 So, I'm a college president and over the last 24 hours I've been inspired by the amazing innovative talent that I've met around here. People who have been actively involved in a number of very complex and difficult problems and finding innovative solutions to really make a difference. My challenge as an educator is how can we produce more of them? In many ways when you start getting to understand the histories of these people, some of them have become what they are by accident, not necessarily because we intentionally prepare them to do what they're doing today. I am the president of George Mason University, it's a large public university, the sort of the great American universities where just every day people, young people from all walks of life get educated. That's the challenge that I'm trying to resolve. How do we do that intentionally? Now, we face an enormous amount of very complex problems today. In fact, last month the United Nations for the second time in history, they got together and agreed on a list of 17 of those and each of us may add our own three or four or ten to that list. When you go through that list what you realize very soon is that each of those problems are incredibly complex. They're complex because they cannot be easily understood from just one disciplinary lens. They're complex because they affect different stakeholders differently, because they cross national boundaries. They're what we call wicked problems that resist any approach from any traditional single lens, single disciplinary lens. There are many of those whether it is to deal with infectious diseases or providing access to education and I'm just choosing one just for the sake of illustration. You may all remember the disaster on April 24th of 2013, a building in Dhaka in Bangladesh by the name of Rana Plaza collapsed. Over 1,100 people died, another 2,500 people resulted, came out with very serious injuries. That building that collapsed was never intended to be a factory. In fact, the day before there were signs that that building was in distress and that something like that could happen. The workers didn't want to go in and the employer said either you come back in or you're fired and you're not going to have many options to make an income. Workers went in, building collapsed, you know the rest of the story. Now, interestingly, if you have that discussion in any of our classrooms and one of the questions you may ask is whose fault was that? Was it the fault of the greedy owner of the business that was exploiting those workers without minimum safety guarantees for them? Was it the corrupt local politicians who did not pursue the right sanctions and revision? Was it the fault of global trade? Was it the fault of Walmart or Cortengles or any of the retailers that purchased the products that were made in that factory? Was it your fault or my fault? I bet you in this room some of us may be wearing a garment that was made in that building. What fault is it? Very hard to tell. In fact, if you ask students, well, how would you solve this problem? What would you do about it? Do you become a labor activist or you set up an NGO or you create an organization and try to boycott products that are purchased from those? Well, each of those may tackle an aspect of the problem and perhaps make the problem even worse. These are very, very wicked problems. So how well are we doing in our universities to prepare people like the ones that are walking the halls here today who may be able to find that innovative solution to any of these wicked problems? What my diagnostic is that so far we're not doing too well. And in fact, if the case of the Rana Plaza disaster was used in an economics class, you will end up analyzing and dissecting the set of incentives that led to that situation. And you would miss every other aspect of that problem. Maybe you will look at it from a standpoint of labor relations and you will lead to a totally different diagnostic. You may look at it from a standpoint of global trade and the conditions that are embedded in global trade deals. Depending on the major that you pursue, depending on the discipline that you choose, you will learn to look at the world from one angle. Any of the people that you will meet here today, no matter what is the wicked problem they're dealing with, they will tell you it is impossible, impossible to understand any of these problems from that single disciplinary lens. And yet that's what we do in colleges. We get you through a very disciplinary way. We teach you the analytical tools to understand the world from one particular lens. That's what we know how to do. So we're trying to figure out how do we change that. And perhaps the best way to figure that out is to maybe deconstruct or reverse engineer the cases where maybe by accident or semi-intentionally we have done this right. So here's some of those cases where I think in my own university we've done this right. Here's one of them. This individual, you may recognize her, Zainab Salbi. She was the founder of Women for Women International, an organization that was motivated by some of the abuses that women suffer in areas that are ravaged by war. And her idea, by the way, came out of class projects and she was mentored and assisted by a number of her professors, really was a very interesting solution to that problem that borrowed ideas from an understanding of the political nature of what those women were suffering, an understanding of the culture of the place, an understanding of the role of