 Good morning everybody. It's a real pleasure to see all of you on Friday here and the annual meeting of new champions as we sort of round up some of the discussions. We've had a lot of great discussions in the last couple of days about science and research and technologies that grow out of the basic research and how they can affect and improve our lives. And today's discussion will, I think, form a nice wrap on some of these. There have been actually quite a few sessions. I hope you're here because you're ready to attend and listen to the ingenuity is not enough discussion. And the main charge of this panel is going to be to discuss what enables complex collaborative and long-term innovations. So how do we drive the basic research and the innovations that we need to solve some of society's greatest challenges? So I have a wonderfully distinguished group of folks with me here today, which I'm just delighted to introduce you to. I'm going to say their names and affiliations for you just really quickly and then we'll begin the conversation. I'd like you, as you're listening to us, to please think about things you might like to ask after a few minutes of framing. We'll give the audience an opportunity, as we always do, to continue the discussion through the forum. And I'm really looking forward to hearing your insights as well. So just to my left here is Bruce Andrews, US Deputy Secretary of Commerce. Welcome. Thank you. Andrew Firsman, CEO of OneCubit Information Technologies in Canada. Welcome. Susan Fortier, Principal of McGill University, Canada. Nice to see you. Eric Chen, Founder and Director of VidaGen, People's Republic of China. Nice to see you. And Jean-Pierre Bouguinion, President of the European Research Council based in Belgium. Nice to see you. So as you've just heard, the panelists here all have very different perspectives to bring. So I've had a chat with them just ahead and I would really like each of them to speak to you about, to give you a couple of quick points to think about when thinking about fostering innovation over time. Can we start with you? Sure, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for having me here this morning. Well, it's fascinating to look around the stage because what we see is, as you've made reference, all of the different pieces of the innovation ecosystem. And from our perspective, from the Department of Commerce perspective, we are America's Innovation Agency. And what we do is focus on what is it that the US federal government can do to help create the conditions that allow growth, allow innovation, and frankly, allow entrepreneurship to thrive. And we do that in a number of ways. We do that through funding basic research, which we are not the only agency within the federal government, but we have several agents, several of our sub agencies are big funders of basic research, which is obviously hugely important. We protect the intellectual property through our patent and trademark office. Another critical piece of the equation. We have our Economic Development Administration, which works with local communities, trying to help them identify, you know, as one piece of the ecosystem, what the role that the local communities can play, and providing seed capital and ability to spread innovation in their regions. And then last is our International Trade Administration, which plays a key role, because one of the things we've really tried to focus on is, you know, innovation starts, but in a rapidly changing world, innovation is global almost immediately. And what, you know, traditionally companies when they grow, they start out in their domestic market, and then they grow internationally. And one of the things that we've recognized is, it doesn't work that way anymore. It's too fast. The world is too fast. Things are too rapidly changing. So how can we help startups from their earliest points go global and really recognize that exporting and being part of a global community will help them to be successful in the long term? Thank you. I realize I got so excited to speak with all of you. I forgot to say who I am. It's Friday. I'm Mariette DiCristina. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Scientific America, and I'm also the Vice-Chair of the Medic Council on Emerging Technologies. So I have some self-interest in listening to the observations of the panelists here as well. And actually, after hearing this, this opening, it seems to me, Professor Borgenon, perhaps you could speak a little bit about the perspective that the European Research Council is taking. Yes, thank you. Well, actually, I'm at one hand of the spectrum in the sense, because the European Research Council, his program of the European Commission, which has been set up to really give the responsibility to the researchers. So it was something which for a long time was not part of the responsibility of the European Commission to really support research. It was really, research was there only as a tool to increase the collaboration between countries or wealth creation, and all of a sudden it was decided, it was a long struggle, that research should be also a shared responsibility of the European Commission. So the way we do it in relation with ingenuity is not enough. I think maybe three points that I can bring forward. The first one is the fact that the way we try to get scientists to be involved in this process is to really, in a sense, push them to their boundaries. That is really to tell them that they may be supported by the European Research Council if they come up with a really ambitious project, which means, first of all, the support we give is typically five years long, which is quite substantial, helps people to really take a long-term view. And so that's the first point. The second point is that the European Research Council is covering all disciplines from physics, engineering, mathematics, life sciences, and also social sciences, humanities. And one thing we tried very hard, and we know it's difficult, and I'm not sure we have the exact right instruments for that, but we are struggling with this, is to really foster interdisciplinarity. We know that a lot of these very critical new developments will happen at the boundaries of domains, so we don't want the scientists, we want to give the possibility for scientists to really have ideas of bridging gaps to really come up with such ideas. And the last point, which also is very important for us, which echoes what you said about the globality, is that we definitely want to, I mean, the program of the European Research Council is definitely open to the world. So that is, we are absolutely willing to apply and to get support. You don't have to be European, but also more than that, you don't have to be fully based in Europe. That is, you can be based in Europe for part of your time. And now it's quite clear that the number of institutions in the world have really accepted the principle, and China is a very good example of a country which has accepted this principle, that maybe people can be sharing their time between the institutions, which actually looks like a