 Welcome everyone to this session called Maintaining Innovation. I'm Joe Palchai, I'm a science correspondent for NPR, National Public Radio, which is based in Washington, D.C., but our reach is global. And we're going to have a very interesting panel with people from different points of view on this topic. And what I've asked each of the presenters to do is we're going to start off with Alice Gas, and I'll introduce her in a moment. And then each of the people in order will try to respond at least a little bit to the person who just went before them. And we'll go around the table sort of trying to build a picture of innovation and the future of innovation and what we need to maintain innovation. And after about 40 minutes we'll invite you all to join the conversation. We just learned by the way that y'all means everybody and all y'all means everybody who didn't think they were included when I said y'all. So we're going to invite all y'all to join in on the conversation. So first I'd just like to introduce all the panelists. We first, as I said, have Alice Gas, she's the president of Imperial College in London. Then after that's Patrick McRae from University of California, Santa Barbara, the professor of history, Rafael Reif, who's another college president from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT as most of us know it, Martin Stratman, who's the president of the Mox Planck Institute, and Andy Thompson, or Andrew Thompson, Andy Thompson, the CEO of Proteus Digital Health, who has to use innovation in his world but from a business standpoint because we felt that was an interesting perspective to have. So Alice, can we start with you about two or three minutes of your perspective on this topic? Sure, Joe, and thank you very much. On maintaining innovation, the way I think about it is that innovation requires an environment, resources, and people. The great environment really includes basic research and really strong basic research, but also includes the unfettered ability to pursue new ideas even if they're challenging the status quo. So that's the kind of environment we're looking for. Resources, of course, are critically important. That includes risk capital, of course, and patient capital, but also incubators, accelerators, places for companies to grow, places for people to convene, and the kind of physical infrastructure resources that are important to innovation. But mostly, of course, it's about people, and it's about the innovator. And innovators come as individuals, they come as groups, and it's critically important that we bring the right people together and give them the right opportunities. And I read a recent article by Eric Weiner in the Wall Street Journal called The Secret of Immigrant Genius, and he talks about brilliant lines blossoming on alien soil. And I think that that's so insightful. He talks about Einstein's great works after he had moved, and I was recently in Vienna and went to Mozart House and saw the great works that Mozart did, incredible period of productivity. And then I picked up a postcard in the gift shop of Mozart's travels prior to that period. And you think about the kinds of experiences one has in other parts of the world. Some 40% of the Nobel Prize winners in physics and chemistry since 1980 were living in a foreign country when they won the Nobel Prize. This year, all three physics Nobel Prizes are Brits living in the States. And of course we know that 40% of Fortune 500 companies have first or second generation immigrants as founders, and 50% of the American unicorns, the 1 billion and plus startup companies were founded by immigrants. Now innovators could be the lone individual like Einstein or Mozart, but it's often a creative collaboration and it could be a collaboration of very different people. I also read the book, The Undoing Project, and Tversky and Kahneman are a great example of two very different people who did brilliant work together. So it's not only moving, it's collaborating. I think it's collaborating internationally because we all bring our own cultures, our backgrounds, our intellectual perspective to collaborations, and we do great things when we work together. And we see this all the time at Imperial. I know they see it in MIT. International collaborations lead to great discoveries. So the one thing I want to advocate for in this session is if we're entering an era of backlash against globalization, we need to make sure we preserve and in fact enhance mobility for creative genius and for the academics, the scientists, the students and the innovators of our time. Excellent. Patrick. Well, thank you all for having me here. And as Joe said, I'm a historian of science and technology, so my perspective might be a little bit unorthodox. And because I'm a historian, I thought I might start with a short story. I wanted to take us back to Stanford University in the mid-1960s where there was a young graduate student who was an experimental music composer. His name was John Chowning. And soon after he finished graduate school, he invented something called frequency modulation sound synthesis. And he did this in conjunction with Stanford's music department. And soon after that, the music department in Chowning received several hundred thousand dollars of grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as the National Endowment of Arts. And a few years after that, the Japanese electronics company Yamaha licensed this technology. And for about the next decade, it proved to be the single most profitable patent that Stanford had in its portfolio. And I find that to be a really fascinating story because it sort of runs against the grain of how we imagine Stanford University or how we imagine innovation happening, that it doesn't always come out of the biotech industry or the information technology industry. And then to play on a point that Alice brought up and something I think that our other speakers will come back to, I'd like to suggest this idea that innovation needs to be rediscovered. And I mean that in two different ways. One of it is that we need a more holistic and inclusive view of who does innovation and how that happens. And that innovation is not necessarily the province of the single loan inventor working in Silicon Valley, but people like users of technologies can also contribute to the innovation process. But second of all, going back to the idea of rediscovering innovation, the need to put basic research back into the innovation system. And my favorite example of this again from history is a discovery in the late 1980s of something called giant magneto resistance, which was discovered by a French and a German scientist. But it was then later commercialized by IBM in the 1990s, and it became the fundamental technology that allowed for the first generation of music players like iPods. And without that basic research, you wouldn't have had that innovation that then followed from it. And if we can think about putting that discovery back into innovation, then that leads us into discussions about