 The innovative companies who were able to scale to global businesses and to have valuations of billions of dollars I think there's room for both and I would I think We're not lacking in the first. It would be nice to see some more of the second. Thank you In fact as a personal perspective I very much agree with you to be honest since concentration of money is also a concentration of power obviously It'd be nice if we didn't just do the inventing and left all the power to everyone else but actually Gave Europe a bit more of a stronger backbone Simon I was having a discussion last night over dinner with a member of a representative of a large corporation Who was saying that it was vital that if government funded research was performed that the results were kept confidential and Could be patented by the corporations who had collaborated with them on that research What would you say to that person if you had the opportunity opportunity to have that discussion yourself? Alma I think this is this is you Well, very simply I would say that I do I disagree with you completely if governments fund something That's us funding something and what we pay for we should be able to benefit from so I don't actually think if he tried or she it might be who who was making the case if they tried to make a case that That taking the route that they were Advocating was going to benefit society more than taking the route. I advocate I would be prepared to listen to them, but I would still tell them that they were wrong One of the central tenets of our argument is that publicly funded research should be publicly available And and I can't think of anything that could possibly be said against that Does anybody want to do disagree and deep All right, I will just say one thing and that is that I do understand the nervousness of some businesses when they have collaborated With publicly funded say university groups or something about Making what they have done open, but I think in many cases especially over this horizon 2020 thing There is a misunderstanding on the part of some certainly some industries who are showing nervousness at what is in that in that legislation They think that what we're advocating for is that everything they do all the things that they create in their industry In their business must now be made open simply because on some scores They collaborate with a university or two on something that is absolutely not what we're saying All we're asking for is that what has been paid for by the public and he's going to be published In fact is published in academic journals and books Should be made freely available to that public that paid for it if there are industrial secrets Behind there that are going to be patented or whatever. That's fine They can stay there and be patented as far as we're concerned We're trying to open up the scholarly literature and I do think that sometimes there is a Misunderstanding that can lead to that kind of fear. I mean it may not be in this particular case We don't know because the person isn't going to say anything But but I think in some well, I know that in some cases that that is a misunderstanding All right Andy Wanted to comment briefly on the jobs act in the crowdfunding Give you a little bit of an update on on how funding has worked and hasn't worked well in the US because that's the other thing I do is startup representation for about 20 years the laws have been really quite liberal in the United States for startup securing funding from so-called angel investors and the sort of keystone behind the existing law is That if people have enough money to be able to afford to lose it They can sort of watch out for themselves But you can only raise so much money because we don't want the bloodshed to be too broad-based and then secondarily you can't advertise so it has to be sort of one-on-one so that there's a limitation of How easy it is to gull people basically and It's also very difficult for someone to be an intermediary so there are very few finders so even though there are many times The amount per year raised from angels as there are from angel investors It's all sort of below the surface and it doesn't have a lot of high visibility What happened with the jobs act is a little bit of a salutary Story if you look at where it started and where it ended up The idea was when Kickstarter and and these other sites that couldn't sell securities We're doing very well. The idea was gee. Why don't we spread this more broadly? Why don't we make it easier to do? Sadly what happened was what started out as the quote-unquote jobs act Assuming that all these little companies would be able to do these little offerings what eventually happened was they had riders by the financial industry added to it which Relaxed the public reporting requirements which had been there since the meltdown at the end of the internet bubble Which venture capitalists and emerging companies have been complaining about bitterly the Sarbanes-Oxley laws that they said rightly Do cost the millions of dollars a year and are very very burdensome however In order to get the jobs act through Congress agreed to raise the limit of quote-unquote a small business to one billion dollars in capitalization Which includes small businesses such as barns and noble with hundreds of large outlets around the world That's not a small business So you had all of this massive deregulation poured on the top at the same time Because Congress didn't want to open the floodgates to abuse they told the SEC you have to come up with the regulations to allow crowdfunding The SEC then did nothing for nine months, and they finally released the regulations which say that it can only been be done through an intermediate The intermediary has to be registered with the major Association which imposes Asset tests and Certification exam testing and anyway it goes on and on and on with the result that the good news is you're not going to see the legions of Snake oil salesmen that Undoubtedly would have come in to set up spurious Exchanges and fleece people from lots of money But on the other hand you're also not going to see any angel networks that were contemplated by the act because it's so burdensome and The fact that you can only raise under the safe harbor one million That it's not worth anyone's while to register because if you're registered you wouldn't do a deal that small So it's sort of a sad tale that after all this good feeling in the press and all of this jobs act What you really saw was a major scam by Imagine this the financial industry to ram through Deregulation that they've been striving to have for a decade at the expense of something which in fact is likely to never happen at all So it's a great idea But be aware of what may happen if you try and do the same thing here That you'll need to take a different approach to avoid something likely very much like that happening because the same Market interests somewhat different, but the same market interests are Likely to want to ride on the back of it here. So go for it, but beware Thank you very much that indeed sounds like something we really don't want to have happen I I'm getting signs that we should be heading to the drinks Just a few words to close up Do you have any final words should I do the summary Actually have a question briefly for Alma Which is that the the the problem that you describe? Clearly a real problem Seems to me to be an opportunity for innovation In that you have some big entrenched players who have a sort of privileged access business model and Really it ought to be the case that yes regulation can play a role But actually there should be loads and loads of new of new entrants coming in and disrupting this business model now There are some like Menderly and people like that But I mean do you would you bet that it will be regulation that solves the problem or innovation? Well, I think we need the world while there's a whiff of regulation We're going to go for that and let's get that in place because that that gives us our policy basis to work on But yes, I agree with you. We do need innovation. We have the players like you've mentioned Menderly and so on We also have a whole tranche now of open access publishers who have a new business model And I'm demonstrating that that's a sustainable one. So that's good and that is innovative in a way It's not very innovative But it is a bit innovative and it is helping I would really like to see more Innovation, I think we need a kind of game-changer here. We need someone to come in with a completely new idea That everybody and this is not my generation or maybe not even your generation though with respect I say that I think we're talking about The people who are undergraduates now and young graduate students Well, I want one of them or somebody who can appeal to them to come along so that they all say That's a great way of communicating our science. Why don't we do that? I'm sure it will happen But it hasn't happened yet. All right. Thank you very much In the interest of gravity, let me just try to summarize a few points So from this panel to the audience and all the legislators and everyone who is active out there I have a couple of points that I take from our various speakers starting perhaps even with the Let's do what we can to actually foster a culture of entrepreneurship. First of all Change the social value that is attributed to it There is obviously a lot of potential in crowdfunding and other ways of raising capital and Perhaps we should also look at the other side of things which is in the area of the tax incentives for investment, but perhaps even tax incentive for Choosing innovative technologies, which in fact funnily enough is a point that came up at last year's entrepreneurship panel at this conference As a way to ease market entry for innovative companies We had two speakers advocating to think bigger To not think, you know, it's just enough to to settle for survival But actually, you know Go for the big one and you know try to reach the sky. Maybe we actually need a bit more of that thinking and perhaps one way in which we can Help people do that would be to find ways to shape hubs of expertise You know create that friend effect where someone can tell you something about how this is done How this is works how this works? I mean, I know from my own experience that it is not so easy to get by that Information in Europe. I mean I had to dig a bit to actually get to it Of course, we want innovation based on scientific progress Which is funded by the public for the purpose of making innovation and Economic activity happen as one of the goals that currently isn't happening on the level it should be So I think this is clearly something we need to be looking at