complicated scheme, but it's quite clear that it's an extremely efficient way of, I mean, really mixing cultures, mixing approaches, and giving opportunities to people. So this is where we are at the moment, but definitely I'm a scientist, I'm at one end of the thing. But it was the initiative of the Scientific Council of the ERC, who is in charge of defining the program to really actually open up towards innovation, because we have a smaller program called Proof of Concept, in which we do want to accompany the scientists who feel that they have a possibility of a connection to more industrial or more societal challenges, developments to accompany them in doing their first steps. We know there are many more steps needed to get to a company, but at least with our own money we decided it was worth going in this direction. And the good surprise, which now it's not anymore a surprise, is the fact that many scientists are very eager to participate and competition to get this extra fund is getting tough. So it means we have to put more money in this direction. Thank you. Yes, thank you. It sounds like always a challenge for the scientists to come up. It's a merit based, of course, always. So it seems maybe natural to speak a little from the academic perspective then. Yes, so ingenuity is not enough. I mean, when you think about this, you realize that it's a very tough world in which we live. And our job in university is to prepare these generation, new generations for this world. So what do they need? Being smart is not enough. Being creative and smart is not enough. You need more than that. And you need to be able to work in the innovation world. And to me, innovation is a team sport. So you need to be able to work with people. That means you have to be truly a global citizen, not only global in the sense that you're geographically or culturally global, you've got to be able to look at the world from different perspectives, different areas of knowledge, that stuff. And you have to, of course, be sensitive to different culture. And one thing you need to do is to be resilient. That's very, very difficult. And you need to learn that as a team to be resilient. So this is the kind of world we need to prepare our students for. And I think this is what we're really focusing on. What do we do to provide a learning environment for our students today that will equip them well for this world? I want to say just one thing about resilience, because what is resilience? To me, it's a mixture of a number of things. It's character, it's human qualities, and it's skills. And just ask yourself, how do you learn that? It's very difficult. But it is so important. And I want to end with a story, because I think it's the most important, one of the most important things that I've learned this year, right a new year actually from a friend who's a sailor. He's crossed the ocean in his sailboat several times, and he's faced huge storms. I was amazed. This is the last thing I would want to do is be in a storm in the middle of the ocean with a small boat. He said something to me. I said, how do you do that? How do you get through this? He says, you know, the ship is 10 times braver than the crew. And you have to remember that. You have to know that your ship is good. You have to believe in your ship. And you have to inspire your team, your crew to believe in it. And that's how you get to it. The ship will not sink. The crew will sink the ship. And when I look at some of the failures in business, often I would say it's not the ship, it's the crew. So we have to prepare our students also to be a good crew member and to have that kind of belief in what they do and in what their team does so that they'll be able to face the storms which inevitably will be in front of them. So I think it's great to reflect on their multi-disciplinarity you were mentioning, coming at it from different angles, different stakeholders. And I think a key part of this is a word I've heard start to come up is trans-disciplinarity. So we are going to build that ship and crew it right. We have to make sure we have quite a variety of folks in there. So maybe now some from the business perspective I think would be useful. Mr. Chen, what are things that seem to be working for you for establishing long term? Yeah, I want to echo with the professor that resilience is very important because when I was young, still young, I used to play baseball for China. So I'm very physically and mentally fit to be an entrepreneur because it's the resilience you gain from the sports training and after I retire from the youth league and I come to Hong Kong for study. And I want to use myself as a story how we start innovation, because we are an innovator this year. So in 2008 there was a very famous only games, Beijing only games that we are so proud of as a sportsman. But in one month right after that there's the milk powder scandal that shocked the world. So I was thinking I mean our countries become stronger, the people have become richer. How come the only source of food, milk powder, for babies are still so dangerous? So we do a lot of research and realize that in the environment there are more than 100,000 chemicals out there. But existing like regulations and testing method can only test for like 5 or 10 or 20 chemicals. So there's a huge gap. So when people say oh this bottle of water is safe to drink, it means that they test for maybe 10 or 20 chemicals, the other thousands are not tested yet. So our innovation is that we use them, we genetically modify a fish, a real fish like this one. And when the fish detect toxin it can screen light thousands of toxins in one time and when detect toxin it will become fluorescent and the intensity of the fluorescence can quantify the toxin for food, cosmetics and water. So it's the breakthrough technology but it doesn't stop there because when we think oh we have a very good technology, we think we can promote to the whole world, save the human being and conquer the world. But that's not the fact because when we face enterprises, when we face governments, I mean they are more reluctant than we think. We thought they will use it immediately but they are not. They think oh this is too much trouble for them, they don't want to take the risk etc. So the innovation starts from the technology and then to the business model that we try to build a position to help them instead of making too much trouble for them. So we try to telling them that if the downside is that if you don't do it today, we announce certain kind of food index that if your product or your company is not on that list, the consumers and investors will ask you a question. And also the upside is that if you move fast you become the leader in this one and you can have a much better brand differentiation, you can have a much better profit margin. So I think for us, I mean the innovation is not only from the technology, it's also very important from your position, from your business model, sometimes it's even more important than the technology. And the second point I want to throw out is that where's the innovation come