 Great. Well, thank you very much for the very kind invitation to come and meet with you to discuss very important topic Not just Ireland, but I think every country now entrepreneurship. I'm particularly honored to accept an invitation from the from the Enterprise Ministry that I have understood had a lot to do with the great Irish growth miracle That occurred towards the end of the last century So it's a great honor for me to be here. I spent the decade of the 1980s at various colleges and universities getting my bachelor's my doctorate and What I recall looking back was that Every Professor that I had or knew basically had the same they weren't doing the same thing But they have the same job description that is they we had the same expectations in terms of teaching in terms of Scholarly research. They didn't engage in what we would call Community engagement today. They would do service which meant they would serve on University committees There was really no interaction at all with society beyond the the walls of the university It seemed like we were at maybe it Here at the University of Dublin At Oxford or Cambridge or something like that Walden Walden University But in fact, I was at the University of Wisconsin Which is a land grant university a state university that had as a mandate to try to help The community whether it's the city or the state But back in the 1970s There really wasn't much help that the University could deliver either my university or any university in the United States because What universities did? Research teaching didn't seem to really matter for What drove the economy? What drove the economy back in that era was what the Nobel Prize winning Robert solo an economist at MIT? One day and the one the Nobel Prize for identifying what drove the economy was factories machines termed physical capital the The places the cities or this that had this physical capital Detroit Did well Pittsburgh and steel did great if you had this physical capital The companies to that was the key strategy for success Yes, of course the factories needed people labor in economics But that labor was typically thrown into factories into assembly lines in the mass production so that what work meant was being reliable showing up on time being dependable and Obeying the instructions it wasn't about anything that you would really learn in a university In fact universities like the one famous one here in Dublin have a great tradition of teaching people Independence teaching people to challenge authority. That's the last thing any any manager on a shop floor would want so that there was a I would say a divide a wall between the University and and The rest of society that's exactly what the great statesman of in Germany Humble had envisioned when he won the independence of the University from the dictates of the state and from the church before humble Universities were really Arms of either the church or the state and if anybody if a professor tried to Expose an idea that went against the dictates of say the church or the state they would run into trouble as Copernicus did right when he suggested that the the Sun or that the the Sun Earth revolves around the Sun the church didn't like that and we all we all know what happened at Copernicus You almost died his result. So Humboldt Was the great statesman in Berlin who freed the University So that engaged the University that we have today where It's all about the freedom of The freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake Not because it's useful in the world so that the University that I got to know in the 1970s was all about Freedom of knowledge or to pursue knowledge for its own sake and there didn't seem to be a lot relevant That was useful either for business or anything else in society Because really business was not about what we call today knowledge or ideas It was about taking raw materials putting them into factories and training out manufactured goods Like tires or steel or automobiles both in Europe as well as in North America, but this changed this changed as the world became From the perspective of the West as the world became internationalized now what we call globalized and increasingly the The West start to realize its competitiveness depended not just on Manufacturing commodities, but on ideas a Different scholar Paul Romer Is likely to win a Nobel Prize for coming up with the the the model that says what's important for growth isn't just physical capital But it's also knowledge ideas Where do ideas come from? Where does knowledge come from? Nobody knows for sure, but we think it has a lot to do with That's a lot to do with research and development has a lot to do with education It's a lot to do with human capital where do you get that knowledge a lot of different places But one place is universities so that as the universe is the is is the global economy start to emerge In the 1980s really and then and then accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall The universities became an important source Society started to look you mean society mean what mean cities states Even national governments started to look to the universities that they would invest in the universities In terms of funding for research in terms of funding for students, but they needed a return on that funding Given the scarcity of funds. It didn't make sense to keep pouring money into universities Just for knowledge for the sake of knowledge But rather they grew this kind of either pressure or this expectation that said something's got to come from this knowledge That benefits people In nobody I think really contested it Yes, the traditional that role of the university is very important in this is an underpinning of democracy in of modern societies, but at the same time the extra financing of universities That was driving research in a lot of the education That was given on the expectation that there be a return to Cities states and entire countries in terms of what they need which is growth growth of jobs innovation and ultimately competitiveness so at first I Think that in the 1980s