 I want to welcome everyone to the first session of the forum for the second day of the forum. And my name is Victoria Masso, and I'm going to be your moderator during the session. So hello and welcome everyone. I am originally from Venezuela, and I am an ITU expert, digital innovation consultant. I am the co-founder of Behavior Hackers, which is a behavioral science organization that focuses on providing companies stuff skills that are needed for the future workforce. Before we start, I want to give you a bit of a reminder and a bit of information of what's going on. So again, welcome five days, over the 120 speakers. We have amazing speakers today. Well, throughout the whole day, it's going to be incredible and all the other days are coming and following. And we're going to be able to see a preview of the previous days very shortly. And at the same time that we have the global firm, we're going to have the regional events with one goal, bringing the global community to unlock the ecosystem's potential. This is very important. This session that you're going to be watching are brought to you on SWAP card. So you can chat, you can comment, you can interact with people. There's a Q&A box and you can connect with other people directly. You'll be asked questions in the poll. Make sure to make the best that you can out of the experience because even though we're not close together, we're close digitally. And we really want you to enjoy that experience. Make sure again to use the hashtag rediscovering innovation to join the conversation. They're putting everything on the chat. So keep an eye on the chat, keep an eye on people, connect with people and make the best of the event. If you wish to listen only, make sure that, well, we have the other UN languages. So if you want to do that, there's a link below. So we're streaming at the moment. So if you see underneath, there's going to be a link where you can join. And you're going to be able to change the language to one of the UN languages. If you only want to watch it in English, stay on the stream. What else can I tell you? Ooh, I have a very important announcement for you. So as you know, one of the elements that led to this forum is that we did a challenge, the ITU Digital Innovation Challenge 2020 and our winners have created their pitches, too many pitches for you guys to go on board for them. And these pitches at the end of the whole forum, we're going to say the winners who they are. So everyone that's listening, make sure to go and vote. And, oh, there you go. We have a slide on this. So go and vote for the best pitch or the ones that you like the most and bring your family, being your friends, watch all the pitches. They have incredible projects that they already went for this whole pre-selection process and will love nothing more than have your input and for you guys to vote and also connect with them, they're incredible. And that's it for the news. So today's session is about mainstreaming the utility systems for impact. And it's going to give you a bit of context. So we all know unicorns and there's only a few unicorns around the world and they tend to be mainly concentrated in very few countries. We all know this. There's an estimated of over 300 million startups all over in different clusters around the world. So why is this happening? Why are we having so little amount of unicorns? Countries and regions are trying and failing sometimes to replicate models like the ones in Silicon Valley. We got actually considering sometimes the factors that brought this ecosystems to be successful. This new and says history, stakeholders, participation, collaborations, and other many, many other factors are key to consider the creation of the success of these digital ecosystems. Understanding these factors is critical to be able to mainstream digital ecosystems and be able to close the digital divide that in turn helps innovators and startups to be able to create solutions that matter and that create an impact and allow them to grow and even become the so desired unicorns that we're talking about. So how do we make this reality available for many and not just for the few? Join us now with these outstanding experts from all over the world as they will share their experiences and practical examples on how to mainstream digital innovation. So before we start with the questions, I would love for the panelists to introduce yourself and please tell me where you're from as well and where are you based at the moment? Because I know that we're all scattered across the world especially in our new reality. So we love to know where are you from, where are you based and who you are and what you do. So if we can start with ma'am Vieng. Yes, of course. So my name is ma'am and I'm the head of both partnership and international development at Jerry Perreco System. We're a product sort of based here in Silicon Valley. I'm originally based in San Mateo, California and I'm from Senegal. Amazing. Ben White, would you like to introduce yourself? Hello, Ben here. So born and raised in New Mexico, the Southwestern part of the United States. I live in Amsterdam now and I'm a founder and CEO of VC Ferre, a co-founder of A-Ban, the African Business Angels Network, and Afrelapse, a Pan-African Association of Technology and Innovation in the Hubs. And Nicolas. Hi everyone. My name is Nicolas. Very nice to be here. I'm Swiss. I'm based in Zurich. So in Switzerland too, I'm the managing director of Digital Switzerland and non-profit association beside that I'm an entrepreneur and business angel too. That's incredible. Thank you so much. And I appreciate that all of you guys are here with all your different time zones and also for the participants. I didn't say I'm based in England at the moment. So we have all different time zones, which