corporate and university research and development, I think. Well, so based on preliminary conversations I've had earlier in this meeting with Raphael, I think you probably have something to say about the need for basic research and innovation. Only if you force me. Yes, please. Joe gave us instructions earlier and he said, listen to the speakers before you and then go after them. Kind of like that. Yes, something like that. So let me just comment on Alice and what Joe said and then go on to the topic of basic research. Alice really covered everything you need to create an environment to produce innovation. You mentioned in the environment resources people and Joe you were talking about how does it happen and who does it. I think let me take that with a slightly different angle on how innovation occurs and who does it. I think there are many kinds of innovation but maybe I can highlight two different flavors of innovation. One is the Uber light innovation, an extremely creative idea, brilliant, based on an existing platform. If we didn't have the smartphone, we didn't have the platform to create something new. So that kind of innovation happens with creative people working together imagining a future. It doesn't require basic science. It doesn't require Imperial College or Max Planck or MIT. But it is creative and is extremely helpful. And then there is the science-based innovation. That is the tougher innovation. The one that really changes the needle into creating the future. The one that makes a difference. The one that comes up with renewable energy or access to fresh water or solution to Alzheimer's. For that, you need a whole continuum of basic research, basic science research, which in my view is the mother of all innovation. It's where advances knowledge that people then use to address problems that we're facing in society. So you have to have people doing basic science. Ideally, in the same institution, ideally not always is possible, where you have people finding solutions to important problems. And they are always, when they find solutions, they all of a sudden learn about a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of idea that came up in their labs or some other labs or somewhere else. And by connecting with people who are doing basic science, they can move the knowledge very quickly into a solution. But then there is the issue of moving the solution to the marketplace, which is what normally we identify as innovation or entrepreneurship. For that to happen in many societies in the UK, in America, there is risk capital to move ideas that will return profits relatively quickly. By quickly I mean three, five, at most seven years. There is risk capital for that. But the real ideas that address renewable energy, that address energy storage devices, fresh water, Alzheimer's, they don't produce a return in three to five years. So for that, we need patient capital. And that is indispensable for the innovation that comes from places like Max Planck and Imperial or MIT, for that to reach society and actually impact society. Okay. Martin, what's your take on this? Yeah, I think I would, first of all, I could agree to many of the topics which have been brought up, I think really innovation is with people. I'm a little bit afraid that sometimes we think in innovation pipelines that we think there is a basic researcher, there is an applied researcher, there is an industrial guy, there is market and whatever. And we think in the sequential model of innovation, I doubt that that is true, that probably has never been true, but these days it's not really true. If you talk on basic research, fundamental research and applied research, it's more the methodology which is different. I think in basic research you are curiosity driven. You want to understand things. The goal of what you all do is understanding. It's insight. If you talk on applied research, it's goal driven. You want to improve a certain technical issue, for example, by a certain factor or so. But in most cases, for what we call fundamental science, it can have immediately an applied aspect. And on the other hand, if you talk on applied science, it needs lots of fundamental research to improve the topic you mentioned. For example, you mentioned the general mathematical resistance. Stuart Parking was a guy who did so in IBM. And he did lots and lots and lots of very fundamental research. He's now by the way a Max Planck researcher, so I know him quite well. It's not just applied research, so I think things are different. I think the second comment I would like to make is what is the role of fundamental research? And sometimes we have the feeling it's just the crazy guy who has a certain idea and he turns the world around. And I think this happens from time to time. We all may have some stories like this. But in the end, fundamental research is much more important, much more important. It's the real insight, the understanding. I would just mention two things which are far off. The one thing is quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is basic research for the last 80 years. Now, we couldn't think of anything today which is beyond quantum mechanics. We need it in all materials. We need it in LEDs. We need in micro devices. We need in sensors whatsoever. So the fundamental issue that you have to deal with quantum mechanics is the basis of all of our, let me say, well, I would say we are living in. The second example is the DNA. The DNA is a result, of course, of fundamental research understanding what the cell is all about. And if you wouldn't have known about this, you wouldn't have any biotech. You wouldn't have any biomedicine. So, again, I think it's really the fundament on which we stay. It's not just a singular event where you're all proud or said we have some billion of return because we have done something very specific. Our society is based on this. And the last point I would like to mention is what is really the outreach of fundamental research for our daily life besides the fact that we set the fundament? I think it's the people which we train are the most important part of all of us. The people we train, we also will see during doing their PhD or so that their minds is changed. And these people whom we train, probably even the cognitive features are changing, I think these people are going then to industry. And they are the ones who combine knowledge with direct, let me say, need of the industrial environment. And if you wouldn't have this, you wouldn't sit here. Well, Andy, you've heard three people who are mostly in the academic world, although I'm certain that college presidents have many broad responsibilities, but how does it strike you as someone who comes from the business world as innovation discussion? Yeah, so it's a really, really great discussion. I'm a little worried that I am a bit out of my depth here. It's just a business guy with so many distinguished academics. Let me sort of reflect back on some of the comments I heard, and then I'll just talk a little bit about how we think about