2015/HLPD-STHE/019 Session 4-2

Transcription

1 2015/HLPD-STHE/019 Session 4-2 Ensuring Relevance, Utilization, and Contributions of the Products of Science and Technology in Higher Education to Economic Development in the APEC Region on the Topic of Smart Analytics and Engineering Innovations Purpose: Information Submitted by: United States High Level Policy Dialogue on Science and Technology in Higher Education Manila, Philippines August 2015

2 Remarks Dr. Frances Colon, Acting Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State, and U.S. Head of Delegation Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation High Level Policy Dialogue on Science and Technology in Higher Education August 13-14, 2015, 9:50 a.m. 10:00 a.m., Manila, Philippines Ensuring Relevance, Utilization, and Contributions of the Products of Science and Technology in Higher Education to Economic Development in the APEC Region on the topic of Smart Analytics and Engineering Innovations Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here in dynamic Manila, to come together with fellow APEC economies to discuss the importance of science and technology in higher education, while enjoying the warm hospitality of our Filipino hosts. I would like to thank Honorable Dr. Licuanan, Honorable Secretary Montejo, the APEC Secretariat, Distinguished APEC participants, and our Philippines APEC hosts for the opportunity to speak to you today on such an important topic. I have here behind me an image from the White House Demo day, held earlier this month. This is one way the United States is working to nurture innovation and entrepreneurship. This event showcased startup founders and announced new public- and private-sector commitments that will provide more Americans particularly women and those from underrepresented racial groups with the opportunity to grow these ideas. Higher Education as the Starting Place for Innovation: Historically, many of the scientific discoveries that have changed the world and that we take for granted have originated in research laboratories at institutions of higher learning. 1

3 Rocket fuel, seatbelts, ultrasounds, bar codes, insulin, polio vaccines, the electron microscope, and DNA testing are only a handful of examples of high impact innovations that have been born out of research and development at institutes of higher learning. APEC economies have played an important role in supporting research and development in higher education and today we see that companies born out of universities are contributing to the innovation ecosystem and sparking economic growth. For example, you may have heard the story of two graduate students at Stanford University, supported by federal grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, who began work on an Internet search engine in The two students went on to start Google. Similarly, engineering students from University of Waterloo and University of Windsor founded the Canadian company Research In Motion. Today every employee at the U.S. Department of State, myself included, relies on one of their most well-known innovations: the BlackBerry. There are many examples, but you get the point: the innovations that are born at institutions of higher learning often yield a great return on investment and have a tremendous economic impact. Recipe for the Innovation Ecosystem: This process depends, first and foremost, on the establishment of an innovation ecosystem that has many components. At the heart of this innovation ecosystem is the higher education system. Fundamentally, innovation comes from people, and their education teaches them to be inquisitive and seek solutions to the world s problems. 2

4 We continuously work to improve and strengthen our educational system, so that more students are well trained in the sciences, mathematics, engineering, and the scientific way of thinking, and also become interested in pursuing careers that depend on these disciplines. In the US we are struggling with this issue and it is a major concern when a majority of jobs in the coming years will require these technical skills. Women in S&T: We also recognize that we have to work harder to build capacity that is inclusive. In the United States, women hold only 24% of scientific, technological, and engineering jobs in our nation s workforce, despite the fact that we account for nearly half of the college educated workforce. Looking at technology industry giants like Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, women hold less than 20% of technology jobs. This is a big problem. In a world dependent on innovation, we need every bright, creative mind we have. This is more than an issue of diversity and equal opportunity; it is also an economic issue. By 2020, it is projected that in the US we will face a 300,000+ deficit in talent to support positions in science, technology, engineering, and math fields where women remain underrepresented. Women make up half of the world s population and it is neither socially, nor economically, beneficial to neglect this tremendous source of human capital. But to see this change happen, we have to actively work to promote, support, and nurture women and girls in science and technology. In the United States, efforts led by government, academia, and industry are working towards this goal, but we recognize that we have a long way to go. We are encouraged to hear that we are not alone in this effort, and that our 3

5 fellow APEC economies recognize the importance of enhancing the participation of women in science and technology. Culture of Innovation: In addition to inclusive capacity building, the U.S. recognizes that policies that support a stable and predictable legal and policy regime for intellectual property are an important component of encouraging innovation. We also work to develop policies that support free exchange of information in fundamental research, greater private sector investment, and bankruptcy policies that permit second chances. We believe that together, through science and technology, the government, private sector and institutions of higher education can nurture innovation and economic growth. Federal Support for Basic Research Spurs Innovation: One of the ways that the U.S. government and institutes of higher education work together to accomplish this is through federal support for the basic research that is done at universities. Historically, many commercial applications of innovations have started with very basic scientific discoveries and many companies would not be where they are today without the initial support of the federal government. The company irobot started with a few MIT scientists hoping to make practical robots a reality. With funding from U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), these researchers grew irobot into a $299 million public company 4