from? When people think about innovation, they always think about technology but I think more important, they also is in business model and the source is not just from the scientists, it's also very important from your customers because sometimes the scientists think oh, they are the PhD, they know a lot in this sector, but sometimes they may, there will be some disconnection from the customer. So our approach is very market-driven. For example, we have the fish that can test many different kind of food, but what kind of food we should start with? And last year there was this drinkage oil scandal in China, maybe you heard of people recycle the oil from the drinkage and then used for our food, another great invention but this is not a great one. So we said oh, this is a good opportunity for us and the market needs it because everybody is so afraid of the edible oil. So we modified the fish so we are the first one that can use the fish to test, to differentiate good edible oil and the edible oil. So this is another example that actually the innovation can come from the market, come from your customers. So that's a great example actually about how it can come in. So I think we're getting a broader picture now but we haven't yet talked about how do you support that over time? So I think you're working in one qubit and you're interested in financial models and so on. I'd love to hear that. Yes, I mean I can only speak from my experience as the co-founder and CEO of a small technology company in Canada, but really we started off understanding that there was this awesome opportunity to capitalize on this new technology of quantum computers. We knew that I mean just recently Alibaba and Intel have announced big programs, IBM, Google, D-Wave, all been producing this hardware and we're really excited to be thinking about you know great technology is interesting but it becomes really interesting when you can connect it to industry applications. And so really our research focus and we are a very research focused organization where we have a strong research pedigree is to be thinking about how we can put some intellectual horsepower toward thinking about connecting this technology to these future applications. But because it is future applications I know it's cliched to say but it does sort of take a village to make this happen and for us you know starting off in Canada it was very easy to get the first little bits of seed money you know people are excited about this technology but as you start to grow up and you start looking around to get the resources necessary in order to really make a sort of world-class organization you have to start bringing in the government policies need to be there in order to support this kind of private research you need to have the strong universities that we can hire from and be able to bring in the talent from especially we're in Vancouver which is a big city in Canada but a small city in the world and so having strong university partners there has been excellent. Looking at the policies that the government has put in place in order to reward R&D and to make sure that it's possible for people who are doing these sort of risky technology businesses to be able to capitalize on things like you know I mean it's it's clear that you're going to put a lot of money in up front and get money out the back end so what things can be done in order to make it so that you get tax advantages and things of that nature things that make it rewarding for investors to make an admittedly risky investment and be able to really see the reward of it in the long term obviously society will benefit if people are making these breakthrough technologies but these technologies won't happen if there aren't the proper incentives to actually get people to go and put these things together so I mean I like to think that we bring the ingenuity to the table but you're right ingenuity is not enough because without having all of the venture capital and policy and human capital in place we wouldn't be able to do any of this stuff I think those are all great points and before I go over to the audience I'm just wondering from the from the panelists we've been talking I think kind of broadly about some of the challenges the connections we need to make the stakeholders that need to be involved can we be a little bit more specific are there any bottles of public or private public private mechanisms that really work for fostering innovation over time is can you can you give us a case study or an example of something that's worked well sure well I can I can speak to actually a couple from the perspective of the United States government I mean you start with with looking at the internet I mean the internet ultimately it is in some ways the ultimate upfront investment of government money to develop something frankly I don't think anyone ever imagined well I think maybe a couple visionaries imagine what it would grow into but it was really the initial investments were to try to create a way for government research institutions to communicate with each other and then you took that ingenuity you took the academia you took the researchers and added to that and frankly it created this incredible engine of growth that we now see today as a result I give you another example which is something we're working on right now which is in the United States we have created national network for manufacturing initiatives and what we have done is essentially going out and said okay what are the manufacturing technologies of the future and how do we get them and so first working with the private sector we identified what are the areas of the future that we need basic research we then created these manufacturing hubs and we now have six of them and we're put we're rolling out more in the in the coming years but essentially what the idea is is bringing together a collaboration where the government puts in the seed money and creates the institution but it is partnered with academic institutions partnered with businesses businesses have put a substantial amount of money and skin in the game so a lot to do the basic research that no one company can do on their own but then you spread that basic research out and allow the companies to take it develop it further and commercialize it so there are some really strong models out there that bring together all of the pieces of the ecosystem and take what starts with an idea and create incredible economic and societal value as a result thank you Dr. Bogen, I wonder if you might want to add from the perspective of Europe some of the frameworks you've seen that work really well well at the moment Europe is is trying something very similar to what has been mentioned by American colleague here namely there has been this European Fund for Strategic Investments which was the idea that the European Commission would come up with some kind of public guarantee about 16 billion euro and which to encourage investment in risky business and so the whole process now which is monitored by the European Investment Bank is about to really get this private fund and in case