Semiconductor Technology Translation & Hard-Tech Startups Intro & Session 1: Innovation Ecosystems

Semiconductor Technology Translation & Hard-Tech Startups Intro & Session 1: Innovation Ecosystems

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my name is marty smith i have the pleasure of serving as the provost of mit and on july 1st i'm going to assume the role of president at my undergraduate alma mater rensselaer polytechnic institute i'm very happy to greet you all this morning i want to start by thanking the co-organizers of this workshop mit rpi and suny for pulling together such an exciting agenda and for giving me the opportunity to offer some opening remarks the theme of this workshop semiconductor technology translation and hard tech startups is of course a very timely theme as we await approval of a much anticipated federal government commitment to strengthen domestic semiconductor production development and research for those of us who have worked in this field for many years either in academia industry or government this is a particularly important moment and one which i believe we are all tremendously excited about and eager to help advance this important agenda but to paraphrase a tv commercial this is not your father's oldsmobile i believe that in order to seize this moment we need to be prepared to think boldly act decisively and be prepared to reinvent our practices and not be encumbered by old models of engagement this workshop will tackle one area that is ripe for work and that is the process by which we bring the work of academia to have impact through commercialization today you'll talk about regional ecosystems a very important point transfer of technology is a contact sport you need to have strength of all stakeholders in order for a region to succeed this requires collaboration amongst all that are committed to regional strength universities must seek opportunities to work together to create a commons that benefits all players in boston we've done that through the creation of joint entities like the broad institute of harvard and mit and the mass green high performance computing center the latter bringing together five universities to create shared computing infrastructure we've studied what it takes to build strong regional ecosystems and without a doubt the most important factor is when universities community colleges non-government economic development agencies and the government work together as unappointed actors to shape the agenda for the regions you're also going to discuss the perspective of industry venture investors universities and government our experience is that all these actors have a role in the commercialization of what we refer to as tough tech or hardtech we created out of mit a new entity called the engine which is a purpose-built organization to support hard tech startups and when i mentioned new models of engagement earlier i often think about a recent startup out of mit called commonwealth fusion systems or cfs for short cfs is committed to demonstrating commercially viable compact fusion reactors reactors it's hard to imagine a more important thing to work on indeed indeed one that could save the planet dare i say the work we did to structure the agreements between mit cfs their investors which included venture capital large companies and venture philanthropy required us to rewrite all the ways in which we do things and i'm pleased to say that thus far things are working extremely well you're talking as well about intellectual property this is a conversation we have to have and should be informed by identifying shared goals the goal of the university is to ensure that the ideas get put into action and that path may be by direct transfer to industry or through a startup we need to make sure all paths are open our job is not to squeeze the last percent of equity or royalty out of invention it is to make sure these agreements motivate all parties to utilize the ideas or make them available to others as a non-oper as a nonprofit institution we take a long view towards rewards that occurs when our pis and inventors remember the role that we played in helping make an impact and make them successful lastly you're going to talk about shared facilities boundaries and design tools all very critical elements particularly in the field of semiconductors we all know that when compared to other fields hard tech takes a long time to commercialize requires significant capital and expensive facilities i believe there are opportunities to address these pain points through the topics and ideas you will discuss in this session in closing let me thank you and wish you well at mit we have been delighted to work with many of you to help shape these ideas and to my colleagues in the capital region i look forward to engaging you much more deeply when i move out there in july i hope you all have a wonderful workshop today thank you provost and president-elect schmidt on behalf of my colleagues and workshop organizers from suny rpi and mit i am delighted to welcome you to the workshop on semiconductor technology translation and heart tech startups my name is vladimir vulovic i'm a professor of electrical engineering at mit and the founding director of mit nano the new 200 000 square foot shared laboratory facility that aims to redefine hands-on innovation it takes a village to grow a fledgling idea into a prototype that can then become a product that will hopefully reach millions that journey from idea to impact for new microelectronics hardware technologies tough tech as we know it typically takes over 10 years and a lot of financial support the inventive idea typically starts in an academic lab then gets prototyped probably by startup then get scaled up by the same startup or maybe by an established company and along the way there better be financial support from the venture community intellectual property agreements with university licensing offices scalable production foundries that the startup can access agreements of other stakeholders and finally the acceptance of the final customers this complex landscape is navigated by brave startup entrepreneurs whose vision and diligence is the key to the final success startups are hence the defining link in the chain of launching the new hard tech ideas and starting and sustaining more hard tech startups will generate more technology and more new jobs which will benefit the established industry partners uh nurture new industries and can lead us to the resurgence of u.s leadership in microelectronics as well as many other related fields we all recognize the need for truly disruptive semiconductor technologies but we cannot redraw the technology roadmap and concomitantly expand the u.s workforce without the national innovation ecosystem that can help these technologies to mature so standing up a national program to support this disruptive tech development will ensure the long-term national security and competitiveness in the first session of the workshop we will focus on what contributes to a thriving innovation ecosystem and how does one build one a system for hardwick startups we will hear from three