6 The research that ultimately led to the development of Siri, the first massmarket assistant capable of recognizing and responding to natural human speech patterns, came out of research efforts by Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon that received federal support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The U.S. Federal Government spends more than $130 billion on research and development each year, most of which is conducted at universities and federal labs. This investment supports fundamental research that expands the frontiers of human knowledge, and yields extraordinary long-term economic impact through the creation of new industries often in unexpected ways. Lab-to-Market: However, we know that at U.S. universities, many of the research faculty who make the groundbreaking discoveries that have the potential to have significant social and economic impact are often not experienced with entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Education: Scientists are traditionally trained to conduct experiments, publish and present their research findings, and teach students not to launch businesses. Currently, entrepreneurship is not a part of the extensive training U.S. scientists receive, but we are hoping to change that. In an effort to equip innovators with a more business-like mindset, the U.S. National Science Foundation started Innovation Corps, or I-Corps, to provide scientists and engineers with training and programs that prepare them to engage with and learn from entrepreneurs and to identify market opportunities from their academic research. 5

7 I-Corps is a boot camp for technology-based start-ups that requires researchers to think as entrepreneurs encouraging them to assess their product s commercial viability while still in development, and developing their business acumen to smooth the transition of ideas from the lab to the market. By pitching ideas to investors and business experts throughout the research and development process, rather than at its end, these camps identify, early on, the ventures and ideas most likely to be profitable in the marketplace. For example, I-Corps enabled Professor Ayanna Howard of the Georgia Institute of Technology to launch a startup based on her research, to help people with disabilities interact with computers. Dr. Canek Fuentes-Hernandez, is working to commercialize technology for use on a medical imaging device that uses high speed shutter technology to replace X-rays with a completely harmless medical imaging system. Whether a successful company is launched or not, I-Corps researchers return to their labs and classrooms with greater business savvy and improved ability to nurture entrepreneurial thinking in their students. This further strengthens the innovation ecosystem by teaching risk and failure as well. This program has been so successful that the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. National Institutes of Health are piloting the same model to move energy and health research ideas to the marketplace. The U.S. Department of Energy has also recently announced the National University Clean Energy Business Challenge. This national initiative will provide student participants with the skills needed to transform promising energy technologies from U.S. universities into innovative energy products. 6

8 The National Science Foundation has also launched a national Center based at Stanford University for teaching innovation and entrepreneurship to undergraduates studying engineering. This center addresses the critical need for entrepreneurial engineers across the United States and will provide a hub for sharing innovation and entrepreneurship resources among the almost 350 engineering schools in the U.S. My own home agency, the U.S. Department of State also leads an effort called Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) that works to empower science and technology entrepreneurs in emerging economies. Since 2011, the GIST initiative has enabled more than 2.8 million innovators to overcome challenges. GIST has also provided training to more than 4,800 startups that have generated more than $110 million in revenue. The annual Tech-I competition is one of the GIST activities that is used to empower young science and technology entrepreneurs to advance their startups with access to coaching, seed funding, and networking which also strengthens their local communities. This year we had several winners from APEC economies: A Mexican entrepreneur, Dr. Carlos Francisco Bernal, won an award for GlucosAlarm, which is a diabetic urine glucose sensor that sends information electronically to patients physicians. Also, an entrepreneur from the Philippines, Dr. Ibrahim Bernardo, won for Sari Software Solutions, which is a microenterprise project intended to empower sari-sari store operators through greater financial knowledge. By providing researchers and students with the knowledge and skills to become entrepreneurs, the U.S. aims to accelerate the economic impact of innovations in science and technology. 7

9 Government Support for Manufacturing Innovation: In addition to promoting entrepreneurship education in universities, the U.S. has also begun to take efforts to encourage and incentivize manufacturers in the private sector to take on the high-risk, high-reward innovations that often originate from the basic research conducted at universities. Unlike other industrialized countries, the U.S. federal government has historically done very little to address the high-risk activity of taking fundamental discoveries and transforming them into manufactured products. As a consequence, many technologies rooted in U.S. research fail to mature to full scale-up and commercialization. To address this, President Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which brings together industry, universities, and the federal government to invest in the emerging technologies that create high-quality manufacturing jobs. In his 2013 and 2014 State of the Union Addresses, the President called for the creation of a Nationwide Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) to connect academia to industry and scale up advanced manufacturing technologies and processes. The federally backed National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) is intended to create a competitive, effective, and sustainable infrastructure for U.S. industry and academia to collectively solve industryrelevant problems. As a first step in building a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, the Administration is funding a pilot institute for additive manufacturing (3-D printing). 8