is quite nice. So thank you so much. And I'm going to really quickly tell you the format of this session because this is a very special session. We actually call this a rapid fire. So we wanted to make something different just a simple panel and just a little conversation. We're doing something called rapid fire, which basically what it is, is that it's going to have a bit of a faster pace than a normal panel. And what I will do is that I will ask you the panelists a question and you'll have two minutes to answer. If you go to overweight too much, I'll stop you. But the idea is just basically try to keep it short and nice and sweet and just get it like really rapid, rapid fire, how we call it. And at the end, we'll let the participants ask questions. So everyone who's watching, make sure to please put your questions in the chat. It's a unique opportunity to have this expert from all across the world with all your guys. Like your experiences are so valuable, incredible. We have to be able to get you to answer as many questions as we can to get as much value. So are you guys ready for your questions? Are you ready? Ready? Sure. Good. I'm not sure if when we're streaming, you can see everyone, but yeah. Hopefully you can. So we're going to start with Mareem. So my question to you is the following. Silicon Valley is an ecosystem that many countries and regions compare themselves to and then try to replicate and they think that they can strive to be. Coming from Silicon Valley and yourself developing programs of innovation, what are the best practices from your ecosystem and across the world that you have encountered that you think others are missing to be able to mainstream digital innovation? There are three things that come to mind when I think about what are best practices that make Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley? The first one is Silicon Valley has one of the biggest safety nets that exists. What that means is that early stage founders actually have the safety nets that allow them to take risk and build companies. We have a very large pool of early stage funding available, both within our angel networks as well as our early stage funds. And that has strongly contributed to basically allowing entrepreneurs to feel the excitement and be able to actually trade stability for scalability. And that's one of the biggest reasons why we have such an important number of unicorns because most companies in the Valley have the luxury to be able to trade stability at any point for scalability because of the kind of funding that we have available. The second thing that I think of is definitely the network. Silicon Valley's biggest strength is its network. It's been built now over a couple of years by basically being a network of both investors and entrepreneurs that have actually been able to scale from each other. It's a very feeding relationship. Entrepreneurs feed from the investors as well as the other way around. And that really does come from the network that the Valley has been able to build. And you would say that it just reinforces itself. The more unicorns we have, the more we tend to create because it's kind of a system that is feeding on its own. And the last part is that I think a lot of Silicon Valley companies, both investors and entrepreneurs actually, usually build companies thinking 10X. So they're thinking about what kind of companies, what kind of industries, what kind of solutions will still be relevant in the next 10 years. And that's a very important approach when you're building a unicorn company because as far as it's concerned, a unicorn is a company that is able to reach a billion dollar valuation in less than 10 years. And what that entails is that that solution needs to be relevant in the next coming 10 years and probably more so. So they focus on building their solution using technologies that still will be relevant in the next 10 years. And I think it really does contribute to making the companies that come out of here in the ecosystem in general very unique. This is an incredible answer. Thank you so much. Now I'm gonna turn my attention to Ben. And in a similar line of question, I want to ask you about the Pan-African ecosystem. And I want to ask you, how can we make the Pan-African ecosystem successful for innovation that can be mainstream? So it's a similar question with a bit of a twist. I think the keyword that was just given was the word relevant. And I think when you are looking at the African startup ecosystem, you're looking at entrepreneurs that are working on solutions that are relevant for the continent, that are relevant for the people that live there and where there are both challenges and opportunities. And to some extent, the discussion around unicorns is distracting because it's more of a dollar question. Can we get companies that have evaluation of a billion dollars? Who cares? We have companies that are growing and scaling not only in their own countries, but now increasingly cross-border. And we see a growing number of ventures that are now venturing outside of the continent. So they are going from South Africa to Mexico. They're going from Nigeria to Egypt. They're going from Egypt into the Middle East. They're going from Kenya to India. And so you're seeing that the continent has an incredible potential to innovate, has an incredible potential to build solutions that are relevant for millions, if not billions of people around the world and they're finding their application. It's already the case that every two days across all of 2020, one startup is closing 500,000 in fundraising. So we've already seen more than 150 deals this year. Instead of a slowdown that you would expect from COVID-19, we've actually seen an acceleration in investment more than, so last year was already, beyond