distinguished speakers from both established and emerging ecosystems through their words and nuggets of wisdom this session will highlight u.s regional differences it will also suggest actions that could elevate regions seeking to expand support for hard tech entrepreneurship our first speaker is professor fiona murray professor murray is the associate dean of innovation and inclusion at the mit sloan school of management uh william porter professor of entrepreneurship and an associate of the national bureau of economic research she is also a faculty director of the mit gotham center for entrepreneurship and development and the co-director of the mit's innovation initiative professor murray serves on the british prime minister's council of science technology and has been awarded the commander of the british empire for her service to the innovation and entrepreneurship in united kingdom she is an international expert on the transformation of investment in scientific and technical innovation and into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs wealth creation and regional prosperity professor murray good morning everybody my name is professor fiona murray i'm a professor at the mit school of management and i'm absolutely delighted to be invited by professor bolovich to participate in this conference now the role that professor bilovich has given to me is to talk about innovation ecosystems and in particular to talk about the very successful ecosystem that has been created in the greater boston area so i want to take a few minutes to basically give you a sense of why i think that boston has been so successful and some of the elements that have allowed the boston ecosystem to be incredibly important in its support of deep tech ventures particularly ventures and software and semiconductors so with that i'm going to share my screen so that i can actually share with you a few slides and so as i know my topic today is basically to think about how we build successful innovation ecosystems and what lessons we can really draw from greater boston now just to put these ideas into a nutshell greater boston's ecosystem has been profoundly important in supporting deed tech and it has been able to do that for really three main reasons the first is strategic focus boston has had a very significant focus both in the life sciences in cleantech focusing on things like climate but also in hardware uh often applied to issues of defense and security but certainly hardware much more broadly the second element of greater boston success is its system that is the system of key resources that deep tech founders can turn to and can access in terms of human talent funding infrastructure and sophisticated sources of demand and the third are really the stakeholders boston has growing and important connectivity among some of the key stakeholders and so it has a purpose community that's been built around some of these priority areas and so together we see that the strategic focus the system resources and the stakeholders are really what allows greater boston to be a very powerful ecosystem supporting deep tech broadly now i want to just step back for a moment as i always do and really define innovation it's a quite overused buzzword but the way i like to think about it is as a process of taking ideas from inception to impact and i want to clarify that ideas we mean a match between problems and solutions those solutions often grounded in science and technology but really it's not about solutions on their own it's actually about solutions that are there to actually support our solving some of our biggest most important problems and challenges we want to emphasize impact because we want to encompass more than simply profit but think about wider mission impact and wider economic advantage we focus on the process because it lets us highlight the journey and some of those system resources that we need along the journey from what you might think of as lab scale to global scale and then recognize that the journey engages many many stakeholders startup venture founders themselves but also risk capital providers corporations universities and of course the government now there are some very unique characteristics that deep tech innovation has uh in terms of semiconductors hardware and beyond so when we say deep tech what we mean we mean it's deeply grounded in new scientific discoveries or engineering it has very deep levels of risk that we need if we're going to bring these ideas along from lab scale to global scale along what you might think of as the classic technology readiness levels and it requires deep pools of capital and expertise to support rapid growth de-risking and learning and so together these factors mean that deep tech whether it is in software or hardware but in particular in semiconductors and hardware really does require significant support to create the sort of economic advantage and impact over that typically 10-year journey that we need so whether we're thinking about photonics or quantum computing uh you know some hardware that we need in new satellite systems regardless of the type and flavor of deep tech it's often this support that we need that's actually so critical to success now we can take many lessons from economies who've really built significant advantage in deep tech and through the mit reap program i've had the opportunity to work with regions all over the world some of which are particularly skilled at doing this and i would think of singapore and israel as two places that we can learn from but also obviously around the united states i'll talk specifically about boston but there's clearly much we can also learn from silicon valley from austin and elsewhere so the first thing is that the places that have been most successful in supporting deep tech ventures and supporting advantage and innovation more broadly have really created what we would call innovation ecosystems these are geographically bounded locations often having nothing to do with political migratories a greater boston being an interesting example um it's actually the ecosystem is probably narrower than the state of massachusetts but it's broader than either cambridge boston or somerville alone and these ecosystems tend to have a high concentration of the resources that we know are so important to support these innovation-driven enterprises these kinds of ventures they're characterized by dense social networks that connect people together and support the sharing of ideas and that sort of exchange of ideas and resources and these ecosystems ultimately create a unique culture and identity that can be really profoundly important to their longevity and their effectiveness now ecosystems that support deep tech as i say whether that be israel or singapore greater boston silicon valley do have these three key characteristics they have the strategic focus on a key set of emerging technologies and sectors they tend to have very deep uh system resources that support the growth of risk taking and learning along each one of those technology readiness levels and along that journey that we know often takes at least 10 years when