it. Yes, I think the immigrant story is a great one you can tell from my accent. I grew up in Texas, but I've lived in California for 30 years, and I've been an entrepreneur in California for 30 years. So I'm an immigrant, and I think it makes a huge difference. Collaboration is a huge part of what we do in our enterprise, and I'll talk about that a bit later. Globalization, yes. In the company I run in Silicon Valley, 22 different nationalities with a huge spread of diversity across the world and across gender. Basic science, absolutely. What we do in our company is underpinned by basic science that happened in universities oftentimes decades ago. Patient capital, yes, we have that. Actually, we're a health care company, a private company, been in business for 12 years. We will eventually, I'm sure, return to our investors. In fact, I'm feeling that fresh. You do need very, very patient capital in areas like health care. And then finally, the people we train. I'll just make a comment. My co-founder in the company I run today is a Stanford physicist. He is a co-inventor of the cantilever beam that's the basis of atomic force microscopy. So he's a very cool guy. First guy to put a valve on a microchip in 1986, and now he's the inventor of what I'm going to talk about in our company, which is a new category of hard work ingestible computing. So we make microscopic computers out of ingredients that you'd find in your diet that are designed to be co-manufactured inside a drug so that when you swallow it, it turns on and talks to your cell phone. Now, without going too much detail on that, the key here is we want to answer the two most fundamental questions in ambulatory medicine. Did the patient take the drug? And if they took it, did it work? Now, I'm going to walk you through an innovation surface area that will completely blow up the idea that one person or even two people could do this. The first is technical innovation. So it's a new category of hardware, hundreds of issued patents. So that's one thing that most people would recognize as innovation. But then there's regulatory innovation. We created a new category of medical device, not just with FDA, but with EMA and CFDA and PMDA across the world. And then a new pathway for a new kind of drug that's a digital medicine and a new product architecture where the therapy is the drug plus measurement, feedback, behavioral cues, data, and analytics in one solution. And a new clinical process because what digital does, if you know the facts, is to move the entire world from probability and statistics, which is how we think about medicine today, to calculus and certainty. Why do I need to know if a drug works in a population if I know it works in you? It's a completely different way of thinking about regulatory science. And then finally, commercial innovation. We don't sell products. We sell outcomes. And by the way, that's what health systems want to buy. And when people talk about this transition in healthcare from volume to value, that is a problem that has been solved in other industries using digital tools and there's a roadmap. I'll stop that. So, but from what you've just said, it sounds like innovation is alive, thriving, well, healthy, everything's going fine. Is there any threat? Are we seeing anything that could, I mean, could make it more difficult in the future for you to find the people or the markets or the capital to do innovation? Yes. Well, Alice, go ahead. He was first. All right. Alice goes first. Well, picking up on Martin's point, actually, I've heard it said the best tech transfer wears shoes. And so the question of whether you're finding the talent and you're able to recruit the great innovative young people who are helping you both advance a technology but also new, probably new ideas and new technologies and how you can make that environment work but whether you're finding the talent you need. Yes, Martin. Yeah, I think I see two threats. First of all, we are talking here on innovation and we know that innovation is essential for our societies. But the threat is that we put this as a prime target of what we are doing. And I think the prime target of what we are doing, let me say in academia, in universities, is not to look for innovation, but it's looking for insight. And if you are only innovation driven, I think then we miss the goal because many times we find out something besides the road. Just to give you one example, which is very famous these days, one of the biggest breakthroughs I know of the last 10 years is the CRISPR-Cas technology, which is called gene editing. Now, the two ladies who have done so, they have concentrated on the bio process to look how bacteria defend themselves against the attack of viruses. That's the story. There was no interest in anything else. And they found out a process which now everybody uses, and that's of course being much more used in the future, which is called gene editing technology. So what I'm saying is if you want to put that goal of immediate application of innovation as a prime goal, I think you would all miss these things we have been talking about. So that is the first threat I see. The second threat I see is we need trust. If you want to let people go, and if you want to let them either do, let me say, an insight, or if they let them do an invention, we need trust because we do not know where that is being found. There is no guided path. I cannot tell them where to go, what to do in order to come to that result. So I think we need trust. We need trust in science, and we need the trust to let them go for considerable time without questioning again and again and again if that person on the right path, Einstein, all these other people had many times also come up with real, let me say, stuff which wasn't correct, which had to be re-corrected. It's a coming and going, it's an industry of course the same. So the more direct your people, the more you tell them what to do, the more you only focus on a proposal system, I think the more you run into a problem. So you need a good balance between trust and proposals. Yeah, no, I'm Martin. Rafael, so I think I don't see the issue, I see threats, but I don't see the issue of innovation driven being the challenge. I think if we focus on problem solving and we identify the right big problems to solve, innovation comes out of that. Just finding a solution that you can want to move to whether it's in the digital area, whether it's in the health area. And God knows you have enough problems to solve. So I think as long as we focus on that, innovation will follow. But to solve problems, as I said, if it's about creating something, it's an existing platform, you're not addressing what I'm talking about. I'm talking about doing something really important. To solve important problems, the tool you have is knowledge. So the threat that I see, there are people who think we know everything there is to know. We just have to use the knowledge we know and apply it. Well, the truth is that we don't know everything we need to know. I