Futures Magazine, Issue 10, June 2012 - Microsoft

Futures Microsoft’s European Innovation Magazine

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Issue n°10 June 2012

Fuelling economic growth Anne Glover: EU's first Chief Scientific Adviser champions innovation For Europe's start-ups no recession in sight “Big data”: use it to create a new business www.microsoft.eu/futures

Colophon Editor in Chief, Lisa Boch-Andersen, Senior Director Communications, Microsoft Europe Managing Editor, Fabien Petitcolas, Director for Innovation, Microsoft Europe

Editorial Board Gail Edmondson, Editorial Director, Science|Business Jan Muehlfeit, Chairman Europe, Microsoft John Vassallo, Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Microsoft Europe Peter Wrobel, Founding Director, Science|Business

Additional contributors to this edition Ann Morrison, editor. Raluca Anghel, Rachel Chan, Peter Haynes, Rachel Howard, Michaela Kraft, Colombe Michaud, Una O’Sullivan, Kevin Schofield and Alex Wade. Production Science|Business Publishing Ltd Layout and Design Chris Jones, design4science ltd Printing Holbrook Printers Ltd, Portsmouth PO3 5HX, UK Photography Robert Taylor - Cover, p 3 Diederik W. Schönau, p 2, p 27-28 Science|Business p 3 (2), p 7, p 32 TheEmployable p 3 Microsoft p 3, p 5, p 26-27 Royal Court Theatre p 5 European Union / Scorpix p 8 Aberdeen University p 9 ETH Zurich p 10 Johannes Kleske/Silicon Allee p 10-11 Tech City UK p 11 Aalto Entrepreneurship Society p 13 Jana Denzler p 14 Mendeley p 17, p 18 European Commission 2012 p 20 Iain MacLean p 22-23 Spenta p 24-25 NextsBus p 24 University of Melbourne, Graduate School of Education p 31 Smulders Group p 32 Naked Energy p 33 EADS p 34

Contact us Fabien Petitcolas [email protected] Microsoft Europe Nerviërslaan / Avenue Des Nerviens 85 B-1040 Brussels www.microsoft.eu Circulation number / Frequency 2,500 copies / Bi-annual publication Disclaimer The content of this magazine, including news, quotes, and other information, is provided by Microsoft and its third parties for your personal information only. Views imparted by third parties do not necessarily reflect the views of Microsoft Corporation. Copyright Microsoft 2012 PRINTED ON FSC CERTIFIED PAPER

WRITERS

DAVID ADAM is a journalist and an editor at the science journal Nature in London. He was previously a specialist correspondent at the Guardian newspaper, writing on science and the environment.

STEPHEN BAKER is author of Final Jeopardy (2011) and The Numerati (2008). Before that, he was a senior technology writer for BusinessWeek in Paris and New York. He blogs at TheNumerati.net

Freelance writer JOHN A. CAREY is a former senior correspondent for BusinessWeek, where he covered science, technology, medicine and the environment. Recent stories have appeared in Conservation, Scientific American and Yahoo News.

The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) involved 5,000 students in six countries, including these 11-year-olds in Holland

Page 29 GAIL EDMONDSON is editorial director at Science|Business. She covered European technology, industry and economics for Business Week magazine for more than 20 years.

DIANE HOFKINS is a writer, editor, journalist and consultant in education and children's issues based in London. She was a senior editor on The Times Educational Supplement, and now freelances for newspapers, charities and academic institutions. ANNA JENKINSON is a senior international journalist based in Brussels with 15 years of experience reporting and editing in Europe and Asia. Her work includes a strong focus on EU research policy. MICHAEL KENWARD OBE is a freelance writer based in the UK with nearly 40 years’ experience covering technology and innovation. He edited New Scientist magazine throughout the 1980s.

An EC climate initiative encourages the development of computer software that can model the impact of catastrophic weather events, like the 2011 flooding in Thailand

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ANN MORRISON is a journalist with more than three decades of writing, editing and teaching experience. As an editorial executive for Time Inc., she was based in New York (Fortune magazine), Hong Kong (Asiaweek) and London (Time). RHEA WESSEL has covered the telecommunications industry for Dow Jones Newswires, and has worked as a foreign correspondent for the English-language service of the German Press Agency. Among her professional interests: the journalism of innovative ideas.

Cover photo: Anne Glover

Contents FUTURES COMMENT Steering Europe back to recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Solutions to the “unmitigated tragedy” of youth unemployment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Europe’s Chief Scientific Adviser: “Our success in Europe and our position in the future depend on our being smart”

NEWS Putting science – and a scientist – centre stage . . . . . . . . . . . . .5 The EU’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Anne Glover, wants to “rattle the cage of the business community” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

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Europe’s technology hotspots typically enjoy an entrepreneurial ecosystem of university talent, venture capital and networking opportunities, like this “start-up sauna” in Helsinki

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & SMES What economic downturn? Europe’s tech start-ups are flourishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Berlin’s Trifense creates a new way to fight cyber threats . . .14 How Mendeley is revolutionising research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16

INNOVATION IN SOCIETY

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Beyond Facebook: using social media to promote innovation and productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19 The next frontier: opening up the world’s data . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 What’s ahead for computers and computing, according to Microsoft’s Craig Mundie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

SKILLS & EDUCATION How to assess – and develop – collaboration, communication and other 21st-century skills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28

Managing Director Düssel wants Trifense to gain a dominant position in a real growth industry – network security products “with self-learning at their core”

Page 14 ENVIRONMENT An EU initiative promotes both environmental technology and long-term growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

COMMENTARY Jean J. Botti of EADS: Ten ways to spur European innovation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34

All articles are also available online at www.microsoft.eu/futures

By 2025, the exponential growth of computing power will transform how humans interact with machines – and vice versa

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FUTURES VIEW

How to steer Europe back to recovery

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s the global economy continues to struggle, governments, policymakers and companies are increasingly focused on ways to promote growth, provide financing for new ventures and create jobs. That is why “growth” is the main theme of this tenth edition of Futures magazine. Even in times of crisis, there are two important economic drivers: SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and the ICT (information and communications technology) sector. According to one estimate, SMEs created 85% of net new jobs in the EU between 2002 and 2010. As for ICT, the Centre for Economic and Business Research estimates that the sector is responsible for 5% of European GDP and contributes even more to productivity growth. Now with cloud computing, these two economic catalysts can stimulate even more growth: IDC estimates that cloud computing could generate over 1 million jobs in the EU by 2015. Please make Richard’s fix: Because the cloud provides access to applications and services via the Internet from remote locations, it allows a company to lower its investment in hardware and infrastructure and pay only for the services it uses. The cloud also means increased flexibility and mobility, made possible by always-on access to data from any type of device. This flexibility greatly benefits SMEs, which typically have more limited budgets for technology infrastructure. Still, the support of national governments is critical to making this vision a reality. At the European and international levels, there is much work to do, both in removing legislative barriers and introducing regulations that clarify the critical issues of security, privacy, data portability and business continuity. We forecast that with the appropriate regulatory environment, the average SME would be able to hire at least one more employee. If only one quarter of the more than 20 million SMEs in Europe took on one more employee, we could create more than 5 million net new jobs. That’s a number that would bring Europe a giant step closer to its vision for a knowledge-based economy.

Jean-Philippe Courtois President, Microsoft International Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corporation

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Helping kids find jobs “YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT is an unmitigated tragedy.” That’s how Angel Gurría, the Secretary General of the OECD, describes the chronic lack of jobs for young people around the world. In the EU, unemployment among 15to-24 year olds is 22.4 per cent, a historic high. In crisis-hit countries, the situation is much worse: almost one in three young adults is out of work in Italy; one of every two in Spain and Greece. “Young people are especially vulnerable to economic hardship,” says John Vassallo, vice president of EU Affairs for Microsoft. They become discouraged and disaffected, and their absence from the labour market puts their countries under economic strain now and at competitive disadvantage in the future. “With more than half of today’s jobs requiring at least some technology skills, it is important to focus on equipping our young generation with the necessary skills and training to be successful in the workplace,” says Vassallo. That’s why Microsoft recently announced it would give 17 European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) €1.5 million in cash grants and donate a total of €170 million in software in 2012 to NGOs around Europe serving vulnerable groups. In Greece the grant will help the Hellenic Professionals Informatics Society provide more than 100,000 young people with free opportunities to work toward certification by improving their information and communications technology, business and technology skills. In Spain, the grant will support Fundación Esplai in offering more than 6,000 young people the e-skills training and industry-recognised accreditation to give them a competitive edge in the job market. By supporting NGOs’ access to critical technology resources, Microsoft aims to help kids, their place in society and Europe’s future economic growth. n

News

For this scientist, all the world’s a stage Stephen Emmott is exploring the environmental repercussions of a planet with 10 billion people – not in a lecture hall, but before a theatre audience BY ANN MORRISON

STEPHEN EMMOTT is a man of many firsts. His laboratory at Microsoft, where he is head of computational science, was the first to develop a language for programming DNA, the first to explain how the brain “builds itself” from stem cells and the first to have a biologist present an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (a visualisation of Darwin’s Origin of the Species). And now, Emmott himself will be the first scientist to have a one-man show at London’s Royal Court Theatre: Ten Billion: An Exploration of the Future of Life on Earth. With the world’s population having passed 7 billion last year, the prospect of 10 billion may not seem that cataclysmic – except that the planet had fewer than 5 billion inhabitants just 25 years ago and hardly any 200,000 years ago. How will this surging force of numbers affect the planet and the way we live? That is the question Emmott

will address at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs for three weeks this summer and for a shorter run at the Avignon Festival in France. The idea came about when Emmott, a biologist by training, met Katie Mitchell, one of Britain’s leading theatre directors, and, as he recalls, “We got to chatting.” Mitchell was interested in Emmott’s computer modelling work on the future of the planet – climate change, biodiversity loss, food and water security and the effect of all this on human beings. Emmott and Mitchell realised that while non-scientists – former US Vice-President Al Gore, for example – have used film and theatre to take on environmental issues, an actual scientist never had. They saw a unique opportunity in presenting a critical issue to a popular audience from a scientist’s perspective, though without the PowerPoint presentations, as Emmott is quick to add.

