 We're almost here. If I could call your attention to the stage, I think it would be best. I'm going to actually stay away from this microphone. But it would be best if we started. By introduction, I would like to at least set the stage of what we're going to discuss for the next roughly hour and 15 hour and 25 minutes. But first, let me at least introduce myself. My name is Andy Hare. I know some, if not many of you in this room. I've been in the telecom space for over 30 years. But probably what's unique about, or somewhat unique about my background is I've worked in both the public and the private sector. When I worked in the private sector, I've worked for both an insurgent and an incumbent. So I've actually seen both sides of the private sector. When I worked in the public sector, I was fortunate enough to serve in a fairly well-respected government within Asia. So got to know the Asia market actually quite well. But I served as their telecommunications regulator and competition authority for the better part of 10 years. What we're going to talk about this morning is a fairly straightforward title, redesigning public service. I believe that when you unwrap that subject carefully, there is a lot, an enormous amount of substance in that. In other words, what is government's role? What is society's role? What is the marketplace? How can the marketplace actually be moved? The predicate of redesigning public service is, I think, a recognition that change is happening. Too often when I travel or when I talk to people, I hear change being driven by technology. And I think there is a kind of an unknown out there. And that is that there is also a change being created by user adoption. Although I'm an engineer by degree, I've been involved in economic principles long enough to know there is not only a supply side but a demand side. And oftentimes, we tend to focus strictly on the supply side because it's a more interesting thing. And it's possibly an easier thing to understand. But to move the demand side is often a much larger challenge. Inside this change that's happening, it's being driven by a variety of things. I think we are seeing the shared, or some people like to call it, the sharing economy is evolving. We're seeing dramatic changes as a direct result of people willing to move or change or redesign the way they do business or the way they live and the way they work. I would like over the course of the next hour, as unpolitic as this may be, to explore not only the successes of redesigning public service but also where we've failed. Because I often believe we don't ever learn unless we start to focus on where we possibly went wrong and hopefully not to recreate or recover from those mistakes. Things like crowdsourcing are a major initiative. I know cities around the world are spending enormous amounts of money to try to figure out how do they move people? How do people in transport move from one place to the next? All of a sudden, the crowdsourcing application surfaces. And this particular device right here becomes probably one of the most valuable devices to learn where people are and where they're moving. Now, with that opportunity, we also have a societal problem, and that would be how do we protect that information? How do we, in fact, make sure that private information remains private or is only released with the consent of the individual having it? The question that I will focus on, hopefully, after we actually have some introductory remarks, is how and what can governments do? Or what should they do? Or more importantly, what should they not do? So therefore, we would like to engage on one hand something that's been written up in the business literature as the creative class. We'd like to get them involved, but how do we make sure it's involved in a productive and efficient way? So can we answer this one question? Is there a common thread? This is the question I'd like to have answered, hopefully, an hour or an hour and 15 minutes from now. Is there a common thread among what we hear today that will represent, possibly, a significant position or direction? I just had a fascinating discussion with the minister from Djibouti, who actually will be our first presenter. And I could not agree with him more. I strongly, strongly believe there are very, very few economies that are similar. I believe there are 208 countries in the world, and I believe there are at least 208 different ways to do something, whatever that something happens to be. I don't think we ever should focus on one size will work everywhere, because it just won't. So with that, I would like actually to introduce, if you'll allow me, the minister from Djibouti. And I'm going to give each speaker, hopefully, an opportunity to spend between three and five minutes to open some remarks to get the thinking going. But as they're talking, I would very much like each one of you to think about the kinds of issues that are being discussed. And then after the introductory remarks, have you direct questions at them? And with that, I will hopefully step back and only serve as the referee or the moderator. So with that, if I could introduce Minister Baddan, who is the minister de la commune Cassillon, the charge de post de la commune Cassillon. He is the minister from the Republic of Djibouti. And since he took office in April 2013, he has launched ICT strategic development roadmap with a specific line of the country's 2035 vision. During telecom world, I would definitely like, while you're here, to be able to see the Djibouti pavilion, which is showcasing their smart city project, as well as a startup. The Honorable Bahan is a jurist, initiated important projects, such as the Djibouti Ethiopian Railway. He has also countered the piracy issue that would affect their coast guard. And is the former minister of equipment and transportation in the former minister of labor with that minister? The floor is yours. It's a great pleasure to be here today to be part of this extraordinary panel representing different continents and talking about the future of our nations, and especially from ITC field. As you mentioned, Djibouti, you have a very strong will to go in this game and to play our role. That means we have a unique position, very strategic position, because not only of our maritime and transportation business, but also for telecom and ITC business, we have very strategic location. We invested from independence in infrastructures like ports. We have today three operational ports. And four under construction. That means seven ports for a country of less than one million inhabitants. This is for the regional purpose. It's not for the country itself. We know that we have to, we have the gateway for our region. So we have to play this role seriously and to invest in. That's why we invested a lot in telecommunication and ports and financing services. Today telecommunication is shifting to ICT. And also in Africa, we are several countries who are pushing to have international standard of ICT centers. We know the future of the youth of our nations and the youth are very involved in telecommunication and ICT things. Personally, I'm very proud to have Egyptian company, Egyptian startup who is one of 16 companies or startups that have been recognized by ITC this year. And I hope they will be the number one. Why not? So it's very important for us to be with our private partners. The government is just there to make the framework and to make the friendly environment. I speak French, that's why my English is from time to time. Mistaking, so sorry for that. I mean, as government, you have to make a good framework for everyone to do business in our country. We have a lot of incentives in Djibouti like free zones. We have a very strong currency. And we have also the stability and the peace that's very, very important items in our region. So I will not monopolize the floor and say thank you for giving me the floor first. I know people have more interesting things to say so. Thank you. Oh, I'm not so sure about that. I would like to introduce our second panelist and just for the sake of order, if you will, we will go from your left to right across the panel. So with that, I would like to introduce Anir Choudhury. He is a policy advisor in the prime minister's office in Bangladesh. And as advisor, he coordinates both its formulation and implementation of the governance and his service delivery. He's a member of the prime minister's national digital task force, the education minister's national ICT and education task force. And the planning minister's national information management committee, he's co-founder of several software and services companies in the US and Bangladesh focused on enterprise management and IT strategy. His interests include coordination of E and M service, which I think actually will be quite interesting if we bring this into the discussion about the role of a revamped government. So with that, Mr. Choudhury. Thanks, Sandy. I'm very happy to be here. It's a very interesting audience and also a brilliant panel that I'm a member of. Why are we really talking about startups today? And startup in government, startup for redesigning public services. I think we're making an assumption that startups are the engine for growth. And startups are the engine for innovation. Let's actually take a look at some facts. Fact number one, government by design is risk averse. The traditional wisdom says that if governments were to take risks, then it would actually collapse. It would not be able to govern. So that's the basic assumption about governments as far as risk taking is concerned. But then also, let's look at fact number two. That real change requires innovation. We're talking about redesigning public services. Obviously, we are talking about changing the way services have been delivered by governments. And governments are facing at least three different types of pressures. One is pressure from the private sector and the NGOs because they are providing parallel services, some of which are actually better than what the government provides. The second pressure is from the media. Media is changing people's expectations for what they expect from the government. The