilities. Number two, the low-orbit satellites which are being launched. I mean, if you look at Starlink or any of them, they're launching about 2,500 satellites, low-orbit satellites between now and end of the year, which means every part of the world, even the remotest part, will have access to connectivity, which has been a major challenge and the cost of connectivity is coming down significantly. So when you have the digital infrastructure and the energy infrastructure, many of the solutions that we are talking about, like we work on AI or telemedicine, we have several innovators, we bring them into the solution, but we work on these infrastructure issues to make sure that these solutions can ride on it. So we create that ecosystem and the infrastructure that is needed for scaling innovations and we bring the investments that are necessary to make that happen. And we also help, like many of you spoke about the, you called it Pitch and, I'm sorry, it was Pitch and Pair. Pitch and Pair to us. Pitch and Pair, so we do something called Pitch and Pair where we also bring growth stage entities and we bring a network of investors where we see a solution, where we see a market, we bring them together and we try to bring them to scale. So we use our neutrality and our ability to work with governments to make sure that we are creating the ecosystem necessary for innovations and innovators to thrive. And we also engage with several incubators, accelerators to make sure that the worst thing that can happen is you have a life changing solution sitting somewhere and it cannot be taken to scale purely because of the disconnects in the system. And that's what we try to bring together. Thank you very much. I think that digitalization, it really helps us, but sometimes it's very important that we can use the benefit of it because we can say everything is open, we are there, we can reach everything, but everything sometimes is nothing. If we do not connect the right pots to the right ones, the right pair, it means nothing. So that's why it's still we need it. And thank you very much, Pradeed, for this global vision as well, because I think it's a trust. What you mentioned is very important in America, but the trust is everywhere. This is the main point. And as I'm listening to you, I can agree with you in every cases, not just the innovation, not just the team, but the connection and the trust. How can we build it together? It's very important. And one more very good example, I would like to hear about Mogdad, that you have a very special economic zone, which is like a little industrial revolution, because what we are talking about all together on a global level, I would call it industrial revolution, because as we heard that from every part of the economy, we can see some new ideas, some new solutions, and we need a really new connection for it. So Mogdad, how do you work with this new special economic zone? So I would like, at first, I would like to emphasize that the role of special economic zone is changing, because in the past we were mainly about the public aid and mainly about diversifying the industry in particular regions and attracting, creating new workplaces. But now we are like, it's an old expression, but one stop shop is something good to call us. So you can come here and you can benefit from all necessary services from the very beginning, from the very beginning of your investment process, or finding business partners, finding the right employees, finding potential clients to accessing the right technologies. And to do that, I guess I would also emphasize the role of connections and trust, because the trust is really the greatest value we have. In our zone, we have like 400 different companies, mainly production companies, it's like 95% of our investors are from production sectors, and the companies like Miele, BSH, Whirlpool, Procter & Gamble, Ericsson, and so on, so also big international corporates. And then the first step of our activity is to divide these investors, these companies into three different groups. The first group is the ones that are really eager to open innovation channels. So they are really eager to work with startups not only to implement the technologies within their company, but also to help the startups to grow and develop and to have the real influence on different solutions. The second group is a group of companies that is open to external innovation, external technologies, but do not want to spend time on experimenting and teaching them and so on. They are more like interested in ready to use solutions, but they are perfect also for us because if we choose the first group, if we choose those 20 bravest ones and the most open ones, we test the solution in our acceleration programs, we test them, we verify, and we know that which one is successful and which one is good for the industry. Then we have the second group which is ready to scale the solutions. So we have ready to use solutions that were like from the acceleration programs and we have the second group of different companies that are ready to implement the solutions, ready to use solutions and verify by other business representatives. And the second, the smallest group is of course the companies that focus mainly on internal technologies, internal development and they would like to go through the process of digitalization within their own company. So that's the first thing we do and then if we have those groups identified, we scout for startups, we choose the best startups from the industrial sector mainly. So Internet of Things, generally industry 4.0, VR, AR, artificial intelligence, cyber security and so on. And then we have to teach those groups how to speak the same language because we have, from the one hand we have big business which is very, where the decision making process is sometimes longer and they are very careful and they see the big picture, they would like to know what the effects and the results for their company will be. And on the other hand we have startups, small companies which are very agile, flexible and very fast and quick and they want the decisions and they want the actions to be made very quickly. And we are in the middle of the process, so we build the trust between these two groups and we teach them how to cooperate and how to benefit from this cooperation. And the third, and I guess the most important factor, which is the name of the panel, so building partnerships. It is the crucial thing in case of building local partnerships and international partnerships. An example might be our pilot program connected with 5G technology, we are now finishing it, we've been running this program for like almost two years right now. And this is a pilot program which required from us gaining a lot of partnerships, not only business partners and not only startups, but also mobile operators, device providers, some knowledge transfers, so some companies that will be ready to teach us the benefits from 5G technology. It is regulatory because still we don't have the official frequencies for 5G infrastructure and 5G network in Poland. So we needed to connect all the dots and have all these partnerships to gain the trust and to build the development of 5G solutions with startups and with business partners. This was in the local level, but of course we are also interested in going global because Mary mentioned Pigeon Bridge competition, so we cooperate with input program. We of course inform our startups about different competitions, different opportunities in other countries. One of our startups made it to the finals in Pigeon Bridge, so the startup from Poland, and they are very satisfied. So this is really important because this is not only helping us to learn what to do and to learn those best practices, but also to share the knowledge and share the potential possibilities and opportunities with the companies we cooperate with. And that is why we are now starting the newest acceleration program because this might be something interesting for all of you. Connected with, if your aim is also to help your startups in global expansion in finding the new directions, we have the newest program connected with attracting foreign startups to come to Poland and to learn about Polish markets. So we have some financing for them to, for the soft landing, so for knowing all the legal HR tax procedures opening the company in Poland. And then we have some financing and experience business partners like Ericsson, for example, that are looking for different solutions and that are looking to cooperate with different foreign startups and help them to know to make the Polish markets close to the city. Close to the startups and, you know, and the Polish market is good because we are like almost in the center, so this is a good network for all the European markets. So that is why I guess, especially talking about our newest acceleration program, building partnerships is really crucial because this is something we as the zone benefit from. In case of our core business, in case of attracting investors, companies, big companies, but also in case of scaling the startup solutions. Thank you. It's fantastic already. We had one solution. So for those startups who would like to soft landing, not just for the US or for the other continent, we can, we can find the possibility, the opportunity here as well in Europe. And Poland is a great market with a huge population and economical strong. So I think it's, it can be very interesting from Tunisian startups as well. And for everyone else from Thailand or whatever. So I think this is the cooperation which brings up brings up us to the next level. As I mentioned, and of course the other way around. So if you, if you have any opportunities for Polish startups, if you want to meet the Polish startups, we're also ready to ready to show them to present them. And I guess that this is something we can all benefit from. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely. And as I, as I promised to our audience that we have some questions and I think I do believe that not just answering the question just end of the session. If there is a question, we should answer for it right now. So I will ask if there was a question to Salma that what are the concrete impact of the Tunisian startups act for entrepreneurs. So the Tunisian act is the start the startup act is an open framework that has actually disrupted a bit the legal paradigms in Tunisia because it's done a totally digital. So it's a full digital process from the application to the to the label grant and then to access to the advantages. It's one of the kind of this kind of programs in Tunisia were not used to digitalization into administration and all that stuff. So it's huge change in the life of the startups. We are it's an open doors to now we're counting so 600 startups so far. And this number is going up each month because we're opening application each month. It's a huge work very rigorous process, but we made it possible for a bigger number of people actually to do that shift into our economic landscape and to promote more the innovation and experimenting, experimenting actually new innovation within the young and who are we are happy to have a lot of talented very it coming from the STEM academics so they are into a physical chemical studies biotech artificial intelligence and the law is giving them the chance actually to experiment to go into that endeavors that were before the startup act very, very risky to go in. And so, more than I think 5 million dinners in Tunisian from public funds, we have been invested only for example to cover to bear the cost of the salary and social and the social and HR taxes. The startups will not have to pay any tax any like tax on revenues or benefit each year, even if they are doing millions and hopefully and luckily we have some startups that are that are actually generating millions of dollars and dinners and they have raised funds from Europe and the last one is expenditure with more than $20 million fund raised and they are active in Tunisia they are creating jobs and they are benefitting from all these incentives, but for the small startups like they are starting at the first year we are giving them wages that we are giving them like salary yes for 12 months just to make it safer for them to do that big leap into entrepreneurship and we try to keep their lifestyle so we calculate the salary regarding or according to what they perceived before as salaries. Yes, before it's maybe as a multinational company or somewhere else they would work otherwise and it's very important that the new talent guy from the university is with the huge knowledge. They can be use this knowledge in a startup or they can go to the big international companies or multinational companies or some other ways and there is always a change and which they move and I think that there is a very good responsibility and high responsibility for the accelerator programs that if they are able to keep them if they are able to connect with the right person and the right possibilities for the next movement because the startup is sometimes we have to wait and there is a question for Mary as well that how do you finance a patient, at least now after a reality not matching timeframe expectation, what has changed in your budgeting timelines and promise funders because it's always a big question when can we get there. Yeah, it's a great question. Actually our budget has only been really helped by COVID I guess I mean one of our big expenses was travel and we really couldn't spend that actually so we were. There was a law pass in Hungary where we could repurpose some of that funding for programs. But yeah it's tricky I think one of the things we learned. Well first of all we don't ever promise anything to the startups I mean it really is up to them and we do our best to help them and get in but unlike Fadi we do focus a lot on the early stage and I understand why you don't. I mean it is really difficult I think this is a different one. It's a different world but I think this is exactly the purpose of government funded programs I mean you know that that's exactly where the resources to go to you should go to create a healthy early stage pipeline and then you know as the companies progress we bring in partners like yourself and other organizations to you know really help them help them get to the next level. But I think one of the things that we really focused on was understanding the reasons that things were going right away or and a big part of it is you know the startups a lot of times just aren't ready and so we really spent a lot of time on focusing on this preparation phase before we actually try to send startups abroad. And we actually launched a new program called the smart