we're doing something extremely new right out there on the innovation horizon and they're also characterized by stakeholders who are aligned in these key areas who have expertise who exchange resources and who manage risk and when these three things come together they tend to be mutually reinforcing they create opportunities they help support success and they certainly inspire cultural change and this kind of notion that we have a culture that supports us taking the really significant but smart risk associated with deep technology and all its challenges so let me just dig in particularly to this question of the system resources that seem to underpin um our support for deep tech ventures and that tend to be highly concentrated in successful innovation ecosystems we like to think of them as having sort of four elements human capital funding infrastructure and demand so think about human capital we're talking about places in the world that are able to attract train and retain experts who have insights into the critical challenges and the sorts of expertise that we need across all of those technology readiness levels so we need human capital that's not just grounded in the basic science but also has some of the engineering uh the scale-up expertise and so on but also some of that managerial expertise that is needed to actually understand how you match this very deep tech hard tech semiconductors to particular problem sets the second key resource is funding we're talking about a range of capital sources from grants to equity for these sorts of ventures and that funding needs to be aligned to some of the particular challenges that we face in deep tech especially the longer time horizons and some of the risk profile while we see risk capital and venture capital in particular being spread more evenly across the world than perhaps it was about a decade ago it's also the case that venture capital for deep tech with its more significant risk its technical risk and its long time horizons continues to be highly specialized and very concentrated in places like greater boston the third is infrastructure we know that again when we're trying to do something in hard tech that's hardware that's in semiconductors we actually need test beds we need what professor bilovich would call foundries where we can explore our new solutions where we can actually for lower cost do rapid experimentation we need shared facilities and infrastructure and we need access to higher trl production facilities that let us test things out at commercial scale that's something that boston has been growing but is extremely important in our ability to build these companies successfully and then fourth we need demand right we need customers so we need early signals of key problem areas whether they're sent by government or large corporations and we need that demand in the form of potential contracts which allows us to experiment through early stage procurement that's extremely important to deep tech ventures who actually need signals of success early in their life cycle and so it really is places where we can gather these resources the human capital the funding the infrastructure and demand that are likely to be incredibly successful secondly we need places which have key stakeholder interactions we like to think of there being five key stakeholders in these ecosystems entrepreneurs um and their teams who are driven to build these kinds of startups around key national priorities as capital providers who have enough technical depth and expertise to invest in some of these sectors with strong partnerships and processes to enable foreign investment um and to really be effective in supporting the whole life cycle of these companies we need university researchers and administrators who understand these priorities to understand some of the opportunities and who are willing to share their resources we need corporations who have some of the strategic assets and who have access to supply chains and then we need government to serve as a lead customer and funder who also willing to provide technical infrastructure and things like that so these are the key stakeholders that we need at the table and it's their interactions that really strengthen our deep tech ventures and so what a greater boston what is it about greater boston in particular the kendall square ecosystem that really does support the density of deep tech ventures that we see around us when we step outside of mit's campus and we might ask the question how did this really come about well it's come about over a number of years and over a number of phases and probably the easiest place for us to start is just after uh world war ii when greater boston's innovation ecosystem took off it was in 1955 that businessweek ran an article entitled new england highway upset old way of life route 128 was becoming what they called the magic semi-circle of massachusetts and ultimately route 128 became synonymous as a technology region at the same time we had this massive rise in university-based funding particularly from dod building on all the funding that had come to mit and elsewhere in massachusetts as part of the war effort and we also saw increasing government funding for basic science again through the national science foundation the endless frontier that we're talking about again today and so by 1957 there were almost 100 companies employing over 17 000 tech workers on 128. by the time we get to 1973 there are over 1200 companies and yet around that time around 1973 75 we also see boston starting to actually be written out of innovation history as a loser to silicon valley and anna lee saxeniyan when she was at mit writing her thesis talked about culture and competition in silicon valley in 128 and you can see in this graph the sort of separation in terms of the number of high-tech jobs that silicon valley really takes off and boston starts to dwindle uh dwindles because i think these stakeholders were not coming together and the kind of resources those system resources were not really being put behind some of the growing companies uh 128 was just that bit distant from the universities that were so core to their creation in the first place and yet at the same time still in deep tech boston's leading biotech ecosystem emerges again you'll see we've taken from 1975 and you'll see in that pink line the take-off of boston's life science ecosystem and later boston taking off in climate tech so another form of deep tech so both areas that are very mission driven uh very deep technology and so we see boston kind of coming out of the ashes in many ways and these ecosystems emerging much more closely around kendall square and much more deeply connected to the universities and so the core of boston success is an ecosystem with the re-system resources and the stakeholders supporting deep tech ventures it's a place where we have the kind of human capital funding infrastructure and demand that will actually support deep tech ventures a whole across a range of mission challenge areas whether that be in health security uh climate security or classic defense and security we're seeing the investments