Coming soon: Stephen Emmott’s name in lights

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Instead, according to advance publicity, the show will have video, music and professional lighting. It will not be scripted, but Emmott and Mitchell have agreed on its overall architecture – the topics Emmott will talk about. “That means every performance will be reasonably the same,” he says, “but not identical.” The message will not be optimistic. According to his analysis of current trends, “Things do not look good, unless something radically different happens in the way we live.” Though Emmott frequently talks to students considering scientific careers – he is passionate about producing a new generation of researchers

– he admits to being a little nervous about facing a theatre audience. “It will be an experiment in itself,” he says. In fact, the entire concept of the show – the intersection of science and art – is so revolutionary that Emmott cannot quite put a name to it. “It’s not a play, it’s not a talk. It’s a thing,” he says in his slight Yorkshire accent. Even Dominic Cook, the Royal Court’s artistic director, has a hard time characterising Ten Billion. “It may not even be described as ‘theatre’,” he says, “but it could just be one of the most important projects I’ve ever worked on.” n

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More information http://royalcourttheatre.com/ whats-on/ten-billion

NEWS

Promoting science as Europe’s engine of growth As the EU’s first Chief Scientific Adviser, Anne Glover supports empirical evidence, research and innovation, university-industry collaborations and science and engineering as a profession – especially for women BY GAIL EDMONDSON

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hen Anne Glover first donned a white lab coat as a biochemistry student at the University of Edinburgh in 1974, academic scientists and industry executives lived in distinctly separate worlds. Even as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, she didn’t meet a single industrialist. “It would have been frowned on had I spoken to industry,” says Glover. “I thought business people were a foreign species.” A good scientist, Glover changed her view as evidence piled up to counter that cultural norm, specifically the vibrant university-industry collaborations in other parts of the world that were speeding

new technologies and innovations to market. In 1999, Glover crossed into that once unfamiliar territory herself to co-found Remedios, a Scottish environmental technology spinoff based on her biosensors research at Aberdeen University. By 2006 she had become a vigorous public champion for bridging the gap between science and business as Scotland’s chief science adviser. Now Glover is taking that campaign to Europe. On 1 January, she became the EU’s first chief science adviser, a post created by President José Manuel Barroso to whom she reports. A key role will be supporting Europe’s highprofile bet that research and innovation can deliver economic growth as well as solutions to

broad social problems. “Europe has fantastic science. And we have great companies,” says Glover. “What we are not doing well is matching them up.” Improving the chemistry between industry and business is at the top of Glover’s to-do list, along with promoting evidence-based policymaking and championing careers in science, engineering and technology. In a wide-ranging interview with Futures from her new office at the Berlaymont, the 56-year-old molecular biologist discussed her vision for accelerating Europe’s shift to a knowledge economy. “I want to rattle the cage of the business community,” says Glover. “I want to wake them up to the fact that there is a whole box of presents waiting for them [in European universities

“Europe has fantastic science. And we have great companies. What we are not doing well is matching them up.” F6

and research institutes], and literally all they have to do is go in and unwrap them.” Business must reach out to the “knowledge producers” in universities, she says, because industry is not telling scientists what are their biggest research headaches. Glover has dealt with these cultural misunderstandings before. As Scotland’s chief science adviser, she helped convince companies that academics did care about innovation and didn’t just “have their heads in the clouds”. One of the most important things businesses can do is just establish contact with universities, says Glover. “Companies should adopt a pet researcher.” Europe’s universities need a wake-up call too. “They are the ones with all the smart people after all,” she says. “They can be more innovative than anyone else, surely.” If universities fail to link research to solving

Glover relishes vigorous debate

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“I am delighted to appoint Professor Anne Glover to the post of Chief Scientific Adviser. I believe her outstanding background and calibre will bring invaluable expertise to the Commission.” José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission

>> global challenges, they risk an erosion of relevance and credibility, warns Glover. “We’re seeing a redefinition of the role of the research university – not just to produce knowledge but to help harness it for the benefit of society…There is a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of our ancient universities.” That doesn’t mean scientists and researchers must become entrepreneurs. Researchers simply need to think about the practical applications of their work. “They need to ask themselves, ‘Are there any small businesses or big multinationals who might use this?’” says Glover. “That’s their responsibility.” Relying on evidence Glover relishes vigorous debate – and it’s just as well since controversy comes with the job. Public fear and scepticism can develop over everything from disease outbreaks to the safety of new technologies. Besides, the scientific underpinnings of such global issues as climate change, food security and water accessibility are far from clear. Glover’s job will be to provide authoritative guidance on the basis of scientific evidence in the face of those uncertainties. “It’s a huge challenge,” says

John Wood, chair of the European Research Area Board, which counselled the Commission in 2009 to appoint a European chief science adviser to ensure that policy is based on the best empirical evidence. Glover’s effectiveness will depend on her ability to act independently within the enormous Commission bureaucracy, he said. During her five years as Scotland’s chief science adviser, Glover certainly asserted her independence. When introduced to Scotland’s head of government, the First Minister, she quickly corrected his mistaken notion that she was a civil servant. “My role is never to embarrass politicians or put them in a difficult spot. It’s to talk about the evidence and be true to that.” At the same time, Glover acknowledges that politicians sometimes have good reasons for ignoring evidence. Take the decision about where to build a bridge, for example. Economic arguments or traffic flows may trump science when it comes to selecting a site, she says. “What I’d ask is for politicians to be transparent about the use of evidence. If they choose to ignore it, there’s an obligation to say why.”

Looking back on her achievements as chief scientist in Scotland, Glover is proud that Scotland is now far more aware of technology’s impact on the economy. Spending on education in Scotland has even risen – a cause she championed – despite an austerity budget. And in 2011, the First Minister invited Glover to sit on the government’s prestigious council of economic advisers. “The government clearly realised that the economy is linked to our achievement in science, engineering and technology.” Glover will use the same science-centred approach on the European stage. “I would hope my role would be seen as an honest broker. I’m there to challenge and help refine the arguments around the evidence base, which is a healthy thing for Europe.” Climate change is one topic on her agenda. Though the scientific argument about manmade climate change is overwhelming, she says, “people don’t have all the knowledge or evidence in front of them to be confident that policymakers are doing the right thing. Until that happens, we are slightly paralysed.” Open debate and knowledge-

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sharing will help empower politicians to act, says Glover, who plans to speak frequently with science journalists and academics to stimulate public debate on key topics. Wanted: the best and brightest Another priority for Glover: infusing Europe’s youth with a passion for science, engineering and technology. “I want the smartest young people in Europe to consider a career in science, engineering and technology,” says Glover, arguing that graduates with those backgrounds have the broadest opportunities. “Our success in Europe and our global position in the future will depend on our being smart.” In particular, Europe needs to give star status to engineers. “They are the link between knowledge and the economy. That’s what they do,” Glover says. “They are very precious people. And what an exciting place to sit – they make things happen.” Glover argues science is for big thinkers and ideagenerators, not narrow specialists. “New thinking across scientific boundaries has fueled an exponential rise in knowledge generation which is transforming science and

NEWS

research,” she says. “For my work in microbiology to have great impact, I probably need to speak to mathematicians, informaticians, material scientists, possibly a chemist – and in wilder moments, a highenergy physicist. Then I need an engineer to convert my research to a real product.” In discussing the need to encourage smart, open-minded thinkers, Glover faults Europe’s “abysmal” record for retaining talented women scientists in the workforce after they have families. “It seems to be an amazing shock to us that people have family,” she says. “There is no pro-active support to keep those excellent women. We have made a huge investment in them. You don’t want to lose them when they are at their most valuable – addressing this could be a real advantage for us in Europe.” Replacing an educated worker costs at least one year’s annual salary of that worker, according to a recent study by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers. “If you have a lot of good women going off on maternity leave and not coming back, then you are just throwing money away – and that is not good business. We can’t afford to do that in Europe.” As a beacon of best practice, Glover points to Finland’s ninemonth parental leave, which gives mothers and fathers each three months – use-it-or-lose it – and allows the couple to decide which partner takes the additional three months. A Finnish study highlighted that men and women who returned to the workforce after the parental leave were more successful than their

The making of a chief scientist Anne Glover 1956

Born in Arbroath on Scotland’s northeast coast (where she develops a lifelong love of sailing)

Education 1974-78 1978-81

Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry, University of Edinburgh Doctorate in Molecular Microbiology, University of Cambridge

Academic Research Tracking microorganisms that she has modified to glow in the dark in the presence of certain environmental contaminants

Industry Credential Co-founder and technical director (1999-2003) of Remedios, an Aberdeen-based company that uses her biosensor research to diagnose environmental pollution and provide cleanup solutions