they fail I mean they do the investment but then in the end they don't get what they hope but there will be this public guarantee to really try and alleviate the kind of resistance to risk that exists I mean the risk aversion which is very well known so this is some people see it as a gamble some people see it as just the only way forward because you have to mobilize indeed I mean public resources small amount quite large amount of private resources and this should be very diversified of course part of the interest of Commissioner Moeda who has been here for this forum but also that we are monitoring on the side of ERC is making sure that some of these investments will go to develop some research firms that it not does go only to things which are obvious investment which are very traditional things about the infrastructures and so on so in a sense our effort in our case is really to really push some ideas which definitely connects and puts research in this ecosystem so I think we've heard some really compelling examples of the national network for manufacturing initiatives and these strategic investments and how things like the internet which nobody could have thought at the time in fact I think I read somewhere that there are something like 20 basic research innovations in iPhones that a lot of people carry and at the time it was hard to imagine that they would come together in a phone like that I wonder if we might at this point take a question or two from the audience if anybody's got a burning one there should be a microphone around could we have somebody for this gentleman here and please say your name and where you're from and here it comes thank you my name is Austin Okerre from Computer Warehouse Group headquartered in Lagos Nigeria but I'm also an entrepreneur in residence at Columbia Business School I agree with Chen when he says that ingenuity is nothing of I mean sitting and creating a solution that goes to look for problems may not be the most optimized way of helping to improve and there's something about design thinking in the latest edition of the Harvard Business School for innovation which means to go to the people who are developing solutions for to see whether this solution is what would meet their need an example is women carry two shoes want to go to the office which is flat and one when they are in the office which is tall and elegant what about someone sitting back and having a brainwave and say let me make retractable heels so when they are going to the office they push in the heel and then when they get to the office you pull it out now this is ingenuity sitting on your own but the women probably will not take that because the style and the cut and so on so how do we bring design thinking into teaching and I can't see the name so this is actually to you this design thinking how do we bring it into teaching and learning so that ingenuity will meet with practical application yes yeah okay great question because this is exactly the kind of questions we're asking ourselves how do we provide a learning environment for students that will expose them to the challenges of the world and design thinking into the curriculum luckily and I say luckily the new generations of students on our campuses are ready for that I'm amazed actually by the fact that they're not content to learn from great professors in the classroom they're ready from year one to start putting in action with their learning in our classrooms they start all sorts of initiatives themselves they design them they lead them they implement them they're really a startup generation and they're really an action generation a walk the talk they do it and so for us really the job is to provide them the kind of support for them to do these sort of initiatives coaches trainers environment they need the space they need some tools we need to provide them with that but we need to let them lead and let them design and lead and what is interesting to me is that many of them will start with small projects many of them are in the social innovation space because it doesn't require too much money to get a great social innovation project on they do their own fundraising crowdfunding they design a project to implement it but for us it's to really provide them it's thinking about what environment we'll make that happen for them they're ready to do it we can put barriers in front of them we need not to we need to make sure that we remove those barriers providing for example I'll just name one providing flexibility in the curriculum for them to do these things it may be that one of their course they'll do online so that they'll liberate a bit of time in their schedule so that they can do this project in the community it's a simple thing but we need to think of a different way of constructing the learning environment so that they can really take advantage of the kind of initiative and leadership that they bring already in year one so this is a good point I mean one of the things I think that was a charge of this panel was to think about how do we how do we find and foster that good research talent do we have other thoughts we'd like to share about how we best do that yeah I mean one of the things that I think has been finding the talent has been easy fostering the talent is the challenging part not because it's difficult to do the fostering but because you need the resources to make that happen and one of the things that from my experience with one qubit that we saw was that I mean we had to go outside of Canada in order to find people who understood the fact that you know you look at so many of these great projects that have happened we talked about the internet I think the human genome project is another great one but everything from semiconductors to synthetic biology when you look at the payouts that have come and the societal benefits that have come from pursuing these things both to private investors and to society as a whole the returns are massive and yet without having people willing to step up to the plate and to support these things many of those technologies could have either happened elsewhere or happened later or maybe even not happened at all and I think that would be a real tragedy so for me I think the important part is understanding how critical it is not just from a self-interested desire to make profit although that's a great motivator but to really understand that it's in society's best interest to support and to foster these communities of venture capital government grants to be able to help the people who are coming out of these programs with a real desire to go out and take on the world to just give them the resources that are necessary to do it and I think that there's a lot of room for improvement there I think that's totally right and the other thing I would add and I think this is really important which is creating a culture that it's okay to fail that failure is not a bad thing because I think frankly too often failure is stigmatized and you talk about government policies you know one of the ones that I think for the United States I'm not even sure we really