third is technology that is creating huge opportunities for disruption within public service. So these are the three things that are happening and that are driving innovation. But because the government is risk averse, many of the innovation are not being able to come to the government. Let's look at fact number three. Innovation is considered the realm of startup companies or startup groups in large companies. And government is neither. Government is not a startup company, nor can it promote startup culture or attitude within its function. So where do we go from there? And then finally, let's look at fact number four. A government is enormously influential as far as citizens' well-being and service delivery is concerned. Let's take the case of a very junior government officer in Bangladesh between the ages of 30 to 35. He or she controls the service delivery paradigm starting from education to health care to agriculture to social safety nets to disaster management for about 300,000 people. So a fairly junior government officer, civil servant, between the ages of 30 and 35, controlling the lives of about 300,000 people. So that's an enormous responsibility, enormous power, enormous influence. Now wouldn't it be nice to introduce the model of innovation that we see in startup companies or startup groups of large companies within government? And it's really all about human motivation. It's not about technology. It's not about other pressures that we keep talking about. It's really about the human motivation to innovate, to disrupt, and to change what is being done today or what has been done in the last few decades. I will actually defer to a gentleman called Dan Pink. He's a motivational speaker, and he used to be the speechwriter for American Vice President Al Gore. He talked about three different things that motivates people. He talked about purpose. He talked about autonomy. And he talked about mastery. Purpose is something that gives a person vision to drive towards a particular goal. In Bangladesh, what we have done in order to introduce this startup mentality or startup culture within government is to define a new purpose for our civil servants. And that's being driven by a digital Bangladesh agenda of the government, the current government, which basically says that we want to achieve a middle income status. For the longest time, we have been stuck at an LDC level. Very recently, we are starting to come out of that. And by 2021, which is the 50th anniversary of our country, we'd like to become a fairly robust middle income country. And the digital Bangladesh slogan or the call to action of the government of our honorable prime minister is giving a sense of purpose for all our civil servants. That you have to take services to citizens' doorsteps. We have a measure for all our services now. We're working with about 400 critical services. This measure is called TCV, time, cost, and the number of visits. We're actually benchmarking every service around the time it takes to get that service for a citizen, the cost incurred by the citizen, including transportation cost, cost of many other unexplained costs within the government cycle of service delivery. And the number of visits it takes to actually get that service. So every single service is being benchmarked around this. And we are basically setting a purpose for all our civil servants to reduce that TCV. And that's becoming a very unambiguous and focused purpose for all our civil servants. We have introduced district-wide dashboards, where you can actually see electronic requests coming in from about 5,000 digital centers that we have set up across the country to every district headquarter. And we can see the efficiency of the civil servants to dispense of these services, because it can be electronically tracked by internet or by mobile phones. Let's come to the concept of autonomy. We have seen that all civil servants are actually tied to rules and regulations. And they have very little autonomy to actually exercise their enormous authority or power. We have formed what are called innovation teams. In every ministry, every district, and every sub-district of the country. So there are about 1,000 innovation teams, each consisting of about five to seven people, who are trying to break the status quo, who are trying to work as startup groups within the individual departments, within the individual districts. And some of these groups are, some of these innovation teams are cross-functional. So we have a policeman, a teacher, a doctor, providing advice and criticisms, constructive criticism to actually change the way service delivery is being done. We have launched an innovation fund. It's sort of like a venture capital fund within the government, for these innovators within the government. Although non-government innovators can also apply to this fund. In the last two and a half years, we've received about 2,500 applications, of which we've been able to support about 100 different innovations across the government, and also from the private sector, from the academia, to redesign public services. They range from launching e-commerce portal for women artisans, migration registration done in a new way, 3D printing services for printing prosthetic limbs, crop diagnostic tools, all different kinds of things that we could not have come up with from the Prime Minister's office or from any ministry. The last of the three things that Dan Pink talks about mastery, autonomy, and, sorry, purpose, autonomy and mastery is the question of mastery. Whether the government officers have the requisite skills to redesign services. And there, what we have done is introduce the concept of design thinking. We've actually taken some of the cutting edge material from the organizations like Stanford Design School, UK government's organization called Nesta. And we've taken many of the tools, customized it to our needs, and trained about 1500 civil servants who are part of the innovation teams. And they're now training their colleagues. And through their work, we've seen about 350 plus innovation pilots ranging from social safety nets to disaster management, to education, to healthcare being tried out. So this is a massive experimentation that's happening within the government without taking huge risks, but many of the successes are being scaled up across the government. So these three things, purpose, autonomy, and mastery, we've actually taken to our heart to provide the right kinds of motivation for our civil servants who are forming a startup culture, startup groups called these innovation teams within the government. And I'll come back to many of these things when there is more question and answer. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I would like to move to our third panelist, George Caramonolis, and he is the co-founder of a startup. And so we're gonna actually dovetail quite carefully with what Nair just talked about. He has actually coordinated and implemented e-government projects for the Greek government. His firm, the company he's founded, is called Crowd Policy. It's a private company registered in Greece, essentially empowers organizations to discover and utilize tacit knowledge by providing tools. And I will use the word advice if I can, carefully, to implement procedures, redesignings. So with that, George, if you could now give us a almost a completely various, very perspective. Because you are a entrepreneur. Okay, and prior to our company establishment, we were working as a consultant at the Prime Minister's office. So we were very lucky to see the public sector as the largest lab and landscape to a test innovation concept because you cannot find a lot of people, space with a lot of transactions. Even if for the private sector. So the public sector has a lot of capacity to end a great human capital in every country that is underutilized and can achieve innovation and public reform when it can be organized and has the right incentives in a way that the previous speaker has talked about. So what I was thinking, what I'm thinking is that we have now four main pillars that every public sector in every country can base the innovation policy or a strategic approach. The first is that the current crisis, even, for example, in Europe and especially in Greece, brings a greater demand for more transparency and accountability, et cetera. The second is that the private sector and especially all these concepts about sharing economy, how, for example, Uber, Facebook, Airbnb operates, that's the standard for the public sector. For example, now a civil servant or a citizen is very familiar with all these crowdsourcing concepts to evaluate services from the public sector. And this is a paradigm shift and the culture that he's expecting from the public sector. And the third is that all these concepts about technology, openness, and political openness, for example, open data, open APIs, and all these legislation frameworks that has been formulated the recent years in Europe also can provide some positive preconditions in order to create startup internally in the government and externally to provide tools and data for the startup ecosystems. For example, when you provide public data, you can motivate the public servants to redesign the digital services. And at the other side, you can develop an ecosystem where added value services can be easily deployed. And the third challenge, or pillar, is that you can think that there is a lot of knowledge at the crowd, at the citizens. And the challenge is how to transform this knowledge into viable operational processes on how, for example, to organize and improve existing administrative processes by taking or gathering ideas and proposals from the crowd. This is something we were doing for the municipality in Athens. And speaking about Greece, a challenge we faced when we were working as consultants at the prime minister's office is how to implement a transparency project in Greece. And the only way is to, the only way was to organize horizontal task forces, joint teams, or innovation task forces that were also cross functional and had the authority to run the project. And now we have in Greece, I think 5,000 institutions, public