mean, in fact, think of knowledge as a balloon that we inflate. The air inside the balloon is knowledge. The more we know, the more we know we don't know because the surface gets bigger. So there is plenty we need to know to use as a tool to solve problems. So I think that's a threat. If we don't recognize the importance of that, that's a threat. And the second point is what I mentioned earlier. Many of the solutions that create innovation, some of them can find risk capital, many of them cannot. I mean, I'm glad to see that you have in your company patient capital. That's why we need to address many of the innovations that already exist. I get filed away because they don't move to the marketplace. But I'm just because I'm intrigued. But does everybody know the CRISPR story? I mean, it's this... Well, we heard it. It was two bios, a couple bios. There are many stories, okay, origin stories. We won't go too far down that path. But the idea is that nobody initially was sitting in an office and saying, we need a gene editing tool. They were saying, we need to understand how bacteria fight off influenza. So my question may be, I don't know if you want to address Pat or maybe Andy. You can't ask people... They weren't trying to innovate. They were trying to answer basic by a question. To my mind, I wrote some notes here. In my view, if you're solving a problem, then that is innovation or research or development. How do you want to describe it that belongs in a company? Because that's what companies do. My basic rule of thumb is when you're solving a problem in a company, make sure that there are no marketing and no finance people in the room. Because you'll get a very different answer. The first thing you need to do is to solve the problem and then figure out how to make money and how to sell it. So that's a very important point. If you're focused on expanding our understanding of the universe, then you need to do it in a research institution. And in my view, the really important rule of thumb in a research institution is don't back great projects, back great people, and let them go off and find the world. And they'll do things that are completely unexpected, I believe. So can I just address this point about can we get talent? There's a couple of very fast points I want to make here. One is that, yes, we can, but we have very, very narrow ideas today about talent. We talk a lot about diversity, but in fact, we are incredibly narrow about what we mean by talent. We focus far too much on fast intelligence and not nearly enough on slow intelligence back to the Academy Tversky point. That's a huge gap, in my view, in the academy in terms of how we value and look at people and how they think. And then there's a much, much broader issue here, which is that in the context of digital society, we are leaving behind a whole generation of kids because our basic education system is broken, it's miles behind. We have to use digital technology to emancipate people at the edge of society and educate them. Patrick, I figured that something must raise some issues with you. All four of my fellow panelists have raised a plethora of issues, which give me lots of new ways of thinking about this particular topic. Martin brought up the issue of quantum mechanics, and we've heard Einstein's name mentioned, but I think it's important to remember that when Einstein did his work, he was a lowly patent clerk at an office. I mean, he would not have been the person to bet on for that. And I think it's also important to remember the importance of working worlds, which is a way of thinking about the problems and projects that motivate scientists to pursue basic research in the first place. And going back to Einstein's example, I'm very much interested with issues of time and simultaneity because of the development of clock and train systems in early 20th century Switzerland. I mean, that was central to the fundamental work that he was doing and a lot of the patents that he saw coming over his desk in the Swiss Patent Office were related to that. And I'd like also to propose the unorthodox idea, which will probably get me banned from future WEF meetings, but the idea is that innovation isn't always a good thing. And I think it's important to remember that. Innovation is a neutral term that just simply refers to the spread of new things and new practices. And we have seen many examples in the last 20 years of organizations and products that are innovative. Terrorist organizations, drug cartels, very innovative, but not necessarily good things. And in the world of healthcare, of course, innovation brings gains and losses. And the question, of course, always is, for whom are these gains and for whom are these losses? When artificial respirators were invented in the 1960s, they forced ethicists to redefine literally what life and death were once again. And innovation, I think, is something that can prompt these philosophical discussions, but it's something that needs to be considered. Alice, were you... Just to build a little bit on this discussion, I think it really is important these days that we keep that momentum and that energy towards absolutely curiosity-driven fundamental research. It's not just about solving problems. Rafael, I also talk about the grand challenges and the big problems, and we all focus on that. And what's exciting is our communities really want to have an impact on the world. They want to do things that are good for society. But we don't have a problem with gravitational waves, but we have great discoveries about them. And we will learn things that we don't even know what the questions are we'll be answering next. And things are changing so rapidly that sometimes those new outlandish ideas become an application before you know it, not 20, 30 years hence. And so I think we do tend to focus on problem solving. We focus on impact. We're trying to measure that. The European Research Council is trying to measure that. We have to be wary to make room for that absolutely unfettered pursuit of new ideas, and I know that you do that. I didn't say anything against that. I just said that these problem solvers need tools, and the tools is knowledge that comes from people doing basic science. I'm supporting basic science. I just actually said that it's the mother of all knowledge. Without them, we don't have the knowledge to address to the people who solve problems. So I'm completely with you. Let me just try to address your point, Joe, about since MIT is one of the many institutions that created CRISPR. I mean, there are more and more coming up, but let me just comment on that. I think it's a great example of people doing basic science, coming up with something extraordinary, not driven by any solution of any problem, but we'll find that's a tool. All of a sudden, you have a tool to create many problems, create many solutions, including in agriculture and other domains. So that's another great example of people inventing something in collaboration, something very new that came from basic science that is going