I think, you know, for those of us who discussed having this meeting,
there was a sense that in the US, the deep community gets together to discuss all of these,
you know, how to do these things better and the UK with practises, oral and Mncube, we're doing the same.
And wouldn't it be a good idea if we occasionally got together collectively and had similar discussions?
So I'm very pleased that we finally got here to this point.
And as every everyone who's been a conference chair will know, I'm relieved to say we're still a couple of minutes ahead of time.
So enough of me.
I'm now going to introduce you to the host of the next session, Dr Alison Campbell OBE, who is the director of Knowledge Transfer Ireland.
The National Office responsible for policy practise and performance of the Irish Knowledge and Technology Transfer System,
started a career in the biotech industry and has occupied many positions at the academic industry interface and most at King's College London,
and I was awarded her OBE in 2010 in recognition of her contribution to knowledge transfer.
So Alison, please do come. Thanks very much, Phil, I think this might have been designed for a tall man being a small woman.
Probably the only thing that mean the Queen actually have in common. So I'm just moving the microphone back down here.
I'm sure that when Samarkand won't take the stage, they may need to adjust it back up.
So. So good afternoon.
I'm absolutely thrilled to be here, and I'm delighted to be asked to moderate this this starting session at the Oxford United summit.
This is this is a really, I think, really important, as Phil was saying, a really important event.
I've been very fortunate myself to to work at the nexus between university and industry interaction.
So probably more years than I'd like to mention now.
Although a taxi driver did say to me yesterday, Oh, you retired immediately went and bought more ice cream.
But what I have seen, I've been really fortunate to work in the UK and Europe and have a role on on the autumn board in the USA.
And from what I've seen and what I've heard in terms the levels of conversations that are going on at the moment,
it really does seem particularly timely to be having this event.
And as Patrick said, it's against a very interesting political and economic backdrop.
We were looking at the different ways in which nations are both looking at and investing in research, and it's changing.
But so too are their expectations on outcomes, and that extends beyond the academy into industrial strategy.
And that brings with it new opportunities and challenges. And that's what this this event is is all about.
But this afternoon, we have the privilege of hearing from views from some key policymakers and opinion leaders from both sides of the Atlantic.
And I'm just the landmass that's in between. So we'll we'll first hear from Smart Wolpert and then Dr Copan.
We'll talk after which they should be. If all the moderating and sharing goes to plan Typekit for Q&A from all of you.
So before he takes to the stage. For those of you who may not know him from our wonderful next academic industry and the international community here,
a very brief introduction to Professor Smart Wolpert.
He's chief executive of UK Research and Innovation, which, as it says on the tin,
is responsible for the public funding of research and innovation in the UK.
Before he took on that role, he was UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser and has a really rich and deep pedigree in research and innovation.
He was for 10 years director of the Wellcome Trust.
Before that, he was professor of medicine and head of the Division of Medicine at Imperial College London.
And his many other highlights to his career,
including being on the Advisory Board of Infrastructure UK and the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research in the UK,
as well as the UK, India and CEO Forum.
Mark received his knighthood in 2009 for services to medical research and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2011.
I'm sure you'll warmly welcome him to the stage mark.
Thank you very much indeed, Alison, I'm delighted to be here.
And I'm reflecting that the last time I was in this lecture theatre, I was at something called the Cambridge Conference.
Now, whether that was Oxford, annexing Cambridge or Cambridge annexing Oxford, I don't know.
But it wasn't an entirely irrelevant meeting to this because it was actually a conference
that brings together the heads of national mapping agencies from across the world.
And of course, the thing that transformed mapping was clocks and.
Clocks have remained at the forefront of many of the technological advances that we are talking about today.
And in fact, I think people don't realise how important clocks are, particularly those atomic clocks ticking away on satellites.
And so clocks really are at the forefront of the current industrial revolution.
And a lot of the work, of course, came at a very basic, curiosity inspired research.
So we are at a very extraordinary time.
And I think it's important to raise our eyes above national issues to recognise that the world in which we are working and living is changing in,
I think, four extraordinary ways. There is the first is a demographic change.
Seven and a half billion people on the planet with all of the demands that we
make on the natural resources of the planet and the pollution that we produce,
both visible in the form of plastics, for example, and invisible in the form of gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
But within the demography are also extraordinary changes as well.
Here we are living in Europe with ageing populations in North America, in Japan,
in China, ageing populations and of course, in other parts of the world.
Many parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South America, young populations.
And of course, that creates a whole series of challenges opportunities.
But also key opportunities for innovation.
And so you could look and say that it is actually innovation that's enabled us to be seven and a half billion people on the planet.
It's been our ability to modify our environment so that humans can live in almost every environment on the planet.
But the problems that come from seven and a half billion people are very obvious and will require major changes.
So science and technology has got us here and it's got to get us out of here as well.
The world of research is changing in extraordinary ways. And of course,
a lot of that is powered by technological change in the form of extraordinary engineering that enables us
to develop amazing sensors in the ability to handle data sets in ways which were never possible before.
And all of that actually has driven the need for team working, multidisciplinary work,
interdisciplinary work in the same way that the world of research is changing,
the world of business is changing as well, again powered by many of the same things that I've been talking about.
And so the distinction between manufacturing and services is becoming blurred.
Jet engine you buy by the hour powered by the hour. Increasingly,
the manufactured object provides the source of a service business and then underpinning
all of this societies are changing and they're changing in somewhat unpredictable ways.
We're seeing the rise of populism. We can't take our growth, our licence to practise as it were for granted.
And I think that one of the important things with UK research innovation coming into being is
the fact that I think we have to engage with publics in ways that we've never done before,
partly because I think everyone here recognises that there are there is such a thing as truth.
It is the nature of research to uncover things that are will stand the test of time.
So that is really important and you can research innovation importantly, includes the arts, the humanities and social sciences.
Because unless we work effectively with those disciplines, then I think we'll be missing major opportunities.
So the industrial revolution is a sort of starting to crash into each other.
I think this is probably currently the fourth. The first, of course, is illustrated with that steam engine in the top right of the slide.
But this industrial revolution is also powered by steam, but it's science, technology,
engineering, the arts and mathematics, and I include in the arts design, the social sciences.