in human capital uh developments of different kinds of funding sources and in particular that all important infrastructure that lets us actually serve as test beds and test out our new solutions to do more rapid experimentation and then there's access to higher trl production facilities at commercial scale being absolutely essential as are those very early demand signals from government boston success is also grounded in the fact that our ecosystem actually talks to one another right right here in kendall square you can walk into entrepreneurs risk capital providers the university faculty and students government and corporations in this very tight proximity and it is those resources and stakeholder engagement that i think have been profoundly important to boston's success so the question i think we want to ask really is what else must we do in our innovation ecosystems to support these kinds of deep tech ventures and support this kind of economic advantage particularly in hardware and in semiconductors i think we need to ask ourselves do we have the right strategic focus on the key set or subset of technologies and sectors have we um created the kind of level of system resources that's so essential and are the stakeholders aligned and talking to one another i think this today's conversation is an important part of that stakeholder engagement both for the greater boston ecosystem but also for the connected ecosystems across the united states and beyond so with that i look forward to our discussion thank you very much thank you very much professor murray uh that was truly inspirational i very much look forward to asking you questions during our panel uh our second speaker uh for this morning is uh dr robert metcalf after a decade at university of texas at austin bob metcalf recently retired from this position as a professor of innovation at the cockrell school of engineering dr mccaff was the founding director of ut austin's texas innovation center as well as ut austin's murchison fellow of free enterprise and professor of entrepreneurship at ut austin's mccombs school of business visionary driven by delivering impact dr metcalf was an internet pioneer beginning in 1970 starting at mit then harvard xerox palo alto research center stanford's and tricom many of us know him as the inventor of the ethernet he is a life trustee emeritus of mit and a member of the national academy of engineering and has over the years accumulated incredible amount of wisdom in thinking through how to stand up a very effective innovation ecosystem bob hi my name is bob metcalf in 1972 a gaggle of us mit grads moved from cambridge to palo alto and we took the massachusetts startup ecosystem with us we started calling it silicon valley now maybe it wasn't exactly 1972 when silicon valley moved from massachusetts 128 to california 101 but you have to admit our timing was pretty good why did silicon valley move west because the east was adopting the wrong law of computing the east was guided by grocer's law 1953 which says bigger computers are better the west was guided by moore's law 1965 which says smaller computers are better ibm's herb gross proved wrong he had punch cards and dumb terminals and time sharing and vertical integration intel's gordon moore proved right he had semiconductors microprocessors software and a startup ecosystem the real founders of silicon valley were stanford professors fred turman and william shockley turman joined the faculty of stanford in 1925 shockley in 1956. both turman and shockley arrived in palo alto with mit phds turman's advisor at mit had been none other than professor vanovar bush creator of the national science foundation shockley after getting his phd at mit and moving to bell labs shared the nobel prize for semiconductors and the transistor shockley then moved west to be with his ailing mother in their hometown in their hometown of all places palo alto there in 1955 turman helped found shockley's semiconductor lab in the stanford industrial park which turman had founded in 1951 shockley's going home to his ailing mother may be the real reason silicon valley took route around palo alto and not around mary hill or route 128 or austin or either of the menlo parks the slow growth of startup ecosystems is pretty random shockless was the first silicon valley startup he was a technical genius and an excellent recruiter but a terrible ceo he recruited eight of the best semiconductor geniuses to staff his startup a year later the traderish what's called the traitorous eight all quit and began the proliferation of silicon valley semiconductor startups that continues to this day when discussing why silicon valley surrounds palo alto i always bring up the weather never far from sunny and 72 degrees fahrenheit they say seattle is rainy austin has hot summers boston has cold winters silicon valley has the warm california sun my reason for moving to california was the beach boys they sang about surfing safaris it wasn't until after i moved to palo alto that i learned the pacific ocean is an hour away below 60 degrees fahrenheit with dangerous rip currents and great white sharks in 1972 i joined the xerox palo alto research center which is still located in what is now called the stanford research park created by turman stanford's park is 700 acres and 10 million square feet of office and lab space major infrastructure for a startup ecosystem i think of park as one of stanford's labs i left xerox park in 1979 to found my own silicon valley startup 3com corporation a week after i incorporated 3com in june of 79 i got a call from a guy named steve with a company named apple in a city named cupertino when steve learned that i had just founded three common would not be joining apple he didn't get mad he helped me all through the 1980s steve was 10 years younger than me i wondered if it was wise to let a dropout kid run a startup steve is famous for being one of the most successful ceos of all time but note steve founded apple in 1976 but he did not become ceo until 1996 steve believed in what's called adult supervision from the very beginning i got that from steve this is a good attitude for a startup ecosystem three comes first few founders were my fraternity brothers from mit most of the rest came from hp after bootstrapping for a couple of years i sold a third of three com in 1981 for 1.1 million dollars a third