institutions and 40,000 civil servants that are going to an information systems every day and upload its administrative decision, payment, et cetera. Every public document in Greece, a payment, a procurement, or that has to do with no personal or sensitive data is uploaded on the internet. And now we have a large registry of 14 million public documents online. And this is a useful repository for every policymaker to study on this public available content and see, okay, how many transactions have to do to make a procurement? How many payments steps exist? How many administrative, so I think, and this is the main concept of the API, an open data economy. When you provide open data and public information, then the role of the public sector can change, can be a data provider. The private sector could, for example, design the services. So this is a challenge that has a lot of aspect, policy, technological, I think. Thank you. Thank you very much, George. I would like to introduce our fourth panelist, Ms. Eileen Kabatende. She is the Chief Operating Officer. She's from Rwanda. She's a Chief Operating Officer for Rwanda Online Platform. She has held various IT responsibilities within the Rwanda Development Board and served as project manager. She's a writer, columnist for the New York Times, CIO of East Africa. She's a member of organizations advocating for youth and girls in ICT, including the Society of Women Engineers and girls in ICT Rwanda. With that, Eileen. Thank you, and hello, can you hear me? Good morning, everyone. My name is Eileen Kabatende as I was introduced. I do not write for the New York Times. I write for you times, Rwanda. I expect to write for you times. It's my pleasure to be one on this panel with such distinguished speakers and also to be with you, the dear audience. So I think this is a very interesting discussion. I'm also privileged, by the way, to be the only woman on the panel. Yes. I think this is a very interesting discussion because I'll give it some context, first of all. In Rwanda, when you give birth to a child, the policy is that within 15 days, that child has to be registered with the government. And this is not done at the hospital level. So it's done at the local government, the decentralized offices. So either parent can go and register the child with two witnesses. But if you're a single mother, can you imagine 15 days after you had a child, you have to now figure out how to go and register your kid? It's good for the government because the government gets the information they need, but it doesn't work. It's not favorable for the citizen. Who, if you miss the 15 days, they are repercussions. You have to deal with the judicial system. So redesigning public service has to change and stop being about the government and become about the citizen, become citizen-centered. In Rwanda, one of the ways that we're doing that is to say, okay, why don't we digitize these government services so that citizens no longer have to go all the way to the sector office 15 days after they have given birth, but be able to go online and register their child. Now, of course, Rwanda does not have the highest penetration of internet. And so there are different ways that we're doing it. One is mobile applications. So some services, not all services, are being put on USSD. I don't know how many of you know USSD, star, three numbers, hash. Usually people from the developing world know this more than people in the developed world. I don't think they use USSD that much. And so putting some of the services on USSD because most of the population actually uses feature phones. And the other, for the services that cannot be put on USSD, putting in place agents, so we have the government officers nationwide, but also having agents that work with the government and with ourselves to provide services to citizens at no extra charge. And so I would still be able to find an agent much closer to my home and be able to reach out to the more underserved population and they would help me to apply for a service. And then I could go and deal with the paperwork after that. So at Rwanda Online, these are the things that we are constantly thinking about. And this is being done in a very interesting way in Rwanda because Rwanda Online is a private company. And so the way the government of Rwanda is approaching this is saying, as the government, we have our core business, but why don't we evolve the private sector? We are not a big company, but evolve a Rwandan company that will work with us to come up with innovative ways to deliver these services. And so we are digitizing, we are looking to digitize 100 services in the next three years. We have six services up now. And it's a very challenging process because one of the things that Andy mentioned was the demand side. So we are strong on the supply because we are good with the technology, but at the end of the day, it's not about the technology and the supply side, it's really about the demand. And so I've already touched on the points of bringing it on mobile, having the agents nationwide, but the other aspect is the government offices are, in my opinion, one of the most key end users because citizens, you're addressing their needs, you're making services easier. The officer, maybe he was making a small cut from making the citizens life more and more frustrating so that they could pay him off and be able to provide the service. So what we're doing is we're doing training. We have training programs with them, refresher courses we go and it's not only training them on how to use the back end of the platform, but just changing, like a near touchstone is changing that mindset and giving them the motivation to see that it's not just about technology, it's about them playing a key role in improving government services to citizens and improving the way that they do business as a government. And so that's been a very interesting journey for Rwanda. It's still very new, the platform only went live mid-July, but it should be a very interesting journey and see how we redesign public service in Rwanda and we are really thinking about it in a Rwandan context like Andy touched on, that you cannot follow any other country. So a government in Africa has not yet picked up speed but the way we do it in Rwanda, we can never look to Singapore and hope to do it the way Singapore did it because it's a very different environment. So yeah, that's my introduction. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Aileen. We will actually hear from Singapore two speakers from now. So with that, I would like to introduce our fifth panelist, Mr. Pear Valls. He is the CEO of a company called, if I pronounce it correctly, Skiddle? Skiddle, sorry, apologies. Software company Headquartered in Barcelona that is transforming, and this I think is interesting, but transforming the election industry by providing innovative technology that helps improve democracy. I think there are many projects around the world to try to find ways to improve that process to the extent we can, but not only would they improve democracy but citizen empowerment, public transparency. He's worked in telecommunications sector in the US and for KPMG's Mergers and Acquisitions Group in Los Angeles and Miami, providing financial and strategic consulting services to private equity groups. With that, Pear, the floor is yours. Thank you, Andy. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. Before I get to my opening remarks, let me put these opening remarks into context and say a few words about what we're doing at Skiddle. Skiddle is a venture-backed technology company that was born out of a university research group. It has had a very high growth in the last 10 years. 10 years ago, we were a small startup with 12 people. Today, we are a mid-sized technology company with 650 people in 21 countries. And as Andy mentioned in the introduction, what we do is we're leading the transformation of a critical market, but also a very antiquated market which is the election market. The election industry is an industry that hasn't changed much in the last 15 years, that has benefited very little from technology and we're trying to change that by bringing technology into the election processes with the objective of making elections more efficient, more accessible, and more secure. Because of what we do and because we bring disruptive technology into the public sector, we have a lot of experience working with governments. We work in election modernization projects in 42 countries all over the world. In developed countries like the US, Canada, France, UK, Switzerland, and Australia, but also in developing countries, countries like Brazil, South Africa, Congo, India, or Bangladesh. And therefore, because of this experience, I think we've seen a lot of things of how to implement an innovative technology in the public sector, in something as critical as an election. And I can say that we've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly in this sector. The three remarks I would like to make is first, one thing that is not a huge revelation, which is that the public sector is not the ideal place to bring innovation because the public sector, by definition, is very risk averse. I think my colleague from Bangladesh mentioned this and they're very risk averse for a reason. It's a rational risk aversion and the reason is that there is, I think, an asymmetry between the risk-reward equation in any project that they do. If they do an innovative project and the project doesn't work well, it makes the national news and it's a big political crisis. If the project works really well, people take it for granted and they don't get a lot of recognition. So I think that is a fundamental problem on how media treats projects that are executed by governments. And that affects innovation because it increases the risk perception by governments. The second point is that because of this high risk aversion, governments have a tendency to work with large multinational technology companies because they perceive that there is less risk in working with these entities. And I think this was fine in the last century because most of the innovation was being done