all expectation at 1.3 billion, we already passed that mark in August and we've only seen more activity in the most recent weeks. And I think even more notable is we've seen, for the first time, a regular flow of acquisitions. The most notable was Stripe acquiring Paystack for 200 million US dollars in Nigeria to expand their services across the country, but also Copagas, Bionic, DPO Group, TradeSafe, SendWave, and We Buy Cars were all acquired. SendWave for 500 million US. So I think it's a little bit of patience and you will be seeing many unicorns coming from the African startup ecosystem. So really quickly, Ben, would you say that one thing that you would take from the ecosystem would be the relevance? Would that be it? If you are building relevant solutions that are meeting the needs of people, which is not always happening in a place like Silicon Valley, you are creating value and by definition you will find capital and you will build something that's successful. And I think what's most encouraging is that the investors that have been committed to the African space are starting to see a return on their investment and that's only going to accelerate activity in the next three years. Now I'm turning to you. Again, same line of the same type of question. I actually would love for you to know what are the main lessons from the digital Switzerland model that you can be transfer to other ecosystems globally? Sure, thanks for the question. You know what we've learned in the last four or five years is we should not forget Switzerland is a country but we are a tiny place. We are nine million people is less than Silicon Valley. It's less than an average Chinese city. And less than many cities in Africa. So we are extremely small. So what can we do not only to survive but to be successful as a tiny ecosystem? The first one is it's all about since digital innovation is like bringing everything together, software, hardware, humans, machines. It's the same in the stakeholder groups. So the first things is bring politics, bring administration, bring business, bring civil society and the academic world together, break out the silos and forget about the silos, bring all these people together. It's easy to say complex to do as always. That's one of the first lessons learned depending on the topics of course, bring these people together. The second point one we've learned it's at the end of the day, especially like for Switzerland. I mean, in Switzerland we only have our mountains and our brains and nothing else. So it's all about education, education, education. So it's really bring for the young people and also it never stop. You should never stop learning. It's all about the pool of talents. It's all about educating people. We should not forget in the next 10 to 15 years in Europe at least 20% of the jobs will disappear. So it's all about educating people to make sure they will transform with the digitization. If I have 20 more seconds, I hope, lost points. Switzerland cannot be digital, everything. We have to find out our topics. This is my recommendation to every other helps. Yeah, I love that all of you, all the three of you touch on very important points that could potentially be transferred to other ecosystems. So thank you so much for that. I'm gonna go because we're doing rapid fire to the next question, which actually connects really well with a lot of the points that you talked about collaboration and those safety nets that Merem was talking about. So my question to you, Merem, is how do you manage collaborations within ecosystems? And I'm gonna say ecosystems because I would love part of this discussion is that we want to make sure that we get a lot, we're global here. I want to make sure that we can take your ecosystems and what you're learning and your experiences everywhere else. So the question is, how do you manage collaborations to make sure that we can mainstream entrepreneurship in every community to be able to unlock their potential? Well, I think that the most important thing to start with is that ecosystems cannot be copy and pasted. And that's something that I say very, very often because it does come up quite a lot where different ecosystems are trying to work with Silicon Valley. And the initial sentence that always comes up is how to replicate Silicon Valley. And the truth is there is no replicating Silicon Valley. There's only one Silicon Valley. Every other ecosystem needs to create their own version. And that depends on the needs of their population. It depends on their cultural realities. It depends on the dynamics that they have between the private and the public sector. And it depends on the relevant industries that they want to develop. So it's very important that the basics of any collaboration between any ecosystem is set on the fact that every single ecosystem is different, contains its own strengths and weaknesses, as a matter of fact. Silicon Valley is not immune to weaknesses, as Ben said earlier. Our strength happens to be a witness at the same time. Our overflowing amount of opportunities and funding does create relevance and irrelevance. And for that matter, it's very important that collaboration between any ex-systems is based on the fact that there needs to be a premise of understanding. There needs to be a premise of understanding of the needs that exist between each ecosystem and the ways in which they can reinforce each other. The objective is to create collaborative ecosystems where startups feel empowered to be able to fly from Shanghai to Silicon Valley to Latin America without feeling like any of the policy restrictions are making it harder for them to develop their startups or to make that product relevant to that industry. And that is at least, in my opinion, the most important basics of collaboration