intel founder bob noyce and hp ceo john young were two of my angel investors they helped me recruit my adult supervision bill kraus my adult supervision bill kraus from hp in 1981. we ipo'd with morgan stanley in 1984. after raising venture capital going public and growing independently for almost 40 years 3com was merged back into hp in 2010. during the internet bubble three comes revenue hit 5.7 billion dollars and it was briefly valued at an inflation-adjusted 52 billion dollars of which i didn't even get half how did we know back in 1979 that the internet would fly because we had a time machine we had built 1972-1978 a nationwide internet inside of xerox our time machine including personal computers ethernets file servers routers laser printers etc when we left xerox to grow the internet we knew exactly what to do startup ecosystems need time machines which is one reason research universities are so important the san francisco and massachusetts bay areas are now heavily networked proximity promotes connectivity which promotes collaboration venture capitalist john doerr famously said that he wouldn't invest in a startup more than an hour's drive from his office in menlo park denisons of kendall square must have a similar rule only it's about not walking more than 100 yards intel founder bob noyce rip and i co-chaired a silicon valley fundraising campaign for mit bob was an enthusiastic phd alum of mit at a meeting to assess the giving potential of alums and set mit's fundraising campaign goal i asked if mit alums were worth what a total of a billion dollars bob noyce smiled kindly and said much more than that i had not noticed that bob was by then himself worth several billion dollars he was fond fondly called the mayor of silicon valley speaking of money startup ecosystems feed on venture capital the father of venture capitalism is said to be harvard business school professor general george durio he formed the first modern venture capital firm american research development corporation with mit president carl compton in 1946 ardc famously invested in an mit spin out in maynard called digital equipment corporation investing 70k and returning 38 million dollars i named my model of startup ecosystems after dorio this model oversimplifies the startup ecosystems i've observed over the decades along 128 along interstate 101 in kendall square along interstate 280 around the university of cambridge in austin and elsewhere the dorian startup ecosystem has seven seven all-important species it is important that all seven and some others are prospering in your ecosystem and that they are enthusiastically connected cooperating and competing and here's the seven species first funding agencies arpa dod doe nsf nih the second species are research professors who get money from the funding agencies mit's bob langer is by far the best example number three is graduating students joining these startups and i do not recommend students drop out of college for startups four scaling entrepreneurs people graduating from previous startups five venture capitalists founders family friends fools angels vcs pes and six strategic partners incumbents trading their brand and scale for innovation and finally seven early adopters god bless customers who risk buying from startups those are the seven species of the dorio uh startup ecosystem model startup ecosystems are all the rage these days there are many good books websites wikipedia entries conferences classes and so on i suggest brad feld he's an mit sloan graduate software entrepreneur who moved to another startup ecosystem boulder colorado and he turned vc he founded techstars a renowned startup incubator brad's excellent book is startup communities start there it's hard to go wrong one way you can get wrong is to confuse startups with small businesses there's a lot of confusing government data on entrepreneurship that includes both startups and small businesses now sure startups begin small but that's just a phase they're going through restaurants salons retail stores and the trades are nothing like semiconductor startups nothing like the species of the dorio startup ecosystem so in my experience you want your startup cfo to be ipo ready not your brother-in-law there are two kinds of startup that you should not confuse website startups and tough technology startups in recent years i concluded that the world's most important problems will not be solved by yet another website on the other hand tough technology is tough let me end by sharing the most important new fact about the human condition thanks to telegraph telephone radio tv internet and smart mobile phones 6 billion or 75 of us 8 billion humans are suddenly on the internet this year we are overwhelmed with connectivity while freedom and prosperity have been greatly enhanced by the internet it has had its pathologies which we work on one by one the first pathology of the internet was porn and then advertising and then spam radicalization polarization hate speech and now the current pathology fake news we eventually subdue these with our latest chips the internet turned 50 in 2019 and it's almost as if we built the internet for covid 19.

the pandemic is fading and we can soon get back to normal will we get back to normal covert 19 is having impact on the evolution of start-up ecosystems we will soon i h i hope forget masks but what about zoom people are still using zoom to avoid kovid or are they my hunch is that people now fear covet less than they enjoy zoom here we are on zoom right this second my hunch is that there are many more people attending this workshop than would have if we had ever been here in person if we had to be here in person covert 19 has provided the activation energy to get us over the hump on the use of internet video for learning and employment we'll not be going back going forward we'll be enjoying the benefits of collaboration video let's shorten collaboration video to uh covid for short how will kobit change our startup ecosystems seems to me that where we learn and work is changing the proximity connectivity collaboration advantages of living in silicon valley or kendall square will fade even if thanks to zoom we can all commute from aspen we still need access to our instruments to our fabs seems clear that just as internet web startups blossomed with cloud computing the semiconductor startups will blossom with highly connected cloud instruments and cloud fabs one of the most important features of a high performance startup ecosystem is coopetation participants including incumbents can cooperate to create research consortia share resources and set standards together all the while competing fiercely coopetation can lead to platforms upon which killer apps are built and unicorns roam now it is often debated whether stanford or mit has had the most impactful startups mit wins this debate hands down especially when it is pointing out it's pointed out that mit's highest impact startup is stanford thank you well bob thank you very much for that uh i certainly appreciate your comments in many different aspects of them and i very much look forward to the panel that you're about to have but before we can reach the panel we have one more speaker david broker currently serves as a chief innovation and collaboration officer for purdue research foundation in this role he is responsible for advancing strategic innovation initiatives target targeting corporate partners and key stakeholders as an entrepreneur broker is the founder and ceo of zorion medical a leading medical device company focused on developing and commercializing fully absorbable technology utilizing biometals prior to joining purdue broker was the founding president and ceo of the indiana biosciences research institute in india in indianapolis an independent uh non-profit research organization dedicated to discovery science and applied research as both an intrapreneur and entrepreneur