take off and we're doing this focused on Poland so we have a lot of great partners in Poland like Magda. I think we see a lot of synergies within within that market. So what we're trying to do is basically develop even more services. I know one of the questions we were discussing and kind of as a group was, you know what are the gaps and what do we see and I think one of them is around this preparation piece you know I think everybody's excited to get to the next level they're excited to get investment and join new programs and expands but you really have to do your homework as a startup to be able to get there. So we're trying to get more sophisticated and kind of having an internationalization checklist and really taking companies through the whole process and make sure they have, you know, a nice landing page. I mean, you know, it's sort of basic stuff but I think a lot of times people want to skip ahead before they really have solid fundamentals. So that's kind of, yeah, what we try to do. I had one other comment that I just wanted to say, just about, you know, I just was looking up Tunisia is around 11 million people it's very similar in size to Hungary we're about 10 million. And, and Poland's a bit bigger but I think you also have the same, you know, feeling. At some point, we have to go international I mean we there's a lot of money going at you know so their money is not an issue in the Hungarian ecosystem so there's a lot of capital available. I wouldn't say it's all necessarily smart capital but I mean I think this is the challenge. There's so much money that we're pouring into hundreds of startups every year to really trying to grow the ecosystem. And for those investors to get back that money they're going to have to go outside you can't finance, you know, the companies. So I think that's also something we try to be really aware of, and I think there's a lot of, you know, probably synergies with how you know how our approach is and you, we have to send it's not like the US where you can grow big enough just in the US market. Because, you know, little countries in Europe and Africa, you know, we have to go outside our home country if we want to actually develop and you know become a business that's going to, you know, have that trajectory that traditional kind of financing pathway. So, yeah, it's really interesting to kind of hear a little bit how you're approaching that and I see a lot of parallels between that with the Hungarian ecosystem too. Well, thank you very much, Mary for that comment as well and I'm just wondering, are you agree with Mary, because she has mentioned that okay there can be many programs that can be many funding that can be hundreds of accelerator programs, but end of the day the startup has to do their own homework and they have to prepare themselves and is there a real help for them for instance Magda, can you change their mindset in a way how they work and how they can make their own homework on the field like being success? Yes, I agree with that it is very important to make your own homework because in Poland we also have a lot of financing, a lot of financing, it is good because we are still pretty young and at innovations and technologies so we need to trigger the market and encourage companies to create something and if we have a lot of financing, we have a lot of companies that apply to one program, the second program, the next program and so on so we have and we always underline that it is very important to know your partner so to learn what they are offering who we are cooperating with, so do not apply to every possible acceleration program if you have a solution only from like MedTech sector, yes because you need to know that we are cooperating with for instance Dr. Ericsson and so on and we are not interested in medical devices, in medical solutions so please apply to us if you really have something from our area of expertise so we don't want to be very broad in our cooperation and start-up activity, we are very like narrowed to the industrial solutions and then we are of course to encourage them to learn and to do their homework so we take the most successful projects and we put them into the meetings, into B2B meetings with different business representatives, but first and foremost we are preparing them, we are calling them, meeting with them and telling them you are meeting this and this company, this person from this company, they are looking for that solution so we need to know because this is very important for us to have a start-up satisfied and a start-up ready like having a new potential client but on the other hand we have a satisfied business partner who will be back, who will be back and who will be encouraged to speak to other start-ups and then we of course tell them that it is very crucial, it is very important and after the acceleration program should be only like a step in your way to success, in your way to scale your product, yes if you finish the acceleration program you need to go to the market, you need to sell, you need to find the clients and we are helping in that so we are giving them potential clients, we are offering them like 15-20 minutes of meetings, B2B meetings and then if you succeed you will be able to get into deeper details with that company and maybe have your product commercialized with other clients and so on, so we encourage them to do that, we offer possibilities but you only have 15 or 20 minutes, if you don't succeed, if you are not properly prepared for the whole process they can go and there is the next one, because it's your responsibility as well, but who do you connect them because otherwise they will never come back to you if you don't have a proper group and they cannot offer them a real solution and real business partner meeting what else Yes, great, thank you and Panard you have also one question from the audience, I don't know if you have seen it, I'm just reading from the chat and I don't know if you have seen it, I try to understand the meaning of the question because it is what is the impact of ease of doing business in Thailand attractiveness for foreign players on the local innovation activities of nation, we see a lot of base industries products with made in Thailand labors There are three specific answers and that's such questions because ease of doing business is a big issues in Thailand, recently for the past three or four years the ranks on ease of doing business in Thailand skyrocket, I think at this moment we should be around top 20, but again, if you're talking about ease of doing innovation business, we still need a lot of efforts, mainly on regulatory teams on the efficiencies of the government that can support private sectors, because our productivity and also efficiency from the private sector, mainly from big firms, that's already nurture new investment for startups in the world. But we are talking about series Bs or series Cs investment for the past two years we already have two unicorns, the first two unicorns in Thailand. So in that sense, the rules and regulation that's allowed us to keep good companies in the domestic market is very important, because they're always challenged by international venture capitalists that they would like to move our good company out of the countries, maybe at least in some so called more fancy and more attractive market. That's the first specific answer that that's why it's very important because our rank regarding to regulations and policies is a bit low. Why the capabilities on private skaters very high. The second specific area is on the legacies of foreign direct investment. And you mentioned about ease of doing business is mainly attached to the board of investment. So in that sense, I think every so called catching up nation, we would like to have more foreign direct investment from so called big companies in the world. But now we are going to move forward from original equipment manufacturing into original brand manufacturing and we would like to have more foreign direct investment on innovations and research. That's why the so called incentive and also the proposal that we can offer. That's mainly focused on ease of doing business for different stage of the art. And the last one is that I think that's mainly focused on our startup ecosystem. They would like to have specific laws and also specific so called regulation and incentive for board investors and also startups in the early stage, like pre seed or maybe in the series. That's why we need to work very hard to nurture them and let them grow. So I think there are three specific answer that I would like to elaborate. Thank you very much and I think it's a we have a little bit more than 10 minutes and I would really like to ask you just if I would be a magician, and I can make your wish through what would be the three very important things that it would be necessary to your based on your experience, of course, which can be changed or which can be just just speed it up the the ecosystem and and the startups word Ron what can we see so at least very quickly. What do you think what we need still what is the very important things we should change in the future or we can cover collaborate in the future and we have one question about the collaboration as well. So what can you see what we need. Thank you very much. I think that's a great question. One, I do believe trust we need to see how we can build trust and that trust will not come unless we start having conversations across countries across ecosystems, because without that we're all working in this sense of fear and not understanding that that is certainly number one. Number two for me is really the ability to think on scale and work on scale. So we need to build the different pieces together but if we're not really looking at the bigger impact and across sectors. I know that I work on health, but the challenge and I know you use the word silos. All of us if I'm working on health I continue in my silo you're working on telecommunications you work in your silo someone else is working on. I don't know automotive industry you work in the side of the what the SDGs have shown is the intersectionality if we do not bring these different pieces I know that you said about today everything is digital right. I mean, you can even you can find at least connect the right points. Yes. Yeah, so we need to start really working together, much more collaboratively thinking big picture and working across sectors. Three for me is really how can we start. There are too many barriers that we have put in place in the traditional economic system, and we need to see how innovations can go beyond and all three of you who spoke from Mary Salma and Mark the all of you said about you have similar population sizes and the need for going through your immediate national economy right. We need to see how we can start doing that so that even in terms of finding solutions bringing innovators together right from the very beginning and not waiting for having a product before you go across so you need to start. How can you really build those ecosystems which are interconnected and working with each other. That would be my third big wish. And now that you're the magician I will let you. Okay, I let it be true but this is the first step first for instance we have to talk and we have to see each other possibilities and we have to see the connection Mary quickly what would be your wish. Yeah, I think it's a great quite I can echo some of what you're saying for deep but I had. So what it's kind of boring but just, you know, being part of a government program. There's a lot of restrictions and you know rules about how we can use our budget and that's great when you you know make a plan five years before the project starts but as things go on and you know I think having a little bit more flexibility and being able to change. We're trying to plan our first international demo day in Poland, actually in two weeks and it's just so difficult for so I don't need to tell any of you I'm sure you've all had this pain so it's just a little bit better. I think it's kind of structure and understanding and maybe that's trust you know from the government side that we're actually going to be you know allocating our resources in the right way. The other thing I wanted to say was about really getting, you know, finding investors that are really open and cross border transactions, I know that they exist. But I think it's something that we're working on, you know really trying to find, and I think part of it is because of, you know, a little bit of the way that the VC environment works here it makes it difficult to get, you know, an investor to come on just the way cap tables and evaluations are structured here is, you know, we're still figuring that piece out and then thirdly it's, it's kind of, I guess, non trivial but just the language I mean we have a lot of really talented startups, especially as we start to get more into global recruitment, you know for our pitch and bridge we have we have polar startups we had Brazilian startups we have lots of you know startups from our different partners. And I think, I think you said this for deep you know one of the worst things is you see a great technology and it doesn't get the attention it deserves and I think sometimes that's just because the founder is a genius but doesn't have the language skills. And it seems to me such a shame you know kind of like with digitalization you know it's we take it for granted now that everybody has connectivity. And I take it for granted that everybody can speak English but this isn't the case yet and I think it's really going to open up. It's obviously we're getting there but I think, yeah I would love to be able to see all of these great ideas, get the attention that they deserve. Thank you very much and sometimes maybe not the founder should be the promoter because I think it's it's can be another solution because the funder is really would like to keep the idea and would like to go for for investment as well but maybe not he's the best or she is the best person for it and they have to understand that they need some changes as well, just to be visible on the market and I think it's it's very important what you mentioned, Salma I am the magician so you can give me five or three, sorry, only three wishes. Actually, so on a local scale, we have such challenges still on the legal framework, because we tried to act very in a giant way with the start of act but still at the bigger framework we have problems with exchange regulation we have some policies that we need to make change to actually give the opportunity to start ups to be to have access to international markets to interact with international skills talents in the easier way. In Tunisia, because of the