Professional Life 2001-present Chair of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Aberdeen 2006-2011 Chief Scientific Adviser for Scotland 2012 Chief Scientific Adviser to EU President José Manuel Barroso

colleagues who did not take leave. “Businesses are quick to say they can’t afford to have the workforce take such a long leave,” says Glover. “I would argue, you can’t afford not to have the best workforce possible. That’s your most valuable asset. Being a 21stcentury economy means investing in excellence.” An adept communicator, Glover may well get Europeans talking and thinking more about science, technology and innovation. But Europe has to do more than that. It needs to

embrace risk, celebrate entrepreneurial success and throw off old ideas. Glover just might prove an effective catalyst for this crucial cultural change. She has a scientist’s abiding

thrill for new experiments. “We’ve been living in a straitjacket. Let’s just shrug it off and see how much fun that would be – there’s nothing stopping us.” n

“Being a 21st-century economy means investing in excellence.” F 9

Zurich

Berlin

What economic downturn? European tech start-ups flourish in the storm

University spin-offs are on the rise – and are surprisingly resilient – especially when they are backed by smart policies, out-of-the-box thinking and supportive ecosystems F 10

BY RHEA WESSEL AND GAIL EDMONDSON

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ictor Henning, co-founder of Mendeley, an online service that helps academic researchers organise and share the mounds of documents they collect, hardly looked up from his computer screen when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. He was immersed in the day-to-day routines of his start-up, including getting more users and securing the next round of venture capital. “We didn’t feel the effects of the financial crisis,” Henning says now. “Basically, if you have a great product and a great team and you can show that you have market Research is key at ETH Zurich (top left) A meet-up for entrepreneurs in Berlin’s Silicon Allee (above) Scenes from London’s Tech City (top right)

ENTREPRENEURSHIP & SMES

London

traction, then you will always be able to find investment.” That comment comes from a 32-year-old entrepreneur in London – not Los Angeles. Despite the economic aftershocks of the 2008 financial market crash, which included a sharp decline in venture capital investment, Europe’s ability to innovate has not been choked off. In fact, it’s gaining momentum. In 2010, Europe produced a record crop of spin-offs from life sciences to information technology, according to an annual survey released in April 2012 by ProTon, the European Knowledge Transfer Association. And the trend line is up. The total number of spin-off companies launched in Europe in 2010 with the help of knowledge-transfer organisations (KTOs) was 579. That’s a 436 per cent increase from the 108 new ventures recorded in

ProTon’s first survey in 2004 (see graph, page 12). Now in its seventh year, the survey analyzes extensive data from 300 to 400 KTOs at universities and research institutes across Europe. In the three economically tumultuous years since 2008, the number of spin-offs created at the European KTOs who participated in the survey rose on average by 6.9 percent a year, and the number of active spin-offs jumped by an average 7.5 percent per year. Better funding and mentoring That data may mark a turning point. Europe has long suffered from a syndrome of producing great basic research but failing to commercialise it. Now, despite Europe’s risk-averse culture, spin-offs like Mendeley, which was founded in Germany, seem to be

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multiplying – giving rise to hope that Europe can create the companies and jobs it needs to compete in a global knowledge economy. “More and more spin-off companies are being generated by academia and other research institutes all over Europe. They are learning the game – and not only in the most advanced European countries,” says ProTon board member Andrea Piccaluga, a professor of innovation management at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) produced 22 spin-offs in 2011 and a record 110 over the past five years. “I think we’ve come to a point where we have reached critical mass,” says Marjan Kraak, business development manager in biotech, medtech and diagnostics at ETH Zurich’s tech transfer office. “Despite the economic and financial crisis, we continue >>

Spin-offs per year

European spin-offs at a turning point?

cry from Europe’s incubators of the 1980s and 1990s, which mainly provided free office space and a bit of business-plan advice. Some universities even have developed specific entrepreneurship degrees, such as Karolinksa Institutet’s Master’s in Bioentrepreneurship, and Aalto University’s new Ventures Program, which will offer a minor in entrepreneurship for students in economics, architecture and engineering this autumn. The University of Cambridge runs entrepreneurship modules for graduates and undergraduates at its Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, launched in 2003. Though many hotspots have been warming up for a decade or more – especially those in the UK and Switzerland – others have built critical mass surprisingly quickly. When the Technical University of Berlin launched its Centre for Entrepreneurship in 2007, spin-offs (recorded from 2000) were averaging 15.8 per year. That number has since doubled to an average 32.3 a year (2008 to 2010). “We’ve reached a point of strong growth,” says Agnes von Matuschka, director of the centre at TU Berlin, noting that a small core of promising companies have received international financing.

thanks to this networked community, says Brabers, a 22-year veteran of the venture industry. “In order to flourish, start-ups need good ecosystems. These consist not just of VCs and entrepreneurs, but service providers, role models, developers, analysts, headhunters and corporations. You name it. If you bring all these together, the chances of success increase substantially.”

What government can do Targeted government programmes are an Source: ProTon Europe important part of the ecosystem. They include monthly stipends of up to €2,500 for researchers interested in to see so many start-ups forming.” commercialising their technology, an What’s driving change? It took a decade or accelerator programme to help German more of learning, but Europe is becoming start-ups establish US subsidiaries and more effective at nurturing entrepreneurs. apply for US patents, and a matching-funds Not only are European research universities programme for business angels. Under this and institutes developing better funding and scheme, Germany offers each angel mentoring programmes, they are now €250,000 over five years, allowing the linking with local and regional government investor carte blanche to match up to 50 offices and business angels to create more per cent of his or her angel investment in a complete networked innovation ecosystems, particular start-up with the government Piccaluga says. funds. Of course, the depressed markets may Finland’s Aalto University is also off to a also increase the allure of starting a new quick start. Though it opened in 2010, when venture in Europe, since jobs are scarce three Helsinki universities specialising in anyway. “In difficult economic times, people engineering, business and design were are much more obliged to think out of the merged, it already has produced more than box,” says Alex Brabers, who chairs the 25 spin-offs. Finnish start-ups are venture capital platform for the European becoming “more and more robust”, says Private Equity and Venture Capital Will Cardwell, director of Aalto’s Center for Association. Besides, he says, the macroeconomic environment is much less Entrepreneurship and a former US investment banker and venture capitalist. important for early-stage ventures than for “The coaching is a significant driver.” late-stage companies looking for growth. As Aalto’s three founding universities Creating the right ecosystem ETH Zurich’s Kraak concurs, but says were merging, a student-led grassroots government and university programmes are Before designing TU Berlin’s programme, entrepreneurship society already was von Matuschka benchmarked successful now helping make entrepreneurship a entrepreneurship programmes at Stanford, building links to Silicon Valley, sending its “manageable risk”. The alma mater of best student entrepreneurs there for stints MIT and ETH Zurich. Her centre now Albert Einstein, ETH Zurich is one of of up to six months and sponsoring employs a staff of 25 professionals who Europe’s leading spin-off hotspots, along internships at hot US start-ups. Last year, with the Karolinska Institutet, Aalto coach TU students, researchers and Aalto’s Center for Entrepreneurship inked a University, Imperial College London, and the professors on how to set up a company, University of Cambridge. obtain venture capital and win government three-year partnership with Stanford University’s Technology Ventures Program Each has devoted significant resources to grants to commercialise their technology. supporting new ventures and hiring experts The efforts got quick traction: “A community that included joint programmes and workshops on innovation and well versed in entrepreneurial best practice. has formed with events and places where Their programmes coach and fund company entrepreneurs can meet,” she says, a hive of entrepreneurship. spin-off activity. All that networking is helping raise the founders from lab to market, connecting Berlin’s start-up scene has come of age profile of Europe’s new spin-offs. Two-yearthem with both investors and industry – a far

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strengthening European research – a result applauded by industry. “The quality of research is the main driver for innovation,” says Dominique Foray, chair in economics and innovation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.

Helsinki’s Aalto University students learning the entrepreneurial ways of Silicon Valley

old Finnish mobile start-up Blaast, which was founded in part by Aalto researchers, raised €2.6 million last year in a seed capital round led by Ambient Sound Investments, a company launched by four of Skype's founding engineers. Silicon Valley start-up guru Steve Blank and a group of Finnish business angels also invested in Blaast, which launched the world’s first cloud-based platform for mobile “feature phones” – cellphones that are not fully fledged smartphones – in January. Tapping global networks Aalto’s award-winning Startup Sauna “open source seed accelerator” programme supports entrepreneurship throughout the Nordic region. It helped Tampere University of Technology spin-out Ovelin raise €1 million from Silicon Valley-based True Ventures. Cardwell says that there are more announcements in the pipeline, and that spinout activity is bringing the Finnish university network closer together. The speed and ease of connecting in a globally networked economy are also fuelling intercontinental entrepreneurial ties. The Technology and Knowledge Transfer Office at the Budapest University of Technology told researcher Tamas Haidegger in 2010 that his technology to scan hands for infection was crying out for commercialisation. Encouraged, Haidegger founded his own company, Clariton, won a grant from Contact Singapore, a Singapore government agency helping people relocate

to the island and conducted his first clinical trials of his hand disinfection monitoring system there. Clariton CEO Haidegger won the 2012 Science|Business Academic Enterprise award for young entrepreneurs. The effort by European universities and governments to connect students and professors with entrepreneurial meccas in the US, Israel and Asia is a key driver accelerating the creation of start-ups. The exchanges, which run from two weeks to a year, create a viral learning environment, giving European start-ups three critical elements they lacked in the past: instant validation for cutting-edge technology, role models and bridges to dense networks of investors. Missing link Europe’s start-up scene still has a long way to go to match California’s. Its largest companies need to become more active in stimulating innovation and taking up new technologies. In the US, large tech companies nurture the start-up ecosystem by co-funding university research and adopting new products quickly. That creates a virtuous circle leading to more excellent research and more potential spin-offs. The European Commission has tried to bridge the industry-university gap by launching the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT). In addition, the EU’s European Research Council (ERC) provides grants to scientists that are based on excellence, a move experts say is