broker has developed a full appreciation of the ecosystems needed to support startup activity and he's certainly building one in west lafayette indiana david please take over thank you vlad and good morning to everyone uh it's a pleasure to be here and um i must confess up front i'm not an electrical or computer engineer as vlad mentioned i've spent my life in biotech and biopharmaceutical med tech and i've been more of a beneficiary from a company level both large and medium-sized companies as well as startups have been in a variety of highly innovative communities and ecosystems including boston the bay area and in europe in germany and in ireland in particular um and so it's pleasure today because um you know sharing some of the lessons that i've learned along the way is being kind of a part of of these ecosystems is very exciting for me so what i'd like to do is start with the definition and example of what we're building at purdue talk about some of the critical success factors unfortunately my fellow panelists have covered many of these so i'm not going to go into too much detail on these maybe highlight three or four and i know that some of the follow-on sessions are going to touch upon these as well and like bob i've got a couple uh ideas in terms of recommended reading and i really do want to get to the discussion as fast as we can so when i look at innovation and ecosystems this has been highlighted before you know innovation is really the execution uh to coming up with a new solution to a problem that creates value in the mind of the customer and value i think the word that's been used previously is impact value does not necessarily have to be monetary um it's uh you know impact in the mind of the customer or the person that's going to use uh the solution of that problem uh you know in my job as flat mentioned at purdue it's really to engage uh strategic partners in terms of understanding uh what their biggest problems are so uh this is a place we start by asking them what keeps you up at night what are your biggest problems and having them articulate that is very important to them figuring out how we can partner and collaborate with them uh ecosystem uh bob touched upon this it's not and fiona as well it's not necessarily just geographic but it really is a networked community of people places institutions that work together to achieve a shared purpose and that shared purpose is very important it provides focus to the ecosystem and so you know i've had the good fortune in the last five or six years uh since leaving um you know a big company work uh to probably work on three the creation of three ecosystems one was the indiana biosciences research institute which vlad mentioned which was an applied research institute founded by some of the leading companies here in indiana uh what made that interesting is that each was unique and and complemented one another from a life science perspective um i would also say that uh i was tasked with leading the covid initiative at purdue to protect the campus uh and many of the lessons uh of how do you build an innovative ecosystem uh were brought to bear in you know bringing back 35 000 students in 117 days uh and and keeping them going through campus or going through the semester uh without interruption but the one i'd really like to talk about today is what we're building at purdue now and so this is a bird's eye view of a new development uh that's occurring uh and what we're doing is we're creating uh what you'll hear here in a second is our lab to life platform this is a bird's-eye view of purdue university the campus proper is sort of on the top and right hand side of this picture but you see in the colored areas over 400 acres of private development that's now occurring on campus and when it's built out over the next 10 years it's going to lead to over a billion dollars worth of investment and when some of us started to look at this we started to think about wait a second you know we were learning from other so-called connected communities or smart city initiatives you know what's the potential here to really use this as a platform for innovation and when you started to add up the number of people that were going to be in the district here it was going to approximate about 10 or 15 000 people residents employers innovators that were going to be in this community and you put that beside the 50 000 or so students and faculty at purdue and you quickly can come up with a number of about 75 000 uh and that is in a greater uh area of a metropolitan area of lafayette west lafayette about 250 000 people so when we saw this we said wait a second this could really be an interesting platform the thing about that made this also unique is is the scale uh in terms of both size and and people uh the other thing was that there was no infrastructure infrastructure has been mentioned so if you flew over this at night with satellite it looked like north korea completely dark so we had the opportunity really to bring in to this district through edge data centers uh pre-planned fiber infrastructure backbone um you know assets that come up out of the ground connecting to you know multiple radios uh the ability to access all kinds of different spectrum etc we pre-planned it and we built it just alongside the master plan and the other thing that makes it really really important is this is all governed by the purdue research foundation so somebody mentioned the mayor of silicon valley well you're looking at the mayor of the discovery park district and when you look at this you know this is what you know a lot of my colleagues in the research foundation are architects and property developers and things like that so they look at all these pretty architectural pictures um this is what we saw right this you take away the walls you take away the ceilings you take away the roofs and you look at how people are going to live work and play in this community um and it truly is starting to bear fruit in terms of what this picture uh it looks like in campus you know when i first showed this about two and a half years ago you'll see in the middle a little robot there and people were like really and i said and yes and sure enough six months later we had delivery robots now delivering coffee and pizza and things like that across campus i think people now see drones here and you saw on that previous slide that we're connected purdue as the second busiest airport in the state of indiana uh and so we're in the process of bringing that onto the platform as well and not thinking about just two two-dimensional mobility but three-dimensional mobility so this picture that i've shown probably the last two three years is really starting to capture people's imagination so what we did um was we invited a group of uh complementary um technology companies uh you know most startups have an advisory board uh and what we did is we created a technology advisory board uh of uh you know att intel cisco dell these kinds of uh companies and we asked them not to invest per se in the infrastructure up front because we wanted this to be a neutral playing ground and open for all kinds of