10 Another exciting element of the President s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership is the National Robotics Initiative. The focus of this initiative is on developing robots that work with or beside people to extend or augment human capabilities, taking advantage of the different strengths of humans and robots. The National Robotics Initiative aims to create new opportunities in diverse areas and will support the development of robots that can increase the productivity of workers in the manufacturing sector; assist astronauts in dangerous and expensive missions; help scientists accelerate the discovery of new, life-saving drugs; and improve food safety by rapidly sensing microbial contamination. As part of this effort, the National Science Foundation awarded a grant to Northwestern University that will support the development of technology for diving robots that can perform underwater screening in situations that would be dangerous for human divers. By encouraging more companies and manufacturers to take on the high riskhigh reward innovations found in academic research labs, such as robotics development, the U.S. aims to facilitate the lab to market process. Start Up America: Another White House initiative, Start Up America, was launched in 2011 as a three-year effort to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship. As part of the Start Up America effort, the President directed all U.S. federal agencies with research facilities to accelerate Lab-to-Market activities. 9

11 The Department of Defense recently awarded $1 million to Arizona State University (ASU) to create a Center of Excellence in Technology Transfer. This center will play an important role in helping the Department of Defense to substantially increase transfer of dual-use technologies developed in defense laboratories to the commercial marketplace. The National Science Foundation s Small Business Innovation Research / Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program, seeks to catalyze commercialization of technological innovations by the private sector. The program increases the incentives and opportunities for startups and small businesses to undertake cutting-edge, high-quality scientific research and development in order to advance commercialization. The success of the Start Up America initiative led to the Startup America Partnership, an independent alliance of entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other leaders joining together to fuel innovative, high-growth U.S. startups. The Startup America Partnership is now operating around the world as UP Global, which has committed to support and train 500,000 entrepreneurs in 1,000 cities over the next three years. Open Data: Also as part of the Administration s Lab-to-Market initiatives, U.S. federal agencies are publishing machine-readable data on over 700 federal research and development facilities. This wealth of data can now be utilized by entrepreneurs and innovators to research and test new technologies and allows for even greater innovation within the country. 10

12 Decades ago, the U.S. Government made both weather data and the Global Positioning System freely available. Since that time, American entrepreneurs and innovators have utilized these resources to create navigation systems, weather newscasts and warning systems, locationbased applications, precision farming tools, and much more. We have committed to responsibly unleashing data from the vaults of the U.S. government to fuel the innovation that grows the economy while also advancing U.S. government efficiency and accountability. This has made open and machine-readable data the new default for U.S. government information, taking historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs while appropriately safeguarding sensitive information and rigorously protecting privacy. In recent years, thousands of Government data resources across fields such as health and medicine, education, energy, public safety, global development, and finance have been posted in machine-readable form for free public use on Data.gov. But the U.S. is far from alone in this effort and many APEC economies, including our host for this years APEC meeting, who have established Open Data Philippines, are taking similar steps through their own government led Open Data initiatives. Universities and the private sector are also taking efforts to spread the development of open data technology and principles, upholding the idea that open data initiatives promote transparency and create economic and social value. Big Data: But, as more and more data are generated and become available, new analytical approaches are needed to harvest meaningful information from massive amounts of raw data, as some of my colleagues pointed out 11

13 yesterday. Government, industry, and academia have all gotten involved with this 21st century challenge. We are making continuous investments to fuel Big Data research and double funding for key basic research agencies. Some companies are also sponsoring Big Data-related competitions, and providing funding for university data research. Kaggle is a Big Data competition that brings together universities and corporations to answer today s biggest questions. Companies have data that data scientists crave but these companies need the brain power to interpret it. The most recent competition asked researchers to identify signs of diabetic retinopathy in eye images, the leading cause of blindness in the developed world. Universities want in on this model as a learning tool for students. Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, Berkeley, and many other U.S. universities are now hosting machine-learning competitions. Universities are also beginning to create new courses and entire fields of study to prepare the next generation of data scientists. The National Science Foundation is establishing a Big Data track as part of its Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. This new track will educate and support a new generation of researchers able to address fundamental Big Data challenges. At UC Davis, through a Research Training Groups project, undergraduates will be trained in graphical and visualization techniques for complex data. The development of student sites with big data applications to climate, image reconstruction, networks, cybersecurity and cancer are also 12

14 underway. Concluding Remarks: Whether through infrastructure, open data, manufacturing innovations, support for basic scientific research, or inclusive capacity building, the U.S., along with its fellow APEC economies, is invested in nurturing science and technology as a driver of economic growth. Institutes of higher education play a very important role in this process as incubators of scientific ideas and talent and as stakeholders in the lab to market process. It was a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak to you today and to learn more about our shared efforts in this area. I look forward to our discussion. 13