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Survival rate is key The real test, of course, is how many of Europe’s promising tech spin-offs will grow into globally competitive companies. The overall survival trend in Europe is too recent to judge, says ProTon’s Piccaluga. He figures that for every 100 spin-offs, there will be only ten success stories. “That is not a failure,” he says. “That is the price we have to pay to produce ten stars.” At ETH Zurich, which has been compiling data for over a decade, the aggregate survival rate for spin-offs created between 1998 and 2007 is 88.5 per cent (115 out of 130 spin-offs have endured). One survivor launched in 2008 is Optotune, which has invented adjustable optical lenses based on elastic polymers – a breakthrough that lowers the cost and increases the quality of lenses used for mobile-phone cameras, machine vision, microscopes and other optical devices. While financial markets were crashing, Optotune’s co-founders inked a contract with a US telecommunications supplier worth several million dollars to develop lenses for mobilephone cameras. The four-year-old company, which now employs 30 and recently moved to a new 1500-square-metre office and labs, is funding its growth entirely through development projects. ETH Zurich’s spin-off dynamic is already producing enviable economic dividends. The 130 spin-offs tracked in its 10-year survey have created more than 900 direct jobs and in 2007 alone paid an estimated 18 million Swiss francs in tax revenues to local and federal government on estimated pre-tax income of 43 million Swiss francs. That’s a strong incentive to keep working on building a better climate for Europe’s entrepreneurs. n

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More information http://www.protoneurope.org

Team Trifense (from left): Klaus-Robert Müller, mentor, Christian Gehl, Konrad Rieck, Patrick Düssel and René Gerstenberger

Fighting cyber threats you can’t see coming Berlin’s Trifense, an EIT Entrepreneurship Award winner, takes a new approach to Internet security – and starts to gain traction in the market BY ANNA JENKINSON

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n the global battle against cybercrime, the smartest minds have not figured out how to prevent new attacks – yet. Professional hackers and criminals with economic or political motives routinely outmanoeuvre cutting-edge computer security systems, plundering the data of multinational companies and government offices, and wreaking havoc with everything from bank accounts to nuclear power plants. These attacks, plus employee negligence and hardware failures, cost companies and organisations an average €2.6 million a year, according to a 2010

study by the Ponemon Institute. But what if computers could learn to detect anomalous activity instantly and block an attack? Three computer scientists from Germany have developed network security software that aims to do just that. The two-year-old company, Trifense, is bringing its first set of software tools to market after a combined 15 man-years of research. Co-founders Patrick Düssel, Christian Gehl and René Gerstenberger all studied computer science at the University of Potsdam, then worked together on a government-funded research project in machine learning at the Fraunhofer

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Institute in Berlin. In 2010, eager to build a start-up based on their research, they moved to the Technical University of Berlin. Initially, the three had hoped to build their own hardware and sell directly to end users. Talks with investors, however, highlighted the difficulty of raising enough money to bring their products to market directly, so they shifted their strategy to partnering with other cyber-security companies. Trifense’s self-learning technology focuses on monitoring incoming data known as “network packet payloads”. Its software enables computers to “learn” to distinguish normal network functioning


secured its first technology partner, Astaro, an international network-security supplier based in Germany, which is now integrating Trifense technology into its own products. “This cooperation is a big opportunity for us right now. It gives us hope that we’ll make it,” says Düssel. Thanks to a German governmentfunded accelerator programme which provides start-ups mentoring and advisory services, Trifense has benefited from office space in Silicon Valley as well as introductions to American companies, the world’s largest customers for IT security. “All the main players [in security software] are in Silicon Valley,” says Trifense Chief Technology Officer Gehl, who has extended his stay to six months this year. “Large German companies are not used to talking to start-ups. US companies are more open to adopting new technologies. They have a different mentality. It’s very important to be in Silicon Valley at this stage in the company’s growth.”

from unusual activity that would signal an attack. By detecting deviations from the learned models, the software can recognise unknown cyber-threats entangled with the payloads. “This is a significant advantage over traditional network security solutions such as firewalls or signature-based systems,” says Düssel, Trifense managing director. The main difference between Trifense’s technology and existing security systems is that it does not rely on any kind of prewritten description of the attack to spot the trouble coming. A spin-off from the Technical University of Berlin, Trifense has patents pending and this year won the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) Entrepreneurship Award in the field of information and communications technology (ICT). It also won a German

government award for innovative ICT companies in 2010. Düssel and his cofounders aim to stake out a globally dominant position in self-learning network security software that protects companies against new and unknown threats before they do damage. It’s a growth industry: Frost & Sullivan’s 2010 report, World Unified Threat Management (UTM) Products Market, estimates the global market for network security software in 2012 at €2.9 billion and the sector is forecast to grow 20 per cent a year, reaching €5.3 billion by 2016. According to a recent cybercrime study by McAfee, Intel’s security technology subsidiary, the annual financial losses from data breaches and intellectual property theft recently reached a trillion dollars globally. In May 2011, the Berlin spin-out

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What's ahead Trifense is already exploring the possibility of setting up US operations by talking with strategic partners, prospective customers and venture investors. The company, which received €200,000 in German start-up funding, is seeking to raise up to €750,000 in seed capital by the end of 2012. American customers can give an unknown European tech company instant global credibility. Trifense has gotten a start: it is discussing a pilot project of its technology with a US financial services giant. The challenge ahead is building up a portfolio of products and testing them with customers in the market. “We want to develop a set of innovative security products with self-learning at their core,” Düssel says. “You need to invest a lot of money to implement. This is hardcore mathematical work.” But if he and his team can create new ways to fight cyberattacks, they can do the hardcore financing too. n

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More information http://eit.europa.eu/kics1/eit-ict-labs.html http://www.trifense.com

Changing the face of science publishing ACES winner Mendeley is revolutionising the way research is done – using cloud computing to create the largest crowd-sourced library in the world. Its software lets academics organise and annotate journal articles, and share and discuss their work with researchers around the globe F 16


BY MICHAEL KENWARD

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he CEO of Mendeley, Victor Henning, and his two co-founders started down the path to entrepreneurship by solving a problem they had as PhD students – how to organise mountains of journal papers. “Every academic has hundreds of PDF files that they need to manage for their research,” says Henning. Mendeley’s goal is to make that task “really easy”. The London-based company provides intelligent database and collaboration tools. Its desktop software allows academics to drag and drop papers into cloud-based folders, and automatically extracts information from those PDFs to help researchers organise their work. Smart algorithms analyse the text to determine the authors of the paper and when and where it appeared. “Mendeley

takes those PDFs and turns them into a structured database that is easy to search and sort and filter,” Henning says. Along with researchers Jan Reichelt and Paul Föckler, Henning launched Mendeley in 2007. (The three connected at a Las Vegas youth hostel during an academic conference.) Since Mendeley’s start, more than 1.6 million people have signed up for its free cloud- and crowd-based service, with 150,000 new users joining each month. Academics make more than 5 million visits a month to the Mendeley website, cataloguing, maintaining and sharing their research papers. Focus on quality While the numbers may look modest alongside the billions of friends on Facebook and other social networks, Mendeley claims it is the world’s largest research collaboration platform and

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Founders (from left): Paul Föckler, Victor Henning and Jan Reichelt – and (far left) a graphic representation of how Mendeley software organises researchers’ papers

research database. Besides, the start-up’s focus is quality, not quantity. When Henning pitched Mendeley at the European Entrepreneurship Summit in Brussels on 21 February, he listed MIT and the universities of Cambridge and Stanford as its top users. “When we came up with the idea, we planned to do it as a side project,” Henning says. The trio would write software and then license it out. They soon realised the huge “potential in the idea of crowdsourcing”, says Henning. If they got millions of scientists to use Mendeley, he explains, “it would be an incredible database of research that would not have been available before”. >>

How Mendeley got its name “You can probably imagine that coming up with a name for a start-up is hard.” That’s how Victor Henning began his blog post about finding a name for what became Mendeley. At first the working title was “Literacula” because, he writes, “we imagined how our software would sink its teeth into literature and automatically (supernaturally?) suck the metadata out of it. Besides, the cheesy ‘B-movie monster’ sound of the name made us giggle.” Since no one liked the name or knew how to pronounce it, the team “tossed around” other options. Among them: Horizontina (“how do you pronounce that?”), Horizontas (“Pocahontas?”), Theora (“sounds boring”), Sciendia (“too generic”), Scientree (“nah”). After Henning read the autobiography of eminent physicist Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!, the name “Feyn” looked promising. “It sounded short and sweet in German, our native language,” says Henning, “but was pronounced like ‘feign’ by our English friends – clearly not the best connotation in the academic context.” But the team felt they were on to something: scientists’ names. As Henning blogs, “The chemists and biologists among you may have already deduced from whom we derive our name: Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev, who developed the periodic table of elements, and Gregor Mendel, who is often called the father of modern genetics.” After months of searching, Mendeley had a name.