innovation we said look we can take care of the infrastructure investment what we want is we want your ideas around innovation and how we could develop a really uh you know um center for for advanced research in terms of networks uh and use cases so that's essentially now what we've created uh is this lab to life platform uh so it's a lab literally that expands 400 acres will ultimately encompass 10 000 people plus the students and faculty at the university we're looking at as i mentioned infrastructure and how to deploy advanced networks not in a lab but truly in a community our partners are very very excited about this because it provides the opportunity to really look at interoperability opportunities and challenges in addition we're looking at certain applications based on some of the strengths of our different colleges and areas of focus in terms of agriculture and manufacturing mobility et cetera so it's a very very exciting opportunity and and uh you know we're we're very open to uh collaborating um with uh with the additional companies so when i take a step back and i think about sort of the critical success factors and like i said you know i identified you know nine you know one is shared vision and focus that's been talked about leadership to make it happen stakeholders capital those are really sort of the what and why of getting something launched and put together what i'd like to maybe spend a couple minutes on is just the who where and how by focusing really on the talent the partners sense of place the assets and then the ability really to in true sense of innovation and startups how do you go from zero to one and then beyond that in our opportunity at purdue uh and the discovery park left live 10 to x um so um i'm going to skip to and we're going to make this presentation available but on the talent side you know not only fiona touched upon this you know talent it goes both ways we want people to come come to discovery park and the lab to life platform so this is a magnet for outside talent innovators entrepreneurs companies but it also being based right next to a leading research institution like purdue it's a magnet to access new talent and i think that's a very very important component of innovation ecosystems purdue trains more engineers than mit stanford and uc berkeley combined so we have a a big talent pool to draw from it was touched upon earlier mix is critical uh it's not just all one size fits all you do need a mix of researchers entrepreneurs and innovators um and trying to understand the difference is really what you need you need to understand what drives these individuals and play to their strengths i've seen a lot of times where researchers try to be entrepreneurs and it doesn't work so you really need to understand what drives the individual in terms of partners and collaborators these have been mentioned as well i would just highlight the last point there in terms of connection to other ecosystems once we've stood up several of the of the places that i've mentioned before that i've had a good good fortune of launching i really have also tried to connect other ecosystems boston silicon valley other places really based on what our focus has been uh and trying to expand the shared sense of purpose amongst our collaborators sense of place is also very very important you know where do you go right particularly for these people that are coming in from the outside or companies that want to engage we talk a lot about the front door at purdue and where do people come if they're a company you know most people know where to go if they're there for a football game most seniors in high school know where to go to get the campus tour but if you're a company or a startup or an innovator where do you go and trying to make it easy for these people is very very important who are the navigators that sort of help these people navigate the ecosystem and find what they need obviously you need hangouts for collisions you know people talk about that there's a lot of serendipity in terms of invention and innovation uh and i would and i would also say that you know in terms of creating a sense of place i would think about uh destination as sort of the the key here not just about place making but really about destination and then finally we've talked a little bit about infrastructure you need to create a playground and the kids will come we want to create the coolest you know place to be and the coolest kids will end up coming there uh and playing uh you know on the playground and you know creating the games uh that are going to create value for the future it needs to be complementary and accessible and we have over a hundred core labs at purdue uh and so making the ones that you know are open for for sharing uh uh is you know takes time but it's a key asset i know that in my own startup uh you know career i tried to avail myself of uh you know those things that are available but it requires staffing and training to make happen and then finally you know this notion of technology readiness levels and going from idea to impact you know a lot of times what we try to target is sort of that middle area tl technology readiness levels three to six and that helps you get you know moving in the right direction but in the discovery park district what we're finding is it's not equally important it's not just the technology innovation but uh reinventing the business associated with the with these platforms particularly when it comes to rolling out new use cases involving new networks and you definitely need scale and focus and commercial viability otherwise people aren't going to come so that's really going from 0 to 1 to 10 to x and our partners that we brought into the district really see the opportunity to cater to the 70 or 75 000 citizens or residents that are going to be part of the discovery park district and then finally um just some recommended reading zero to one i think most people are familiar with that book that's a great book by peter thiel smartest places on earth is an another interesting one this is really looking at sort of the non or off the radar sort of emerging places that are happening uh it was written by uh uh antoine van achmal he was an investment banker and is the one that came up with the term emerging markets so he made his um you know fame uh back in the 70s by investing in emerging startup companies uh very good book and then strategic doing again the sense of execution and making things happen so those would be three books that i would recommend so vlad i'll turn it back to you at this point for the discussion thank you david thank you uh that is exceptional insights in an emerging ecosystem uh dear audience uh if you have questions for the panelists uh please type them in the chat uh we will make sure that we pass along the ones we receive and ask the panelists to indeed respond as the moderator i have the privilege of actually starting us off fiona bob and david thank you very much for presenting to us holistic view of thinking about what an ecosystem of supporting a startup and growing an idea really takes it is very hard in each of your 10 to 15 minutes