understood the implications would be for the future but it's actually our bankruptcy code that if you fail in a business it doesn't bankrupt your entire life the business is self-contained and so that failure doesn't mean that your entire value or your entire wealth or holdings are wiped out but we need to teach young people that it's more important to try but it's okay to fail and frankly the key to that is actually learning from your failure I think that's your point about resiliency to a significant degree but I think really changing the way because I think too many young people think that failure is a a sign that they've done something wrong rather than if they fail but then learn from it you know you look at entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs who you know failed and then was wildly successful learning from those failures yeah I think I'm gonna just say this and then leave it but I think a scientist once pointed out to me that as you go through studies in the early grade the K through 12th grades every problem does have a right answer so it's hard for students to get their head around the thing that scientists do every day which is try fail try again try again fail fail yeah I think talking about how to help the researchers actually in our company I also have an interesting game theory talking about how to split the shares in the tech company between the researchers, investors and also the business team the third issue be one third for each of them the researchers have one third that's equally important is the business team because they help them to connect the market and help them to understand the commercialization and investment actually is also very important one of our investors sitting here Peter Liu from City Converty he shared with me that investment is like a vehicle it's not about the money but the managerial experience from the more senior people and also the resources it can help so I think these three factors are very important and adding to that is the government's role actually when we talked about government for research or innovation people usually emphasize too much on the funding issue they think the government just put in money for the research and then it will take off but the reality or the or something I have been learning or suffering from our own Hong Kong government is that they have put a lot of money into research to help us do all those innovation but I think what is more important is the user department to be a pilot user for your technology because for us or for the researchers what they want to see is not just to have something invented but what they invented get its way into the user department to see in the application department but usually there is a disconnection there that government have money for the research but they are not willing to try new things because they always entail some risk and so just when we talk to the government and say oh maybe we wait for the advanced country to use it first but when we go to the developed country they say oh why don't your local government use it first so I think for the government they should on one hand to put money into the research on the other hand to be a pilot user to help you to do the marketing and to do the validation of the technology Yes I think the point I want to make about the European Research Council is the fact that we decided very early on to really put a lot of emphasis on young researchers and the whole point is in a researcher's career the moment where you really become independent you have the ability to develop your own team and it's a very critical moment so we wanted this to happen and we wanted this to happen also for people in a way where they free themselves for their own personal history in the sense that if they really feel they have a great idea they can come up with this idea so then the other side of the coin is of course the people who make decisions about to whom we give the money we actually do exert some pressure that they take some risk because actually the academic community tends to be very conservative so we try to tell them we really want them to take some we want high risk high gain project and therefore we are absolutely willing that's what you said about the culture of failure that is something which we are okay with it and actually we are just at the moment running the an exposed evaluation of the program the whole point is to see how things after they're finished because now we have a number of projects that are finished actually how many of them really led to breakthroughs how many of them led to failures and so on and actually I will be embarrassed if there are no failures because it will show that actually instead of I mean listening to us pushing people to take risk actually they are not taking enough risk so anyway I'm very keen on knowing what has happened for the program globally I'd like the resonant idea of if we if we want to really achieve we're going to have to take those risks and we have to figure out ways to support people over time whether it's fostering a culture that accepts that we can fail sometimes making that failure protected in certain ways sharing the risk and investment benefit over time I think those are really useful lessons so it seems like a good place to let the audience ask another question I still want another one right here in the front if we could get the microphone out thank you good morning my name is Rami Sharaf I'm the CEO of World Rich Group in Cambodia the way I portray the whole thing I portray it connecting it with agriculture it starts with plowing then seeding then irrigating then fertilizers then some of the crop will blossom some of the crop may die and then we harvest my point here is this whole process should be with a global scope because there are millions of talents hidden without being seeded or seeds that could not be seeded without given the environment the right fertile soil where it can blossom and I think the forum can play a major role and one of one of the things that could be done is to go globally and find some mini greenhouse where in association with the governments ministries of education academia universities where we can announce that there will be a world forum greenhouse for these young talents at the very early stages and once they are there let's give them the right soil and irrigation and fertilizing this is one point the other point one of the major challenges that we have is funding many ideas get killed because of funding now when we have a startup that was lucky to get funded I think we can recycle or revolve that same fund when you are granted that fund you have to sign that once your idea works you have to adopt another new idea and the same amount you got you have to give back and this way we can have the same amount recycled from one idea to the other idea to the other idea without the need to knock doors and say please give me I need money for the other idea like that lucky guy who got the money and now he's not you personally and now who's making millions out of it so if we can have both the agriculture