to become a tool. I'll give you another example, which is already having a solution coming from basic science, neuroscience. We have neuroscientists at MIT working on dementia in Alzheimer, understanding the age in mind, fundamental understanding of how the mind works. And to make a long story short, somebody else discovers something about optogenetics, how light affects how brain cells work. And two months ago, after a lot said of basic research, applied to solving a particular issue of Alzheimer's for the very first time has been announced that in laboratory mice, Alzheimer's have not just been stopped, but being regressed. So actually, you can bring it back. That is the result of fundamental science, which eventually produce some knowledge that people then figure out how to apply it. And now it's in the stage of innovation. It's being moved out to the marketplace to create human trials approaches. Yeah, but also go ahead, Martin. Yeah, I would also mention a topic which probably is a little bit different from the discussion we had before. I think we all agree on the fundamental science. I think very important is, of course, talent scouting, as has been mentioned before. But there's a second side of that metal, and that is the industrial side. I think just to give you one example from the recent German history, you know, after unification, we had the eastern part of Germany just more or less was emptying out. There was no industry there. It was totally gone because of the 40 years, let me say, of the communist regime in that part of Germany. Now, after unification, of course, Germany has put a lot of effort, state money in universities, Max Planck Institute, all kind of other institutes. So established research centers, let me say in the eastern part of Germany. It's not that immediately you also get an innovative environment around these centers because there is sometimes the second part missing, and that is the industry which can take that off because the knowledge you have is because of mobile knowledge. The people who have that knowledge in their mind, they're mobile people. They can't go anywhere. And the real problem is if you want to do innovation and you want also to not help the world as such, but you want also to help the local sites where you live, I think there has to be some sticking factor for knowledge and for the people and that given side. And what I'm saying this is, I think, and that is, I think not only true for Germany, but also for the US, you need industry which also invests in R&D significantly. It does make much sense to create knowledge in the university as a kind of outreach of what industry is doing. You need probably the same amount of people in industry who are capable of taking up that knowledge and that's again the story of Stuart Park and the others. Otherwise, it does not work. In Germany and the US, you have to keep in mind that two-thirds of R&D is done in industry, one-third only in the public sector. So there is a majority of R&D done in industry and that is totally necessary. And I see sometimes also we are talking of dangers, of danger we may see on the horizon. I think one danger I can see is that industry is giving up R&D to some extent, thinking that others may do so and you can read in Wikipedia what the knowledge is all about. That is a total mistake and you will totally fail. So I'm also fighting for R&D in industry. So I'd just like to comment on that. I think it's a very interesting point. I don't necessarily like the conflation of R and D. So let's say R in the academy, D in industry. I think one of the lessons of Silicon Valley actually is that large companies are not very good at doing anything other than incremental R&D on the businesses that they already have. If you think about the trajectory of Microsoft in the last decade or so, C-Bama made it the most profitable software company in the world and he tripled their revenue but he missed a whole series of really important inflection points in that industry. What Silicon Valley has discovered actually is that R&D is best done in venture-backed companies that are unconstrained by legacy businesses and by customers and can think about the next big thing. And so we're a company like that. I don't have to worry about the people who use the medicines that are already being made or approved. When I go to a regulator and try and teach them about something new, I don't have to worry about the fact that they may get annoyed with me, which they sometimes do, and decide that they're going to take it out on the products that are already on the market. And so these new enterprises can really be very powerful at shaping and bringing new science to market. And indeed look at Silicon Valley, I think there's probably something like 50 to 60% of the world's venture capital in one place and it's deeply powerful. It really has been a huge engine of value creation. Patrick, well, maybe Patrick. Yeah, I just wanted to add a little coded to that and a bit of nuance to that. So again, sort of coming back to this idea of challenging some of the orthodox thinking about innovation and where it's coming from, from corporate R&D. Again, I think it's important to remember that when you go back to the heyday of American, the best corporate R&D labs of Bell and GE and things like that, largely they weren't focused on disruptive innovation. They were focused on incremental innovation to preserve their patents and things like that. So again, I think this idea that we're encouraging people to think that innovation has to be disruptive is missing a large part of the story and misdirecting some energies. I should really clarify. I don't think that's the case. What I do believe is that we're at a moment of enormous disruptive potential because we have a new utility called mobile computing and it's fundamentally powerful in the same way that electricity was fundamentally powerful. And when you hit those types of discontinuities where human systems and human behaviors start to radically change, the whole world moving from building people product to software service mobile platform, that's a moment in time when people that focus only on incremental innovation are seriously at risk, which is why there's been so much recent disruption. Alice, did you want to add? I'd just like to add and perhaps ask. I know that at Imperial and certainly at MIT the collaboration between universities and industry can be extremely powerful. And I see that has evolved quite a bit over the last decade from more of a contractual you do this work and send us the report to more of a partnership where that fundamental research can be driving in various directions, the corporate partner and say, hey, this might be useful for what we're doing over here. And it's again that intellectual collaboration that's so important to advance things and it allows us to do fundamental research with impact. Can I comment on that? I think it's important to follow Alice's point for industry to do R&D or to have an R&D operation or development operation however