strict regulation in terms of financial changes and exchange etc that goes through the central bank. It is still one of the struggles that are facing the Tunisian startups in a more like open and international way I think it's amazing to see more and more soft landing programs and to see more and more exchange programs. I think this is key to build our new very big ecosystem. And I hope that it will lead to tackle like more in synergies and more a group of startups that will tackle like our biggest like problem problems now that are climate change or water management or any kind of this I think I believe actually and not really resolved but by one startups and start up in Tunisia or even in the US. I believe that we need actually to build forces and to build like group of people that will work together in order to find solution to this very prominent problem that we are facing now. The third situation the third is for emerging ecosystems, how to have a place actually in this very active word and they are doing pretty good and they are offering a lot of opportunities to their startups so for the Tunisian ecosystem and similar ecosystem that are emerging that are they are doing their jobs, how to build a place how to how to make a different differentiation and to propose a value proposition that will be proper and make it stand out and to actually being like an active actor in the whole ecosystem world. Thank you very much. Magda and Panjab you have only like a pitching competition so only for one minute. So it's like real startup competition. So Magda what is your wish? I can speak quite fastly so I don't know not fastly just in one minute in the message. I will repeat because I am almost the last one so I will repeat building international partnerships of course we have all our own expertise but as you mentioned you have medical solutions but to every medical solution you need some IoT devices and IoT technologies so this is something we are good at and so on and so on so we can combine the dots and we can connect the dots and create something great. This is one thing and the second one is connected with my previous statement so having advisor startups that can use accelerators and companies institutions like we as the step as only the step in their in their development so use them wisely and know that if you succeed if you cooperate in a good way. They can help you to scale instead of having the next and the next and the next financing be ready for the for the clients. Thank you. Thank you very much. To specific things I think we are under a myth that you want to have the right age for entrepreneur right particularly for startup for the each but for me I think it's no age limitations or the right age for entrepreneur. That's that's very important. The second one is on how small companies SME and also start up could work with corporate big corporate. So in that sense, the last corporation not not not necessary to be there will all the time. Sometimes you need to live and to work with them. So in that sense, I think both always a myth. We need to think about it carefully and work and work work it through unless it will be very difficult for start up and also small. So continuing idea people that would like to be on. Thank you very much. I think it's very, very important comment what we got from there. So trust on scalability, flexibility, trans border investment and regulation legal framework. It's kind of exchange exchange programs and emergency for the emerging market emerging ecosystem, get some some really unique value proposition, and no limitation no age limitation and no size limitation and no no cooperation, no cooperation limitation so we wouldn't say the startups can operate only with startups we could say that multinational companies can work with them so we have to open our mind for it and I do hope so that all of them became true soon. And by the first step, we did already we have been talking about this very important project and thank you very much for your cooperation for your best best practices what you have shared with us. And I do hope so that the audience has enjoyed and I can promise is the name of you guys I hope so you I can make it if anyone have a question and they can just directly send it to you. I think you will answer for them as well. And thank you very much for being with us here and I would be only one task just to talk about the next program. The mechanisms of entrepreneur universities because not only the startups, but the previous step the universities is also as important as the startups and, and the entrepreneur ecosystem so thank you for joining us and stay with us in the live streaming. Thank you very much for your cooperation here. Thank you. Hey everyone, welcome to the global innovation form of it you for the ones who just join us and welcome to the second session of the afternoon on entrepreneurial universities as an accelerator for economic development. I'm very happy to be the moderator of this exchange. I'm very used to be one of the speakers so it's it's also a new chance especially to manage the time. I know that our guest speakers and panelists have a lot of experiences to share, but we will try to to moderate everything. So the idea here, you will have three rounds of questions that the panacea will be answering with the expertise. And then at the end of the session, we have allocated time for Q&A session from the from the attendees just reminding you some house rules here as you can see the session is being recorded. So if you stay on the call you're accepting to be to be recorded. So this is the case for the panelists and they know it and also for the attendees. And also, you will be able to rewatch this session on the IT website, and also it will be stuck on the on the swap card. Really take this event this conference as an opportunity to share and also to network and to connect as my colleagues said in the previous session. You can also participate using some hashtags. I'm sharing them on the chat. The first one is hashtag rediscovery innovation. And the second one is hashtag ecosystem building. Okay, so I'm just I just posted on the on the chat. And now let me introduce before I give the stand to the panelists, a little bit more about entrepreneurial universities and accelerator for economic development. So being myself an entrepreneurship professor, what I what I'm seeing, and let's see if the panacea thing the same, but it's more and more need for entrepreneurship and for training into entrepreneurship and training is only a small piece of the iceberg. In terms of entrepreneurship, and this is due for several, for several reasons, just some thoughts here, but definitely the changing to the labor market is one of them. So for instance, we have more and more new companies to start to start to hire people and MBA students. I was reading recently a report that more and more startups hire MBA graduates and MBA students. So there is a change in the labor market. There is also a change in the needs of the people in terms of what they want to do as a as a career. Okay, so before, if we take the previous generation, the generation even before people were spending 40 years in the same company, which is probably not the case anymore. Okay, so definitely at one point at a time people would like or will go for an entrepreneurship career. And let's take it out also this switch from classic or traditional universities to entrepreneurs as a way to fight poverty. Okay, I'm thinking about emerging countries here. I have been the chance. I had the chance to live in several different countries, but the idea here would be to develop skills so people can launch their own business and fight poverty. Okay, and not only in emerging markets. So maybe we can also integrate the context the current context that. So this is not a talk about the carpet. Don't worry. But maybe the current context is also key. I mean, we cannot understand strategy and strategy of the universities without understanding the context and the COVID-19 situation that we are almost done with it. Okay, so just to give you a number then I will give the stand to my to my to my colleagues and the Paris but the idea is that in 2013 the US 40% of the workforce will be on demand. Meaning that they will have no that they will have no employer. Okay, there will be self employed working for large companies and medium companies. Take the case of Uber, for instance. Okay, they have zero drivers till some drivers are working for them indirectly. Okay, so today's session is about this about understanding the role of the universities and this transformation oriented to entrepreneurship and also why and how the traditional institutions should rethink and maybe become entrepreneurial universities. I mean, this is what my my colleagues and the panelists today will be discussing. So without further introduction, I will pass the the world to my to my colleagues. So we have six panelists, sadly one cannot be here directly but he was kind enough and committed enough to share his thoughts on videos and the moderators will help me to share this. But we will start with, I will ask each panelist to introduce him or herself for, let's try to do it for 90 seconds. So basically who you are, more about your organization and division and the mission of your organizations. So maybe we can start with Miss Lade. Hi, how are you. What's to you. The stand is yours. Thank you so much have VA and good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all the participants. I'm absolutely delighted to be here and thank the ITU for this kind invitation. Lade Araba, the co founder and president of the Viziella Foundation, a nonprofit that educates trains and mentors African girls and young women from underserved communities in the STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and math. We run after school STEM clubs for girls attending poorly resourced public schools. We run coding boot camps for young women to equip them with skills to make them valuable or tech enabled entrepreneurs. And we also run STEM camps for teenage girls to build their confidence and interest in the STEM fields. In our programs, we aim to build girls self esteem and engage them in stimulating STEM activities to develop their entrepreneurial and leadership potential. We enable the girls to work in teams to solve real life challenges and provide experiences for them to succeed. The Viziella Foundation's programs create an environment where risk is rewarded curiosity is encouraged and creativity is expected. At the end of our programs, our students are more confident and better networked these programs ultimately are helping these students to become more successful and entrepreneurial, and will also inspire them to take on the world's greatest challenges. Thank you, Lade. I know virtually passed the microphone to Caroline Kiena. Thank you very much and yeah, I echo Lade's delight at being here and joining in this discussion. I have worked, I'm based in Birmingham in the UK. I've worked at, I've worked in UK universities for nearly 20 years. To start with, sort of, I was doing career coaching and then, lastly, I've been supporting students and graduates with enterprise and entrepreneurship education and activities. The Boston University was founded back in 1895 from the business people of Birmingham really to serve them. And that's something that we've kind of carried through that that's really been underpinned everything we do since then. We, all the research that we do is applied. So we work extremely closely with business and that's ranging from big corporates, but increasingly with SMEs and with startups. We actually are currently the times higher UK entrepreneurial university of the year and accolade that we're extremely proud of and, you know, it's through a lot of hard work over the, over the, over recent years that we've, we won that award last year. Sadly, it was online. We couldn't have a big celebration. We're making up for that now. And we have a strategy that focuses on three on outcomes for three main beneficiary groups. Obviously, that's our students but equally important to us. It's the businesses and our region. We're very proud to be a civic university and, you know, a huge employer in the region and working very closely to improve the, you know, the social economic and health outcomes of people within our, within our region. And I'm part of something called the Aston Center for growth that I wanted to touch on. And what we do is, and I'm sure we'll talk about this a little bit more really is to use the research that our academics do to underpin sort of business support programs for SMEs. And that's from the BCN program that I run, which works with student and graduate startups through to scaling up SMEs. So yeah, that's the kind of synopsis of what we do at Aston. You really have the opportunity to detail it more, Caroline, and I think we are all getting used to even celebrate online. Sadly, so most of the things are being online, I guess. Thank you so much. So now I will ask Mr. Adelaide or the Bumini, sorry for the pronunciation, if I, if I model your name, just let me know to introduce yourself. I did my best on this one. Thank you for speaking. Go ahead. Oh, thank you. You did model the name. Thank you for having me. And I'm very glad to be with all our panelists. My name is Adelaide Bumini, and I'm a social impact tech premier, a psycho economic and enabler, and I'm a public safety expert. I'm the co-founder of ExoBrickman Solutions Limited is an impact software development startup based in Lagos, Nigeria, and we're focused in the area of West Management, public safety, mass transportation, and smart healthcare system. Our flagship product is PACAM, the West Management Solution, currently deployed in Lagos State. We tried to connect the entire stakeholders within the ecosystem together at just a click. And our mission is to deploy important social impact software solutions across social economic sphere. And our vision is to become a global tech company that offers an end to end solution. Amazing. I'm thrilled to have your thoughts on how social ventures can collaborate and help on this. I'm also social as an opponent, so it will be definitely interesting for the audience as well. And I will kindly ask Mr. Ralph O'Yenny to introduce himself as well. Hello everyone, and on behalf of Smart Africa and myself, I want to say thank you to ITU and the Global Innovation Forum for having us here, for having me here. So my name is Ralph O'Yenny, I'm the head of digital transformation, innovation and services at Smart Africa. And what we do at Smart Africa is that we transform Africa into a single digital market and this by assisting member states and government with the social economic