Victor Henning

>>

The Science|Business Innovation Board awarded Mendeley the Microsoft prize for the best company with a business model based on cloud computing, one of four Academic Enterprise Awards (ACES), presented at the European Entrepreneurship Summit. On the day before the ACES presentation, researchers had uploaded 800,000 papers to Mendeley’s database, but because the service is based in the cloud the company is able to deal with such high volumes of traffic and to scale up seamlessly as it attracts more and more users. “Where Mendeley excels is in making it brilliantly simple to organise and annotate the papers you are reading, to keep that data synchronised between your local folders and the cloud, and for sharing and discovering research across your social networks,” says Alex Wade, Director of

Scholarly Communications at Microsoft. “Mendeley is an excellent example of making the best use of both rich clients and the cloud, and in providing a seamless experience between the two.” Since each document comes with unique user-generated social information, Mendeley knows who people are, what they are reading, and what keywords they use. But, Henning insists, the company is more than just a social network. “Scientists are not known for being sociable,” he jokes. “I have always seen social networks as being a subset of our functionality.” Business plan Mendeley is turning its database into a platform for developing scientific applications. More than 1,000 people have already signed up to create apps for Mendeley. One such programme helps

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researchers take their bibliographic information – the lists of papers they refer to in their work – and carry it over into other database managment systems. Other apps enable users of Twitter and the WordPress blogging site to work with Mendeley. When the company held a competition for app developers, the winning entry was openSNP, which enables people to feed their personal genome into Mendeley and other research databases in order to find the latest medical research on diseases like diabetes as well as to promote new genetic associations. As for sources of revenue, Mendeley has started to collect a share of the income generated by these applications. Companies and universities have also taken out site licences, allowing them to use Mendeley software to manage research portfolios and to improve collaboration across their organisations. By providing such connections, Henning believes that Mendeley could become a portal for Open Access journal publication. Henning also thinks Mendeley could profit by circulating the papers that it helps researchers write. As he points out, publishing in the science, technology and medicine sector is worth about $15 billion a year. With a network of 1.6 million academics, Mendeley already has excellent access to a “great commissioning network”. And, he continues, “we already have the technology”. In presentations, Henning proudly quotes Werner Vogels, the chief technology officer of Amazon.com, who commented, “I strongly believe that Mendeley can change the face of science.” Given how it has tapped cloud computing to transform the ability of academics to organise their research, Mendeley already has. n

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More information http://www.mendeley.com http://www.eitawards.eu/01_03_12_The_ 3_winners_of_the_first_EIT_entrepreneu rship_award.aspx


It’s the Facebook effect: from big industry giants to the European Commission, everyone is learning the value of linking individuals through the Web

Using social media for innovation and productivity BY STEPHEN BAKER

This is how it usually works in Brussels. A European Commissioner gives a speech. Journalists write articles about it or discuss it on radio or TV. People get the news; the word is delivered. But on January 24, when Neelie Kroes, Europe’s Commissioner for Digital Agenda, spoke about entertainment in the electronic age, something different happened. The

transcript promptly went up on a website, http://www.commentneelie.eu. Next to each paragraph was a space for readers to add their thoughts. In several of these nooks, conversations started to appear. Next to one paragraph about video on demand, a commenter provided revenue projections for the industry. When another person asked for details, the revenue-projector

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responded with a link to a study. What started out as a speech in Brussels quickly sprouted into a small community and a handful of intra-continental connections. It was a minuscule outbreak of social networking. In the world of social media, the industry behemoths, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, earn the lion’s share of >>

What started out as a speech in Brussels quickly sprouted into a small community and a handful of intra-continental connections. It was a minuscule outbreak of social networking. >> attention, not to mention investment dollars. But the online world is rich with other opportunities for people to connect. Consultants and technology researchers now view nearly every interaction and artifact online as an opportunity for a chance meeting. If a speech can generate a conversation, so can a Word document or even an Internet search for a 1997 Volkswagen Jetta. If used wisely, these seemingly random interactions among millions of people can lead to breakthrough ideas, new approaches – in short, innovation. The trick, says David Osimo, managing partner at Tech4i2, a UK-based consultancy, “is to find ways to attract brainpower.” Sceptical? It’s only natural. And let’s concede from the get-go that, just as some critics claim, much of social media content is trivia – teenagers sharing their quotidian details on Facebook or kittens doing yoga on YouTube. However, the challenge in social media, as in the rest of the jumbled and crowded world of information, is to zero in on the valuable stuff, where the richest connections lurk, where the freshest ideas are streaming, where innovation is most likely to occur. One vital element of social media innovation is the disappearance of borders, walls and hierarchies. These structures

Neelie Kroes, Europe’s Commissioner for Digital Agenda

tend to bottle up ideas, preventing them from mingling with others—a key step for innovation. In 2009 the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co. addressed this by launching the Phenotypic Drug Discovery Initiative. This allows researchers from all over the world to submit their molecular formulas for testing. If they show promise, they can partner with Lilly, or seek out other alliances. One advantage to this open platform is cross-pollination. A pulmonary specialist, for example, might submit a drug designed to battle whooping cough. But others may see the compound’s potential for an ailment affecting a different organ. As the boundaries between disciplines vanish, the potential for innovation rises. Using the technology In its fifth annual social media survey, the consulting firm McKinsey found that 40 per cent of the more than 4,200 global executives polled say their companies use social networking and blogs, a figure that goes up to 86 percent in high tech and telecommunications companies. Among the ways they use these technologies: to scan the outside environment for new ideas or competitive intelligence; to match employees to tasks; and to foster communication and collaboration

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throughout the enterprise, particularly in the realm of best practice. Researchers at Microsoft, for example, recently built tools to provide employees with information about the other people copied on emails they received. It included links to their areas of study, papers they had published, conferences they had attended, and also information about their lives, their languages and hobbies. According to Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s Future Social Experiences Labs, emailers eventually clicked more often on people outside their traditional contacts. “Even though it’s work,” Cheng says, “people are interested in the outside life of their colleagues.” Why does this matter? Many social network researchers view the corporation almost as a single brain. In this scheme, each person, like a cluster of neurons, represents a node of memories, skills and knowledge. Trouble is, the people they mingle with tend to resemble themselves. Fresh ideas are much more likely to occur when individuals come in contact with people who are different from them in terms of background or expertise. In this sense, social networking has the potential to spark new synapses in the corporate brain. Researchers at IBM have gone so far as to inventory the knowledge and skills of the company’s 400,000 workers and then, almost like an online dating site, offer some of them lists of potential friends and collaborators. These human connections are vital, especially in today’s world of networked computers and advanced search engines, which are handling much of the traditional knowledge work – the storing and retrieving of facts – in the economy. But computers still cannot carry out higherlevel, conceptual thinking. And they are incapable of formulating great ideas (or recognising them if by chance they produce one). Only people do this. Social media connect individuals, using the power of networked computers to amass and augment human intelligence. Granted, that’s awfully exalted language for a social media world in which, as we’ve already conceded, the vast majority of


The challenge in social media is to zero in on the valuable stuff, where the richest connections lurk, where the freshest ideas are streaming, where innovation is most likely to occur. communications are mundane. Yet even in that vast digital morass of empty tweets, self-serving replies and emoticons, researchers can find gold. As the McKinsey study concludes: “When adopted at scale across an emerging type of networked enterprise and integrated into the work processes of employees, social technologies can boost a company’s financial performance and market share.” Stefan Weitz, who is part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine team, looks at social

media as a vast laboratory, one that is changing the nature of search. For starters, Bing has some 2 million people on its Facebook fan page. This gives the company an enormous focus group to try out new ideas and concepts, from rating new photos and designs on the Bing homepage to linking to Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites. At the same time, Bing is combining the learnings from social media with search. The idea, says Weitz, is that search results will eventually

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provide answers and links customised to individuals. “We’re using it to construct a more articulate representation of a human being,” he says. That spells more innovation. And its source material, from clicks to tweets, springs from social media. n

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More information http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How _social_technologies_are_extending_the _organization_2888

Opening up big data Mining the vast amounts of information on the Web is the next frontier for innovation and growth

BY JOHN CAREY

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he lochs and hills of County Argyll in western Scotland provided stunning backdrops for James Bond’s adventures in From Russia with Love. But these days, the local government is more concerned about its citizens than about spy thrillers. The biggest chunk of the £109 million spent each year by Argyll & Bute Council goes on social and health services, much of it on home care. Cultural activities are a mere blip in the budget, far below even catering. How do we know all this? Argyll & Bute Council is one of more than three dozen local governments in the UK and the US

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that have opened up financial ledgers for all to see on the web – down to exact payments for cutting grass or repairing boat propellers. Ordinary people see exactly what their local governments are up to. Officials can spot ways to make their operations more efficient. And by knowing exactly what their rivals are getting paid, businesses can better compete for government contracts. “That drives down the cost of these services to the local authorities,” explains Luke Spikes, CEO of Spikes Cavell, a British analytics company that runs “Spotlight on Spend” programmes for governments. The financial transactions of Argyll & Bute Council are just one sign that we are “on


Argyll & Bute Council, which presides over this majestic part of the Scottish Highlands, has placed its ledgers online for all to see

some government databases for citizens and companies to use. This promotes greater transparency, which businesses and entrepreneurs can leverage to offer new products and services.