education in dealing with some of the issues that those women were facing. She, her solution, took the form of a global non-for-profit organization that raised money from wealthy donors and foundations, but also leveraged the power of women in place who understood the dynamics, the local dynamics better than anybody else. Well, we've spent a lot of time with her trying to figure out what we did right during her time at Mason for her to be able to do what she did. There are other cases, Jamie Constis. Interestingly, Jamie was very, she created her own degree program at Mason. She was interested in Spanish and Spanish culture. She was very interested in computers and data. She was also very interested in children exploitation. That's really what drove her passion. She took internships to spend time in Panama to work with the National Center of Missing Exploited Children, but also to work with Datatel with an information technology company. When she graduated, she joined the FBI. She was able to bring together the knowledge that she had acquired from those complementary fields and her work led to arrest 500, in fact, achieve 500 convictions of traffickers dealing with children and to save more than 1,000 children. She was able to not only be what we call a critical thinker, the whole mark of American liberal education, but to be a critical doer. Not only to be able to dissect a problem and to understand the problem from multiple angles, but actually to do something creative, innovative about it. This is a third case, Roger LeBlanc. Roger still hasn't achieved the impact that the other two have, but he's showing us the way of how universities can do this. Roger is fascinated by issues of sustainability. He wants to dedicate his life to sustainability, and he used every minute during college to create movements of students, to create initiatives and actions, to have an impact on our campus and even beyond. In fact, some of his landmark achievements was to create a green event during March Madness that now has been replicated globally. What does that teach us? What it teaches us is that it can be done, but it cannot be done with traditional structures. We need different models, and that's what we're trying to do at George Mason. What we're announcing today is our creation of a school of impact and innovation that tries to do precisely that. Our school, by the way, is not in any of the existing colleges or schools, is an entity that draws faculty, innovative faculty from across the university, is led not just by an academic leader, but also by an industry leader that understands how multiple solutions are being applied in practice, and it brings the best that the university has to offer, but also the knowledge and the ideas that are happening in the community around us. We are collaborating also with organizations like Evolved that are helping us understand what the right capabilities are. What are the skills that the people that we run into in the halls these days, what are the skills, the abilities that they have found a way and managed to acquire? Our goal is to have a series of programs both for undergraduates, for graduates, and even for people who are already in the field. There are lots of organizations offering solutions in every area of management and leadership, but not necessarily in the space of social impact and innovation. So we're designing bachelors, we're designing a masters, and we're creating tracks that hopefully will position our graduates to either take jobs in the organizations that are on the forefront of creative problem solving or to create new organizations to find new and innovative solutions. We think we're a good place to try this out and we encourage you to join us in any way that you would want to. We are a young university and that creates a culture of entrepreneurship that is not that common in higher education. We are one of the pioneering Ashoka Changemaker campuses. We are large and this is important because some of the initiatives we've looked at and we've looked at great things that are happening normally in elite institutions that are really not very scalable. Everything that happens at Mason has to scale up. Our student body is incredibly diverse. Over half of our entering classes, minority, about a third are the first in their families to ever go to college, about a third are on Pell Grants. How do we do this on scale? And we have 20 years of experience in challenge driven learning. We are also in a very interesting, surrounded by a fascinating ecosystem. We are right outside of Washington D.C., although we are outside of the Beltway, which protects us a little bit from the craziness in downtown Washington, but gives us very easy access to it. We're surrounded not just by the federal government and all the multilateral organizations in Washington D.C., but we're also surrounded by a vibrant business community and by probably the richest network of NGOs and think tanks perhaps anywhere in the world. We want to bring that ecosystem of institutions to help us do this and do this right. There is plenty work to do and there is plenty of room at the table. So we're encouraging any of you who has an interest in educating the next generation of these creative problem solvers to pull up a chair and join us and help do this. Challenging us, challenging our model, joining us, if you have resources that can help us do this, even funding us, whatever it is you do. It is important for us that you know where we're up to. Thank you very much.