development using digital technologies. Smart Africa is an alliance of 32 member states, 32 African countries, heads of states and governments, as well as academic institutions and private sector stakeholders, partner organizations such as the African Union and ITU. And you understand that for the success of our mission, which is to transform Africa into a single digital market, how important the startup and innovation ecosystems development is, as well as human capital development. And maybe later on we'll share a little bit more about the Smart Africa Digital Academy that we call SADA and how entrepreneurial education is part of this whole flagship project. Thank you so much, Ralph. And I will ask now Mr. Marco Zenaro to introduce himself, please. Thank you very much, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm Marco Zenaro, I'm from the Abdul Salam International Center for theoretical physics, which is a category one UNESCO institution, where I had the unit which is called Science Technology and Innovation. My interest is in the field of Internet of Things, and I have been organizing training activities in more than 30 different countries, and I'm interested in using this technology to reach the STGs. So I'm very happy to share my experience with you in this session. Thank you, Marco, and welcome to all of you then. We have the video from Mr. Dana Redford, who sadly cannot be here today. I will kindly ask the hosts to share the video, please. This is the million dollar moment, I guess. If you don't know Celia or Luisa, if you can hear me. Yes, Javier, I can hear you. Maybe can you repeat again? I didn't understand. Yeah, if you can just share the video of Dana. Thank you. Your colleagues, it's a pleasure to be with you here today, virtually of course, but even more virtually for me, because this is pre-recorded as our colleagues, our hosts have shared with you. It's an honor to be at the ITU Global Innovation Forum, and this session on entrepreneurial universities as accelerators for economic development is a key aspect to how we can actually build partnerships and mainstream entrepreneurship. Today, I'm speaking to you from Lisbon, Portugal, but in fact, I am virtually doing a training program right now for the US Department of State in Guinea-Bissau. So I will be joining you for the last 30 minutes of the conversation, but I thought I might be able to start us out today and talk a little bit about the entrepreneurial university. In 2014, I wrote a handbook with Professor Alan Fayol on the entrepreneurial university, and we can say that the themes of the entrepreneurial university have been something that has been developing over the years, and that continues to need to be developed. Of course, this happens perhaps at a different rate in different countries and different contexts, but this is still a very current theme and something that is constantly evolving. Thank you so much, Dana, from the distance, and as you heard, he will be joining us for the last 30 minutes, so you will see him and hear in life as well. Dear panelists, thank you so much for introducing yourself, and I can see that you want to talk more, so this is what we will be doing right now. Let's start with the first question, which is actually two questions, the what and the why of entrepreneurial universities. So, what is the reason for having entrepreneurial universities? And the why is not only why we should have them, but also what are the challenges for those traditional institutions? Also, the current entrepreneurial universities, what do they need to improve, continue doing, or stop doing, maybe? And the other question, it's obviously, what do they gain besides doing things well? I mean, we have some social entrepreneurs having a good meaning, or a good vision, or a good mission isn't enough to receive support. More than that, you need other incentives. So what could be those challenges and those incentives for the normal university, traditional universities, to become entrepreneurial universities? So just to follow a bit, the panel will start with Dana and his video. Please keep in mind the question, and then I will turn it on to you, the panelists. So guys, if you can just share the video from Dana, what is entrepreneurial university, and we take it from there with the challenges and the opportunities for them. Your colleagues, it's a pleasure to be with you here today, virtually, of course, but even more virtually for me because this is pre-recorded as... This one sounds familiar, maybe I think it's the next one. So... Javier, can you confirm this is the word, right? Yeah, it should be this one. Thank you. Thank you. So we can look at the entrepreneurial university in different ways. And so I would like to start out with talking about what is the entrepreneurial university? So I would like to start out with talking about what is the entrepreneurial university? So first of all, we can think of the entrepreneurial university in three parts. One is the organization itself becomes more entrepreneurial. And this is a key aspect because if we think about how organizations are arranged and developed, we really are able to make some changes that can improve how we do things, make things easier for those who are part of these organizations. Members of the university can also somehow be entrepreneurial, somehow create and become more entrepreneurial themselves, creating startups, spin-offs. From my native United States, we have a lot of tradition of university professors going off and starting their own businesses, developing new ways of doing things, taking a time off from their academic careers to become entrepreneurs and not being penalized. So we'll get to some of the aspects that we need to understand on how to enable an entrepreneurial university, but certainly allowing individuals to leave and come back is something that was key to how this is developed in the United States. We can also talk about the environment, and this is a key aspect. We have at this conference talked a lot about looking at ecosystems. Ecosystems are key. It used to be something which I would phrase as infrastructure. You have an entrepreneurial infrastructure, which actually helps us to support entrepreneurs. And this is really something where you talk about this idea of, as it was referred to in 1998, looking at the structural coupling. Now, what does this mean? This actually means the third mission of the university, and the third mission of the university is to help in developing the entrepreneurial university within its context, within the environment around us, which is something that the outreach aspect of the university after the first mission, which is research, second mission of teaching or interchangeably teaching and research. The third mission is integrating and helping become a mover, a catalyst for the internal development of the university, but also of the outside and of the surrounding environment. In this regard, actually, I have been involved in a recent project. You can look it up and see something called the HCI initiative with the EIT. The EIT is the European Institute for Innovation and Technology. The EIT has been promoting this because they exactly want universities become more entrepreneurial. And so we have been advising them in PEEP, my NGO here in Portugal, the Policy Experimentation Evaluation Platform, to help in trying to develop this regional aspect. And if you look at the first call had about 85 different proposals and then 12 were selected. These are all projects of about 1.2 million, and they develop these entrepreneurial mechanisms within the university. So one of the things is to try to get it so that you're able to have startups, but that's not the only goal of an entrepreneurial university. These are things that are easy to measure, right? The idea that you have a startup and then you have the educational experience and then the startup. However, many times people have the educational experience and then later in their life, they're going to do something entrepreneurial after they are able to gain knowledge in their specific area of work. Thank you. Then I will get used to talk to a video. I think an interesting thought, especially on how do we connect practical or the application practice of the theoretical knowledge that we get at the university and how we can apply it straight away when we receive it, which is probably the best way to remember it and to recall it and to be able to use it properly. So as I always say, if you don't use it, you lose it. So definitely there is a gap there that we need to facilitate. And what about you Adelaide? Did you attend an entrepreneurial university? That would be one of my questions and maybe tell us a bit more about how you started your entrepreneurial journey, especially as a social entrepreneur, which is slightly different, not to say very different than a traditional entrepreneur. All right. The same version is the model of necessity. So in this part of the world, your head just needs to be very open. You need to be able to get opportunity and honestly, here in this part of the world, the street is the real entrepreneur university. You make your mistake, you learn from your mistake, you push ahead, and that's what it is. And honestly, like I do tell people, what we are gaining from the outside world now, what we're gaining from events on the streets, events in the open market is such a huge volume of knowledge. And I tell you, I didn't get that from the school. So in the university, I think, like I do tell people, I'm only being taught to read, to get out of school, to serve my nation, to get employment, of course, hand salary, be diligent, and retire at 60, maybe have high blood pressure, and die at 70. But honestly, it's so different out here. And for you to leave your comfort zone, you need to think and come to look at it even across the other side of the world. People that are inventors have never been product of universities. Is it that they dropped out? Is it they never been? But they are good at also employing the university graduates. They're good at, and I would tell you this. When we started our business, we have so much that we're brought in and we have to also let many people go. But guys that are turning our space into viable products, most of them are just school start, school start, school start orders. Some are still in the university, smart guys. And even those that went to universities are being taught by the street. So it's extremely important that we understand our environment. It's extremely important that we understand the problem of the environment. And if you don't understand the problem of the environment, that's it. But one thing I can tell you that I got from school of the university is the background. I'm a sociologist by training, and that helped me immensely to understand problem, social problem. And so what I try to do is not to digitalize this problem and put it in such a way that the entire stakeholders within the ecosystem can make sense of and make value for. Yeah, indeed. I do believe as well that education can have many forms and not only the traditional one on the bench at the university, and definitely you need to adapt to the people. I mean, no need to do very high level finance strategy if what you need is to count the dollars there per day in your business. Fully fully fully agree on this one. And then we have we have Karen who has been having an impact at a local level and probably also international level that's focusing on on Birmingham in the UK and supporting. I would say classic graduates students who have a project. So how are you building those into communities around universities and why are you doing it as well. Yeah, so I think I definitely take Adelaide's point. I think one of the things that we do at Aston and obviously lots of other universities will do is sort of share our research and innovation with SMEs but that's always very much a two way street. Obviously, the, you know, the professors will share their expertise, but they need to see it actually in action within within the SMEs. So I think that's that's hugely helpful for them to have like a test bed for their innovations. We have a couple of things that we do here. One is quite interesting. It's called the innovation vouchers program. And that's where SMEs can essentially get funding to buy some consultancy time from from an academic with a particular expertise. So that's a really good way of transferring the knowledge. We also have things called that we do a lot of Aston called knowledge transfer partnerships where again an SME works with somebody from the faculty in a particular area of expertise, but they actually also get a graduate to work on that project as well which to actually kind of oversee the implementation of the of the research and innovation. So that that's that's really helpful to have that graduate embedded that that's fully funded so that the graduate will get paid to help with the transfer of the of the innovation or technology or expertise. And the other thing that I would say that we do to in the way of kind of an entrepreneurial university is around the training programs that we run. So whether that's the program that I run which is for student and graduate start ups, or whether it's looking at the next stage for kind of scale ups. The center for growth actually started through their involvement with the Goldman Sachs 10,000 small business program. And then, and obviously that's gone on from strengths to strengths. So we're involved in delivering a number of different programs. But again, I think the learning is very much two way. On my program we use practitioner trainers, because we don't want it to be too academic we want it to be real, really practical training for the startups so kind of to help them bootstrap their ventures to start with but also, you know, to help them get investment if that's what they need. And then the final I think is around this human this issue of human capital. You know, we're seeing certainly in the UK at the moment will shortage of talent for all our businesses not not just start up across the board. So one of the things I think we can do as an entrepreneur university is to make sure that we're delivering students and graduates that have an enterprising mindset. You know, we talked about these kind of 21st century careers and we're currently training our graduates and students for jobs that don't even exist at the moment. So we need to make sure that they're agile and good communicators and problem solvers. Alongside obviously this delivering the subject area expertise that they're studying. So I kind of think that for me that's the three main areas that kind of sums up an entrepreneurial university. Thank you. Thank you. And