It's a it is an extraordinary time with extraordinary opportunities and that gap between exploitation of the digital world,
together with the physical and biological worlds. That's where the exciting interface is.
There is a fusion which is happening literally in the case of the design of products
such as some of the extraordinary artificial limbs that are being developed,
one called the Blatchford Limb one, the major engineering prise in the UK, the Robert Award, a few years ago.
So the technologies are extraordinary. The data, A.I., robotics, new materials, the ability to exploit these, and in my area of biomedical sciences,
biological genomics has taken us to extraordinary places where we can now think about editing genomes.
And all of this has the enormous potential to improve the quality of life of people across the planet and to generate prosperity.
But of course, there are challenges of all of these technologies, and each and every one of them is neutral.
It's how we apply them that matters. And this is where governments have to think very carefully.
You can see all the debate that's going on at the moment around the very big technology industries.
And I think one of the things that is actually critical is that as far as possible,
we work responsibly when we are innovating in terms of how we implement innovation.
I'm not going to say an enormous amount about UK research innovation. Thank you for the introduction, Patrick.
At the beginning, we are in fact, in a year old.
But just over a year ago, there's a new organisation and we bring together the seven research councils research
England and thank you to researching and for sponsoring this conference and Innovate UK.
So we bring together the innovation agency and our research councils under a single organisational umbrella.
And if I were to summarise what we are about in three words, it is simply knowledge with impact.
And so we have seven and a half billion pounds a year, all garnered from the pockets of taxpayers.
And I think what I as a taxpayer would like from UK research and innovation is that, first of all,
it generates discoveries, but discovering things really has an impact when they are providing benefits to society.
Now those are the benefits of pure excitement of new knowledge.
So the discovery discovery of the Higgs boson of the identification of gravitational waves have excited the public,
so we should never forget the cultural importance.
But at the end of the day, what governments care about, they care about the health, wellbeing, resilience and security of their populations.
And that, in turn, depends on economic prosperity.
And so we are about. Helping to fund the discoveries,
but also working with the people that make these discoveries to catalyse turning them into utility of different forms for society.
So at the top, it's the the impacts, the economic impact, that social prosperity, the enriched, healthier, more resilient, more sustainable society.
Underpinning that of the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding.
And then we can do our job properly if we provide the best environment for research and innovation.
And that is, I would say, first and foremost about people. And this is an international audience.
It is a diverse audience and we will only have the best research and innovation if we have a diverse population.
And so having people from all over the world is critical.
The University of Oxford is a diverse environment,
although it's working hard on diversity at every level in terms of undergraduates all the way through.
And so people is what matters at the end of the day. But of course, people can only give of their best if they're in a an excellent environment.
And so that's about having a trusted and diverse system.
And one of the things that's really important to us is the culture of research, and this is an integrated thing.
You can't tackle diversity on its own and ignore bullying and harassment or ignore questions of research reproducibility.
This all ties together at the end of the day. And so Jennifer Rubin, who's head of the Economic and Social Sciences Social Sciences Research Council,
is taking on that as a sort of champion for Ukraine. And then, of course, you can only do research on innovation if you have the right infrastructure.
And of course, that's what great universities provide. And we have to be a decent organisation if all of this is going to come together.
So the UK has an industrial strategy and it is an industrial strategy which basically focuses
on the underpinning features that you need in order to have that good economic prosperity.
And you can't really have an industrial strategy which isn't focussed on science,
engineering, technology, the arts, social sciences, design, mathematics.
So it's a good thing for research, and there are four grand challenges within that.
And these are not sort of top down tablets from some mountain.
They are, if you like, where the top down meets the bottom up, they're about clean growth.
Tackling the seven and a half billion question in terms of energy and eliminating plastic waste as far as
possible about tackling the demographic changes are changing society about the whole question of mobility.
And it isn't just mobility of people, it's mobility of goods, of services, of bits and bytes.
It's about digital mobility as much as mobility of people.
I'm constantly struck now how video conferencing is now so good that actually a lot of travel can potentially be eliminated.
Although there is nothing to beat a conference like this where physical networking does happen and you meet people you wouldn't meet otherwise.
And of course, underpinning all of this is AI and the data economy.
It is that transformation in the ability to move data around and analyse and use it.
And underneath that, we've created a new challenge fund, the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.
And you can read the titles of the sorts of challenges that have been identified.
And each of these is it's industry led in the sense that these are tackling the problems that industry has identified as being important to them,
but equally, they are working with academia. It is knowledge with impact at the end of the day.
And so the Faraday battery challenge is a very good example of that.
There is a blue plaque and not very far from here denoting where the lithium ion battery was invented,
although it's worth saying that the person who invented it has a very good example of global mobility.
But clearly,
energy storage is one of the key issues in a world of variable energy production where you have intermittent wind production or solar production.
You can't have intermittent power supplies, so we need storage.
I could go through each of these, but I went, you'll be relieved to hear and I am conscious I need to stop in about seven minutes time.
I'm just going to go through a few areas because I think it's just worth looking at it through
the lens of some of the technologies and technologies I've already been talking about,
of course, clocks. But this is an area where the UK is undoubtedly a world leader and instead of a mechanism of support that I think has been very
powerful and started in the era of the research council's working on their only pisarski and for quantum hubs were created,
distributed around the country, working together and 800 million pounds won around sensors and metrology won around quantum enhanced imaging,
one around network, quantum information technologies and then quantum communications technologies.
And, of course, the potential of new, very powerful sensors, for example, gravity sensors.
The ability single pixel cameras means that we are going to be able to sense the world in
ways again that are almost beyond imagination at the moment in terms of the potential.
And but of course, the next phase is taking this technology,
which is at the point at which it can be commercialised, and that's where we've got to already.
And so there's already, as part of this work, been a lot of collaboration with industry new companies such as M Squared Lasers,
which was shortlisted for the MacRobert prise.
Big companies such as Leonardo and We All Know A recently announced a second phase of the quantum support,
which is 153 million of taxpayer funds which will support businesses delivering quantum
enabled products help the technological transfer and growth of the businesses.
And that brings along 205 million pounds leveraged committed by industry in support of that.