at these companies. But if you look at what innovation developed in the 21st century is being developed by technology startups which are entrepreneurial, they are smaller, they are more flexible and they are different actors from the large multinational companies. So I think one of the key things for governments in the future is they will need to learn how to engage with these more entrepreneurial startup type of entities. And the third point is that I think when we think about government we have to make the distinction between two actors. There is the politicians and then there is the civil servants. And I think in general there is a tendency to overestimate the power and importance of the politicians and to underestimate the role and the importance of the public servants. At the end what I've seen in the countries where I work is that politicians want to do things and some of them are new within government because they just were elected and some of them come from the private sector so they don't understand exactly how government works and they have a lot of ideas, a lot of initiatives, they want to leave a legacy and therefore they are very interested in doing things. But then on the other hand there is the career public servants who don't have any really strong incentives to try anything new. They are big defenders of the status quo in many cases and without their support it's very difficult to implement an innovative project in the public sector successfully. And we've seen that most of the projects that we've seen fail is because of that research. So I think it's very important to have a good understanding of the different actors and to know very well how to engage with each one of them and create the right incentive so that innovation can be successfully deployed in the public sector. Thank you, thank you very much, Pierre. Clearly last but not least is Dr. Alex Lin. And on a very personal note I had a very distinct privilege for 10 years to work for the Singapore government. So I am very anxious. I know we had some comments before the session but I'm very anxious to hear what you have to say. Let me just give a quick thumbnail on your background just so at least the delegates know where you're coming from. Dr. Lin is actually the head of, and I'll use the proper word, the Infocom Investments Organization within the government of Singapore. He leads a team of investment professionals to develop Infocom startup ecosystems in Singapore. And I think it's fair to say elsewhere too, I think even beyond the shores through strategic investments and promising companies. He has held entrepreneurship, investment related roles in several organizations, working closely with Singapore universities promoting creation, rapid prototyping capabilities and incubators. I think one of the most interesting points that you made while we were having our precession remarks was the kind of things that you look at and the kinds of things you do in terms of investment. I will be, if I can, a touch provocative right now. And that is you've heard two of our panelists talk about the risk aversion of governments and you and I have worked for that same government. I'd like to hear your thoughts on risk aversion. Thank you, Andy. Being a last panelist, actually, that's a huge advantage. You get to hear everybody's viewpoint and you can comment on that and other people cannot comment on yours. Being at the... Andy just mentioned about my organization, Infocom Investment. As you can see the history is that Andy needs to say, put a little bit context to it that we are used to be called IDA Investment. IDA is a government agency and in order for us to differentiate ourselves, move away from the government, trying not to be too much government, we change our name to Infocom Investment but remain the acronym because you're always being called IIPL. Now we'd like to emphasize the P and L because we are private limited. Why do we do that? Because we want to be able to get close to the people, get close to the whole industry because we are private limited, just like I mentioned about government is about people. It's not about what we do but it's about what we do for the people. Now I just want to take the opportunity to comment about the risk aversion. I won't be able to, being partially in government, I won't be able to say that government is risk averse or not risk averse but I want to take something a little bit on context. When we talk about risk, the definition of risk, it means that the probability of losing something of value. Yeah it's risk. Okay the definition from Wikipedia. But the point is that usually we say something is risky because that we don't want to do it. Not necessary because it's risky. It's just that we do not want to do it. So take for example, anybody down here want to jump out of the window. Nobody, right? But if somebody want to do that, he will say that can I get the harness? Can I have a rope and I can do an Australian repelling down? Can I have a trembling now says? Right? Can I have a cushion, air cushion below and do it? Or better still, I will jump out from the first floor window. Right? It's all about you want to do or you don't want to do. It's not about risk. But when you don't want to do, you say it is very risky. Now put the thing in the label of context. That for everybody who don't want to move. Okay? We have a saying say it. The only thing unchanged is changes itself. Right? This is very cliche. Everybody heard about that. Which also means the go-po is changing. If the go-po is changing by holding the same course, you are taking maximum amount of risk. This is not risk of us. You're taking huge amount of risk. 100% of risk. So for a government who don't want to change, say the same course, it is not risk of us. It is absolutely risky. Now you begin to realize that the context of language causes you to think something else. But for entrepreneurs, a lot of changes about it. Entrepreneurs, you look at the go-po, the go-po move, he change. Start up, he change. It's called pivoting. Now, every time when he pivot, his risk is reduced by 50% because either he make it or he don't. So it's 50-50. The second time he make it, the second time he try a pivot is 50 multiplied by 50. That is 25% and further down, further down, further down. His risk is constantly reduced. So entrepreneur is very risk averse. But when you understand that, then you realize that why are we using the terminology of risk averse on the government? It's not about risk aversity anymore. It's about government do not want to change. It's not about risk aversion that you can argue about all these things until the cow come home, nothing will happen because government just don't want to change in that aspect. But they are comfortable in that aspect. So it's not about risk aversion. Now, when you start looking at that, it's that government actually take a lot of risk. Take for example, R&D. Singapore spend on the average every year is about $3 billion, sigma dollar on R&D. And the returns is miniscule. Is it very high risk? It is very high risk. Granted that a lot of government do the same thing from the university. That is what you get. You get a lot of research on the blue sky. You don't know whether you will come out or not. So that is the situation that government do take a lot of risk. In fact, government is the one that take the most risk. Entrepreneurs start up is the one to take the least risk. Now, the question is that it's not about risk anymore. It's whether you want to do it or not. So when Singapore situation is that we start looking at that. They said, look, we need to be able to change. We need to be able to respond to the citizen when a big decisions life better. There's a pretext of our smart nation initiative. Smart nation initiative basically means that how can we garner all the knowledge is possible on the city, in everything that we live, from the data we analyze it, so that we know how we can make life better for our people. Now, it is covered almost everything. So, but we are very, very challenging. We have to start thinking of that. It is not just about technology. It's about business model innovation. It's about policy innovation. So in order for us to do that, we need to change then how we go about changing. So we start looking at ourselves that what happened to our industry? How it happened to our economy? Well, first thing we realized is that Singapore economy very much is a system integrator economy which also means that you take technology here and there, assemble something and then you sell it to the market. Compared to company, one in Singapore who started seven years ago the same thing, robotic assembled parts and sell it to the factory, compared to another one in Taiwan doing exactly the same thing seven years ago. The difference is that Singapore after seven years is $40 million in revenue and $30 million in market capitalization. Now, you notice that if the revenue is higher than your market capitalization, the company is deep, deep trouble. True enough, a year and a half he bought a property company, he transformed into a property company. While you look at the Taiwan company, he started working with the university, bringing in the technology, he start building his own thing and eventually he sell his technology to the Singapore company and the Singapore employee want to work for the Taiwan company because it's better paid out there. And he have a huge margin. He have $400 million revenue. He has this 2.5 billion market capitalization and own about 3% and 4% of worm robotic market. Now, when we start looking at this one and say, ah, that is the transformation that we need. We need to transform our industry from system-integrated type eventually over to the innovation-driven enterprise IDE, we call it. The question is how to do it? Nobody have any clue. So that is when Singapore government do a little bit different except we start experimenting. We have to figure it out. So we start with something called acceleration. Acceleration is a very, very different concept as what traditionally we all understand is called incubation. A lot of time we said we don't, incubation in the university and then something that