 Live from the Congress Center in London, England, it's The Cube at MIT and the Digital Economy, the second machine age. Brought to you by headline sponsor MIT. Welcome back to London everybody. This is Dave Vellante. This is The Cube. We're here at MIT IDE. It's been a day long event. Really around the book, The Second Machine Age, written by Eric Brynjalsen and Andrew McAfee. John Jacques de Gruffis here. He's an MIT alum, a PhD, and we attended the session today. John Jacques, welcome to The Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. So of course you were at MIT for a number of years in the early part of the 90s, well into the 2000s. You're here as a guest today, listening to the content. What'd you think about the event today? Well, it's a wonderful event. I think the authors spelled very clearly the qualitative change from the industrial era to this digital economy. A message that we all need to hear and to disseminate, in my view, because still most companies, most leaders in our leading companies don't realize, don't realize this qualitative change going on. We were talking off camera and you shared with me one of your passions is education, not surprising. But helping young people navigate through the changes and the digital economy is one of the biggest changes that is going to necessitate a change in the way in which we teach our young people. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. What do you see, what do you prescribe? What would you like to see happen in education for young people? Well, when I came out of this conference with thousands of ideas in my head, of course, but one of them is about the implication of this new digital economy on education and on what we need to, and how we need to teach our children. We see, we saw charts from Eric Greenhouse showing the stagnation of wages, showing also the divergence of income between the college graduates and those who do not have a college graduation. And it's not only a problem, a situation in the United States, but in Europe as well. My wife is Spanish and so I know Spain well, just to give you an example, Spain had not long ago more than 5 million unemployed people. It has improved a little bit, slightly not much in the last few months. Half of them don't have a secondary education, they have not completed secondary education. Also, 35% of students in Spain drop off of high school. So I really wonder, and that's Spain, but I think it's probably true of most of Southern Europe, perhaps it's a little bit better in Northern Europe, most probably, but how do we prepare our educated children to the new digital economy, but also how do we deal with this population of young people who drop off? Why such a high drop off rate? Obviously they're not becoming, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates billionaires. No. Why? Is it because we're teaching them the wrong things? Are we not engaging them correctly? Do they have to work for other reasons to help their families? Why such a high drop off rate? Well, Andrew McAfee touched upon the fact that the way we educate children hasn't changed much in the last 200 years and is no longer well adapted to this new economy. Our model of education was built when we needed to produce clerks and workers in the factory. So basically people who repeated mechanically and day after day what they were told to do. Nowadays we need another profile of workers that have more initiatives, creativity, but the educational methods and models have not much changed. So I think young people are indeed bored at school, so that could be one explanation for just one part of the, small part of the story. Our experiencing a de-industrialization in Europe. We have long term unemployment in Belgium where I'm from, for instance. We have instances of third generation of unemployed. People, means young people who have not seen their parents work, neither their grandparents. So there is a kind of desperation around and I hear some of these people, these young people say, well, why study if there is no future? Of course it's a wrong analysis. It's a terribly wrong analysis. It's what they should reach exactly the opposite conclusion, but it's a fact. So I want to ask you about your PhD is in commercializing science, essentially. I would determine, correct me if I'm wrong, but taking R and D and actually turn it into something that can be commercially viable. So that's a fascinating topic. We see companies all the time, especially large companies, have a very difficult time translating R and D into commercially viable products. They tend to do very poor at R and D and they tend to go buy companies to inorganically create value. What do you see as going on in terms of that transference of R and D into commercialized products? Where are we at today? Well, compared to 20 years ago, we've made a great progress and MIT has been a precursor in doing that. And people from all over the world come visit MIT to try to understand the secret source, if there is any. And in Europe, more and more specifically, it's a very new thing for universities to consider dealing with industry, to consider turning their research into ventures, into commercialized products. But they are considering it now, whereas years ago it was dealing with industry Why is it so hard in the United States? It seems relatively easy, although we complain about government roadblocks all the time, but why is it harder in Europe? It's harder in Europe because when I say Europe, I mean continental Europe mostly. Great Britain is a little bit of a special case. It's difficult because when people, founders of companies, policymakers, etc., people, investors, talk about entrepreneurship in Europe, what they really mean most of the time is self-employment. It's not to create, to grab that huge opportunity, create a company, try to make it grow, become a global leader, go public or whatever, or becoming the next Google just to take this kind of image. The concept of entrepreneurship in Europe, unfortunately, is still very much to create what's once-owned company that provides a good income, an interesting activity, what we call the lifestyle company. There is nothing wrong about lifestyle companies, of course, but I'm convinced that what our economies need, what our societies need in Europe are growth-oriented startups. So that's one problem. Another problem is that universities, for instance, universities in general... How so? What do you mean? What I mean by that is that they tend to think that they are going to make a lot of money with these startups, these spin-offs. Oh, they want to look off the cone. So when they negotiate, they sell their license, their IP, their intellectual property to these young founders, young scientists, becoming entrepreneurs. The universities are too... They want too much of the ownership of the company, or they want royalties that are much too high. So basically what they do is they kill the company before it was born. Okay, Jean-Jacques, I'm sorry, we're out of time. We have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was really a pleasure meeting you. Thank you. Okay, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this word. This is theCUBE. We're live from MIT, IDE, and London. We'll be right back.