model and the revolving of fund I think under the umbrella of the forum that could be one of the best outcomes of this forum thank you I really like that idea the thing that I like the most about it is the second part that you talked about I don't even think that's necessary to put into policy when you look at the places that have been the most successful at receiving investments an awesome example I think is Silicon Valley and when you look at why we went to Silicon Valley to look for some of our investment it's because all the way back to Fairchild Semiconductors you know the 400 companies including Intel that sprung up from that guys like Google kind of coming around these are the people who you know the people who were successful there are the people who are seeding the new companies and I think even without making that completely formalized it's just a natural side effect that if you get a little bit of venture capital then you become a billionaire it's almost like a natural part of what you would do with your billions is to give back to it so you see these hubs with little seedlings kind of spreading up around them and they sort of get watered by the people who had that initial tree so I think that that's something that's very strongly happening just as a natural side effect of those places where there really is some of that initial success it's just so nice to see that it actually does happen I like your analogy because it talks about sustainability of the whole innovation system in my sector the way that it happens is with alumni actually we've been very successful and are prepared to be there for the generation on campus not only in giving money that's great we like that but in providing mentorship networking opportunities we're lucky that we have alumni all over the world and that gives an entry to our students into this their world everywhere around the planet that is a way of making it sustainable where generation give back to the other generations and make the whole thing sustainable so I think it can be applied at every stage of the process of building innovation I think that's right and I think they're also looking for various models and adopting it to the local circumstances let me just give you a couple one is just the incubator model which obviously works very well in a lot of places of giving a space where entrepreneurs can come and they're actually entrepreneur experienced entrepreneurs who can help them and that's something that we actually as a government we don't run them but we seed them we give seed capital to help start them up and then basically just say go because it's the ingenuity and it's the creativity of the private sector another model is taking it a little more global which is the United States government the Commerce Department and the State Department have created what we've called the Global Entrepreneurship Summit which is done each year this past year was in Kenya President Obama attended but we're literally bringing thousands of entrepreneurs from around the world to one place together so you get all these you know mostly young people but some older folks as well from around the world to come and hear from some of the leading entrepreneurs and we've actually created a program that we call the President's Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship which is taking incredibly successful entrepreneurs some who are household names you know like Tori Birch who frankly isn't a internet but he's created this incredibly valuable you know shoe company or clothing company but then also folks from various different ways and bringing them together and helping them mentor a next generation of entrepreneurs and I was just actually in Portugal last week talking with the ambassador there about what they've done which has created a training program for women entrepreneurs and women corporate leaders so there are a lot of models out there and part of it is taking it and figuring out which ones work for your country or your area because frankly everywhere is a little different and what they currently have and what may work best in that community since this gentleman mentioned me as the lucky guy let the lucky guy say something first of all I believe the harder you work the luckier you are and well turn to part of the funding mechanism actually the Hong Kong government is quite clever they decide funding them they for example is a one-to-one matching so you need one dollar from the investor before they give you one dollar so let the investor do the DD for you and second they have a 10% clause there for every 10% of the income you get you need to return this 10% to the government until you fully repay it and for us we have paid all the amount back to the government so that's the good news and third we not just return the money we also provide them some advice for the funding committee we are telling them maybe it's not just important for you to fund ideas you should they now have a new scheme called public trial scheme for example if you have a new technology so the innovation department will pay for that amount for that user department to try your technology we find that money much more useful because you have the user for this new technology so it's not just like a new technology you get a client for them so this is a third also the innovation in the design of the matching and we also actually self-dispatting the funding mechanism that should we put money as many ideas as possible or should we focus the funding to celebrate the winners because when we see is that we're trying to culture the fostered entrepreneurship environment in Hong Kong but very important is to have a few winners or showcase that's how you like Silicon Valley you have Google, Facebook and then all the young people the talent once you do that so as in Hong Kong and China but we are still debating should we like spread the money to many ideas or should we focus on a few winners so a thing that we have talked about around a bit and was one of the other charges of this panel that we haven't really maybe met head on so much is how do we protect the intellectual property you know what are the ways that we make that in a supportive innovation longer term as well I'd be happy to start and you know one of the one of the aspects of my department is our patent and trademark office which is you know the the leader within the United States government in terms of protection of intellectual property because protecting intellectual property is a critical piece of innovation and making sure that when innovators and entrepreneurs come out with idea and create new products and new value that they're able to protect those ideas that people can't come in and take them you know and frankly because you would never have the same incentive for people to do what they do or big companies which frankly just come along and take ideas and so having a very robust intellectual property protection system but not just by country because frankly one of the challenges that we face is this is really a global issue and you know the creation of value and the creation of