And so the UK investment over quite a sustained period now in quantum technologies is now over a billion pounds of funding.
And it's a really good example of how universities have worked with industry in all kinds of way,
everything from licencing to spin outs to collaboration for a technology that
is still quite difficult for a classic private equity investors to invest in,
this is hard technology to understand.
I remember when I was the government chief scientific adviser, we actually produced a report for policymakers on quantum technologies,
and the community was resistant to it at first because they thought it was all obvious when it might have been to them.
But they once they got into it, they really enjoyed producing it,
and it was quite interesting actually seeing how they were communicating it to each other.
And in the end, I think it was valuable for the technological, the technical community,
as well as for government policymakers, compound semiconductors.
That's another area where the UK is very strong as a cluster in South Wales and with big
investment by Cardiff University for an Institute for Components Semiconductors company Ikee.
Working with the university to fund a former compound semiconductor centre and 50 million
of government funds invested to create his compound semiconductor applications catapult.
And of course, all of this links to the quantum technologies I've been talking about health care, which is my area originally.
Just amazing what's going on? So an example of a global collaboration is the human cell atlas.
The ability to analyse individual cells in the human body to do whole genome analysis,
look at the whole expression of the products of those genes proteins,
understanding cells, organs, organisms in health and disease at a level that's never been possible before.
And of course, you can study a hepatocytes liver cell in a normal person.
You can study a hepatocyte in an alcoholic in a cirrhotic after a heavy meal.
Cells, you can just study them in different physiological states in ways that would have been inconceivable before.
And then, of course, that's coupled with the ability not only to analyse the genome, but to manipulate it.
So gene editing, the power of synthetic biology, cryo electron microscopy to look at the molecules of life.
A Nobel prise for Richard Henderson a couple of years ago at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology and, of course,
another Nobel prise at Greg Winter a year later,
also from the Laboratory Molecular Biology for his ability to understand and engineer antibody diversity.
And of course, all of this at the end of the day is about people in health and disease.
And that's where, again, technology lets you do things that weren't possible before.
So I am one half millionth of the UK Biobank, so I volunteered to be a participant in the UK Biobank in about 2000 and five or six.
I think maybe the third year that brings together half a million people, all volunteers aged between 40 and sixty nine point two entries.
So I've given away my age and all half million of them, all of us are about to be sequence, coding and sequencing of half million people.
In 2003, there was a great celebration of the first human genome had been sequenced.
Who knows exactly what it was, course, but it was probably about a billion dollars.
The idea that we were able to do half a million of them six years later was sort of unimaginable, really.
I'm concerned about two minutes left. So and we're just about to move that up to five million people.
These are extraordinary things, mobility, I've talked about the Faraday challenge, it's led to the creation of a Faraday institution.
And of course, one of the things that industry want is scale up facilities.
We're good at starting up, but we need to scale up before you can go into commercial production.
And here we've created a scale up or creating a scale up facility for battery technologies agritech.
One of the big problems for the world is feeding the planet sustainably in a way that doesn't destroy the environment.
And of course, there you see a vertical farm. It's not very tall.
But we now have the ability to grow foodstuffs hydroponically, so you don't have to worry about destroying soil.
You can grow them vertically stacked so you can multiply the surface area.
You can light them using LED lighting 24 hours a day, so you can almost effectively beat the efficiency of photosynthesis in aggregate.
You can increase the carbon dioxide concentration a bit and you can control temperature,
and suddenly you can revolutionise certainly the value of high of high value crops.
You're not going to grow wheat this way. But the technology here and again, actually I was.
The Oxford Farming Conference is a very well known farming conference that brings people together,
and technology is something that is high in people's mind. Energy, energy, power underpins modern life.
And so we have to be more efficient in our production of energy and our use of power.
So I see that production of power and we're working on that.
We've funded some energy demonstrators using intelligent local systems to deliver power to heat mobility one here in Oxford,
but in Orkney, West Sussex. And I think it was a success.
I think there's anyone in Oxford, and we should never forget the creative industries.
That's something where the UK is very, very strong indeed. It's actually worth an enormous amount to the UK economy, over nearly 11 billion pounds.
And the creative industries are being transformed by technology as well.
In almost every imaginable way. And so the Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Customs Programme is
investing 80 million pounds in research and development partnerships across the UK.
And there is actually an interesting question in how we measure R&D because there are.
The UK has an R&D target to move. Our investment in R&D from 1.7 per cent roughly was just under 1.6 nine percent.
Now I think of GDP in R&D up to two point four percent by 2027.
But we are still, by OECD standards, a low invest in R&D as a proportion of GDP.
But we get a lot for our money.
And I think that we don't always identify where R&D is, and almost everything in the creative industries is actually R&D.
It's in the word creation, public policy.
I'm almost finished. She'll be pleased to hear.
One of the things that there was a famous report by a chuckle Viscount Haldane in 1918, which established the modern machinery of government.
But he said something very memorable in his report,
which is that he thought the government would work better if it took more account of evidence that clearly has some resonance.
And government has many important research and innovation questions on behalf of all of us as citizens.
And one of the things that we're doing is working with government departments that each
have now published areas of research interests that are published on government websites.
And there are all sorts of questions where the research and innovation communities can help the delivery of public services,
which have the possibility of being transformed by technology.
I'll finish by just saying something about clusters because place and infrastructure is really important.
And there are obviously places like Oxford which have enormous critical mass and enormous
diversity of academic excellence and increasingly broad business growth as well.
People function more easily in clusters. If you go to Kendall Square in Boston,
then you will find that there are a cluster of biotech companies doing quite hot biotech where people can walk from one job to the next, as it were.
And so that ability to cluster research and innovation is very important.
And I think there are sort of four ingredients for customer success.
So the first is you need a at least a small critical mass of industry.
You need aligned academic strength. You need local support in the form of government.
And the fourth and probably most important ingredient is actually leadership.
But those are the conditions where you can grow modern high tech businesses.
And when you actually map across the UK, what's the scale of the excellence varies in different parts of the country.
There is very widely distributed excellence,
and so we have a place based fund which is looking to find those places that have these full ingredients and provide some support for them as well.