you describe it is extremely important. I don't think as you both said that that's where you're going to see basic research. It's not going to happen. The industry R&D really follows by and large. Companies that try to do that, they missed the boat anyway even though they discovered the future they didn't see it. So they are not good for basic science but they are good to apply the roadmap but you both said that. However, as Alice said very often places like Imperial or MIT come up with innovations that are going to make a difference. If companies, and that was your point, do not have R&D. There is no place to move them. And that's what happens to places like MIT. There is no place to move that innovation so the only choice we have is to start a company. And I think that's why I think you have to have R&D to be the home of these kind of innovations from places like Imperial and MIT. Can I just comment on your point about collaboration? It's a great point. I'll make the comment that one of the ways in which we seek to collaborate with universities is slightly different. It's not to contract or to do something that solves a specific technical problem but to identify people who we think are really very bright, very committed in the domain in which we want to have impact and we'll make them a completely unconstrained grant. Just keep doing what you're doing and maybe we'll get something good out of it. We don't ask for any rights because the idea there is, well we get good will, right? And that's what you want, right? I don't want to be negotiating on something that hasn't yet been discovered. So it's an excellent way to have a collaboration with universities and partnerships and it's amazing what comes out of that if you just build a great trust relationship. I think trust, what you mentioned, I think that's essential. According to my experience and I had lots of collaborations in this industry, my life as a researcher, it's based on trust. You have to have a trust relation to the person you work with, because you open yourself. The scientist opens himself because he has to lay out things which he may not even have published. The industry also has to lay out things which let me say is somewhat secret. There has to be an intense collaboration based on trust which is not that easy to achieve immediately. So it takes a little bit of time and then it may be also very, very stable. And I also would comment on these incremental verses, let me say disruptive innovation. I totally agree with you that we are living in new times. That is a disruptive time, that I would also say. But this disruptive time has to influence all the conventional industry too. The German car manufacturer cannot just build a car, like they did 20 years ago. They have to adapt this. And not only they have to adapt this, they have to be leading. Otherwise, they cannot get that price for a German car. They can get it right now. Boeing is doing the same. Airbus is doing the same. So I think we should not forget about that probably 90 percent, I would guess, of the fortune which is being earned around our countries is more or less further development of existing industry by also partially disruptive technologies in given industries. General Electric today is not General Electric 100 years ago. A turbine. Today is not a turbine 100 years ago. So there's lots of... And they do quantum mechanical calculations to calculate the new turbine to make sure that they understand what the turbine is all about. What is the grain? How is the grain composition, etc. So I think... And these are huge companies. And that is sometimes a painful and time-consuming process. So I want just to make sure that you also understand this gradual improvement of conventional industry also may have disruptive character. So as a moderator I also have to use an element of trust and in this case my trust is that the audience has some interesting questions that they would like to ask and I'd like to invite them. Thank you. There's one behind me and maybe easier there's one in the front row here so we'll come to you next. Stuart Brooks with Chevron. Picking up on the point that Alice made about the impact on society do the UN sustainable development goals provide a visionary framework for innovation? Does anybody feel comment? I could comment on this partly only. I think we have a long discussion in Germany on these kind of goals. I think partly these schools are of course correct. They try let me say to focus in certain fields but I have also again to say if you want to steer the direction researchers have to think it's a mistake. So I think yes, there is a truth in this but it's not the total truth. I think you have to give the liberty of individuals to think also across lines and if you want to force them to look only in major top topics which are let me say general interest of the public then you narrow your scope and I think we all know in all of our institutions if you narrow the scope that's the worst thing you can do. You have to keep your eyes open because you do not know what is popping up in which part of the unknown universe and I think we are talking here of unknown unknowns, you know? Sometimes there's a feeling the program you are mentioning this is known unknowns but you're also talking of the unknown unknowns. I think those kinds of goals are useful. Are useful to have guidelines or goals to aspire to but I agree fully that you don't want to be rigid in the process of trying to reach an aspiration or a goal. Chances are you're going and I've seen it many times you're going to find something new and unexpected and you have to be open to recognize that and if you are too restricted and that's another problem with many of the cases with industry R&D that they are focused on something and they find new things and they just put them aside because it's a distraction and that is really a problem in academic environments for innovation so I fully agree with the point you just made. I think it provides inspiration for individuals because there are framework and as Raphael and I know grand challenges and long-term issues can be something that motivate people to pursue certain paths of fundamental research motivate students to decide what to study and where they want to work in the future and where they can make a difference in the world so it's a useful framework but it wouldn't be a template to go in and say this is what we're doing. Sir, would you mind identifying yourselves? Hi everyone, I'm Jetty Bunsell I'm a global shaper from India and I'm involved in the electrification of the remotest villages in the Himalayas people have never seen what a light bulb is there was a point made around Uber being a very good innovation frankly to me it does not cut it because a startup that is making three billion dollars losses a year and caters to only 5-10% of the world population is not innovation for me when I look at innovation I see mobile which has reached out to the marginalized communities of the world and has truly changed the way people are living