content which you know there is there is controversy where are the lines where is the right place to draw the lines but making sure that there are strong protections so that when value is created that the feet the folks who have created it are able to get that value off of it over the future without having to worry about losing the protection from it Yeah I mean that's I have developed a much more nuanced opinion about intellectual property laws as I've gone through trying to build a company that really relies on having intellectual property as we do our early stage research at OneCubit we've put a lot of effort into developing novel methods to connect this quantum computing hardware to real-world problems and our goal is that you know we came first we're the first software company dedicated to building software for quantum computers and our goal is to be able to put that research into you know this valuable asset the upside of that is it means we've got a real chipped when we go and trade and work with larger companies and to be able to say look we've done this work up front it's been successful you know you can work with us and it de-risks your ability to get together but the downside is one of the major reasons we had to raise money to begin with is because it's expensive to go through that process and now that we have gone through the process thankfully Canada and the United States have an excellent patent highway that allows us to really share this but I got to see Jack Ma speak yesterday and you know his company has just announced a big initiative in quantum computing but of course our patents aren't valid over here and so thinking about like wow it would be so great to collaborate but also thinking is it safe to collaborate because these things are so regionalized so if there is something that can be done to bring a sort of more global community together if we're looking to have more global you know collaboration and to have companies work together at this scale there really does need to be a framework because if it costs a million dollars in order to be able to protect yourself to do these things there's going to be a lot less because that's a very big barrier Thank you I think maybe it'd be great to I see a couple of folks have been waiting very patiently here to give a chance to maybe behind me here Thank you Just maybe to pick up on the last point of Andrew my name is Pascal Marmi I work with the the Swiss government in China I have an impression our institutions are not set up for this global collaboration we present entrepreneurs coming from one country to another and it's to a certain extent a hard job to convince the people of a small country in Europe to invest into innovation that will go out of the country into another one I think similarly some of the funding mechanism for science they remain very attached to a national system of innovation and then finally to the university I would love my kids to be global citizens and start maybe one semester at one Canadian university moving to European one and others but no one is going to give them a credit for that because they need to stay attached somewhere so I'm just wondering what are some of maybe the creative ideas out there to fulfill the vision of Andrew You bet he want to try that Yeah I'll talk about the university since you you mentioned how great it would be for students to have a bit more mobility and in fact this is something that we're working on because we create all these networks of university and our view is that that is for a purpose and we ought to have a little bit more trust and confidence in one another and make sure that when we create these networks that it becomes very easy for students to go from one place to the other and have a very portable system of taking their credits from one place to the other so that's one area that we're working on you're absolutely correct I think that from our perspective one of the job we need to do and do it soon is identify the unnecessary hurdles speed bumps all these things that we put in front of people that make that navigating this global environment easy and there are ways to do it you need to be I think determined to do it and I think that we're at the right time now it is very important that we put in place an environment that is a lot more fluid for young people to travel in I think I I saw a number of hands up in this section could we give them a chance the front here end up thank you hi my name is Wen Fang I work for Weatherford part of my role is to look at technology development and commercialization so the thing with innovation is with that comes resistance to anything that's new or the fear to change so I think we have done a lot in seeding and getting an idea commercial but I think what have we done or is there a support framework or structure that's in place now to help with the sustainability of that so I think one example is I I mean if we look at Uber I think the resistance that comes from traditional business that has big funding that has government support I think what can we do to help entrepreneur help navigate that I think the gentleman I think with the idea of you know the fluorescent fish I mean I can imagine public sentiment on genetically modified I mean the ethical debate around that so I think what can we do to help a great idea perpetuate well so to your point and this is this is important one which is government plays a really important role in two ways one is there's obviously a very important government regulatory role but there's also staying out of the way of innovation particularly when disruptors come along and it is a real challenge because frankly and we've seen many examples over the course of time in our country of entrenched interests trying to use the regulatory process or the legal process to fend off disruptors or new technologies and so and from policy making standpoint it's not always easy because you want to enforce the law but you also have to be mindful of what are the broader implications and how do you allow innovation and development and frankly not closing off your system so that new ideas can come forward and frankly we can fundamentally change the way that you know some businesses get done in certain industries so there is a real tension and a real challenge but I think it is an important one for policy makers not to let the regulatory or legal process to be totally overtaken to keep disruptive or new technologies or new ideas out of the marketplace Good question over here I think we have time for one or two more So I have a high level policy questions one issue for innovation policy here in China is not just selecting winners actually selecting kind of strategic industries I think you mentioned for the manufacturing innovation hubs for each of these hub you actually have a focus specific focus say send a 3D printing for the first one how do you balance this on the one hand being visionary and strategic going into the future and on the other hand not making decisions on behalf of the private sector and secondly we know in each of the major countries we have multiple