is workable then we bring it over to do acceleration, push it to a market really fast. What we do is that we flip the model. We acceleration first before incubate. Why do we do that? We take whatever that is people think, what is a problem? What is a good problem to solve? I mentioned that. We are trying to make our people's life better so we want to solve our people's problem. Trans-population, for example, mobility, aging population. We don't have enough hospital beds to catch up with the people getting older. So we have to figure it out. So looking at the data, we say, this is a good problem to solve. Can we use the technology? I do not know, but it doesn't matter. Technology can come later. So we start working on the business model. First, we work at the market and say, who want to buy it? And that is when we realize we make a huge, huge, huge mistake for many, many years. Because of all the government, one of the major capability that we have is about giving money. Giving grants, right? Everybody look to a government and say, hey, I want to build something. Can you give me some money to do that? That is what we do very well and that is a major, major mistake. Why is that so? Because that once the company have money, he's able to feed himself. He don't need a market. While if he have to go out and sell and make the customer pay for it, he will be self-sustained. So in Singapore's situation is that 2013, we have $24 billion VC money, venture capital money on the island, but we only invest 1.7 million. So it is not about no money. There's a huge amount of money down there, but money cannot find a good project to invest. Why VC don't invest? Because the project is not good enough. So when we start understanding this one, then we realize that less adjusted portion of it, we notice about 61% of our company fail within the five years is because that there's a poor product market fit. And so we look back and say, look, let's do some acceleration, change the model, teach the people how to build a company. And we start looking at this at, okay, where do I get the entrepreneurs? And we have to have in all the public study, GM, global entrepreneurship study, we have a startup genome, okay, world entrepreneur and startup ecosystem, et cetera. We are ranking pretty high on top. So we look at the data and say, yeah, we do have a lot of entrepreneurs. Why is this still working? We began to realize that most of the surveys done is by economists. Economists look at what the data available. People start up not necessarily because they are entrepreneurs, because of economy. 2008 Asian financial crisis, we have a lot of companies started up. 2010, market is good, phew, all these companies disappear. And you realize that people start because there's no other job, so they start. We realize that, ah, there is something is wrong. So we begin to look at what is inclination? Why people start up? So I put the data out, and we notice a very, very interesting, there are three group of people. Entrepreneurs, leader manager and professional. From the same so-called education background, they can be all three. So you can be an entrepreneur, you start, let's say you're an engineer, you become an engineering company, you're an engineer, you can be a professional by becoming a chartered engineer, okay, on your own, or you can become an engineering manager which is the leader manager. The fun part of it is that we only have about 7.8% of them are entrepreneurs. That the first time the data was revealed and all of us feel that this is a doomed day because that we don't have enough entrepreneurs. Singapore population are really so small, 5.4 million, as only less than 10% of them are entrepreneurs. This seriously spelled trouble. But as we get further to understand it, the entrepreneur, the more you encourage them, the more you let them expose to entrepreneurship, the more they are excited about it. While for the professional, the more you ask them to do entrepreneurship, the more they hate it. So the education is totally polarized. Do not let these people go for the entrepreneurship training. But we did a mistake. We invite a lot of researchers into Singapore, set up research labs, have wonderful projects, wonderful things, and eventually we say, come, make some money out of it. What did the researcher do? They just pack up, thank you very much, he left. And he was screaming murder and said, why is this happening? I put so much money, billions of it inside down there. I got no returns. And when I asked you to do something, you just leave. Is it fair to me? But only when we realized that this is basically their psychology, this is an inclination, we stopped that and said, okay, you stay where you are, I'm okay with that. We look at the 10% of them. The 10% pre-OK because at one entrepreneur, create a job that hire about nine people anyway. So the ratio worked out to be pre-alright. So at least we realized that, ah, it's not too bad. And it's a learning experience that we constantly play with it. So we went for acceleration. Acceleration, we invested, IAP, our infocal investment, we invested in five, six of them right now, six accelerator. In Singapore, we start building business. We work with other countries, places that are in Asia Pacific, through some of the awards scheme that say, look, if you want to do acceleration, let me teach you how to do it. So we bring the knowledge, we share the knowledge openly and say, look, you send the guy in town there, watch how I do it, by the time you go back, you have my playbook and do it and customize for yourself. We create exchange program that allow the company in Singapore to go overseas, as well as an overseas company to land in Singapore and I bring you to whole Asia Pacific. Because we are pretty good at doing it. It's just that previously what we did is not scalable. Now we are able to do it a little bit more scalable. And why we want to do that is that we understand Singapore is too small. When we are so small, you can't stay on the island. This is a place, it's a launchpad for you to go to Asia. Sometimes we jokingly say that we are like banana, we are yellow outside, we are white inside. So for the Westerners who come to Singapore, yes, you love it, it's all English sign. Yeah, and the Asian will come down there, oh, you see a lot of Asian faces, oh, if both of you feel comfortable, but we get deeper to it, you realize that we are just oxymoron, totally different. And that help everybody to integrate and we are able to bring the people out this way. So that is the thing that we have gone through doing it. Now, so quick summary is that we know money is not a concern. Building the business by identifying a problem is what we need to do and build innovation driven enterprise is what we need to do. Entrepreneurs are there, just have to find them. Groom them, give them the opportunity and you will change. Now, for the government, the role of the government, other than provide some of the money to initial kickstart and provide the knowledge which we have, what the government do most importantly is actually in the policy portion of it. Because the government control the policy and government need to be very responsive to the industry about policy. So what we did at one stage is that financial sector is a highly regulated place and we were looking at it, can we have some financial technology start up? And everybody was just looking at it, no. In Singapore, you spit chewing gum, you got fine. You think you can change all these things? Unlikely. But we managed to hold the people in together and said, sit down, let's do something about it. Let's change. But we can't change because changing our law is not overnight. We adapt by saying, can we create a sandbox? Financial regulation, sandbox. If we do within this sandbox with this quantity and all these things, maybe we can accept it and see how. So the first batch of them went through and pretty interesting. We have interesting that thing that come up. Remittance using cryptocurrency, et cetera, et cetera. And that is the kind of things that we begin to experiment and see fruits. So to answer the question about risk of a city, I do not know about Singapore, whether being a risk of us or not. Yes, we are pretty risk of us because we are afraid of dramatic change. We're trying to control everything. But we are constantly experiment. So we experiment on doing all these things, including creating a space, a space so dynamic that a lot of people begin to visit here. So we call it Bash. Build amazing startup here, Bash. And everything in Bash is movable. Tables on wheels, even the cubicles are on wheels. Why do we do that? Because we want to be subliminally let our people know that down here, nothing is permanent. You can have a table today. Tomorrow, if you don't keep your stuff, the table can be gone. And people begin initially, it's very edgy about it. After a while, they are comfortable about it. And this is a very, very subliminal. We create distraction. We have a ping-pong table down there. We have a football table down there. It's not for recreation, but for distraction because that's right in the middle beside the working space. And you see people working halfway, it's so stressed, you come halfway, oh, I remember something and go back. And we have mistakes too. We initially started off with video games. In fact, we have perfect distance, 1.8 meters away from the screen so that our K-next can work. But we realized some mistakes. The moment you play computer game, you fully engross in it. It's no longer a distraction. So we remove it. So yes, we have two big panel of white elephant down there and we learn the lesson and we move on. We will figure out someday what to do with this big TV screen. It could be advertisement, but this is only in-house. You really don't need that, but we just don't know now. But there's a journey of constantly thinking of changing. So when we start looking at government-wise to set, this is what the government will listen. The government will work with you and try to figure out because the government do have its own inertia. The inertia is not easy to move. But for the good of the people, it's a small step experiment. And