that to me is innovation and what I see nowadays is most of the innovation is catered to the 5-10% of the world's population and frankly a woman in India does not care about artificial intelligence she cares about how she can feed her children three square meals a day and that is where innovation has to come so that it can reach to the majority of the world's population so where can we find that innovation coming through? So Alice go ahead I would actually say that our students are some of the great innovators who are motivated by making a huge difference in the world and thinking about other parts of the world one of our first winners of our Althea Imperial Program Women's Entrepreneurship Award one for fuel cell type electric generators for villages in India made out of waste products like rice hulls and those kinds of innovations and that ability to connect them to different parts of the world and then deploy them is something that I think is really important it's very exciting because our students take their prize money and they get other grants and they start to build that up I can't speak to your specific national context but I can just make the general observation that I think historically and I think also in contemporary times a very important source of innovation are users if we look at the emergence of the PC computing industry in the 1970s a huge driver for that were the amateur hobbyists who were a huge catalyst in getting this off the ground and I think coming back to a point that Alice made at the very beginning of this panel if you get away from thinking about innovation as something that is done by a single person and if you frame it in the context of knowledge communities of engineers, of technicians, of users of maintainers of systems then I think you end up with a much more robust picture of how innovation can be fostered it also strikes me and I'm curious to what the panel thinks is that the mobile phone wasn't invented so that people in the Himalayas will have access to telephone that's not what drove the industry to begin with I mean it's a happy consequence that you have an innovation that's so transformative but I was thinking in terms of your product which people swallow that's initially at least going to be for a developed world but if it works and if it's cheap and if it's valuable and if the mobile phone can transmit the information from the rural village to the clinic that's fantastic Let me just build on what you're saying here I think that the tech industry in particular and the mobile phone is a really important thing because what we're seeing here is communication for everyone everywhere it's a really, really fantastic idea most people who own a mobile phone make less than $10 a day it's fantastic by the way it's not an act of congress it's not gravity it's not an accident it's a business strategy and that's the kind of business strategy that takes a lot of courage a lot of application a lot of vision and so that industry gets very high marks for me if I compare it to the industry in which I'm in we generally build healthcare products that you can sell only to the richest people and the richest country in the world and that's a problem so I'll just relate it to us the whole idea behind our company is the mobile phone can become the most important backbone for healthcare service delivery the world has ever seen the vision of our company is healthcare for everyone everywhere and we can only say that because everyone has a mobile device and so why would AI be relevant to a woman living in rural India because billions of people are entering the middle class we'll never get them healthcare services if we think we're going to do it by building hospitals and training doctors we're going to have to do it by leveraging the resources we've got getting people to do much more work and manage much higher groups of patients and we're going to do that by making use of artificial intelligence so doctors can only get tasked with the things that they really need to do and very routine things can be done automatically and so it's highly relevant because not only would that woman in a rural India village want to feed her kids she'd want to make sure that they get vaccines get prenatal care get postnatal care all that stuff and that can all be massively impacted using mobile Yes, Martin and then we'll take a question I would pick up the last question because I think it's a question which is worthwhile thinking about basically the question the question aims to something which I would call inclusion exclusion so what is really the inclusion of that world and is the world more getting illiterate let me say we have small bubbles like I know the Boston area Munich area whatever area which we have these hot spots of science and innovation and we leave the others behind my impression if I look back from my own let me say time as a scientist I think partly it's the opposite when I was young you know we had information bubbles you had to come to our Max Planck Institute because they had a huge library MIT whatever and you have to be they had to be there to get the information because without that information couldn't do anything you didn't even know the basic physics now I think it's the most important that we all strive for what we call the open to publish our data very openly and I think this open access which is I think coming up and Max Planck has made a decision that up to 2020 we want to have all our publications open access means in fact and the others are more or less following the same road means that in any part of the world you have access to latest technology then of course it's necessary that in those parts of the world you also have academic institutions which are capable of solving also local problems because the problems which are there and the needs which are there may differ from the needs we have in Germany or here in Switzerland and I think for that reason it's necessary of course that there's a spread of that knowledge and there's also a spread let me say of these hubs where this knowledge is being developed it's not a good solution yet in the end we end up with 6 or 10 or 20 leading research sites which are all in three countries because they have the funding schemes to do so I think that would be a big mistake and that would let me say bring people so heavily apart that exclusion is in the end the real life and so for that reason yes it's an interesting question question over there thank you hi good afternoon excuse me I'm a professor of management at a university in the US and one of the things I study is technological innovation it would be great if we didn't make any type 1 or type 2 errors so type 1 are the kinds we the paths we choose that are not to be not so good and the type 2 are the ones we don't choose that are not to be great in somebody else's pocket so what I was interested in knowing from the panel is what management processes can be put in place to minimize type 1 and type 2 errors but not get them to zero so that we are paralyzed and do