So challenges and opportunities. We have extraordinary research and innovation in the UK.
There's an issue of knowledge diffusion. And I think this is a problem for every country,
which is that the gap between the most productive companies and the least productive companies
is very broad and the opportunity for technological diffusion is extremely important.
I've talked about the issues of scaling up. We have got a very uneven economy in the UK, and that's not one that is sustainable in the long term.
And I've said this already,
we really have got to be leaders in enhancing and supporting equality diversity and make sure that the culture in which we work is a good one.
Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Sir Mark, and also thank you for letting me know that I too will shortly be sequenced.
Troublesome to our of our next speaker is Dr. Walt Copeland.
He's undersecretary of commerce for standards and technology and this director, where he provides high level oversight and direction finest.
Walt is a great friend of those of us who work in research, commercialisation apart from anything else.
He's been there and he's done that himself, and he understands the art of the possible.
And I think sometimes the art of the impossible team. He has a distinguished and very diverse career in science and technology.
He's been executives in large and small corporations in US government, non-profits and other public sector settings.
He's been a founder, a CEO and a president in an impressively large number of technology companies and has also served as managing director of tech,
commercialisation and partnerships at the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.
He's developed and led a number of national programmes to support technology commercialisation and is spearheading a number of initiatives in the US,
which I think he's going to share with us. Well, please come take Steve. Alison, thank you so much for your kind remarks.
Phil, Tony, thank you for gathering us here together in in Oxford.
I'm actually wearing a US UK pin.
With all due respect to all of our international guests and participants as well, there's so much that we have to share.
And I think bringing this community of practise together to look at how we drive innovation
value from fundamental science and technology investment is absolutely critical.
I'm delighted that Sir Mark began his remarks talking about the power of the atomic clock and how transformational that research has been.
The latest generation of atomic clocks from this Boulder Laboratories have been recently published,
and it's plus or minus one second in thirty three billion years.
So prior to the onset of the known universe, we can now exquisitely understand time,
which enables us not only to do the traditional things like advanced communication synchronisation of GPS,
but also to understand fundamental properties of gravity and and so many other elements that are important to the future of innovation,
technology transfer and innovation are interlinked.
And with all due respect, the investment of however many pounds, dollars, yen,
whatever it happens to be in fundamental research ultimately needs to be linked in a very purposeful way with the commercial marketplace,
with entrepreneurship, with sources of capital, with the ability to lead corporations through uncertain times.
And so I'll be describing for you today a little bit about the role that and I asked
the National Institute of Standards and Technology plays in the United States.
I'm delighted that we have a number of our partners here in the room, including Amex Day of Board Representative,
a part of the Manufacturing USA Network, for which Nest has a coordinating oversight.
The mission is really quite simple. We're part of the US Department of Commerce with the National Metrology Institute for the United States,
so I just had the thrill of visiting with the eggs in Teddington here at the National Physical Laboratory, a sister agency of of of nest.
This actually has a very broad remit in innovation and industrial competitiveness.
And so as part of the U.S. Department of Commerce,
we actually take a different lens on the R&D cycle because we focus on linking it actually with investment and with manufacturing integration.
It's about having the ability to measure things with exquisite precision.
And as Lord Kelvin famously said, not too far away from here.
Worse, the effect of to measure is to know.
And so our ability to understand and control at the fundamental level is absolutely critical to the scientific enterprise.
But perhaps even as importantly, our engineering, our manufacturing enterprise as well.
And so Nest has oversight for the advanced manufacturing national programmes in the United States of America,
as well as oversight for technology transfer and innovation policy.
So although we are fundamentally a non regulatory agency through the authorities vested in the Secretary of Commerce and then hence through to me,
we have the oversight for the legislation in the United States.
The By Dole Act, for example, which has been so critical to US innovation through the clarity of ownership of intellectual
property rights for their deployment in the betterment of society through commercialisation.
And in this sense, commercialisation is not a bad word, although it's often misunderstood.
Just at a glance, this is an organisation that is about half and half of federal employees,
as well as associates that include a large body of postdoctoral fellows, visiting scientists from corporations from academia.
And this provides a unique sort of melting pot environment to to bring concepts from the laboratory
into commercial reality or consider Industries National Laboratory in the United States.
This is one of the reasons why we carry out this sort of unique role of bridging from foundational research into manufacturing implementation.
We're home to five Nobel prises directly and have contributed to many, many more,
and the majority of those are actually in the areas of quantum science and physics.
At our two major campuses in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Boulder, Colorado.
And in addition, Mist has close relationships with academia across the United States.
There are 11 collaborative institutes and an equal number of centres of excellence across the United States,
with America's leading universities to provide funding,
but perhaps more importantly,
access and sharing of knowledge and and the ability then to to move technology concepts into into commercial reality more effectively.
In addition, along the bottom. Let's see if that actually actually works.
So we coordinate a Manufacturing USA institute, so I'll describe those momentarily across every state of the Union in the United States.
There are a series of manufacturing extension partnership programmes that represent support for small
to medium sized enterprises and and also provide support for entrepreneurs and access to capital.
And it's one of the powerful networks in the US that provides tremendous leverage for the US taxpayer.
In addition to the Baldrige Performance Excellence programme is another public private partnership.
I'll describe momentarily the priorities in the United States are not too dissimilar from those that we've heard about from Sir Mark today.
The ones that missed addresses as a primary focus are looking to the future of structural biology and all elements of understanding,
as well as control of biological systems, and then translating that into the manufacturing setting.
The Internet of Things and Advanced Communications, including 5G artificial intelligence.
I'm pleased to be one of the co-leads of the High Commission on Artificial Intelligence in the US,
and it's an exciting time also to be a co-lead of the Quantum Initiative.
The National Quantum Initiative, which has some similarities with the UK programme, part of the Quantum Science Programme at Nest,
involves a quantum economic development consortium that's managed together with Stanford Research Institute on the West Coast.
But it brings together 60 plus of the leading United States based and global multinationals focussed on implementation,
early deployment of quantum based technologies.
And one of the wonderful elements about this is that the early adoption opportunities are in the areas of measurement,
science metrology, which brings nest in the United States to a very important role.