the cusp of a data revolution”, as former US federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra says. Think of this revolution in two complementary parts. “big data” refers to the vast amounts of information stored on the Internet, data sets from governments and businesses, scientists and social networks that are so immense that conventional software tools cannot capture, store, manage or analyse them. Companies that can rapidly bring order to this mass of information have a winning strategy, as do the organisations willing to harness big data’s potential for their own growth. The other aspect of the data revolution is “open data”, the unlocking of

Big data Hundreds of exabytes a year are flowing onto the Net from doctors and hospitals, smart electricity meters, weather instruments, supermarket checkout counters, government agencies, smartphones, Facebook pages, sensors on manufacturing assembly lines and countless other sources. Just as important, advances in hardware and software are keeping pace, enabling uses of data that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. “We can collect it, store it and process it,” says Greg Fairbank, CEO of Saratoga Data Systems, a California-based company. “It’s the perfect storm for big data.” The ability to open up big data is “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” says a recent McKinsey report. Retailers like Amazon, Tesco and Kroger were the first explorers of this new frontier, using their enormous databases of purchases to target customers with individualised promotions, boosting sales and earnings. Manufacturers can also profit. Real-time analysis of data from sensors on the factory floor can keep assembly lines humming better, while information sharing across R&D centres and manufacturing facilities can slash product development costs. In fact, McKinsey predicts that big data can cut development and assembly costs for many products by 50 per cent. The ability to analyse huge amounts of information and make it more accessible is helping governments fight crime, nab tax evaders and track terrorists. And there are huge savings to be had, particularly in health care. Medicine is full of unanswered questions. Is it better to fight heart disease with bypass operations, stents, or drugs? What’s the best combination of

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medications to treat diabetes? Thanks to the tools of big data, the answers can be found by looking at how thousands of people were treated and how they fared. Such sleuthing, using data from Kaiser Permanente, led the US Food and Drug Administration to determine that the blockbuster painkiller Vioxx raised the risk of heart attacks, for instance. Now, Medicare is tinkering with reimbursement formulas “to see if we can get better health care outcomes as the result of changes in the payment system,” Chopra said at a recent conference. The potential health care savings? McKinsey pegs it at $165 billion per year. Opening up the data frontier has been made possible by clever software. In the 1990s and early 2000s, companies like Oracle figured out how to gather and store huge amounts of digital information. By 2003, the world had so much data that “when Google tried to index the entire Internet, it realised it couldn’t use oldfashioned methods,” explains Bob Gourley, founder of research and advisory firm Crucial Point and organiser of the Government Big Data Solutions Award. So in 2004, Google devised a new approach called MapReduce. The basic idea: Parcel out bits of the problem to many different servers or computers. This massively distributed strategy makes it possible to get answers or solutions in seconds or minutes rather than days or weeks. Legendary programmer Doug Cutting took the MapReduce idea and created an open-source software package that he named Hadoop, after his son’s toy elephant. Now, companies like IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, along with government agencies such as the US National Security Agency, use Hadoop to process enormous amounts of data. Open data Governments and businesses are starting to appreciate the ramifications of big data and take advantage of all it can provide. And as more and more information finds >>

>> its way onto the Web, big data companies are developing an increasing number of applications to make sense of it. As Spotlight on Spend and other examples illustrate, the other very promising trend is open data, which begins with the sharing of government public information among individuals and companies. Wind-turbine maker Vestas analyses petabytes of information on wind speeds, electricity prices and weather modelling research to give customers more certainty about the financial return from wind farms, explains Lars Christian Christensen, Vestas’s vice-president of plant siting and forecasting. Pictures from NASA and ESA satellites are being used to guide geologists in their search for oil and valuable minerals. The German Federal Employment Agency, after crunching years’ worth of historical data on unemployed workers and implementing other measures, reduced its spending by €10 billion a year. “Many new businesses are emerging to analyse government data,” says Mika Hållfast, development director at Logica in Finland, which is running a pilot effort to collect data from Finnish Rescue Service operations. The information could be used to provide services like sending real-time updates on road accidents to drivers on the same route. McKinsey estimates that “Europe’s public sector could potentially

reduce the costs of administrative activities by 15 to 20 per cent, creating the equivalent of €150 billion to €300 billion – or even higher – in new value.” One government-related sector ripe for a data-driven transformation is transportation. Most people take buses only when they have to, because bus routes are often hard to figure out and schedules unreliable. That’s why a California company named NextBus grabs real-time GPS location data from every bus in cities like Boston, plots the positions on maps Crunching real-time GPS data and historical traffic flow patterns makes California bus transportation predictable

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Thanks to open data, citizens of some Spanish communities can report problems like graffiti and potholes – and track the city’s response

showing routes and stops, and then adds in historical information about traffic flows to predict how fast each bus can move. The crunched data is beamed to everything from LED signs at bus stops to smartphones. Suddenly, riders know exactly when the bus will arrive and where it will go. A vast array of services based on open data could translate into substantial growth for start-ups and software companies. Imagine adding real-time information from commuter rail, taxis and car-sharing services to display all the options for getting from point A to point B. Then, combine that with real-time location data from smartphones, so that transportation providers can cater to your precise needs – with no effort on your part. “I don’t think we’re at the point yet where we get out of the airport and there’s a sign that says, ‘Hey Mike, here’s a cab for you,’ but we’re not that far away,” says Mike Pilcher, president and chief operating officer of SAND Technology, a Canadian analytics company. Open data can make governments far more responsive. In several Spanish communities, people can report such


“Citizens finally feel like they have a way to participate in the care of the city, and the governments benefit because they’ve essentially outsourced the task of monitoring the streets.” Jordi Plana, Spenta CEO

the University of California, Berkeley. The road to the data revolution has a few bumps, of course. “There are challenges with open data,” says Michaela Kraft, head of Microsoft’s open source strategy for Western Europe. One problem is that too often data are stored using different standards and formats. As a result, says Luke Spikes, “we need a Babel fish” – a modern-day version of the creature in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy who could translate all languages. When Spikes started Spotlight on Spend, 60 per cent of the financial records had to be “eyeballed” (manually validated) by real people, though more experience has brought that down to 16 to 17 per cent. problems as graffiti on walls or dead That’s why Microsoft and others are animals in the street over the Internet creating such Babel fish, offering software using a system developed by Barcelonatools that can read different formats and based Spenta. Then the individuals can track the government’s response. “Citizens standardise the data. Another issue is resources. While finally feel like they have a way to opening up data promises to make participate in the care of the city, and the governments benefit because they’ve government more efficient in the long run, essentially outsourced the task of the new efforts have upfront costs. The monitoring the streets,” says Spenta CEO solution, policy experts suggest, is for Jordi Plana. Similar efforts are being rolled individual governments to piggyback on the experiences of others. If Poland, for out in Ireland and across Europe. “Open government policies in many countries are instance, wanted to start a citizenreporting programme like those in Ireland permitting citizens to interact directly with or Spain, it would make sense for the agencies, manage information about country to roll out the same software themselves – and in the process produce a more efficient government,” explains Henry platform. “Given the limited financial Chesbrough, executive director of the resources of the governments in the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at European Union, they need to make sure

that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says Microsoft’s Kraft. Still, there are a few simple policy steps that governments can take: Commit to making data sets open and transparent. Bite the bullet on relatively small upfront costs to reap large savings later. Share best practice so that individual governments don’t have to start open data efforts from scratch. And hire a few good experts. For instance, the winner of the first Government Big Data Solutions Award was the US General Service Administration’s USASearch. “It delivers better search results to more than 500 government websites,” explains Gourley. The GSA’s secret? “They found a smart young programmer [Loren Siebert, also a noted San Francisco entrepreneur] and teamed him with GSA senior executives,” says Gourley. How big, how open and how far-reaching can data get? Physicist and sociologist Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich has proposed a €1 billion system that taps into every conceivable type of data to predict the future. Says Pilcher: “You can take this as far as you can take software – which goes as far as imagination can take you.” n

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More information http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/ Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_ data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation

“You can take this as far as you can take software – which goes as far as imagination can take you.” Mike Pilcher, president, SAND Technology

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What will computers be doing in 2025? The exponential growth of computing power will transform how humans interact with machines – and vice versa. Microsoft’s Craig Mundie, and his avatar, explain BY GAIL EDMONDSON

It’s the year 2525 and 20 heads of state have agreed to meet for an extraordinary summit to regulate the global financial system. Each leader arrives as a lifelike avatar, walking down a virtual gilded hallway into an auditorium. As the Chinese Premier presents one of three competing proposals, a lively debate ensues with the European and US representatives. There is not a translator in sight. Instead, computers are translating in real time, allowing each leader to speak and listen in his or her mother tongue – and interact as naturally as if everyone spoke the same language.