absolutely nothing while at the same time getting some result and to just illustrate a type 1 a type 2 error of consequence was the refusal of 7 different studios to produce the Harry Potter films so you can imagine how they are thinking what happens in most organizations is that those misses don't get counted but you get slapped on the wrist or worse if you commit a type 1 error thank you interesting yes I don't know that I have the answer but I want to give you that shot but before I do so I want to address the question raised earlier and I'll come to you in a moment because I think it's very important to recognize that the innovative ideas are coming today in the process in which it comes to benefit the developed societies and what we need to do more is try to do more innovation in developing societies and you do see that in some American institutions you do see that actually an imperial the example that Alice gave you but let's recognize that it is true that the driving force today is to innovate for the advanced society and then expecting that eventually that would reach the rest of the globe and there is plenty of innovation needed in developing societies on your question I don't know the answer but I know something that seems to work and that is the following you mentioned, I think it was you and you mentioned collaboration and I would like to add to collaboration almost multicultural collaboration let me just make the following point at MIT we have people collaborating in one institution from 152 countries in the world so three quarters of the world is represented in one institution and you give them a project a problem that are bigger than themselves and all of a sudden cultural differences and biases that they bring from their home countries disappear because what is valued is what is that you bring to the table to solve whatever it is we are trying to work on so if you have multicultural groups from different backgrounds and you have them working together in a collaboration chances are by probability by statistics that type one and type two will be avoided how to manage that is a problem but at least I know that that combination works anyone else? yes so in an enterprise it is very hard to know about the type two errors you make until it is way too late so there is not so much you can do about the type two the key in my view is to be very clear about the fact that you need people to make type one errors and that there are no penalties associated with following a path and then not necessarily succeeding with having to change direction one of the things I often say to people is that in a small company the real sin is not making a mistake it is not moving you have to move every day you make a decision try it out if you get feedback change direction but you have to move I am sorry to engage in a debate actually I disagree that type two errors cannot be managed they can be managed if we get data on the fact that we made all those mistakes take a look at universities we reject more people than we admit we know nothing about the rejection rate excuse me the performance of the people we reject and we base our admission decisions based on the ones we have admitted so we have lost all of the data in all of the regions so if organizations continue to keep records of all of the opportunities that did not follow they would then be able to connect the decision criteria with the outcome and improve the decision making process let me suggest a friendly amendment we do know of the people that we reject that succeeded violently elsewhere we have another question over there I believe microphone coming hello I'm Christoph Hans involved with Roche I wanted to bring one element of innovation which was in the title Maintaining Innovation because in the end of the day we have to finance innovation and if we want to foster it we need the financial means for it and just strengthening that on the one side I feel basic innovation has to be done in universities, research institutions Max Planck institutions of this world so it's extremely important also if we want to have this kind of geographical diversity to find the financial means public financial means in order to be able to have this basic research on the other side if we want to have innovation and industry we need a strong protection of intellectual property so patent protection rights which is very diverse throughout the world and on the other side we need and this clearly influences also the industry you mentioned should be around the best research institutions for a pharmaceutical company there are not a lot of countries where you wanted to bring your research facilities due exactly to this IP protection on the other side it's also necessary to have a market system which in the end of the day allows for innovation premiums if you are successful and for example with pharmaceutical industry there will be a lot of discussion with regard to pricing of drugs who is going to invest in Alzheimer's if one single drug is 1.222 billion of expenses definitely today nobody if there is not an adequate innovation or risk premium you can get so I feel this is very important to maintain and also with the idea of increasing innovation in the future if we have the societal choice to use for example medicines only as a cost position in order to maintain health care cost most cases it's 10% of health care cost so it's not that important but still we see it as an important thing and then I feel it will be very slowing down innovation yes we only have a couple of minutes so I'm going to get a short response I think that's really a point which we missed I think the boundary conditions for innovation are very very important but the boundary conditions for example just to give you two examples is can we still rely on experiments with animals can we still rely in the future on experiments with monkeys for example or is the society not allowing us to do so green gene technology in Germany is an issue so if the boundary conditions are so that certain types of research is not really being done or is forbidden more or less not formally forbidden but there is a problem so the boundary conditions are very much essential for all of these innovation processes I totally agree I'm afraid if you could say 20 seconds the difference between how the tech industry and the pharma industry looks at patents is stark one of the problems in the pharma industry is that they haven't gotten beyond the idea of protecting their business with anything other than a patent that's a problem it means they've got finite product life cycles and in tech you have much longer product life cycles and so business model in particular competitive advantage innovation is a requirement in that industry if they're going to get to risk premiums that are indeed required but they can't just be based on patents okay I promise an interesting discussion to all our panelists and they delivered I'd like to thank them all for joining us today and please join me in a round of applause for an interesting discussion