In addition, our work in advanced manufacturing. I'll describe in in a moment in greater detail,
but it's a focus of the United States policy and the industries of the future to create a stronger bedrock of connecting academia,
the corporate sector and public private partnerships to advance advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity and privacy.
Many of you may know about in this framework that's been used in cybersecurity around the world,
and we're leading the development of a privacy framework that's not a regulatory focus.
It really focuses on enabling innovation by embedding appropriate principles into a
privacy framework and then disaster resilience as another area of great focus for next.
Translating the knowledge of what happens in wind storms and fires and earthquakes volcanoes.
I was just at the Volcano Observatory that's run with the U.S. Geological Survey in the Big Island off of Hawaii last week,
and the atomic clocks are being used there now as part of measuring.
Gravitational acceleration forces, and it's an exciting time in measurement science to to translate into very practical value,
community resilience, building and infrastructure resilience.
And so in addition to our traditional roles and documentary standards and measurement dissemination, technology transfer is a great focus.
As Alison graciously introduced, this is a passion for me as well, but it's also part of my job.
And so it's it's a great thing to see these things come together.
I mentioned these public private partnerships briefly. The Manufacturing Extension Partnership is an interesting model.
It ties in with the Small Business Innovation Research Programme of SBIR. You may have heard about that.
It takes a portion of the direct federal appropriation for science and technology and applies it for collaborative research with with industry.
The MEP focuses actually on tracking its impacts very, very closely because as we measure, we develop greater understanding and independent studies.
Most recently have shown that for every one tax dollar that comes into this programme,
fourteen point four tax dollars in personal income tax alone are directly attributed to this public private partnership.
It's an interesting way of government to look at our own tax dollars out versus tax dollars back into the Treasury.
So measuring those types of returns on investment as we look to the future are very,
very important for the validation of of how government invests on behalf of its public.
Manufacturing USA Institute. I'll describe those in greater detail.
The Baldrige Performance Excellence programme is quite interesting.
It was created some 30 plus years ago as as the United States was facing really a crisis of manufacturing quality.
We were looking at Japan and Asian countries and their work in the automotive sector and saying, Hey,
wait a minute, we need to to wake up to to celebrate and to stimulate quality in our organisations.
And so the Baldrige Performance Excellence programme is another public private partnership under the wing of Niss,
but it's managed with a private foundation, independent foundation.
And so for government to work effectively with the private sector, having independent bodies is a very useful construct.
And and so the Baldrige Foundation ultimately works with Nest in administering this highest level
recognition for U.S. organisations and we ourselves at Nest in terms of the management practises,
the best, best practises for leadership and strategy and human capital development utilise this framework as well.
United States face the need for a national strategic plan around advanced manufacturing focussed on economic impacts, manufacturing employment.
Looking at the fact that we have many dynamic areas,
some of them were already mentioned this morning looking at Boston and Silicon Valley and Denver and Austin, Texas.
Even places in the sort of unexpected parts of the United States are really building clusters of innovation that are attracting capital.
And we're serial entrepreneurs find a whole because of the co-location that the ability to access the clusters.
And so the Manufacturing USA institutes are certainly part of the national strategic plan in the United States for advanced manufacturing.
And and the goal is, although we have seen ourselves initially as a source of so many innovations that
could then be commercialised elsewhere as one makes one learns and it's it's very,
very important to have that core manufacturing base in the industries of the future.
This was outlined in the Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing.
The next led on behalf of the nation. It was a very, very close partnership with the manufacturing and the academic community as well.
And the vision is is to ensure national security and economic prosperity through advanced manufacturing
leadership with a series of goals that include the development and transition of new manufacturing technologies.
I invite you to review the strategy for American leadership in advanced manufacturing.
I believe you'll find it instructive and perhaps some elements will be of value in the UK or in whichever country.
You are from to educate, train and connect the manufacturing workforce.
Again, this is an area where we see that the public private partnerships, the manufacturing institutes,
as well as manufacturing extension partnership plays an important role of tying the laboratory to the marketplace.
And then lastly, the objectives and priorities under expanding the capabilities of the domestic manufacturing supply chain.
Manufacturing USA is part of the solution, as I indicated, it's all about connecting people early stage ideas,
but then resources and a shared portfolio of advanced manufacturing projects with a focus on industrial competitiveness that that the corporations,
as well as the academic institutes who are part of these centres,
then can have access to facilities that no individual company would be able to build on its own.
Certainly for entrepreneurial business, having access to pilot plants,
having the ability to validate technologies and scale up their systems provides de-risking in the eyes of the investor.
And so the Manufacturing USA programme provides those elements as well.
And it's all about taking our manufacturing readiness levels to to the to the right here to number 10.
So it's not trial technology readiness levels because that does not define Mac manufacturability per se.
And so this brings sort of a new lens,
a new vision for translating technologies from the laboratory into the marketplace by demonstrating manufacturing capacity and capability.
Because at the end of the day, investors, even early stage investors are going to require the validation of taking concepts through this gap
so that so that they can take it on effectively invest with the appropriate degree of confidence.
As someone who's a former head of a venture fund and also who's who's led a
series of companies from start up to public markets or to to acquisition exits,
it's important to have that credibility of the technology.
So the idea and the proof of concept, so much more of it is required to be advanced for the private sector with its own risk tolerance.
We know that the government sponsors early stage technologies, which is by definition a high risk venture.
But then in other elements, government is highly risk averse, right?
It's it's a unique dichotomy that we that we face.
And so developing new tools, new approaches to bridge the gap, new concepts,
constructs that enable management of conflict of interest and perception of conflict of interest is indeed a very important step.
So let me point out Ms. Rd in Chicago and and the close collaboration with a series of universities in Northwestern being a key player.
They are focussed on digital manufacturing. It went through a name change.
It's quite interesting that its previous name, DMG,
I was actually directly adopted by the Chinese Manufacturing Institute and indeed the US Advanced Manufacturing Strategic Plan.
We found online the following day translated into Chinese, and it's fine.
So this, you know, this is the world of open innovation, right?
So we make it available to the world and we have to look at competing now in much more intelligent ways than in in previous times.
One of the other institutes that I'll just point out is called nimble.