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hat’s a futuristic scenario Craig Mundie is working to enable. “The ultimate dream for a global economy is the ability to meet and talk easily with anyone in the world,” says Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer of Microsoft. In the coming decade, Mundie predicts, the exponential growth in computing power will transform how humans interact with computers and vice versa, paving the way for fascinating new experiences. The Redmond, Washington-based 62-year-old computer scientist regularly demonstrates just how far computers have come already, sometimes by sending his avatar across the world for virtual chats with students as well

as policy leaders such as Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, EC Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science. Recently he was physically present in Brussels, where he spoke to Futures about computing breakthroughs and the policies countries need to take advantage of them. From his strategic position at one of the world's largest computer-science research organisations, Mundie is steering those advances. Over the past decade, Microsoft has poured over 6,500 man-years into basic research on “natural user interfaces” (NUI) that allow computers to mimic human interactions and process information. “We're not very far away from being able to blend the physical and the virtual, and

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give people the ability to move around in this environment,” says Mundie. In 2010, Microsoft incorporated NUI research into Kinect, a three-dimensional vision system for the Xbox that brought machine vision and speech to gaming. With Kinect, players control the movement of the figures on the computer screen by moving their body. Sensors “see” and translate the movement without the need for a control stick. Kinect uses the same basic technology that Mundie depends on for his avatar. Kinect also enables Xbox to be controlled by the user’s voice. In addition to NUI, Microsoft is focusing on machine learning to enable computers to crunch and make sense of vast amounts of data as well as other advances to make them more useful human assistants. All three technology shifts will “change what we expect from a computer,” says Mundie. Researchers and managers are only now beginning to deploy computers to mine and analyse the mountains of “big data” that are collected by governments, businesses, universities, social media and other information intensive entities. The goal is to discover correlations that will generate


US and Europe in producing talented young scientists and innovative technologies, warns Mundie. Closing the gap with Asia means rethinking both education and lifelong training policies. One challenge, Mundie says, is to get children excited about science and technology at an early age. He sits on US President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Among PCAST recommendations is the creation of a corps of “master teachers” who are paid to take courses in technical disciplines during the free summer months to help inspire student scientists. The majority of the PCAST advisors traced their own enthusiasm for science to an inspiring elementary schoolteacher. “There is cause and effect,” says Mundie. That’s Craig Mundie’s avatar on the screen talking to the avatar of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Another key issue for governments is to European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science. While Mundie was not present at ensure that the existing workforce has the the Brussels event, the Commissioner was on stage, far left skills needed to remain productive as new technologies transform jobs. As Mundie says, “There is not enough focus on how to endow workers aged 20 to 60 with skills that valuable business and scientific intelligence. know, since along with Microsoft Research (with more than 800 researchers around the will make them suited to the jobs of the (For more on big data, see page 22.) future.” As for computers as personal assistants, world), he also heads the company’s startWhile education and training are vital, the says Mundie, “We envision a future where a up business group, and has spent his career key driver of competitiveness is investment computer is more like a helper and less like launching businesses in fields from in basic research, Mundie argues. Kinect a tool.” It will work on your behalf, not supercomputing to healthcare. was developed as a product from start to merely at your command. Travelling in India To reap the benefits of technology finish in three years, but it was built on 10 and can’t read the menu? No problem – breakthroughs, however, countries must place your phone in front of the menu and it have smart information technology policies. years of basic research in seven different disciplines, in four labs on three continents. will recognise the dialect and translate the For example, governments need to make “Absent any one of those research efforts, available the huge fields of data stored in regional specialties instantly. Indeed, cloud-based systems – such as incidence of we probably couldn’t have completed the Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 can already disease or historic weather patterns – for do this. product,” says Mundie. “If you don’t have basic research, the technologies and the entrepreneurs to build new business ability to assemble them, you are cutting models, and for scientists to make New business creation yourself off from the breakthroughs that new discoveries. Natural user interfaces, machine learning create whole new industries or new Countries that want to keep pace with and the evolution of computers as human helpers hold the potential to act as catalysts advances in technology will also need skilled capability.” That will be as true in 2025 for new businesses, says Mundie. He should local workforces. Asia is now outpacing the as it is today. n

“The ultimate dream for a global economy is the ability to meet and talk easily with anyone in the world.” Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft

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SKILLS & EDUCATION

Finding – and measuring – 21st-century skills Companies want employees who can think critically, work collaboratively and communicate through new technology. A revolutionary project is teaching students how to do them all BY DIANE HOFKINS

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Close collaboration: These 11-year-old students are working on problem-solving tasks in a pilot program at Mariaschool in Beneden-Leeuen, the Netherlands

ven before the dawn of the new millennium, business executives, educators and parents were asking what skills workers would need to succeed in the new century. The answers are now becoming clearer, thanks to a ground-breaking project called Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S). In 2009, three technology giants – Cisco, Intel and Microsoft – joined forces with the University of Melbourne’s Assessment Research Centre and six governments (Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, the Netherlands, Singapore and the US) to identify the key proficiencies that employers are looking for now and into the future. Their findings: companies want individuals who are good at critical thinking, problem-solving, collaborating and communicating through new technology. The search for such talent is getting more and more serious. According to PWC’s 15th Annual CEO Survey, one in four

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chief executives said they were unable to pursue a market opportunity or had to cancel or delay a strategic initiative because they could not hire the right talent. One in three of the 1,258 international CEOs polled for the report expressed concern that skills shortages will impact their company’s ability to innovate. To help address the problem, the European Commission held its second e-skills week in March, dedicated to showing young people the relevance of – and demand for – e-skills in a digital age. But to keep ahead of global competitors, businesses are also looking for people with the social skills to appreciate different perspectives and cultures. These 21stcentury skills are not part of the traditional classroom curriculum. What’s more, they are challenging to teach, to measure and to adapt to the needs of Europe’s citizens. But the ATC21S project is making exciting progress, and changing the world of education at the same time. In a school in Finland, for instance, two >>

Skills for the future To define future skills, ATC21S researchers reviewed national and international studies on 21st-century learning. Four broad categories emerged: ways of thinking, which involves creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making; ways of working, which includes communication and collaboration; tools for working, like information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy; and skills for living in the world, such as citizenship, career choices, and personal and social responsibility. To assess these skills, the researchers wanted to go beyond the students’ responses to questions and actually interpret the behaviours that led to the answers. Since computers can log every keystroke, they can amass a huge amount of behavioural data, which, if interpreted properly, can illuminate students’ thinking as they respond to various problems. The researchers built a group of practical, computer-based assessment tasks around two skill sets that encompass all four categories: collaborative problem-solving and ICT literacy. The collaborative problem-solving tasks have proved particularly successful, while some digital assessments need further development.

How the tasks work Imagine Leena and Harri, secondary students in Helsinki. Seated at PCs in two separate rooms, they have just begun the “Hot Chocolate” task. It is one of a set of activities taking about 45 minutes each, designed to teach and test collaborative problem-solving skills. Each student has been given half the information needed to complete the task – maximising profits in Europe. Leena can see the ingredients, like chocolate and sugar, and regional sales charts, while Harri has profit charts and market research for each region of the world (Europeans prefer unsweetened beverages). As they share information via a messaging system to pool ideas and work out a strategy, their computers are recording each step and decision taken, searching for keywords in every communication exchanged, tracking every mouse movement. The computer will plot each child’s skills on a carefully constructed continuum, from emerging problem-solver to a highly sophisticated one, so the teacher can devise strategies for individual improvement. The tasks are game-like, each demanding a different way of collaborating. In another exercise known as the “Beam Balance”, children have to move weights of varying masses back and forth in order to find a scale’s equilibrium. Melbourne University’s Professor Esther Case explains that children also learn from the tasks themselves. The “Hot Chocolate” task helps them build knowledge of the world around them, while the “Beam Balance” teaches scientific concepts – the 21st century, collaborative way.

Since computers can log every keystroke, they can amass a huge amount of behavioural data, which can illuminate students’ thinking as they respond to various problems. F 30

SKILLS & EDUCATION

“This research has broken the ground on assessment… And it will lead to changes in curriculum across the world.” Patrick Griffin, associate dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and ATC21S executive director

>> 15-year-old students sit in separate classrooms – each at a personal computer working together on what appears to be a game. In fact, it is a fairly sophisticated business problem that involves the cost of materials, marketing information, sales and profit figures (see box). As they bat ideas and information back and forth, the computers they are using to message each other are also assessing the ways in which each is collaborating and building knowledge. The exercise reflects the dramatic rise in collaboration via information technology networks across countries and time zones – for most of the global workforce. Schools have failed to keep pace with that shift, continuing to focus on the traditional curriculum, reinforced by competitive national exam regimes. When schools are judged on their results, they teach what the exams test. But what if policymakers change the exams? “How do you change the nature of assessment?” Greg Butler, senior director, Worldwide Education Strategy for Microsoft, asks rhetorically. “How do you measure you and me collaborating?” Here’s how. Researchers divided the desired skills into two sets – collaborative problem-solving and digital literacy – and developed two suites of complex, challenging and appealing activities that children could work on in pairs from PCs in separate rooms, schools or even countries. The students, each of whom has only half of the information needed for a solution, might be asked to balance a beam with weights, feed balls into the mouth of a clown or figure out how to add up a set of numbers to get to 20. In every pilot school, the pattern was the same. Diederik Schonau, senior

international consultant at the independent assessment body, CITO, describes the scene in the Netherlands. After 15 minutes of noise and some bafflement, the students caught on, became intrigued and “worked eagerly” together on the tasks. Teachers taking part were “very interested and surprised by the assignments”. Assessing assessment The ATC21S project involved 5,000 12-to16-year-olds, cost upwards of $3 million and harnessed the thinking of more than 200 academics worldwide, along with executives at major banks and multinationals. “This remarkable initiative… has cracked the code on how to set standards for, and assess the acquisition of, 21st-century skills,” says Robin Horn, education sector manager for the World Bank. ATC21S was “a harbinger of a wholly new approach to standards and assessment”. That’s important, since to make changes at the classroom level policymakers need accurate information about the abilities of the student population. “This research has broken the ground on assessment,” says Patrick Griffin, associate dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and ATC21S executive director. “And it will lead to changes in curriculum across the world.” In fact, the ATC21S assessment data led to the OECD’s decision to measure 15year-olds’ “collaborative problem-solving” skills alongside the usual language, mathematics and science tests in its 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey. “ATC21S has played an essential pathfinder role to move the assessment agenda forward,” says PISA director