indeed how important it is to create those bridges between the corporate world, and also the universities, knowing that at the end of the day the objective of the university is to create the, the workers and the managers and the managers of tomorrow. And sometimes we tend to, we tend to forget it. We tend to forget it. Thank you so much. And I would like to hear maybe more about the latest mission and your organization and what you are doing especially to create those bridges as well by educating young women in terms of in terms of entrepreneurship need to be what you're doing with your, with your organization please. Thank you so much Javier and I'd like to echo and, you know, affirm what both Carolyn and Adelaide have mentioned. We've seen students come to us at the high school level where they have only been taught about computers on a chalkboard so they've taken notes but they've actually touched a computer. We've seen computers science graduates come to us and they learn more in five weeks about coding, programming, and just even basic entrepreneurial skills in five weeks and they have in four years that's the feedback that some of them have given to us. So our programs, you know, in the spirit of entrepreneurial universities are built on a 360 degree developmental learning model which we believe entrepreneurial universities should possess and that's how they should be structured. So the three pillars of this model that we engage in our programs. First of all is filling the gaps in the theoretical instruction within the parent institutions. Secondly, and very importantly is experiential learning where students can really get their hands dirty so they're involved in labs they're building prototypes they're tinkering you know having maker spaces. So that's what entrepreneurial universities typically do. And then third and very important is also exposure to industry so making sure that these students have a direct link to professionals working in their field so other entrepreneurs who are doing similar to things to what they desire, and also just being able to listen to professionals speak about their careers and the journeys that they have undertaken. Again, this is a very important aspect of entrepreneurial universities. And if you think about, you know, countries like the US or even the UK and just the number of patents that are emanating from the various universities and educational institutional institutions that are very entrepreneurial, then it tells you and it gives you an indication that we need to be supporting students to embrace this thinking but actually also be linking them practically to be able to start developing products and solutions and to look at challenges as opportunities. And there are a number of case study examples that we could discuss as success stories I just want to quickly share one example with you, where we have two students I'm a rushing Habiba currently 17 and 19 years old so they've been students in our after school girls from 2018, where they learned how to analyze problems, we help them to develop critical thinking to learn how to work in teams and also to again tinker try things out and develop prototype solutions. So one challenge that they were very, very proud is the high rates of childhood mortality in Nigeria where you have a lot of children unfortunately who died before the age of five in low income communities, and so they developed a mobile app that basically enables parents to keep track of the vaccination schedules, also provide some with general health information to keep their children and themselves healthy, and then provides them with verified addresses and contact details for clinics and doctors who are certified professionals because we also have a lot of fake doctors, unfortunately delivering fake medicines, and this app gives directions to these clinics. Now, they had started working on it in 2018, they have the opportunity a year later to present it at the International Technovation Challenge regional competition, which is an international competition organized by nonprofit in the US, they received very high commendation, they continued working on it, we supported them, and in December 2020 I'm excited to announce that they were selected as the second up at the MTN Hackathon. MTN is one of the largest telecommunications companies operating in Africa with headquarters in South Africa, and they won additional technical and financial support from this leading telecommunications company to final finalize the app moving beyond beta testing and getting to a point now where they're getting ready to release it and publish it in the App Store and Google Play Store so that it's available to serve a global market because this issue is not just, unfortunately it's not just a challenge in Nigeria, and this is the type of impact that our 360 degree developmental learning model achieves and what traditional entrepreneurial universities are able to produce. This is the type of transformational impact that we would like to see as more and more universities embrace this entrepreneurial spirit. Thank you so much and congratulations for the winning prize in them, very impressive. Thank you so much. Then I would like to ask Val for a little bit more to explain us what is SADA, so I understand it as a platform for improving and accelerating the digitalization in Africa in general, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how this is helping for entrepreneurial education on the continent. Yes, and thank you Javier, and I'm going to take it from there, she has some great examples on entrepreneurial education and let's just take it from there with SADA, which is like an initiative in the Smart Africa and the goals of SADA are number one, create digital awareness, number two, develop 21st century skills, and number three, create demand driven skills. So SADA has been active for a little bit more than a year, so it's very recent, but yet we train more than 1000 government officials from 25 African countries. We have organized more than 20 virtual training workshops, and we are in the process of creating physical academies in some of our member states, precisely in Randa, Burkina Faso, Benin, Tunisia, and Morocco. And from the video of Dana, there is one key element that he highlighted that I really like, he said that the interaction of universities with the environment is a key element to entrepreneurial universities. And what we do as SADA is exactly this, what we do is we built that multi stakeholder approach, so that SADA benefit from the network of Smart Africa, where you have industry actors, you have government officials, you have universities, you have international organizations and all those different stakeholders coming together and co-creating content. Right, which is great, because it makes it less general, but very specific and very targeted to what we see the skills that we need on the market, on the local markets in Africa specifically. So if I have to say, and within this whole network, what we do is like we advocate these entrepreneurial education principles. We have over initiatives where we look at pro startup policies, for example, with governments, where we support governments, developing those policies, and we make sure that we put an emphasis on this type of education that is so key for the development of our content. Thank you. Thank you so much for the inspiration. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to know more. And I know that this is one of the complexities. We have a session at this time bounded and you have so much to share. And it's even more difficult for me because I cannot give my opinion on everything all the time. So, which for a professor, as you know, professor, it's very, very difficult. Last but not least, we have Marco. It would be amazing if you can share a little bit more about the research that you do at the ICTP and also how you are able to commercialize this science, this technology, this innovation. A little bit what Lade and all the panelists were mentioning also. There is some innovation that can pop up from universities and then it's what you do with it, how you commercialize it and how you exploit it. Maybe you can tell us a bit more about what you are doing on this. Thank you very much. A very good question. So we do not do it directly. So what being our mission very clear, which is supporting science and developing regions, we do so by organizing training activities. So we organize many training activities. And in those training activities, I would say we have, you know, different components. One is the awareness one that I just mentioned. So making, you know, participants aware of, you know, cutting edge technologies. This is one. The second one is what Dana presented is structural coupling in training. So asking participants to, you know, find application of these cutting edge technologies in their own environment. So there is no way I can come up with an idea that would fit, you know, specific countries. Of course, it's, you know, local participants when they learn about the opportunities offered by these technologies. And I would say that the third component is something that a delay and mentioned, which is, you know, all the material that you have available right now, which I think, you know, is completely different from what, you know, would happen 20 years ago. Now, you know, thanks to, I would say, you know, open science in general, so making a, you know, documentation and papers and, you know, technical instructions feel available. So I think, you know, participants in our cases in general entrepreneurs can come up with the ideas that can use these, you know, large amount of material openly available on the Internet. So that, in my opinion, has been, you know, a game changer in some way. Thank you. Thank you so much. Definitely some challenges on the innovation, making it available as well. I would love to transition to the next question that we are trying to answer here, which is about what are the challenges and the opportunities. I know that we are being very positive here, which is good, but obviously there are challenges, maybe hostels and barriers as well. What would be those changes and opportunities for institutions? Your institutions are the ones that you are collaborating with to become more entrepreneurial oriented. So maybe we can start, or we will always start with a video from Dana, so I will ask the organizers to share the video, which is also a good starting point for the reflection, I guess. Thank you. So we can look at the entrepreneurial university in different ways. And we need to think about what are some of the key aspects that are needed to make sure that the entrepreneurial university can either be created, or something that can be sustained. So in this regard, we think about, at least in Europe and some of the discussions that I've been involved with as an expert with the Joint Research Center and the European Commission. We have something called Entracomp. Entracomp is the entrepreneurial competency framework. This has been really important in trying to orient different programs on what types of competencies they need to develop. So in this regard, we can think about the future orientation of competencies, not just competencies of today. We want competencies that are going to be of tomorrow. So we want the entrepreneurial university to be looking and developing entrepreneurial competencies for what are needed in the future of work, and not just matching young people, let's say, with entrepreneurial opportunities of today. The other thing is that we want to identify the champions within the university. We want to identify those who can drive the entrepreneurial university forward. And undoubtedly today in our panel, we have some of these excellent champions already that are with us. So you can see what these champions are doing and what they're thinking. In terms of also developing the message, developing the mission, the statement, the mission statement, the vision for a program, the program could be not only for a type of educational activity, but the sort of outreach activity that would also be done. So we then need to be able to communicate and develop that program and develop commitment across the university. This is really what a lot of the initiatives sponsored by the European Commission have that desire. We really want to work at the very holistic concept of the entrepreneurial university and go across boundaries. So there's another initiative, which you can also take a look at, which is HCI Innovate. It's a higher education initiative, a higher education institution and HCI. HCI Innovate is a self reflection tool that I helped develop with the OECD and the European Commission, and it's had quite a lot of success. It's had thousands of unique visitors. You can use the tool so that you're able to manage your university or your team of researchers, of professors in your department, etc. And this is something where you can help do some self reflection and it gives you where you are on that continuum, according to all of the other people who have taken this survey so it's not about rankings but it's very much about helping you to understand. And then of course we need to develop awareness. Awareness can be from self reflection and self assessment, but also the acceptance. I mean, many times you're also looking towards breaking some of the barriers with the actual faculty members. In terms of facilitating faculty and the orientation and the education, one thing that I'm very passionate about is to help educate entrepreneurship educators. And in fact, this is the type of program that we've done not only for the European Commission at the higher education level, but something that I'm also involved with in Africa with our NGO and with the sponsorship of the State Department. So, we can think of entrepreneurship in many different ways. We can think about it in terms of businesses created, but I also think we need to think about it as the larger perspective that you can be entrepreneurial, most importantly, as as a as a working for someone working in an NGO working at a university. And this is one of the key messages I think that all programs need to really emphasize. So I would try to take this and think about the type of culture of entrepreneurship that we are looking to develop. And if we are also talking about culture, then we can talk about why is it important today. It's more important today because you know there is no lifetime jobs which used to be there and if we look at some of the tensions between the traditional university aspects the the institution and what is needed for the future. These are going to be key, key challenges. So I'm looking forward to speaking with you more and looking