It's it's actually a unique location. It's it's built on a brownfield site.
It's the old Chrysler manufacturing plant for automobiles in Delaware.
It's it's a bit of a metaphor like a phoenix has arisen out of the ashes of the old line industry 3.0 regime,
and now we have the National Institute for Innovation in Biopharmaceuticals,
a strong public private partnership bringing the world's leading biopharma manufacturers together with the entrepreneurs,
together with academia, together with the federal sector and a very unique model for for leverage.
Once again, it's creating an environment for innovation as it's creating connexions between people,
early stage companies, strategic corporate investors, the larger players who are part of the the institute.
And I visited quite a few of these institutes already in my time as undersecretary of commerce,
and I must say that they are transformational because communities that were once seen as.
As derelict or old line manufacturing sectors have moved away because new technologies have come in or have been offshored,
it creates now that vitality of of rebuilding workforce,
of of driving entrepreneurship into the economy and creating access to seed and expansion capital.
So I talked before about part of my job and innovation, and I use the term return on investment in another context already.
My boss, Wilbur Ross is is also a person who's had a long career in investment.
And he resonated when he and I first met.
Just talking about the concept of ROIC in federally funded research and innovation and taking the broadest possible definition of return.
We're not just talking about financial returns or economic returns, but we're talking about returns to society.
We're talking about returns to our people. And so it's important for us to consider the social dimensions.
I love the fact that Sir Mark used the term steam with regard to the the previous industrial revolution,
as well as to its importance in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics today.
Our goal in the United States is to continue to innovate how we innovate,
and we've seen that that there's been great power in the previous policy construct.
The By Dole Act has been very, very important for us,
but the federally funded research in our national laboratories or federal laboratory complex has not been as productive,
if you will, because of some of the challenges that are just in place due to policy and and the regulatory as well as legislative constructs.
Our goal, together with the White House, with the Office of Science and Technology Policy,
is to address some of the root cause challenges for for slowing down innovation
in certain key sectors and to modernise our system for the 21st century,
to take to take the long view and and to address some of the challenges, including regulatory burdens,
some of the structural challenges and in many cases, it's all leadership and culture issue.
And so I'm in the midst of transforming my organisation of the National Institute of Standards and Technology with a new
structure to bring a long term focus on these challenges and the role of technology transfer and innovation is actually part
of the job description of the scientific leadership as well of the organisation to reinforce the fact that how we measure
our scientists performance is not just on the factors of their of their papers and the number of scientific publications,
but we actually look at the impact of the work that we that they do in impacting society positively.
So the U.S. invests around one hundred and fifty billion dollars per year in R&D.
About one third of that is at the three 000 plus federal laboratories.
This is the host institution for the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer,
and we report annually to Congress and to the president on how we're doing as a nation and technology transfer.
Two thirds of that is extramural research, primarily at universities and collaborations with R&D institutes and with industry.
And our goal is to have a much more purposeful connexion on the innovation cycle with this research that creates the seed corn for the industries,
for the opportunities of the future. We certainly have come a long way over over the past decades.
1980 was when the Stevenson, Weidler and the biofuel acts actually were written into law.
And we see, however, that our our networks are absolutely critical to create high,
high fidelity connexions between the government, between our universities,
between our federal labs, our research organisations, entrepreneurs, investors,
including strategic investors as well, who will do some of the larger deals.
We also need to look at new models for how early stage and and venture capital investment is managed in the future.
And so looking at these networks provide access to resources and talent on a shared basis.
It's important. The Lab to Market Initiative, I co-lead with Michael Kratsios, who's the deputy assistant to the president for technology policy,
and it brings together all the science and technology agencies in the US.
You know, actually a very close partnership, despite what one reads about fractured politics and and polarisation, et cetera.
I must say that the science and technology complex in the US has been working in a very close, harmonious and coordinated way.
And and I'm delighted that that we see the need for continuing to move the needle on innovation for the United States forward.
We took a lot of time over the last year to listen to stakeholders across the United States,
as well as to benchmark globally, and the results of the input request for information is public.
It's on the Nest website, and the summary report of the national conversation is also available in an analysis report
that Nest has issued that we call our return on investment initiative the Green Paper.
It's this special publication one two three four easy to remember, easy to find on on our website.
But the idea here is to have five overarching strategies and five key findings, as well as other opportunities for changing policy,
including tax policy to incentivise innovation at the interface between the universities and an industry to invest in early stage,
higher risk enterprises. And and the findings are in in these five categories.
Identify the regulatory impediments, as well as the administrative improvements that we can implement in federal tech transfer policies in practise.
Recognising that this is the driver for innovation.
It's not just about random diffusion of knowledge, but this is focussed directed movement of technology from the laboratory to the market,
increased engagement between the private sector investors and the public sector research and development community.
Investing in building a more entrepreneurial R&D workforce. Learning from one another as we are at fora such as we experienced today,
supporting innovative tools and services for technology transfer, making them easy to find making deals easy to do.
New agile approaches to entering consortia, collaborations, public private partnerships and.
And in many ways, since the applications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence to help people find cluster,
utilise technologies and build upon them for the enterprises of the future.
So tech transfer is something it's a term that's actually misunderstood by so many.
When I'm in the US and I talk about technology transfer and I'm speaking to somebody in the trade area.
They're thinking about sort of forced technology transfer and compulsory licences.
And as a result of trade deals that all of a sudden the technology rights are exhausted in the host country and given to the recipient country.
So in some ways, we have to find the right kind of language to describe what it is that innovation professionals do.
But at the end of the day, it's looking broadly fulfilling the public and the private need driving innovation,
economic value through all the tools, the resources that are available to us in the 21st century.
I look forward to our conversation with you today. Here's my contact detail.
Walter Kopen at Niseko and thank you again for your attention, and I look forward to our discussion again.
Thanks. Do you want to have the middle seat? I'm on the middle again.
Yeah, thank you. Well, thank you very much for that. Really, really appreciate your talk and just the the breadth and range.
And it's it's very clear that there are a number of common themes there, just in terms of elements like clustering,
the importance of place, the sense of the different kinds of initiatives to get industry to engage.