of presentation to indeed capture a journey that will take 10 years however you have placed in our minds a set of challenges a set of opportunities and through the talks uh you have also exemplified what has been done in the times past hopefully what's coming in the times to come will not be that different at least the insights of what we have received as a knowledge from time that we have seen will indeed inform us how to build the next set of amazing startups what does tell me is that the ecosystems do vary across the world and indeed if if you count how many effective places on the planet there are to launch an idea and grow it how many of those are around and maybe i can ask professor murray just as a background of how many places can i go to to launch my startup and i would find myself right now saying oh here is a working ecosystem where i can easily transition that idea into a product that millions can use so as always professor bulovitch we can rely on you to ask the hard disk um and do it making it sound so easy um how so if i understand you right how many ecosystems do we think there are in the world where i could easily take my idea to impact yes so i think it would be fair to say that if my idea was in the sort of consumer so i'm solving a problem for consumers and my solution is largely grounded in software i actually think there are a lot of places and there are many more places than they used to be um so i think we used to imagine that america and a variety of places in the us were the perfect place to do that i think it would be fair to say looking at some of the most recent unicorns that it you could do that extremely effectively sitting in cairo you know within sites of the of the great pyramids um you know you could do it sitting in lagos um a variety of places in east asia um so i think and all over europe and london and berlin in paris you know in station f etcetera so i think if it's in software you would think dozens and dozens of places and places that are actually even more exciting than doing that in the us today i think the more the technology becomes deep tech as i would define it the more it becomes focused on hardware and really acquiring a complex um stage technology readiness the more we need new boundaries the smaller we're likely to be able to do that and so i think the deeper it gets the smaller the number of places where we can probably be affected bob and david in your experience actually translating hard technology into a brand new idea as a pharmaceutical or as a semiconductor as fiona points out there are very few places you can really turn to so what does it really mean for a startup to have a great semiconductor idea if the journey from that idea to that idea being broadly adapted is becomes dramatically limited simply by the ecosystem that might be able to support that kind of growth of that kind of idea well when mark zuckerberg was dropping out of harvard with his facebook thingy he got some advice and the advice was if your software consumer software company if that's what you're gonna do you need to move immediately to palo alto and he did and it worked because he plunked right down into an ecosystem that was completely complementary so for example if you were innovating in energy i would say go to houston because houston will be solved in i'm sorry energy will be solved in houston it's pretty it's just so obvious semiconductors it's it's uh well there's boston and there's silicon valley and i bet you the i bet uh purdue has some semiconductors what david dude well that's what i was going to say vlad is the world is becoming digitized right and purdue just celebrated their 152nd anniversary as a land grant university and over that time we've seen innovation from the industrial age right and now we're moving clearly into the digital age and everybody needs to figure out you know how do i digitize my innovation strategy and everybody needs a chip to make that happen right i mean that's why we see all these supply chain issues emerging and why there's now bottlenecks in cars in energy in retail and all these different places and so i think that you're going to see the core of what's historically been boston and palo alto but i think you're going to see some emerging areas like bob started to point to energy in houston agriculture in the midwest centered hopefully around a place like purdue automotive manufacturing probably also sort of centered in the midwest uh you know and and then you start to think about the ancillary things and the additional intervention there's a lot of converging innovation that's occurring and so i think those places that really facilitate that convergence i think will emerge as you know as the as the future places um you know we work a lot with some of the silicon valley companies but it's very hard to get like a use case implemented in palo alto for a mobility project right well come to purdue where you know you got acres and miles where you're not going to hit anybody but but a cow right if you want to do mobility projects do them out out here right so and that's that's this notion of extending the footprint so so i think you're still going to see the traditional places where people have gone but i think you're going to see some emerging places based on the use cases that emerge because of this i think the difference is going to be that in the past we haven't had the internet and now we do and so the that dynamic the connectivities you were talking about are going to be easier to create so there'll be more fluidity in where resources can be located don't you think well uh so i will just again remind the audience if you'd like to submit a question use the q a feature uh at the bottom of your zoom window and uh a breakthrough a breakthrough that we need in um uh connectivity is how to turn off the mute button so david mu david's mute button is on and and how do we signal to him that he needs to turn his i i'm paying attention i'm i'm only going to chime in when i move let's make a chip a chip that turns off the mute button automatically what do you think i think you just blink and it happens but listen bob the question that i have for you actually is someone who has lived through multitudes of innovation ecosystem and saw them grow either thanks to your own inventions or mentions of others over the last decade you spent your time at austin uh when you arrived in austin the bustling of the austin innovation ecosystem was present but wasn't as dominant as you would see it right now what changed what caused the growth of the austin ecosystem i went there 11 years ago and i promised to help austin become a better silicon valley and there was considerable resistance because there's a culture there of wanting to stay weird keep austin weird and i kept telling people being weird and being a successful innovation hub are not the same thing but a big problem with us back 11 years ago is we only had one venture capital firm austin ventures and aust if austin approved you did well and if austin didn't approve you didn't do well and it was it was

2022-03-16 17:39

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