do not try to change the government overnight. It's going to be very, very difficult. Thank you. Thank you very much, Alex. In terms of Singapore government being risk averse, I have to add a very personal side to this. They hired me. So I tend to think they were a little bit, they took a risk when they hired me. Having said that, there's been a lot of very interesting things. I don't want to get too far afield in terms of the primary thought, which is really the discussion of public services, if you will, and public services being, let's say, the relationship between what government's role is and what the citizens should expect and should citizens want. I'm going to actually put a pair on the spot because I think, well, maybe not on the spot, but you made a comment, which I think was actually quite interesting. I, having worked for an IBM for 15 years of my career, your comment was about the big US multinational, and quite frankly, I think you even one time in some emails back and forth, you talked about it's always safe to buy from IBM. And I think your comment this morning was really a sort of saying the world has changed enormously. That rule doesn't exist anymore. I'd like you to probe that a bit further in terms of this is going to get to the point of innovation, if you will. They're coming from Eileen's companies. They're not coming with all due respect to anybody who still works for IBM in the audience. They're not coming from the KPMGs or the IBMs anymore, if you will. They do their role, but quite honestly, I think it's people like Eileen that are really pushing the envelope. So I'm going to ask if you would just expand that a bit, expand that thought a bit. Then I'm going to ask the audience if there is somebody with a question. Does anybody have a question? Because we want to get a microphone to you. So yes, so we'll ask Per to answer that question, and then we'll go to right to here, please. Sure, I think the say goes like if you buy from IBM and the project goes wrong, you're not going to get fired because the decision that you made was probably, was probably a safe decision and it was not a bad decision making. And I think honestly that if you look at 30 years ago, really the innovation was being done by these type of companies, by the Hewlett Packers, the IBMs of the world. These were big companies that had big R&D departments and they were the ones producing innovation. And therefore, you had a strong, solid, stable company on the one hand and a company that was doing innovation, all combining one entity. And it was, I think, a reasonable decision for governments to work with these type of companies. However, things have changed in the last 20 years and these companies on the one hand have cost, a lot of cost because they have to become efficient. They have problem growing because once you become a company that has $100 billion in revenues, it's very difficult to continue growing. They've cut R&D significantly and what they're doing is to bring innovation is they're buying startup companies. They are sourcing basically the innovation to small startup companies and when they become interesting and they gain a certain size, they buy them. So for governments, the governments need to be aware of this trend and if governments want to do, really innovative stuff in the public service space, they need to learn how to engage with these smaller companies. And these smaller companies, by the way, they have advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage for a government is that they are little known. Some of them are not very financially stable so you can engage with them now but you don't know if two years from now they will be still in business, which is a problem. But there are things that you can do to mitigate these things but on the other hand they have some other advantages. First, they have the latest technology. They're much more flexible than the big companies. They are willing to adapt the solutions to the market needs. Some of these bigger companies, they go with a solution fits all type of approach to all markets and they're very rigid in terms of customizing or making changes to their portfolio. But again, it needs to be a cultural change. Right now what we're seeing is that... Cultural change within the company or cultural change within... Within the government. Within the government. Right now what we're seeing is that governments, in order to engage with these companies, what they do is they do it through an IBM or through an HP. So they have the contract with a big multinational company and they ask this big multinational company to subcontract the small startup company. This is how it's happening right now, but it's not working well because at the end, the bigger company doesn't really have a role sometimes in that project. So it creates another layer of complexity, another layer of cost. And what we've seen is that sometimes, eventually the government wants to get rid of this layer once they've gained confidence in the smaller company and wants to engage directly with the smaller companies. And I think as this happens more and more, they will start getting more comfortable working with these type of companies. And I think that's the future. Goes back to Alex's point of what he was saying, the transformation, the continual reinventing within government, within. To the question, please. Thank you very much. My name is Gatrud. I come from Uganda. Particularly interested in what George was talking about, the data repository in Greece. Before I ask my question, I would just give a brief background about what we do that is a little similar to what he was talking about. We were invited here by the Uganda Communications Commission under the Smarter Africa Alliance because of the innovation that we created in Uganda. It's a web portal that has financial data alongside poverty and socioeconomic indicators. We've gotten positive feedback from government agencies because we thought we would have this financial data from the national to the sub-nationals because we believe the people in the sub-national entities and categories are the final consumers of public services. So we thought we need a resource that would feed this information to the right people to be able to ask questions and also to the policymakers because we visualize it online and you can play around with it and see how this region ranks against this one in education, in health, in water, in environment. So my question is, George, what kind of feedback do you have from government and how do you access this data to have it there? Because in Uganda it's a bit complicated. Some data is not publicly accessible and they tell you we have policies that do not allow us to let this data out. But we believe if people see this data that is the only opportunity for them to ask for accountability and transparency and if it's still held in there then we cannot put out what we want to put out. So it's about access and the feedback and how the government policy makers are taking it. Thank you very much. Thank you for, it's open, okay. Thank you for your question. It is really interesting because you have two challenges. The first challenge is when you have the data and how you analyze this data when you are not a statistician or a political scientist. Then when these data are available in an open format, member of the startup community or a civil servant can use easily and freely available tools to visualize all this data and make this data from machine-readable or raw data to easily readable or understandable by humans and non-computers. So the key challenge is the provision of data and the format. The second is how to take the data and this is a problem for the relation of the public and the private sector when you need the data and the data are not available. In Greece, there was an initiative by an NGO where it was public the request for public data from the public sector online. For example, we had a platform and you can see the request for public data and the response for the public sector. Indeed, all this process of demand and supply for public data was public available and this concept created a public pressure to the government, officials, or executive to provide this data. So the concept is when you don't have the data, this is a problem that you can give visibility with the objective to take the data. If I can add one thing, we're working in Uganda in a project that is called Uganda Speaks. Uganda Speaks, I believe, and it's precisely about that. It's about citizens being able to file petitions and complaints through mobile phones. It goes to a platform. The local representative needs to respond to that and everything is visible and transparent to basically force that response. So we can talk if you want to offline but there's a project right now called Uganda Speaks that is precisely about that. Let me just jump in and very quickly you said this is not about the data not available. It's whether the data owner want to do something with you or not. Let me give you some example. It said for mobile phone, just on the app exchange, it collected a lot of data about the individuals. You know, what is his preference? What does he buy? What does he check and everything? And those data available, you pay for it. And now the question is that it's whether the data from the government, whether they want to work with you or not. It's a lot of time, it's the dynamic. I'll give you one example. It said for all the countries, yes, they always keep the data within their own country. It's the same thing for bank. Bank, there's a banking secrecy act, bank data cannot leave the bank. And non-bank employees are not supposed to touch or look at it. But we are able to still innovate by having the bank employee operate on it and we have people, okay, we will stand at the site and say, okay, can you do the analysis this way and let me know what's the outcome. And we look at the outcome and then say, oh, let me get adjustment. Although it's not a very efficient way, but it works and it can continue to do that because that is how you try to circumvent the so-called the regulation restriction, but you're still able to work on it. So the question