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Andreas Schleicher. “It fills a critical gap between existing basic research on assessment design and methodologies, on the one hand, and the implementation of large-scale assessments that provide reliable data at reasonable cost, on the other.” Governments in every industrialised country care about their position in the PISA league tables. So the inclusion of collaborative problem-solving data will push politicians and policymakers to expand school curricula beyond the three basic subjects that PISA currently measures. That will increase demand for the ATC21S findings and materials, which are now migrating to the cloud so they can be easily accessed. ATC21S will offer curriculum recommendations, advice and workshops for teachers as well as policy and implementation guidance for test developers and governments. Of course, official testing means scoring children and ranking countries – always a controversial process. But ATC21S has worked on a “developmental model, not a deficit model”, says Greg Butler. In other words, its purpose is to help identify what each student can do so that the teacher can help the individual child take the next step. Still, once the main part of project is wrapped up in June, the debate will probably intensify. After all, arguing about education policy is a skill that is centuries old. n

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More information http://atc21s.org/ http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/ceo-survey/keyfindings/hr-talent-strategies.jhtml

Doing well by doing good An EU initiative puts people and projects together to develop environmental technologies that can lead to long-term growth BY DAVID ADAM

As Europe tries to wrest itself from the financial crisis, one policy question keeps popping up: which strategies offer the best prospects for long-term and sustainable growth? One surprising answer, featured in a new report from Brussels think tank Bruegel and the European School for Management and Technology, is environmentally friendly technology. “Identifying the most economically beneficial solutions early on and becoming a global technology leader and standard setter, offers vast opportunities for exports and economic growth,” the report says. “Hence, our de-carbonisation strategy may eventually have a greater impact on long-term European growth than the

current economic crisis.” Says author Georg Zachmann, an economist at Bruegel: “In certain areas, Europe is well placed to stay at the forefront of technology development.” The goal of an EU initiative called Climate-KIC, short for Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community, is to make Europe even better placed. Set up in 2010 and funded through the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), the initiative is a sprawling mixture of education and business schemes involving public and private sector groups across several countries, united by the common goal of finding marketable ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise protect the planet. Integrated partnerships It’s much more than a project, says Henrik Morgen, director of operations for ClimateKIC, based at Imperial College London. He prefers the term “long-term integrated partnership”. As Mary Ritter, the immunologist who heads the Climate-KIC, explains, “Our partnerships operate as an ideas marketplace. We put the right people in touch with the right solutions.” For example, Sainsbury’s, one of the largest British retailers, has an ambitious sustainability plan with clearly defined targets that reach out to 2020. These include reducing operational carbon 30 per cent by that year, putting all waste to positive use and improving water efficiency. Sainsbury’s is working in partnership with Climate-KIC to determine the technological solutions to help achieve these goals and to create greater awareness of this sustainability agenda among its 150,000-strong workforce and 23 million customers. Knight Frank, the global property consultancy, linked up with the Climate-KIC in order to address a range of carbon-

“We put the right people in touch with the right solutions.” Mary A. Ritter, CEO, Climate-KIC

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ENVIRONMENT

reduction challenges. Among them: proposed 2018 energy standards for buildings in the UK. It is estimated that British commercial property worth a total of £100 billion does not meet the minimum recommended levels of energy efficiency. If these buildings are not improved, they will become difficult to rent and their values will fall. Since both public and private pensions funds in the UK often own portfolios that include these properties, this situation, if left uncorrected, would have serious implications for the overall value of those pension funds. A start-up British company that the Climate-KIC has nurtured just might be able to help. Naked Energy has patented a revolutionary hybrid solar panel that can generate electricity as well as heat for commercial and residential use. By combining photovoltaic and thermal energy, this technology is efficient, cost-effective Naked Energy, a start-up that the Climate-KIC and prizewinning – Naked Energy won the has nurtured, puts its hybrid solar panels to 2012 EIT award in the Climate Change commercial and residential use category. If Naked Energy cannot completely solve the UK’s £100-billion property problem, it might work together with Knight Aboreal, which aims to set up processing centres in tropical forests to promote Frank to develop a technology that can. As non-timber products like cosmetics and David Goatman, the head of Knight Frank’s medicines. sustainability consultancy, says, “We are According to Ritter, Climate-KIC is also keen to work with other Climate-KIC an ideal “ideas broker” in the effort to partners who are able to offer verifiable reduce the carbon footprint of cities. The carbon benefits and a competitive business partnership includes companies working case.” KIC CEO Ritter, who came to the initiative on advances in smart-grid technology that can manage power demand, and biomass via her role as Pro-Rector for International Affairs at Imperial College London, is keen systems that create energy from buildings’ to stress the global approach of the waste water. Says Ritter: “There is a huge Climate-KIC, saying that is the only realistic market for these innovative ideas.” way to tackle environmental change. She The Climate-KIC also encourages points to a project which combines innovation through its Pioneers in Practice scheme, which temporarily places expertise from Imperial College and the employees from one partner firm at insurance company Lloyds to develop another. Encraft, a small UK engineering computer software to model the impacts of catastrophic weather events, such as recent consultancy that specialises in low-carbon building solutions, is one of the severe flooding in Thailand. The ClimateKIC is also partnering with Amsterdam’s participants. The Climate-KIC program is Schiphol airport as it develops the idea of “definitely a good thing”, says Matthew airports as low-carbon cities, with park Rhodes, managing director of Encraft, spaces, biodiesel-powered ground which will send its first employee to a transportation and environmentally partner company abroad this year. responsible energy, water and waste One of the most successful Climate-KIC management. Another international project: programs is “theJourney”, an intensive,

“Our de-carbonisation strategy may eventually have a greater impact on long-term European growth than the current economic crisis.”

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Georg Zachmann, economist at Bruegel

three-week summer school that exposes participants to the latest developments in science, policy, innovation and business in three different countries. The aim is to help students, who come from graduate programs as well as industry, develop an entrepreneurial mindset. And they do. Alumni of the two-year-old program have already developed three start-up companies, with more on the way. One of them, DECO!, works in Ghana to promote composting at the local level and to convert bio-waste to organic fertiliser, thereby boosting sustainable agriculture. While the Climate-KIC got off to a slow start, especially in dealing with all the required legal and financial issues, it is definitely on the move. Says Richard Templer, the director of Climate-KIC in the UK and a professor at Imperial College: “We want to develop the best environmental technologies, and get them out to the market ASAP so we can compete.” And export and grow. n

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More information http://www.climate-kic.org http://www.bruegel.org/publications/publica tion-detail/publication/691-the-greattransformation-decarbonising-europes-ener gy-and-transport-systems/ http://followarboreal.com/

COMMENTARY

Do innovation differently Commentary by Jean J. Botti, chief technical officer and member of the executive committee of EADS, member of the European Research Area Board

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paradigm shift is needed in Europe if we want to foster the rise of a creative entrepreneurial class to address issues including sustainable development, information technology, alternative energy and overall European growth. Conventional thinking tends to dissociate technology from industrialisation, but the fact is they are symbiotic. As a result, countries with overly developed service sectors like the US, UK and France have lost significant ground to manufacturing-based countries like Germany and Singapore. That is not to say that we should manage the innovative arenas of countries with 60 million people in the same way we run nations with a population of 5 to 10 million. The 27 countries of the European Union, for example, should all have a chance to foster areas of excellence and concentrate on what they do best. To promote innovation and growth, Europe needs to define itself based on the strengths and weaknesses of each of its members. Here are some ideas: 1. The European Commission, together with political and corporate leaders, should identify several “Big Programmes” for the next 30 years. The Galileo satellite project was the last of this rare European species. Not only do these programmes create long-

term technological value for Europe, they also develop local skills and expertise and inspire a culture of innovation. 2. The focus should be on developing the key demonstration projects that address major societal issues like the environment, security and mobility. They are the visible manifestation of core competencies of teams, regions and countries. 3. Eliminate the bureaucratic redundancies that exist in the various Commissions, especially those that discourage entrepreneurs from entering the market. 4. Fund fewer, but bigger, research programmes. A smaller number of betterfunded projects will be easier to manage and understand. 5. Spend less EU money on administration and instead redirect funds to core programmes and resources. 6. New (or existing) EU organisations should manage these programmes as real industrial projects by focusing on key metrics like time and deliverables. The more time and quality lost in the upstream early stages, the less chance a company has to be first to market.

“Fund fewer, but bigger, research programmes.” F 34

7. Avoid the peanut-butter effect – trying to spread projects thinly across too many countries. Better to allocate small projects to certain countries, assuming they have the right competencies. 8. Since patents are the best tool to protect our innovation crown jewels, we should discourage research programmes with countries that do not comply with World Trade Organisation rules. 9. Funding mechanisms should be simplified; all European countries should have innovation incentives through pan-European tax credits. 10. Encourage transatlantic collaboration and implement it in all fields that require new knowledge. One obvious area: developing replacements for conventional carbon fuels. Trying to be politically correct and support every country and company in equal measure will only harm Europe’s long-term business and policy goals. Our objective should be to develop the best entrepreneurial innovation wherever it occurs. Note: the views and opinions expressed in this paper are the personal perspectives of Dr Botti and do not necessarily represent the position of EADS and its Divisions.

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More information http://ec.europa.eu/research/erab/abouterab_en.html

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