government agencies responsible for founding or management of the innovation processes in Europe we have Commissioner Moida coming as well from another major agency how do you co-ordinate between these different agencies for innovation policy So can I take the first step of that because you've actually raised something that is really important which is for innovation to happen you have to have competition and frankly government can play a role but government has to be very careful and I can give you our perspective and I think the a number of European companies chairing as well on what's being done on the strategic emerging industries here which is if you use it as a way to stop competition and to keep out foreign companies then it's going to fail you're not going to get real innovation you're actually not going to develop an industry because it's not going to be globally competitive and so you know I'll give you an example on the manufacturing hubs we've done we actually allow foreign companies to be part of them they've got operations in the United States so we actually have a number of non-American headquartered companies that participate in these because of their presence and because of their operations in the United States but I think there is a real danger and I think you know I've and I've had a number of industries you know both American European and global come in and talk about their concerns about the strategic emerging industries here in China and how that's going to choke off competition in the long term you're actually not going to let the market work you're not going to have true innovation so it's figuring out how to balance letting real innovation happen while also providing an atmosphere and frankly an environment an ecosystem that innovation can take place but using government regulatory policy to you know choke off competition is a very very dangerous thing to innovation did you want to add anything Dr? yeah actually I wanted to come back to what you said about intellectual property which of course has been the base for developing new business but sometimes business try to be pre-emptive on things and actually they try to actually prevent things from happening so all the debate about open access to to data is very much actually concerned by this because depending where you put the limit to open access to data is going to determine very much what will be available and therefore at what moment you can start your own business which definitely has to be based on something specific but also in some cases if you just block this circulation of data you are going to make the innovation impossible so I think determining where you draw the barrier between what is shared what is not shared is actually becoming a very strategic issue and on which it's not clear how we should go because clearly the many governments wants to regulate on that and actually it's basically impossible to regulate on that because you said it's completely global issue so if you cannot come up with some kind of a global agreement on a number of issues so for example some of them have also some ethical dimension if you look at anything which has to do the genome I mean definitely there have been a very serious battle about what can be patented about the genome and I think it was a very important step to decide that actually it cannot be patented because it's common knowledge and it has to be shared so I think this discussion about what can be shared what cannot be shared is very central to actually the innovation process because depending where you put it you can change completely the landscape so we have just about three minutes left or so and I want to toss what I'm going to say is an unfair question out to the panel right before this and because I've been thinking we've been talking about a variety of factors if people so we've presented the audience with a lot of things to think about and chew over but from your perspective each of you if you 30 seconds or so if there were one thing you would suggest to people they could take away from this to focus on to help foster innovation over time could you make a recommendation to the folks in the room anyone want to start you know one of the things that you said earlier was talking about the almost unintended positive consequences of policy and specifically the bankruptcy law thinking to my experience in Canada and something that I would love to share with people around the world is one of the things that made it easier for me to make the decision to not get a real job and to go out and to you know when I had really nothing to risk continuing to have nothing for quite some time was the fact that in Canada we have a reasonably good social safety net we have health care and so thinking about you know when you're maybe 25 thinking I'm going to put five years into this and maybe five years down the line I'm going to come out with nothing because that's really that's part of risk taking knowing that the worst case scenario was not going to be abject poverty and that disease wouldn't ruin my life but you know that there were things there that would be helping me out so I think partly that sort of like completely holistic thinking was directly impacting my ability to do this and I can say that I'm not as certain that I would have done the things that I've done if I lived in a society that didn't have quite as much of a safety net to help me out luckily we didn't need it I mean you know we've been reasonably successful but that was a big factor of being able to take that risk and I think helping people take risks by limiting the downside is also a big part not just sort of rewarding the winners but also making sure that there is a little bit of a softer landing for the people who are going to try again so foster and support limit the risks I think maybe it's a good time for me to do a quick summary of some of the things I've been just struck by while I've been listening to everybody first of all I heard a lot about making connections when we talk about why ingenuity is not enough so to support that connections to technologies detectives of policy leaders to students to universities to funders to finding incentives to other countries so inviting people in seems really important number two take the long view as much as you can you don't have to think sustainably you have to work to face challenges that pop up over the time and support on all fronts I heard applying models that work which makes perfect sense that we would want to support evidence based models that work whether they are incubator or networks or manufacturing things that foster inclusiveness and we heard a lot about protection you just left us on that note but also about competitiveness and how competitiveness is part of the key to success and we also heard the theme a lot of going global so I hope we give you something to think about about why you know ingenuity itself is not enough why we need to create a lot of supportive frameworks around that and I have to say I can't think of a better panel to address this topic thank you very much everybody thank you