that you really have to bring back to ask the question is that, what is the data owner value? What do he get? What kind of benefit does he get to work with you in order for the data to be floated out? We do know that because we know that it actually extracts a lot of value and when we show the value back to the data owner, the next time is much easier. We work together to make sure that we avoid the regulation, but that is how it works. Okay, we have a question here. Well, the microphone, oh, the microphone's here, good. It's an addition to- If you could introduce yourself, please. I'm Yanis from Greece also. I would like to, from the Atlantic Association of Mobile Application Companies and I would like to add something to the question from Uganda. The key issue for the Greece transparency project that George mentioned before is that the public forces enforced a legislation framework that enables and forces every decision made from a government official to be published online. The same day that it signed. So it's an open project from all, including all the public and state agencies that are enforced to publish their decisions except for decision related to national security and personal health data. All the other decisions, including the financial data, are now publicly available on the internet. This is the essence behind the transparency project, which is a major achievement of the public forces from non-government organizations, the industry, and the academic forces, and of course political forces in Greece. Thank you. Any questions? Yes, please. Hello, my name is Duji, Duji Om, and I'm from Bhutan. I just have a very brief comment. Basically, I just wanted to seek your views on this. As Mr. Choudhury mentioned, that one of the assumptions that we make is that government as ricks adverse. So on this, I feel that it's almost become like a chicken and egg story, egg story. Like for example, if the government doesn't really have adequate resources, then the government becomes very, very cautious in trying to create an enabling environment where you bring about investments like the R&D and other projects because you have a very limited resources and you really don't want to spare the resources in areas where you are not very sure about it. So it becomes more like a chicken and egg story. That's what I wanted to point out because if the government has adequate resources and they can afford, then definitely they can put in the R&D and then as a result, this is how the whole innovation gets started and then the innovation, the whole entire ecosystem gets built on. So it's really got to do with sometimes also on the availability of resources that a country has. So I just wanted to seek your views on that. Thank you very much. Here, please. Thank you for that comment. Often it's actually not a resource issue, what we see. I'll give you one example of, and Alex I think pointed out, it's not about technology innovation in most cases. Technology helps, but it is really about service innovation. It's about business model innovation. It's about policy innovation. I'll give you one example. For the primary school teachers, we have about close to 400, 500,000 primary school teachers in Bangladesh. Every year we have about 50 to 60,000 teachers retired. And to get their pension processed, they have to go through a 12 to 16 month data collection process. They have to produce about 21 different types of documents to the government before pension is approved for them. So pension payment happens after that. So it's just the approval process. And we realized by analyzing the process is that only eight types of documents are really required by the law. So 13 documents were added because of certain people wanted to do it in a certain way and added these documents for safety reasons. So just by eliminating these 13 documents, you can cut down the process which would take 12 to 16 months, 12 to three to four months. So that's a process innovation. And you don't really require a lot of R and D investment there. So it's a matter of, I think several of the speakers, actual panelists talked about, the incentives to make that change, right? So why would a civil servant or a department want to make that change? And that's where you have to, I think what we did in Bangladesh, we have not been able to link performance to any kind of cash or bonuses. But what we have done is provide public recognition. So there are competitions across departments, competition across districts where they do the best type of service delivery. And the best innovators, the best change makers are actually awarded by the system, often by the minister or sometimes by the prime minister at the end of the year. So best innovator award, best change maker award. So these are things that we have introduced. So it's really devising the right incentive system to make change happen. And Alex actually talked about the risk aversion. I actually agree with him that it's calculated risk. So how you've actually, whether you have provided that cushion, whether you've provided that sandbox where that change can take place, experimentation can happen. And then once it's proven to be successful without making a lot of investment, then you scale that up across the department or across the country. I'd like to take the opportunity to actually talk about the procurement issue. What we have seen, and Perry actually talked about making an outsourcing decision to IBM or to smaller companies. And more and more what we are doing in Bangladesh within the government is that we are realizing that innovation actually will come from small companies. So what we do is, in the case of our national portal, which took about three years to build, about 42,000 office of the government are part of this huge national portal publishing information on a daily basis. It took five or six companies and three iterations of procurement to actually get the technology right. Now that we have it at a point, it's stable, robust, very user friendly. Now we have actually done a maintenance contract to a larger company who can actually maintain it. That company won't go away. So the experimentation phase was done with smaller companies who were up on cybersecurity who could actually devise very robust, user friendly technology, but could not really maintain because they don't have the resources or they may not be around for the next five years. So now the maintenance is being done with the likes of an IBM, the larger company. Fascinating. That is actually a very powerful idea. We are running late on time and I wanted to give all of our panelists an opportunity for a final remark, but actually I wanted to direct, actually that's a question to the minister. We've heard repeatedly for really the last two or three, there's gonna be a question on innovation. Repeatedly that the world is a wash in capital. It is amazing how much money is in the world right now. It's amazing how few ideas there are for that capital. And so, and Alex probably sees this all the time, this enormous backlog. So if we're missing ideas, the question then becomes, in a country like Djibouti, how do you foster innovation which actually will develop those ideas? And as a minister, you must see those kinds of programs to push forward, if you will. Yes, thank you. I didn't make comments about the aversion of government action because I'm judging, so I won't judge. But I'm not sure that it's a question of aversion, it's a question of idea maybe. When you have an idea in private sector, you can go and do it. If it's okay, it's okay. You're recognized. Otherwise, no problem, you lose only your money. Here you talk about people's life, other priorities and things. So, and the question is, is it your thing to change easily? And personally, you cannot. That's a public thing. So for the education, if you want to change small thing, you have to have the approval of the population. This is longing to the people, the public. So all shareholders, I mean, the population, have to share the point of view of what you change and how we change. And if they agree, then you can change. In private company, you can try and only the boss decide. No problem. This is maybe the reason why you don't feel the innovation. But you talk about the issue about the dimension. The law is clear. But it seems that you have very much number of new things that ask it regularly. And that shows you that someone, somewhere decided to put a new procedure. It was not good. So it's better maybe sometime not to change too much things and without the approval of the population. For the money and ideas, I think nowadays, I always thought that the problem is not money. The problem is idea and where everyone who has money has to put somewhere this money and want to get back with the return. I think today, Africa is the land where the opportunities are there. I know Rhonda is doing a very good job in investment promotion. And everything starts, in my opinion, from investment promotion aspects. Because when you try to promote investment, you try to facilitate things for everyone. For governments, the government wants things to be done or to do it. It wants to be done in good conditions and affordable for everyone, health, education, security, every issues. And if someone cannot do it, the government has to do it by itself. For Djibouti, we're a small country. If you ask big companies to come and make railway or ports, they say, why, you're less than one million, you don't need. That's why we pushed for this project that we did it in public-private partnership. So we say, we take the risk. Can we just share the risk with us? If it's a success, you take your money. Otherwise, we'll pay it. That's why we have, in 1999, we had only one port. Today, we have three operations and four under construction that, after two years, we'll have seven ports. We have a new railway station, a new railway operating from Djibouti to Ethiopia. We interconnected our region by fiber optics. And all these investments are public investments, mainly. So the idea is to attract money, to attract financing, to secure and to give the guarantees that this will be done at the right purpose. And the risk will be covered by the