is to make sure that we are creating policies and structures that allow entrepreneurs to really flow and thrive regardless of the city that they are in or the ecosystem that they are trying to set themselves up in. But I do not believe in the fact of replicating Silicon Valley or any other ecosystem for that matter. And I think it's incredibly important for the success of any ecosystem, especially in emerging markets, that it's centered around their own needs and their own strength, because that's exactly what other ecosystem, what other successful ecosystems have done. They have not created themselves as a replicate of anything else. So I would definitely push towards collaborative ecosystems on policies and on structures but remain individuality and uniqueness in pretty much everything else, especially needs and relevance. That is 100%. There's actually people in the chat agreeing with you as well with what you're saying. No replication. We have to find our own way of doing our systems. Similar question to you, Ben, again, but flipped a little bit. How do you handle? So we talked about, well, you deal with BCs, innovation hubs, engine networks and all these elements. We want to know how do you make sure that these collaborations are there to support entrepreneurs, especially when you're talking about working with so many different African countries? How do you make sure these collaborations are happening? Or what do you do that you can give to others about how are you making these collaborations work? Yeah, I mean, I think it's essential. It's essential in terms of unlocking the continent's potential. If you look at the US, $397 are invested per capita. In Asia, that's $21. In Europe, it's $31. On the African continent, it's $1 per person. So the scope and the need for investment is immense. Now, how do we drive more capital into the continent and into the ecosystems there? Three examples. AfroLabs is a Pan-African Association of Innovation Hubs. There are now 225 hubs across the continent who are a member of this Pan-African entity. And what they're doing is basically sharing their best practices. How do we manage a hub in our community? How do we cooperate as a group of hubs to negotiate with corporates to bring in technology, to bring in capital investment or infrastructure? How do we combine forces to strengthen our voice when it comes to things like policy, whether we're doing it on a national level or we're operating regionally or on a Pan-African level? So I think building these local communities and strengthening the infrastructure that these communities depends on is essential. And you've seen how relevant this is just these past couple of days in Nigeria with a situation like let's end SARS. And it's really the local startup community that is very sort of instrumental in helping to drive this movement that is saying we need to do things differently in the future and we need a different response from our government. At the same time, we're very active in trying to better engage the private sector. ABAN is the African Business Angels Network. We are working to formalize more than 80 networks across the continent that are consists of high net worth individuals that come together to co-invest in early stage companies. And what's more important than the dollars it's that these people are coming from the private sector. So they have a Rolodex, they have contacts, they can help make introductions, they can help bridge the gap between startups and commercial activity, which is what drives traction which is what builds the investment case. They can also be involved in helping founders understand something like governance. So it's critical that we have more people from the private sector involved as mentors and as investors. And then vcbra.com, which is an online platform connecting more than 135,000 founders across the continent representing 15,000 startups. And literally anyone with an internet connection can now go online and access not only learning materials but mentorship and funding and program opportunities free of charge. So we need to do more to make this infrastructure to make these opportunities and resources more widely available and to give entrepreneurs every chance of getting access to the support that they need so they can continue their efforts to grow great companies. And my name Ben, thank you so much. Actually, I just received a message saying that we had before a bootstrapping session and you should definitely join. There's the ones after this talking about funding resources. So if you're interested in funding that's an interest you want to go to. Nicholas, similar type of questions to you. What are the key factors that you can mention on how you manage successful collaborations between government, business, academia and the public sector to be able to grow ecosystems that you can also help translate into other ecosystems? I give you two examples to try to be concrete. In Switzerland, we are good right now in two topics. The first one is the drone industry and the second one is the blockchain industries and why? Because some years ago, some people, you have to start somewhere and some people said, hey, maybe we might be a good place for reason why it's set to start this industry here. So they started somewhere and they had the idea exactly to collaborate. If you want to change the law, you need the administration, you need the politicians, you need to bring the corporate and the startup ecosystem together. And we see these two examples, quite interesting is really blockchain and drone. Why now we have thousand and thousand of jobs that cooperates at startups in collaboration with the politics all over the country. So the first key factor is choose your topics. This is what we believe. As I said before, we are tiny