So we're going to now move into a short Q&A session and I'm going to join the boys on the committee chairs.
Indeed. Yeah. So I think we are going to open it up to the audience, but I guess to to kick off one,
there's a question from me and I think Mark called it the knowledge diffusion,
saying, you know, terrific at engaging many companies, but yet there were more to engage in.
I know this is something that we often battle with in Ireland. I mean, about half of our audience, something does actually come from businesses,
but that's still not enough and it's still not enough of the companies involved.
I'm just interested with the the variety of mechanisms and the strategic planning that's going on around this in both the U.K. and the USA.
What more could we be doing or what more could industry be doing to really
target those companies who don't yet really engage with the research system,
but for whom such engagement would really lead to good innovation? I'm OK.
So, I mean, I think one's going to break the problem down a bit,
so there's a diffusion from the bleeding edge to the leading edge, and that sort of happens,
all right, because these are the very high tech universities companies, but it's actually getting from the leading to the sort of medium.
And then the trailing edge is a real issue.
So I mean, there's no single magic bullet points that companies building capacity through their supply chain is really important.
And so companies themselves,
the big companies play an enormously important role in technology diffusion because actually they help their supply chain if they're sensible.
And actually, I think there is something important at the moment with increasing industrial digitisation about building standards as well,
because actually,
if you're a big company in principle, you can have your widget digitally specified and built by a company anywhere in the world, potentially.
And we'll see much more micro in local manufacturing in the UK.
We've got the catapult network. And that's an important part of their job.
But if you talk to businesses and I think one of the big challenges at the moment is in this digital world,
there are all sorts of people trying to sell technological solutions to small companies, and it's very difficult for them to be good customers.
And I think we all recognise that in our everyday lives, we've been flooded with offers for technology that will make our homes smarter.
It's people we want to be smarter than homes, but then we leave that site,
and the message that comes across from several sectors is that the people of the sort of small businesses that are perhaps at the trailing edge,
they value peer. Technology transfer, in other words, they will believe people who are in the same places then who have been customers,
and it's how do you turn people into good customers? That's the big challenge with diffusion.
And I think it's it's about how you engage peer networks that's going to be really important, wolf.
Yeah, I think those are those are marvellous points.
And to the discussion around standardisation for entrepreneurial ventures as well as for existing companies,
it's absolutely imperative to have standards to provide credibility for new products,
for market adoption and and for entry into a trusted supply chain.
We're facing, I think, a resurgence of of focus in the United States around manufacturing and supply chain integrity.
And what this means is that we need to provide more opportunities for engagement.
I use the term network development and cluster engagement several times in my discussion today.
And so providing these abilities for organisations to meet with one another to make it easy
to find technologies and expertise in a way that's credible and validated is is so important.
And then I mentioned also the of the need to incentivise, in some ways, industry to come back to the interface.
Many of the corporations in the US, the UK and other nations are global players and we'll have global R&D centres and they will shop their
technology projects and their development projects to where they believe the best available resources are.
And so I think it's imperative for corporations to look globally at at their resource base, but also to be re incentivised, if you will,
to come back to their home markets to look at the UK based opportunities to look at the US based opportunities in a fresh way as we reposition,
in many cases, the opportunities for entrepreneurship.
Connexion with the capital community. And then also for the corporate strategic investor,
as well as for the larger R&D based corporations to access the technologies through public private partnership came over to the audience now,
and I have to tell you, we have a few beaming lights here and I don't quite see you.
If you'd like to talk to you, can you wave you have a question vigorously?
Yes. Sorry. Alice Frost from Research England,
I want to ask about place because we are about to publish some papers from Cambridge University and one from Philip McCann at
Sheffield University described the UK as like the inequalities of the eurozone in the space of Wyoming in terms of its extremes.
And if you look at the map of America, a something like the distribution of venture capital.
What you find is actually an increasing concentration in the East and West Coast, with the flyover states having very little.
I just wonder, do we need a next? Do we need another generation of policies to address these kind of inequalities
in if we're going to accept a world of entrepreneurship and capitalism,
are we going to have to think of a whole new set of techniques to address what seems to be inequalities that are growing, not reducing?
Yeah. I also think that's a wonderful question. And in in the US, this certainly is an area of great focus because the white space between the coasts,
as well as the concentration areas for venture and for innovation,
permit great opportunities for the research universities and for cluster development, as well as for the use of the power of the network.
So, for example, the New York Caressa and Silicon Valley Koretz, who in terms of early stage investment,
actually are now increasingly working together to look at deal flow from across the nation.
And so as that network of early stage investors, as well as the the seed stage investors become more sophisticated.
That in itself creates those greater opportunities for growth.
So I think we're going to see a confluence and a necessary confluence of both a policy push
to create this as a national opportunity in the US that includes within Wyoming itself.
But but also, I believe in many countries, these same types of issues have arisen as a real pleasure for me to be in Youngstown, Ohio, where we are.
The America Make Centre, which focuses on additive manufacturing and so on, has been revitalising this old steel town.
And it's it's a thrill to see these clusters, even though it's not even on the map of venture investment yet in the United States.
But the number of companies that are created and the amount of capital sources that
are coming together from a diffused source are now becoming increasingly available.
So I believe we're going to have to use all the instruments available to encourage those types of developments.
So I think you have to look at place through the lens of people. And so what makes a good place for people?
It's where you can live, work and play. And so we actually have an advantage in that.
We're rather a small country geographically.
And so it's partly about the physical cluster, but it's also partly about enlarging the physical cluster effectively by good transport, for example.
And so if you can move around easily and of course, transport works in two ways it's moving people around, but it's also moving work around.
And so increasingly, people are going to be able to do things remotely.
And so I think as we're looking through simply the policy of the concentration of things in a physical space is only part of the issue.
It's how you make that concentration more available. And if you just put the UK on the map of the United States,
we are on quite a small place overall and so we ought to be able to do much better than we are.
And I must say, when Andrew Witty did his work in about 2013 commissioned by the government to look at strengths around the UK,
you will find that there is serious excellence in many, many parts of the country.
So if you look across the south of Scotland, for example, you'll find this amazing photonics cluster.
You find gaming around Dundee and Abertay.