forward to joining the session here at the end. I will be coming in from my session in Guinea Visao and we will be able to talk more and I look forward to seeing you in just a little bit. Thank you so much. Thank you. I would like to ask you another question. So you are, you mentioned the example of those two students who are 16 and 17 years old, if I'm not mistaken, I'm terrible with ages. And the idea is that do you think that this is a solution, an early stage or an early age program, or is it better to turn on the university into entrepreneurial university with the objective of unlocking potential talent. So as we said, human resources and not reaching the labor market is one of the keys here. So do you think it's better to do an early stage program as yours or to do an entrepreneurial university where people will learn entrepreneurial skills. Among others, what do you think. Great question, Javier. And what I'll say to you, the short answer is it's not an either or just given the existing deficit in so many countries, we need a holistic approach that ensures and facilitates entrepreneurial programs and that spirit across the entire educational life cycle. So I would say starting in primary school, going all the way through to university. So programs like ours are very important, but it's also important that we do have these entrepreneurial universities. What we believe is that a solid foundation, foundational education that build strong life and human skills is critical. Now, people typically refer to these as soft skills that I think it goes beyond being soft to actually being a requirement for success today but also in the future. So things like critical thinking, problem solving, curiosity in electoral rigor, teamwork, public speaking, writing, being able to manage things, you know, meeting deadlines and so on. So we need to help students understand that they have an internal locus of control and that they should not always be looking outward for other people to solve their problems or to develop solutions for them. And this is what it means to be entrepreneurial. And I think that this starts at a young age and it goes all the way through to when you get into university. So programs like the ones that I described at the Vizela Foundation are helping to bridge this gap by ensuring that we're not losing students in their critical junior and senior high school years where they're often faced with many challenges could be personal family or other social cultural or religious. So it's important that we get these students the opportunity to learn in a conducive environment that really challenges them to think outside of the box and helps them to start to look at problems and challenges as opportunities. By the time we usher them into these entrepreneurial universities, they have a higher chance of succeeding and coming out and becoming, you know, the innovators who will be solving problems and creating value, not just for their communities or for their countries, but I think more globally. At the end of our programs, as I've mentioned, we also see that entrepreneurial potential is unlocked. And it's a very powerful identity for them to leverage this newfound confidence to further their education to become new employees. Because while we know that we are supporting future entrepreneurs, it's also a good thing for us to create people who will ultimately work for others for who are entrepreneurial in their positions because that's really how you help companies to grow and to develop and also to create new value. So we think that, you know, if I was to summarize all of this, you know, we need to think about this as an entire life cycle opportunity, and also to ensure that we have very strong linkages with industry so programs like ours entrepreneurial universities, they do need to ultimately have very close partnerships collaboration with professionals, you know, industry. And this is ultimately how we ensure that young people who start ventures can succeed so we limit their their failures and just ensure that they're able to become successful in whatever field. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for the transition that is made very, very easy for Caroline on the need of working on this third mission of entrepreneurial universities just for the audience, which is about the need of partnerships with other organizations and other with companies which is kind of related to what I asked you before and what you are doing in Birmingham. Please, can you tell us more about about this third mission of the entrepreneurial universities and the importance of the partnerships. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I just, I just couldn't agree with Lade more. I think it's, you know, is a lifetime endeavor. We have our students for a very short period of time, but increasingly actually we are seeing our young people coming through and they're already running their own businesses or or they want to start up kind of purpose led businesses, particularly kind of around focusing around sustainability so I definitely think it's something that it should be happening from, you know, school age, right through to university and beyond but in terms of the partnerships. So, yeah, BC and I've been working on the project for the last nine years and it's, it's sort of unusual in that it's a partnership of four of the universities who work together to support our students and graduate entrepreneurs. You know, quite often universities as you're in competition for for students or for funding and different things but actually this is a real coming together. And it's so important because it just it gives us, it gives us kind of capacity. It means that we can share the different expertise that the four universities have so that we can get access to different sort of sectors so maybe different labs that students can use or different experts. And, most importantly, I think we're with our project and we offer the usual kind of startup support of training a little bit of funding, some co-working space, a mentor. But I think one of the most important things is this kind of entrepreneurial community, a kind of ecosystem, and it enables us to forge links with professional services partners so you know solicitors, IP attorneys, accountants, we work closely with a lot of the banks, because increasingly they're either running kind of accelerators or incubators themselves and we can feed into them, or we partner with them, we did a hackathon, a climate hackathon recently with a bank. And obviously partly it's for their CSR, but also there have been a couple of, there are a couple of really good potential businesses that are coming out of that hackathon and between us we can support them to give them the best chance, you know, as Ladi says to really give them a good boost to start with them so that they don't fail in their endeavor. So yeah, I think just working in partnership is really, really important and very lucky that it's something that we do on our project. Thank you. Thank you so much, Caroline, and then just to pass the question to Adelaide, but also how you collaborate? Okay, having a partnership, let's collaborate together is interesting, but then how do you collaborate? Are you sharing knowledge? Are you sharing technology? Is it about the funding? Is it about the visibility and the network? So I would like to ask you the question Adelaide, did you receive any support in terms of entrepreneurial teaching, research? And maybe I'm extending a bit the question since I'm also a social entrepreneur in terms of funding to found X Rubicon, and I love the name by the way. So what was the support that you received at the beginning and then to continue the activities? It's not only starting it, it's continuing that. So I like the fact that you say you like the name, so let me start with the name. Making friends. So the name came, of course, myself and my co-founder, we sat together and we said, you know what, we need to go into base. And we said, we're not going to cross the Rubicon. And immediately we crossed, we are not going back. So that is how crossing the history. So the history records actually crossed in the Rubicon. So to go to the question, honestly, like Madame Adelaide said, it is very important that in, as long as we have it, University of Entrepreneur, exposing students to this harsh reality is extremely very important, is what makes them strong. Entrepreneurship is a mindset, is a mentality, mentality to succeed. And I also shifted if I go into, dive straight into the very question, is the fact that not everybody will also be an entrepreneur. We also have an entrepreneur that will have to work. Of course, the future of work also made it easy in such a way that I can work in your business. I'm innovating for your business as an entrepreneur. And not just that I'm a salary earner, but I've taken the business and there are various ways we can do that. So we can build an entrepreneur across the entire ecosystem. Nothing was so far. However, to get into the dive into the question diary, it was a harsh reality. But yet it is in this part of the world, when you are going to come up with social innovation, or social impact innovation. The stakeholders in the ecosystem are very important. The user, the business stakeholders and the government, because those part of the environment are heavily regulated by the government, call it transportation, call it waste management, call it public safety. So the path that would deliver the value are in the hands of the state, the regional or the federal government. So are you ready to talk to those people? Do they understand the English you're speaking? So the reality is very, very different. But in my own mindset, I've known that you know what, if I meet this mountain, I know I can climb it, but I will go around it. So at every mountains I come, we try and try and try to go around it. So in this scenario, we came with one strategy, we said, these people will never find you. Even if you submit your proposal, they will take it and go and give it to one of their family members. So you know what? Let's take the risk. This risk is what they can less finance this. Social impact solution is very expensive. So we financed it ourselves from our pocket. We deploy it during the course of doing research. Even the business stakeholders will not want to cooperate with you. Oh, you cannot come and disrupt our system. Oh, you cannot come and do this. Oh, they are not ready. So you also need to get funding to do research yourself outside of it. So we did all of this. Then we launched. Then they started coming in one by one. Everybody that says it to not work. The government that wanted to take the hell out of my life, then they're not coming. Then they are partnering with all of us. And we're saying, ah, this thing is getting big. It's getting big. And they are talking about, you know what? How can we partner with you on data? Oh, how can you give us data from the backend? Oh, how can we see? And that is where you need to cash them. Because in this part of the world, government don't work with data. So at the end of the year, they don't charge a budget. And of course, they cannot make any sense of it. So but when they add data, they can make instant decision not within other. Now they are seeing that. And I can tell you right now that within six months of our product out, we're ready, we're ready, we're ready, or what is it called? Helping government to focus on policymaking. So it is just what it is. It is hard. They will never give you the space, but immediately use. Everybody will start to plug it. In fact, I will tell you this. We did what probably anybody has not done. We brought up a complex solution within four months. And this was pressure from government. We have given you two months to do this. And they know it's not possible. But they wanted us to fail. But you know, my team are so great, we don't sleep. We don't. We don't have anything in the office. So we walk, we walk, we walk, we walk. So their vision is when they come, they will say, oh, sorry, the time is not possible. So we're always meeting the time. Okay. We will even meet the time. So at the end of the day, they could not do anything about it. And we're happy to see that the mindset is now changed across the country. The various state governments are now calling that we should collaborate and help them solve the challenges that they are facing in public safety and waste management. Thank you so much for the agreement I experienced myself that you need to do some achievements before people follow you, even if you are the same person with the same project and so on by the same team. Yeah, this is how it is, sadly or luckily. So there is a need to continue anyway, if you believe in what you're doing. That's for sure. Ralph, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about how Sada is helping on the different missions of an entrepreneur, especially the second one, but also on the teaching and on the research would be would be amazing. Yes, and thank you, Javier. I like the intervention from Adelaide. And if I may start in terms of teaching. I think teaching, especially in Africa has to happen at all levels, right, from students, but also with government officials. And this is what Sada is promoting, not only teaching with government with students, but also government officials that become students of universities as well, especially works in the context of entrepreneurial universities, because we believe as smart Africa that the private sector and the governments need to work together. They need to work closer. Right when the government established those policies, if they're not in contact with startups and entrepreneurs, how are they going to establish or create the right policies. So this is what we're trying to do with Sada in terms of teaching is bringing those two together and we're doing it at the regional and continental and one not international as well. I have this melting pot of professionals and students together and teachers. It's just great. In terms of, in terms of commercialization of knowledge or partnership. I mentioned it earlier, I believe in co creation of content. It's very key. I give you a specific example of one virtual workshop that we've done. A little bit less than a month ago with a partner Intel and the government. So the government's come to us and this is smart Africa. We have all these things happening about big data and artificial intelligence. And those are ministers and they say we need we need a government officials to know a little bit more about it because we have the community coming at us with this and we don't really know how to react. So we look into our network and Intel was very happy to come and create