place. We cannot be digital everything or innovation, everything what we do is, and I believe every help in the world should do the same. Switzerland is known for watches, financial services, life science, pharma and some of the topics maybe and we are figuring out what can be the next big industry for the next 50 years. And one of them is drone slash robotics and the other one may be everything around decentralization technology, which is the blockchain one. So I believe one of the really key factor is think about some topics and then bring the people together around it. It's concrete. If you bring those people together around digital, I believe we've done the experience too. There won't be any outcome except a nice discussion. Find out your topics for you help. This is what we continuously do. And I believe it's one of the major key factors. Amazing, and last question before we go into a few questions from the audience. So if you can make it super, super short because we have just believe 10 minutes left. So the questions is so in Miram, why do you think some countries or regions are not achieving successful ecosystems, these ecosystems? So actually there's the same question for all of you guys. So really quickly to the point, why do you think some countries, why are they missing to be able to create this innovation ecosystems? I think that every single country is different but for the most part, there are two biggest reasons that I have found through the work that I do. The first one is focus. One of the biggest reasons why some countries are not achieving any success when it comes to innovation has to do with focus. They're not focused entirely on the development of their ecosystem. They're simply kind of copying or focusing on what's going on in the region, trying to replicate programs that are known or famous or look appealing, not really focusing on the needs that are coming up actually from the ecosystem and not directing resources towards what they are finding on the ground and rather taking in the noise that is coming regionally. That's the first reason. And then usually the second reason really has to do with the fact that they're not listening to their entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are known to be vocal and advocate for themselves. That's what makes them entrepreneurs. But a lot of developing ecosystems really are not listening to the needs of their ecosystems. They would rather take information from long consulting reports about how to help their ecosystem rather than actually taking the information from the entrepreneurs themselves. And that is actually happening to cause them a lot of damages on the road because the best people who are to be able to speak about how the ecosystem is doing is the entrepreneurs themselves. Amazing. And if we could turn the same question to Ben, very quick, why do you think, exactly the same question, what do you think are missing the countries that are not creating these ecosystems? I think they are. I think it just takes time. We have different initiatives, for example, part of the thesis is that as entrepreneurial communities grow and as they organize themselves, they not only make themselves visible, but they make themselves more accessible. And so now there's a partner for government to work with. And so you have something like IFER policy where groups from within the startup ecosystem are coming together in hackathon forums to come up with policy recommendations for the government saying, this is how you should drive your policies in terms of the systems that we're trying to build and develop. And you've seen these startup policy hackathons manifest those that have been adopted by countries. We've seen this in Tunisia, in Senegal. It's already in advanced stages in South Africa, in Kenya. Another initiative is Smart Africa, where every African country, the government is actually saying, okay, we will champion a theme, whether it's smart agriculture or big data. And then let's start to build clusters of excellence around each of these critical themes. And so you're starting to see increasing ways where government and the startup community are aligning themselves with a shared mission, a shared goal where the roles of each is increasingly clear and where there is, I think, really exciting partnerships that are starting to take place. So I couldn't be more excited about where it's going. But again, it takes time to do these things. It doesn't happen overnight. In terms of other countries not achieving it, is there anything they would say that other countries would need to consider to be able to create these ecosystems? Is there any quick advice or element that you think it's missing? I think it comes down to this dialogue, right? To having people involved in this conversation and having the right people around the table. And if people are clear about what the end goal is, then it's just a question of implementation. And that's the kind of conversations that we're seeing now, which we haven't seen in years past. So we're moving in the right direction. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Niklas, same question to you. What do you think is missing? Sure. I love, by the way, the last remark of Penn. It takes time. We should not forget Silicon Valley. You know that Maram started 50 or even 60 years ago. Israel and other amazing hubs started 35 years ago. So they're already two generations of entrepreneurs. We should not forget. They agree, it takes time. Besides that, you need the political framework. Again, in Switzerland, many people are coming to the place because we have a very liberal and open-minded blockchain framework. If you don't have it, no one will come to your place. The third one, you need to educate talents, educate entrepreneurs, software engineers. Or the alternative is let them entering a new country like Silicon Valley is doing amazingly well. Let them coming to your place, give them a visa, whatever, give them the opportunity to come to you. I believe political framework education, then they are the two most important ones to build such an ecosystem or to fail if you don't have them. Yeah, that's perfect. And that actually brings me perfectly to a question from the public about are you concerned to have talent from the ecosystem moving to other ecosystems? Is this something that will scare you? If I might just, I believe it's a, I don't want to provoke it, but it's a war for talents. And COVID will boost the process. You need in every place in the world more software engineers, more businessmen, more great entrepreneurs, and there is a war for talents. That's the reality. We have to face it. And not every ecosystem will win or will grow at the same pace. I believe it's a, that's the reality. So we are not scared and no one should be scared, but we should all be focused on what can we do to attract talents and not lose them. So it's a talent, as I said, it's all about talent and the war for talents is happening in the world. So that's the reality. Mariam, I think you want to add something. It looks like you want to say something about this. Well, I completely agree with Nicolas. I think there is definitely a need to attract talent. But I also think that with the strength of remote working and remote collaboration, the world has shared talent for a very long time now. So the Kambali is actually one of the places that relies the most on international talent, both remotely and in-presential. So I completely agree that the best thing that any ecosystem can do is to figure out how they can create the framework to attract the most talent as possible. But I also think that within the remote world that we have been forced now to create and that we have been creating for a little while now. Sharing talent has actually been a lot more common than we think. And I think it should definitely continue that way. Anything to add, Ben? Look at the historical relationship between the United States and India and what kind of exchange of talent has happened between those two ecosystems and how they have both benefited from that relationship. And then consider who is the CEO of Microsoft and Google. So I think there's incredible opportunities now also for the African continent to have talent travel around the world, learn, build experience, build network. And we also see many founders coming back to the continent because Africa is the opportunity. 1.3 billion people very quickly, one in five working humans on the planet will be African. So there is all kinds of opportunity and you need incredible amount of talent if you're going to unlock that. And so I think these things are part and parcel to growing and developing these ecosystems. Okay, thank you all of you so much. Sadly, that's the only question that we can take for the public today because we ran out of time but everyone in the chat as well, like if you want to keep the conversation going you have a whole system to be able to talk to people, for the speakers if you wanna join as well feel free to talk to the participants whenever you want. I want to finalize this with a final 30 second message, almost like a quick snapshot, 30 second message that you want to give to people or to anyone that is looking to mainstream the ecosystems or entrepreneurship. And I think a lot of what you said really, like it was really, really well said but in 30 seconds, if you were to say something what would that be? So I'm gonna start with Moran. I think the message I would have is for entrepreneurs because they are the ones that make ecosystem and I think that the only thing I would tell them is to dream. Dreaming is a privilege and it's expensive to dream but if you have the option to do so dream much bigger than you think you can be expected to do so and that's the only way that you'll be able to build companies that you think will be relevant. You just have to dream as big as you possibly can and do not let yourself be demotivated or put in a box by any framework that has already been put in place. Ben? The African continent is going through something that happens once in a lifetime. We're literally watching a continent transform in front of our eyes. Think about what has happened in Southeast Asia and realize that you could still be at the very beginnings of something that explosive. So get involved if you're smart. Show up and learn about what's happening across the continent for investors next week. Tuesday and Wednesday we have the 7th Africa Early Stage Investors Summit. It's a free event you can register via vc4a.com and if you're an entrepreneur or you wanna get involved in mentorship check out vc4a.com. All of the resources are there online, freely accessible. Hey, Nikolas, your 32nd advice for mainstream leaders like assistance or entrepreneurship? Sure, not easy after Ben and Marian, but I will try to add one more. The future belongs collaboration in any case. We should really think about it. Don't work only just for you. Work for the world things and above all, do it for a purpose. I believe the future belongs, you know, digital innovation is just a meme. At the end of the day, it's all about the humans and the sustainability, the environment, our next generation, do it for that and not just for you or for money. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you so much Ben, Nikolas, Miram and the whole team behind ITU for putting this together. And for all of you guys that are watching for being here with us, thank you so much. And that's it for us. Make sure to join the next session and we'll see you throughout the next four days. Bye everyone.