There was a lot of disappointment because Didn't seem to be a lot coming out of the university and at that point scholars discovered There's a difference between investing in a factory or a building investing in an idea The difference is if you know if you have a table, you know what you have if you have a factory You know what you have you know what you do if you have an idea you don't really know Will it work and if it doesn't work? You don't know will anybody will there be demand for anybody Want it and so there was something that that we call the knowledge filter really this barrier between between The investments and research and then the innovation that would come out of it I first heard about this on a visit not unlike this one up in Stockholm about eight years ago nine years ago Stockholm was going for the sweetened Sweden's going through a period of economic stagnation and They called a little meeting to ask what can be done to rid at night That the Swedish economy I was kind of a disciple of this this new Growth model the new indulgence growth model that said it's all about knowledge So I marched into Stockholm when I told our host the minister of economics that I know what to do What Stockholm what sweet needs to do is to invest in knowledge. It needs to invest in R&D It needs to invest in university invest in education and Fest and patents even invest more broadly if you think about knowledge. It's about ideas and creativity invest in culture I put more money to theater and into Museums and just Help people become knowledgeable and creative and I don't forget that they are hosts the minister of Economics said well, we're sure that the the professor must be right Said but nobody will ever believe him here in Sweden because by any measure indicated that the OECD does whether it's R&D per capita per GDP dollar or patents per capita By any education measure Sweden comes out number one or number two And that was the first day that I heard the phrase the Swedish paradox What the paradox was was that it's not enough just to invest in the knowledge of the ideas Because people aren't sure which are the good ones or which aren't the good ones. They don't miss is like spill over for commercialization for innovation Rather you need a mechanism to take it out now the Swedes didn't They didn't invent that that term or they didn't invent that concept as you may have invented a term even Earlier a senator in the United States Senate senator by Had really observed the same thing at American universities And he felt that even with all the investment from the federal government funding research there wasn't enough coming out of the universities So he and his colleague Robert dole got together commenced Congress to pass the buy dole act in 1980 Which I won't get into the details, but it changed the property rights intellectual property rights from Innovations from federally funded research from the You know usually if you own if you give the money you own the intellectual property that meant the federal agencies It could have been the environmental protection agency the Pentagon the National Science Foundation that said anybody wanted to commercialize a New product from that research would have to go through Negotiations red tape of the funding agency the by-law act shifted the property rights to the university and suddenly they were in business But the universities could then decide what to do with the intellectual property that was accruing from all this research It seemed like a breakthrough But over time We could see that there was an explosion of patents during the 1980s from the universities But when people look more carefully what they'd see was a few universities MIT Columbia University in New York The University of California system, especially Berkeley Had a lot of pens most universities didn't have very many at all Secondly what they realized was that these patents were not generating a lot of revenue For the universities that was one of the hopes that the universities have the actual intellectual property They could actually generate revenue which would help finance Part of the expense of research and education, but it wasn't working at most most universities Thirdly, there didn't seem to be a lot of startups from universities There's a national association of Technology managers of universities called the American University technology managers autumn They have a national association. They collect all the data that the universities are Engaged in so we can see the patents and licensee we can see the spin-offs of the startups coming from the universities and we don't see a lot from American universities and Typically, there'll be something like 450 startups a year now that might sound like a lot to you You know for the University of Dublin had 450 startups that would be a lot, but we're not talking about the university We're talking about a big country the United States. There's 50 states. There's I Forget 2,500 Universities in America Suddenly that doesn't seem like very many when we look at individual universities MIT maybe is 2325 that seems like a lot MIT has this enormous science engineering Infrastructure Stanford at six or seven Other university University of Illinois hardly as any so it seemed that there wasn't a lot Coming out of the universities either in terms of entrepreneurial activity that suggested for all of the hopes that the universities could fuel innovation either through technology transfer through licensing or through spawning spin-offs Not a lot seemed to be happening So I got to I did a project with a doctor student where we realized A lot of people realized there was a problem with the data and the measurement. There's really a problem with people like Like me the professors at universities. We were going to the universities asking what they did when in fact The actual professors scientists engineers other people at universities They were had the capability of starting a company Even without the going through the technology transfer office of the university and this is because the technology transfer