You look at the Northeast and you find renewable energy. You start mapping out the country and you find actually,
we are in a very good position to have very advanced technological clusters right across the UK.
And I think that's the challenge. And it's not about Plonking and Nanotechnology Institute in every coastal city of the UK.
That's not the right answer. It is about building on strengths. You have to have a bit of kindling in order to actually get the cluster to grow.
But I think one just got to look at it. I think if you look at it through the lens, people work out what makes people want to be in a place.
And it's actually, again, my culture is simple. What makes a place attractive to live is where you can play.
So it's an interesting problem. And the.
The idea of designing strategy on Play Right film will probably kill me, so I'm going to be a bit bold,
but I think it would be if we just didn't at least reach four for one more
question from the audience and risk of running a little over here on the left.
Yeah. Thanks, Alison. Leonard Hobson from Trinity College Dublin. You both mentioned steam in your conversations.
Come up there again about culture, which is very interesting because I for me,
I think a lot of the future is about creativity, supports innovation and creativity and innovation.
However, engaging industry with the arts was like the arts,
and the creative side of universities is an even tougher challenge than trying to get industry to engage with, say, the STEM and the technology side.
So what? What advice or how would you see? How do you crack that particular chestnut to get the traditional, say,
the tech industries of the bio industries to engage in the creative side of universities?
I think to the to the point that was made about about work, live, play,
the the arts are and the humanities more broadly are, I believe, an underutilised resource for innovation in itself.
But there are also a tremendous resource for corporations and in terms of the quality of life for their people,
wherever they happen to be living, as well as in many cases, areas for for innovation and and investment.
I've seen many of the arts incubators and and new start-ups across the United States,
and it's not the traditional corporations that are going to be investing in them,
but they're very interested in the outputs for the quality of life of their people and for the vibrancy of their communities.
Yes, I'm not convinced that it is that difficult to engage. Look, who made Apple all their money?
Actually, Jonathan Ive from the University of Northumbria with a design background who took their technology and humanised it.
And I think the great opportunity now is about humanising technologies,
about making it attractive and easy to use, particularly with the demographic transitions we're going through.
And I think you see lots of examples of where, for example, at Imperial College,
the partnership between the engineering and the Royal College of Art around the corner, we're seeing this increasingly.
I mean, I think the you get Google DeepMind, what makes their interfaces powerful is that they actually have psychologists.
They have designers making it. It's an effective interface.
And so I think that the big, if successful and indeed some of the small, successful, innovative companies have really got it.
Look at the company improbable, which is a UK, one of the many UK unicorns that was a company that started as a gaming company, so computer games.
But it realised that the worlds, the virtual worlds it was modelling and creating could be the real worlds that it could model.
And of course, one of the great opportunities which we haven't really talked about is a digital twinning.
So we thought a fair bit about A.I., but the extraordinary opportunity of a digital twinning to model products,
processes and reduce the R&D costs, all of this depends on the creative industries.
And so I think that the door is wide open, actually.
I was particularly struck by that our Institute for Manufacturing Research in Dublin actually has a couple of psychologists embedded,
very focussed that you were talking about. So psychologically, I may be a little under pressure.
I'm looking at Phil. Would you like which to draw to a close relative? One more question.
One more question. Thank you. References. Jeremy Long from the Oxigeno Local Enterprise Partnership.
I think there's been some fascinating remarks made about place, but I'm going to go on digging a little more in the time we have,
because in what you've talked about, you've mentioned global R&D centres, technology diffusion.
I mean, who do you believe in? A UK context should own the thinking about place and trying to take it forward.
Because when you talk about live, work and play, those touch upon so many different political organisations, local organisations,
all of whom aren't particularly well joined up in making the very best out of the place that any of us try and live and work and play in.
Since you mentioned you came about stuff, and I think the idea that there should be a single owner is probably wrong,
but I think if you look at the sort of political trends in recent years,
there is obviously a big focus on place in government for very obvious reasons because of course, place goes with votes as well.
But you see the rise of mayors probably slower than the United States,
but you see the power of what's happened in Manchester with the sort of combination of had been seen as a leader.
Richard Lees, you see what's happened with mayors around the country?
Ultimately, if you want a place to work, it's going to be the places themselves where the leadership is.
And so I think you need national support. You obviously need to connect to create the national network of transport links places together.
But then you have to have the sort of local networks of transport as well.
That means, for example, that East Anglia is connected to Cambridge, that Cambridge is connected to Oxford.
And you can see much more conversation about this than you did before. You can see the conversation amendment about the railway across the north.
So Place doesn't reside in any one area. And of course, none of this is new.
You go back to people like Patrick Geddes and his work at the end of the 19th century,
Jane Jacobs in the United States, who did these amazing studies of the death and birth of the Great American city.
So I think responsibility placed lies ultimately in places with citizens, with communities.
But it has to be the national government has to provide a facilitated framework.
Well, yeah, the the challenges are, of course, are in every place indeed.
And so the concept of regional identity, but also a degree of regional and local ownership is absolutely essential.
I mentioned the manufacturing extension partnerships as one of the important tools for innovation.
And it's actually the states and the local regions that are actually the key investors there.
It's not from the federal side because they care about their local place from the federal side.
I mean, quite clearly, there's a goal to enhance quality of life and economic vitality and so on across the entire nation.
But but there are unique requirements in many cases, their unique relationship that need to be built or in some cases rebuilt,
where there may be differences in socio economic or political outlook within a very localised area.
And so creating a coalition that overcomes those types of local or personal interests for the regional good is is essential.
While I was in New York, we created a regional cluster that we called Accelerate Long Island that actually brought
together all the political districts and all the economic districts around a common umbrella.
The state of New York was convinced at that time to allocate a portion of the Public Employees Pension Fund to invest in local businesses.
And that was such a successful programme because it resulted not only in job creation,
but also retention within the region that that the local power then has the ability to cascade much more broadly.
But coalition building and and creating a sense of harmony and an understanding of the resources that are
available within the place that the community wishes to build upon is an absolutely essential series of steps.
Thank you. I'm sure we could probably be here talking for an awful lot longer, but I think I get shot in the work.
Thank you so much. A terrific start to the event.