government, knowing that risk is limited because opportunities are there. If you have to make studies like international or international companies, they do. If you have to make studies and to know how to do this and if you see the ratios of actual things and you see there's not enough interest, you won't do it. But we believe that when you do, the need will come after. That's why we are pushing for a smart city in Djibouti and we are doing this from scratch, from zero. This is a new city that will be fully smart. Why? Because we know the need is there. We have telecommunication infrastructures available and Africa is booming. So we know that we have to do it and that will be succeed. So we invite everyone to join us for this kind of project. Thank you. Thank you, thank you very much. We are getting very close to running out of time. George, I see you wanted to make a comment, but if I could, and then I'm gonna go back to Alex and work right to left and ask each of you. But before, George, you're one comment and then I'll give you the ground rules for how we'll close the session now. Okay, that's my, okay. But okay, we are discussing about how to redesign services and which is the role of the startup ecosystem and new entrepreneurs when in the same time we have limited resources, have there are a lot of difficulties in the procurement process. For example, a big information systems may take a year to be implemented. And how can startup a small company can operate on this landscape? I think when you provide data for the public sector provides data, then the startup can use this data and develop an application that improves a public service. So when you take data, the startup that develops the application, any government application must return the application because it has been developed using public data. And that's the model where the startup ecosystem and the public sector could collaborate on the redesign on public services. The second is, and this example was, we use this concept when a project manager at the transparency, because I had this role at the transparency project. We have only 10 web developers and the strong political will and important direct need from the Prime Minister. How could we run the national transparency project? Okay, we can develop a prototype, a proof of concept of the transparency platform and then make this database robust and make the open APIs and open data available. And then the startup ecosystem came to us. Okay, I can contribute to this project by taking your data and your open APIs and all these technological interfaces. I can contribute to the transparency project. And that was the way that the transparency project scaled up in Greece. Because if we were waiting for the procurement process, it may take years. And the procurement process started at the same time when we started all this agile concept. And before one year have a contractor for the enterprise edition. And the transparency project in Greece operates for five years. So you have to be more agile and find collaboration and synergies with the startup ecosystem. The basis for that concept is to be open at the technological and at the process level. Thank you, George. We will conclude the session now. But what I wanted to do was actually have this very august panel give their final thoughts. But I'm gonna give you a single ground rule if I could. And that is, if your thought could be on, if you had unlimited authority, unlimited power to accomplish anything you wanted, the law never got in your way, resources never got in your way, what would be the one thing you would do, the single one thing you would do to actually redesign, which is what we're talking about, redesign public service, the single one thing. I think we've heard the common thread of its innovation. We've used the word data a lot. I tend not to like that word. Because it's too, to me it's just too broad. I mean, I don't know what the word means, what the word data means in English. But I think the common thread we've had is innovation and information. So if that, now each of the panelists has unlimited power for the next four minutes. And they'll stay on this stage so we can actually hopefully control the power. What would you do? What would be the single one thing? If you could limit it to a single sentence, just so we respect time. Alex, we'll start with you and we'll work our way this way. All right. I mean, definitely we know that the public service need to change, need to be redesigned. And what we are looking at and what is the most important obstacles that what we are seeing is actually the people inside the public service. It is not about resources anymore because the resources, as and when we would identify so-called the problem worthy of solving, the resources come automatically. Sometimes we use a phrase in Chinese we call that niluo shen kai fung tia zi lai. Let me say, if a flower is blooming, the butterfly and bee will come. So my ability to identify a problem worth solving is the very, very key critical first thing that the redesign will happen. So if we have all the capability that we have, we would like to change the people mindset to start looking for opportunities that are able to solve something that worth solving. Not about just looking for a problem, but problem worth solving. Because there's a lot of nitty gritties, a small irritation around, but it's not worth solving, but look for things that worth solving. Take one example, as I said, in Singapore's situation it's going to be imported about 97% of our food. If the same situation happened to about, probably about 50 overcome city, the same size, if we're able to be self-sustained in term of food, within our small little confine, I think the same thing can be replicated to the rest of the place. So these are the problem worth solving and we would like to encourage the people, be it mindset change or anything, to start looking at that direction. Thank you, Minister. What would be the one thing to redefine public service? The one thing to redefine is to continue to redefining the public service permanently. I think it's as simple as that because public service changed with the evolution of the mentality, the cultural situation of the countries. So continue to redefine permanently the public service is the solution, I believe, simply. Thank you. Per? I think the key thing to reform public services is you have to reform the role, responsibilities and incentives of public servants. I think in too many countries, these are people that basically have permanent perpetual jobs, they don't have any incentive to do really anything new. They have very low salaries and some of them are managing pretty large budgets, which is kind of dangerous. And therefore I would try to implement the best practices that have work in the private sector, in the public sector, in terms of compensation incentives, a promotion not through seniority but through merits. And I think that would have a huge impact on bringing innovation and really transform the way public services are being delivered. Aileen? If I had all the money in the world, I would use it to put in place infrastructure, this is in the random context, infrastructure to be able to reach the underserved population, so the government would be able to reach them. However, I would then put the money aside and bring in a private player to take some of the risk, because I feel when you have resources, then innovation kind of tanks. So have a private player, and this is what we're doing in Rwanda, is entering a private public partnership with the government, because when they bring their skin into the game, then they're forced to innovate, which is what we're doing, we are forced to innovate or we die. And so then I would only use that money to facilitate the activities around the public private partnership, which is helping the public servants to be able to deliver the services in the right way. So I would use some of the money, but then I would keep the rest. George, you have one minute, one minute. I would agree. Most important is to incentivize all this social and human capital that works on the public sector. If I had the money, I would try at least the direction. Anir, you have the last word. Thank you. Well, I don't know if unlimited power is really a reality. I mean, it seems to be a myth to me. So I would actually work on three things. Not even in the highest office of the government, unlimited power doesn't exist. So I would work on three things. One is user-centric design, and that's something that we're actually doing with design thinking, concepts deeply embedded in our civil servant training programs. Second thing I would do in concert with many of the other panelists is public-private partnership in very creative ways. Even at the micro level, the public-private partnership that happens today is at the macro level, bridges, roads, infrastructure. But we can do public-private partnership at the very local level that we're doing in these digital centers, 55,000 digital services across the country. I think that has actually yielded enormous potential. And the last thing, the third thing I would do is public-public partnership. Aline talked about a concept of birth registration. 15 days. What we realized in Bangladesh, we have a similar situation, that the health workers who are in a totally different ministry than the birth registration guys who are the minister of local government. So the minister of health has 60,000 health workers who go from door to door. So if they could actually do a trigger to the local government ministry, that would suffice as birth registration. So there is public-public partnership that can also yield enormous innovation. So those are the three things. Thank you. There's only one thing, Mr. Sheldor. You did three things. There's only one thing. I'm sorry. Thank you. With that, we have run over our time a bit, and I hope you've at least found the session as rewarding as I have. Let's, if you would, just give this August panel a hand for a good job. Well done. We shall also thank our moderator for that. Oh. Thank you. Thank you. A lot of business in Africa. Thank you so much. We have offices in South Africa.