the content with universities, right? So they co create a content between industry actors and universities and use the Sada platform to teach all those government officials and they even collected feedback so that we had to do like a second session. There is even more appropriate for African government officials based on the realities. Then, lastly, in terms of research. And this is the great thing about smart Africa. Unfortunately, we don't have enough time. But I was going to give you like so many examples of different initiative that we're doing. Give us one. Give us one. I would love to hear them as well, but we are going to wait for Dana to spend more time with him. Exactly, he's on the call. And I want to hear from Dana after all these videos I want to hear from the men in person. So we started this flagship project with Randa and it's a smart city. It's a smart cities initiative. And Randa has three priorities. The first priority is security. The second priority is having these cities very clean and the third priority is good governance. So we supported Randa with all this landscape assessment to see how to make it happen and he created like a lot of data. What do we do with this data? Well, we use it to, as I say, co-create content with the industry actors, with the academic institutions in order to train the students. So that was a quick example. Thank you, Xavier. No, thanks to you. Thanks to you for the example. And you will have the time to share it with us and definitely with the audience. I guess we can all agree on this that if the audience wants to ask us more questions or know more about our projects, we are very happy to share them, to share our contact details at the end of the session and to answer the questions. I guess we will agree on this. Hi, Dana. Hi, how are you? Live this time. You did the videos very, very interactive. So we had the feeling that you were here with us. So I've been thanking your videos just for you to know. But let me ask you to ask Marco a little bit more about the same here. So about also this tension line that we suffer a lot or we experience at universities. So Caroline was saying we need to have practitioners and a good mix of practitioners and academicians. And this sometimes creates a tension line between the teaching, the research and also the commercialization because it has to be financially sustainable. What's your experience with this, Marco? What's your approach to this? And I'm listening because I'm very close to this one. Very good question. I would say that the biggest tension from my point of view is how universities value entrepreneurship, right? So when in a career path, how does that play a role in setting up your progress in the career? I would say that would be number one. And the current one, which is I think gaining more and more attention is the tension between this open access movement, open data, open science, making your research completely open versus intellectual property in a way. So many of the colleagues are afraid. How am I going to publish my research and my data if that is going to be valued for my career. And at the same time, setting up a business using maybe some of the ideas that I would like to publish. So that is a current tension and I think we're going to see much more in this field in the future. Definitely. I always say that teaching and university activity in general is an individual sport. Sometimes two individuals have been something we need to fight against. Definitely. And then this question between completely open to versus completely closed innovation and the reality is probably somewhere in the middle or depending on what. Okay. If the case of Tesla, they made everything available. If you took the case of Microsoft before everything was closed innovation and now they are changing. So advantages and disadvantages on both sides as well. Ladies and gentlemen, I think you will agree if we start the next question with Dana and I'm very happy that I don't need to ask for the video. This is really making my day. And I would like to ask you to ask you a little bit more about how can we concretely create those entrepreneurial universities. Okay, so meaning in terms of the mission but in terms of on the field. Okay, not not the mission. Okay, let's change the world. That's why we exist, which is very good to have an objective, but more in terms of day to day activities. How can we create effective efficient and at the end of the day, entrepreneurial universities that create value and not only retrain one million people. That is very good. How many of those people created the company? How can we create outcomes and not out so that would be my my last question. Don't worry, we'll have the time to share a little bit more and I will ask you an answer in two minutes, which is almost impossible. I know it, but please go ahead. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Xavier. And it's a pleasure to be with everybody this time live. And I think that the key aspect is, you know, you're asking for an entrepreneurial university but how do you have the the actual professors, the staff. We need to be able to train these people to be to have this larger view of entrepreneurship, not just the startup aspect. So, you know, the sort of 1.0 of this is that we would look at universities and how many startups they create. In fact, that is not the only outcome or output that we want. We also want people to use their entrepreneurial competencies in different ways. We need the staff to be trained. And then I think that there's another key aspect which I'm really interested right now about, which is the regional aspect and I think that we need to have matrix which we can measure how many connections have been made. For example, has the university connected with the regional strategy? You know, where it is located is obviously of great importance, but the major sort of output of a university cannot just be human resources for existing companies. It has to be the ideas, the innovation, the youthful exuberance, the entrepreneurial spirit of young people and those at young at heart to be able to move forward the needle. So I think, you know, in a very brief comment, I would say that we need to work at developing the human resources within the university. We need to focus on the regional impact and we need to do this in a perspective, the largest perspective of entrepreneurship. Thank you, Javier. No, thank you. Thank you so much to you. And then maybe another question to Lade and we are following the same order which is the alphabetical one here on the last name, which is based on your experience. How can we make sure that the teaching and the curriculums that we are building so the content at the end of the day are helping to improve the traditional curriculums of the university. So let me give you a quick example here. They asked me to create an incubator in the university. And then they said, oh, you have to teach. And then the idea is that if I need to teach, just call it a corpse. Let's not call it an incubator or whatever. So do you see like the difference and how can we adapt this to avoid doing the same with different walls and different names at the end? What are your thoughts on this? Great question Javier and good point. So I mentioned earlier that we utilize a 360 degree developmental learning model that we've developed and the third pillar is exposure to the industry. So I believe that entrepreneurial universities need to develop a deep culture for industry collaboration. So what this means is across the entire institution, there needs to be faculty and staff who are actively engaging with industry. In our case, our students are connected to industry through mentoring and coaching, field excursions, but very importantly, at the end of all of our programs, they have to develop working prototypes that have a commercial angle. They develop business plan, you know, market study and so on. But then they present these pitches to a panel of judges who are professionals from various industries and they grill them. They have to demo the prototypes. So whether or not they work and at the end of it, you know, there are a number of prizes and some of them go on to develop these further. And maybe another quick example that I really like is from a Shacy University in Ghana, which I think is very entrepreneurial. It's one of the younger universities in the country, but it's operating now for I think about 20 years. And it's a product example of an entrepreneur university that is developing future leaders and innovators. When a Shacy was setting up its new College of Engineering a few years ago, they started out by connecting with industry and other engineering programs to really get into developing the curriculum, the modules and determining the learning outcomes to ensure that their students were receiving practical education but also being prepared for the future. And what you find it a Shacy, which is not necessarily prevalent in other institutions in Africa is all their students have to do internships. So they are spending their summers or you know, several months of the year actually working in different companies each year they do a different internship. So by the time they graduate they have real hands on experience. And if they want to then go into entrepreneurship directly, they help them to succeed and they've developed critical thinking, they have those professional networks as well. So the final thing that I'll say is, you know, universities also need to invest more in R&D research and development. We should see research partnerships with industry, and we should also see a direct link between the curriculum and the jobs that the students or, you know, the the startups that the students will ultimately create when they when they get out. So I think I will start Javier. Perfect. Thank you so much. Definitely being exposed to entrepreneurial environments and also to entrepreneurs themselves. I'm always kind of laughing when I when I hear people saying I'm teaching entrepreneurship or hey okay how many companies need to start known, you know, talking from experience, I see you smiling. Guys, so I guess you had the same answer. I think this is this is very key and this is this helps me to ask the next question to Caroline. I mean, how can we make sure that we have a real impact as professors, as academicians, as deans of universities, for instance, and also as public entrepreneurs, how can we make sure that we have a real impact and again, we're not just counting the number of people that we are training, but we're actually counting or okay, like in the previous session, how many new unicorns do we have in the country, which makes more sense. What are your thoughts on this one? I think that impact is always an interesting one and when you go to conferences it's always a question that's much debated, you know, how can you demonstrate the impact that we have as, you know, enterprise and entrepreneurial educators. And I think, you know, Diana made a good point in it. So we have something called the Hemkey Survey in the UK, where every year we have to report the number of startups, their turnover, the staff that they employ. And obviously that's one picture, but I think it's so much more important. You know, one of the best things in this discussion, I think, was when Ladi talked about the two young girls and their app that they developed and the impact that it's had, you know, it just brings everything to life. And I think that that's what we need to do more of is to showcase our entrepreneurs and talk about their stories and, you know, speak through them. With some of the work that we do at the very early inspirational stages, it's about getting kind of relatable role models in. So, you know, we don't want the necessarily no disrespect to kind of grey-haired CEOs, but we want to get the young, vibrant entrepreneurs, start-up founders, you know, like Adelaide and to come and talk to our students, because our students can then see themselves in that position in a few years' time. So, yeah, I think it's very important that we get across these kind of the good news stories and the individual stories, using storytelling actually to talk about the impacts that our work has. Yeah, and definitely it helps more than having those kind of stories. They started in a garage and became billionaires kind of approach and having someone who is really sharing the passion, which is something that you can definitely feel. And I guess we all have it on the on the score is more inspirational. And at the end of the day, it has been demonstrated that people exposed to entrepreneurs, people when their own parents are entrepreneurs, tend to become entrepreneurs. So it's about exposure and role model and the example as well, which will definitely help me as well to ask a bit more to Ralph about the role of the digital technology and the role of technology and the digital world on this development and building of the entrepreneurial universities. I mean, how is technology helping us? Dana mentioned that we have to, we have to be global and local at the same time, which is kind of a paradox. Is technology helping for that and how can we manage this technology to build entrepreneurial universities? So many questions for two minutes. I'm sorry about that. Yes, and I know I have two minutes. But, but it's very interesting. I mean, we did like a study at Smart Africa and I'm telling you so, so, so interesting and so relevant to the times of today, in terms of the relationship between digital development and a country being organized and the socio economic development of this country. And they totally correlated right countries that are really well advanced in digitally are usually more organized than overs. And when they more organized, the more efficient and the development is even higher, which is, which is amazing. So digital technologies is cross cutting or reason, or reason to Lee, when you look at the health sector education and agriculture and all those sectors, but also vertically vertically when you look at the actors, the government and even the private sector actors. So, knowing this, you understand why it's so important to develop those 21st century skills or like Dan has said in his, in his video, the, the, the competencies right in with the digital technologies because the stake is the social economic development of a country. Thank you so much and thank you for being so time bounded all the time. But maybe we cannot, we cannot understand the world without technology. I mean, what would have been the university doing this pandemic without the technology, for instance, so I guess this is a sad, but a good example at the end. And then Marco, again, last but not least, we are just following the same the same order. Let's start with us a little bit how we can help entrepreneurs to build this ecosystem, which is not only about the university. We mentioned companies, we mentioned organizations, we mentioned governments. How can we help them to build this ecosystem and also to have this impact on the sustainable development goals, which are the 17 United Nations goals for sustainable development. Tell me, which one is your favorite one? I mean, all are good, but on which one are you working the most? All are essential, more than good by the way. They're all essential. They all have to be reached and, you know, at the same time. So, if I look at my field, right, which is Internet of Things, I would say that in that case, the regulation is really important. You know, favorable regulation would help entrepreneurs, you know, develop solutions to reach the SDGs. And regulation can be a game stopper. I mean, if entrepreneurs cannot, you know, adopt new technology. Now, again, we're talking about cutting edge technologies, because of a limiting regulation, then they would not be able to, you know, apply that in the field. And, you know, starting adopting it to try to, again, you know, solve the SDGs. So I would say that regulation, from my point of view, is the most important ingredient. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We are running out of time, but actually, I think we will get it back a bit. Just wanted to take some questions from the audience so they send them to me in a block text. I will try to translate this. But just for you to know that this is generating a lot of interest from the audience as well. So we are receiving several questions here. And one of them, just to pick up one, they're all interesting. But one of them is the role of incubators. And maybe this is something that we didn't touch base enough or we touch base it kind of intuitively as part of the role of the university as well. But what are your thoughts on incubators? Interestingly, I did work on this for the ITU recently, but it's not my turn to give my thoughts. So what is your point on the business incubators in this whole ecosystem that we are speaking about? Anyone wants to take the lead here? You want me to say something? For me, I think that it's just really important to give our students a sort of safe space to start up. We obviously provide them co-working space, talked about the importance of community. It gives them a registered address to use. It gives them a place to bring that's sort of smart, they can bring clients to. And then it's a place where we can bring all the externals to come in and meet with them. And yeah, I just think it just helps in some way to sort of improve their chances when they first starting out, but actually equally it could be to help them to learn how to fail quickly and move on to the next venture. I think someone wants to borrow what Karin just said and add something out of personal experience. If not, don't worry, we have one million questions here, more or less. We will not have time to cover them all. I think the best advice for the audience is to contact us directly if they have more questions. I see several questions for all of you actually. But another interesting one which is more in the role of the professor, which is what are the criteria when we are recruiting professors today and what maybe should be the criteria to build the entrepreneurial universities. Remember the example of this friend who said, I'm teaching entrepreneurship, I never found a company, so maybe this is one of the things that has to change, but what are your thoughts on this? What do we need to change on the existing to create those entrepreneurial universities? Well, maybe I will just jump in because I think that educating entrepreneurship educators is really a key component of the entrepreneurial university. And well, I would say in the United States at least, you have mainly adjunct professors, those who are actually working in industry that are generally teaching these courses, so many times not those with PhDs. I think that you want the professor that's going to push the needle forward. I remember in one of my universities that I worked with, they told me that I had to do the grading by having a final exam. And I simply told them that that is not how I teach entrepreneurship, because I think that if you're teaching it by something where people have to do a multiple choice answer to questions, then you probably missed the point. So, you know, in trying to mold to what they wanted, I did do a series of quizzes throughout the semester where I wanted to make sure that they had been doing the reading. More importantly is I think to have really innovative types of pedagogies. One of the things that I've used is a personal strategic plan at the end of my course. So this is a mixture of your personal values, your work in your future life, and it doesn't have to be that you create a company, it's really trying to mix those values and what you think you want to do in the world of work. So I think it's more important the innovative pedagogies. And again, I would pitch that we need to help train those professors. Yeah. And the assessment is so much part of it. I'm struggling with this right now. They asked me to do a theoretical questionnaire for future entrepreneurs. And my say is like, I mean, you will never go to a company that will ask you a definition. If someone experiences this, please raise your hands, but I guess no one. So definitely we need to adapt the assessment as well. And maybe last question just to make a third one, which is more maybe related to those working on the African content. But not only which is one of the gaps for startups and for entrepreneurs or self-employed people is when they need to commercialize. Maybe because they live in extended areas or rural areas with no access to technology or limited access to technology. Maybe they need to work five days to reach the first big city. So how can we or how are you as panelists and entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs? How are you helping to bridge that gap in terms of commercialization? It's the case in Africa, this is the example in the question. South America is a lot like this as well and probably some regions in Europe. So how can we help as universities and practitioners to bridge that gap who wants to react to this one? It could be the name for a new conference by the way, but in like 30 seconds, who can answer this? Go ahead, Adelaide, please. Thanks. I think it's not as bad as you said it in Africa. And let me also put that the internet Nigeria as a country, I think is the sixth largest internet user in the world. If it has not moved to the fifth now and the mobile penetration is also on the increase. Well, you have more interaction and activities actually in the rural, in the urban area, not in rural area. And I can also tell you that even in the rural area now you can be shocked that people are actually using smart phones and they have access to internet. Recently, I saw in the, sorry, in the densely forest of Ogun state where you have so much of elephants. These local people were inside the forest and no elephants appeared and it wasn't the internet. And I was like, how did they record this? And they actually live streamed it. So it's not as bad as the other side of the world is thinking is quite improving. If you look at the data and statistics, you will see chunk of what has been registered as mobile penetrations actually mobiles that have been sold by telecoms and whatsoever. But we have so huge market of mobile that have been sold on the second hand market. But nobody is getting those data and it's huge, if not larger than the normal one. So I think it's quite impressive of what is going on in Africa and Nigeria in particular. And however, there can be more improvement and let's say it goes. Fully agreed. Just reading the questions here, but indeed huge market. Probably your role is important. Yeah, but making the data available. Guys, really five seconds each or 10 seconds each. Two punchlines for Ralph and Lade. Ralph is his hand first, but I think we can do the ladies first approach. Ralph, if okay for you. So let me go ahead with two main ideas on this and then wow. And then we go for the conclusions guys probably running out of time. Thank you. Thanks Javier I actually wanted to contribute to that last question to say that I think product market fit is extremely important for any entrepreneur to aspire to so regardless of whether you're in a rural community or wherever you are. Commercializing means that you have paying customers and I think that that's really where the focus should be. And if your market is local to where you are, then you should be thinking about how to convert those early adopters and grow that market and basically have a very robust customer base. So I think that that the focus so that's that's really what I wanted to contribute Javier. Thank you so much and I know that there is so much to say only on this question. Go ahead Ralph. 3-4 punchlines. Three punchlines the first one is that we have so many examples of fortunately I cannot share them all. But there is a smart Africa scholarship fund and what's so special about this fund is that you have governments right coming from all Africa, contributing into the phone with private sector and development partners such as it you to send African students to universities such as Carnegie Mellon University or the African leadership university. So this is great. This is a good example of partnership for the betterment of Africa. The second point is political commitment political commitment. I totally agree with Marco, you have to develop the right policies in order to get to those rural areas in order to be totally inclusive with education and the right policies for entrepreneurs but also for education and here you have entrepreneurial education right. The third and last point is adapted to the local context what we see a lot in Africa is that you teaching students in school to program computers which is great it's awesome and program smartphones but as Adelaide said in rural areas you have people with regular phones and ussd technologies why they're not learning how to program with those type of technologies. Here we go Javier you have it my three quick points. Thank you. Thanks to you. Well, we'll just ask you. Everybody uses Twitter here. Everybody's this is familiar with it 140 characters I know they change it but let's keep it like this. Twitter is banned currently in Nigeria so I don't have access. Okay, good. Perfect. Just in 10 seconds if you can. Last thought, maybe a wish. Okay, so the previous moderator was a magician. Let's imagine that you are at the contest of Miss and Mr Universe. Okay, what do you want as a last wish for entrepreneurial universities? Okay, in really 10 seconds and maybe we can start with Marco that was in the alphabetical number with a name like Zenado always the last. Yes, if I have to do it in a Twitter style, I would say that structural coupling in training is key to reach the SDGs. Maybe okay. I was counting the characters I'm not judging chef the audience will be the opinion that yeah I completely aligned with this. Maybe then I can go ahead with your last thoughts. Yes, I think we should have more discussions like these I think that's that's key building community and and building on ideas of one another. Thank you. Thanks. As much as we really want our universities in the private sector to take charge we can't really scale without the right enabling environment so the role of governments is critically important and I would love to see more government support and creating the right regulatory frameworks but also facilitating these types of universities to become mainstream across the region. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've had coward in go ahead please with your, your thoughts. My mind was similar actually and I think it's that policy makers need to hear the good news stories that are coming out from all of our founders and, you know, take heart and action on them. Yeah, I hope they are hearing us all of them today. Ralf, go ahead please. Digital is beyond border. We can make a billionaire every day if we benefit from the market size of the continent. Count me in for that plan please. Becoming a billionaire. At the last but not least go ahead with your maybe with your last thoughts and then I do the conclusion. We're not too late so it's good. Go ahead. That's it for the goal is very essential and I think we should all embrace that. Thank you so much. So as a moderator, which was a tough job, but I really enjoyed doing it with you guys. Thank you so much. I would love to conclude a little bit by summarizing what you said and what we said, which is kind of tricky in less than one hour. I guess, but definitely, I think we should start with the question, which is what we want this to be and what we want the outcome of this to be. If it's just a conversation between people working in education presenting their thoughts and their projects. It's very good, but I apologize on what we want. And we mentioned something very important, which is the need to collaborate and to be global and at the same time to adapt locally. So we need to have those global connections to be able to bring it locally. This is what we all think at the end of the day. And the objective is to have a real impact. And this is something that we cannot achieve alone. So I'm very, very happy to connect with all of you and with the audience. And so I invite you to share your contact details. Maybe you're linked in on the chat so the audience can connect with you and further the conversations. But let's think about this. What is the outcome of all those meetings and conversations? If we keep it just like this, it's probably a splash in the water, as we say in French. If we connect and we further the conversations, definitely we can start projects. Maybe we will not all become best friends or work together at once. But as Adelaide said, maybe it's a no today, it will be a yes tomorrow. So let's take this as a first step between us and obviously with the audience to create those entrepreneurial universities we believe in. And again, thanks to all of you, especially to the attendees, but thank you for sharing your thoughts. And it was my pleasure. So wish you the best. Thank you. Okay, so the recording will be available on the ITU website and obviously stay tuned for more events like this. I hope to be invited to meet you again guys. And when I say guys for guys and girls, but definitely again for the show, we will be crossing paths. Thank you so much. Back to you, New York, I guess. My job is done now. More like Geneva. Thank you.