offices They tend to be small with a handful of people three four or five people They're flooded every year every employees required to fill out an intellectual disclosure form I'm required to every I think I think that's true in Ireland It's true in over Europe and so every year I'm kind of proud of all my great ideas that could be inventions I'm an economist So every year I get back in a meal that says thanks We'll call you if we need you and that's the end of it Most of the of these scientists and engineers at universities are people like me That's what we get so that these small offices stamps have to decide which projects look like they're the most promising to generate Revenue for the university. They'll typically take something that's relatively standardized perhaps an incremental innovation That could perhaps be licensed and they'll follow that Everybody else is free to do it. Their idea is what they want. And so what we started to realize that there's lots and lots of Professors who are taking their ideas and they're commercializing them and the university doesn't know about them It's not really their business. So Through the help of a foundation the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City We secured the records of Scientists at the National Institutes of Health The top scientists who get grants and we were able to do through a survey and interviews asked the scientists Have you started a business? These are very prominent success for the high fliers of science PhDs from Oxford postdocs at MIT Residencies at moxplonk and so on and What we found was that one out of four of the scientists we thought we spoke with their interviewer survey had actually Started a business which is a pretty high rate of Entrepreneurship really way beyond what anybody was else of picking up because we weren't asking the universities what they were doing we were asking the scientists what they were doing and And And so what we think this is revealed that there's a lot more coming out of the universities Then people had at the American universities than people had Previously known or expected and we think this is important because This kind of entrepreneurship From scientists from the university that serves as the conduit or the mechanism that takes this knowledge That's really expensive comes from the result of research in laboratories goes through all kinds of different vetting procedures and Actually ends up out of the market as a as a Potentially new product or or innovation and it suggests to us that there's a lot more Suggest a couple things first of all that the role of the university has changed considerably from what I recall back in the 1970s when I think there was really the separation between Society and the universities the universities were I wouldn't want to say they were extremely as to society They were fundamental for social values for democracy political values, but they were not a factor in input into Into production into economic growth that I think the view was actually Universities were aware of burden. They were a luxury either going to one was kind of a luxury that didn't have a lot to do with a Good future income In financing one also seemed to be coming to cost of that growth It was a substitute was a trade-off with economic growth Well, I think that that view is totally flicked now so that universities are viewed as Complementary to innovation and economic growth, but one of the reasons why it seems to be Had this positive impact in the United States is that we can't really see the impact And when we look for it in terms of patents or in terms of licensed Intellectual property, it's not really compelling evidence where we see it as the actually through people It's people and especially the scientists engineers who are very active and if they've got a good idea They get involved in help getting that idea out into society now We don't really know an consensus for the broad spectrum of scientists engineers We just really know for the very high fliers in a very narrow field We've done some work since then but I to me the bigger takeaway from this is that the role of the university has clearly changed It's clearly not I would never want to say oh, it's working optimally or it's working. Well, it certainly has changed One of the reasons why I think We're seeing so much Entrepreneurship and commercialization from the American universities has to do with the government structure I know that in some parts maybe many parts of Europe. There's a sense and a concern that the That the challenge for the European universities is due to a underfunding of the universities And I think that's always an issue But what I see is the big difference between the European universities and the universities in North America It's a governance that allows the the professors freedom so they can be professors They can in this comes a surprise to many people they can say at their jobs But they could also start firms at the same time the assumption I think many people have is oh, they'll either have to go on leave or sabbatical or they have to stop being professor some do for sure but many don't and I think it's a system that is designed to maximize the Spillover of knowledge from the research labs out into the society get those products out there That's going to create jobs and innovation and worries less about potential conflicts of interest between the professor who now has a business as well as His duties at the university So I will just close by saying I think in my lifetime. I've seen Perhaps not a revolution of the universities But certainly a change in the universities and I notice it's spread Across the Atlantic to the side of the Atlantic as well and I I can see that the universities now are in a Process of transition from being a classic humble university where the focus is knowledge for its own sake To a university where it still has that element of knowledge for its own sake But now there's a priority also of knowledge because it can contribute to society especially Contribute to innovation and growth. Thank you very much