Eduard Alarcon  0:02  

So a very good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, in whichever time zone you are in now. So a collision of four extraordinary individuals and therefore extraordinary minds is about to happen. We don't have slides to support, so I'll try to do white magic. So, we have four panelists, addressing the very topic of which are the bounds for innovation. Is innovation unbounded? Which bounds do we have? And particularly how material science can shape human civilization? So, if a dialogue stands for two minds in a conversation, this is an X-Logue. We'll have four minds, discussing how to innovate better. We have the pleasure and the privilege to have here with us today, Professor Teresa Riesgo, who's the Secretary General for innovation from the Ministry of Science and Innovation in Spain. We have Professor Andrea Ferrari, who is the director of the Cambridge Graphene Center at the University of Cambridge in the UK. We have Professor Vladimir Falko, who is the Director of the National Graphene Institute in Manchester. And then connecting online from Cambridge, Massachusetts, 7am in the morning, we have the pleasure to have Professor Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, from MIT morning, Pablo. 

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Pablo Jarillo-Herrero  1:42

Good morning, everyone! 

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Eduard Alarcon  1:44

Then, I don't have slides, as we're planning to do. Stay with me and try to visualize the following, to focus on the theme, the topic of the discussion. So innovation, it's a multi-pillar system, which encompasses at the very least, the government, the academic research, and the scientists, the society, and business. And the difficulty, and the beauty is that the four pillars are inextricably intertwined. And we need to work in this collective endeavor of innovation to have a better or more virtuous, so called Innovation Funnel. So with that context in mind, we were posing a set of questions to the panelists, I will briefly recall them for the audience to be aware of these questions. 

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Eduard Alarcon  2:44

The first overarching question is, is innovation unbounded? Because it's a perpetual funnel, because the innovation funnel is always nurtured by novel scientific knowledge. In that sense, should we keep pumping up institutions, such as NSF and the European Union, ERC and the like? Should science be unbounded? Should we let science occur spontaneously? Is innovation more nurtured by scientific knowledge or driven by visions? Is there tension? Is there a virtuous balance there? Now, the second question, to foster the dialogue, the conversation, is what is the role of science per science? Similar to art for art, arts for artists? Should we leave the scientists to do science so that there is a spontaneous emergence of serendipity? What should the rest of stakeholders in this system do? Now the third overarching question is should the individual scientist have multiple roles whenever we trigger the innovation process? Or should the scientist primarily act towards science and then create teams composed of different expertises? Now the fourth, and the last before the last question is, how can we better pursue high impact innovation prone interdisciplinary science?

Eduard Alarcon  4:27

There already exists evidence that interdisciplinary science is more impactful on the mid- and the long-term, but we know as well, that's usually the one that nurtures innovation. And finally, this is a bit controversial, I was asked by Zina to ask the panelists to kindly consider this a very in depth but in a sense, informal conversation like if you're in a fireplace, in a discussion among colleagues, in a fireplace, but you're expected to be controversial at times. In that sense, my last question would be, what is the final outcome of the innovation funnel? Is it the market only? And therefore, on a short term temporal scale? Is the outcome of the innovation funnel, the grand challenge of humanity? And the final question, is there a third way? Is there an intermediate way? Can states or governments tilt the market so that we guarantee that there is socioeconomic progress aligned to the future challenges of humanity. And without I would like to introduce the first positioning from Professor Teresa Riesgo.

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Teresa Riesgo  5:45  

Do you want that I answer all these?

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Eduard Alarcon  5:48  

Whatever you consider!

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Teresa Riesgo  5:51  

Okay, I will try not to do it all together, because it's maybe too long. So thank you very much Eduard, thank you very much to the organizers of PUZZLE X, for inviting me to this panel session with these very prominent scientific people that I'm a little bit, I don't know, amazed about that! I will try to show you which are the things that we see particularly in the government in Spain, but also in the Ministry of Science and Innovation, how we see the innovation to boost the science and to take the science out of the caves and take it to the society somehow. I will also try to go to material sciences as the main topic of this conference, so I will try not to be just the political spirit here about the innovation policies that that we plan, or we are going to do. First of all, I would like to highlight that, in some of the questions, in many of the questions of Eduard, there is something underneath that is important. And that is cooperation. Cooperation is a very important issue for innovation. So here we have a say, people working in basic research and also applied research for material science. But if we want that innovation to happen, sometimes we need someone else to put someone else talking on the year of these people saying maybe we could use this for this, and especially on the applications this is needed, but also maybe we can manage a business. 

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Teresa Riesgo  8:01

And for that we need a manager, because something like that, maybe we have the government there that is supporting the action, because there's a high risk or maybe they the companies cannot put the money in something that is so risky, but at the end of the day, we can have cooperation as the main thing. So if we want to talk about cooperation in innovation, of course, we need knowledge. This is the basic thing. I mean, everything that we could do in innovation without basic knowledge or deep knowledge is normally a little bit fuzzy. Yeah, we can talk about business models and could be interesting, that is not the things we do for example, in our Ministry of Science and Innovation. So within we need knowledge and we need some tools that we can help on top of that. So this is our plan in and our role in the Ministry, which is to help this knowledge be taken out and, through innovation processes, could be facilitating missions and also improving the life of the people and also producing new markets. That is something that we are seeing this morning here on this stage. So this is one thing that we want to do in, at least in Spain, and we are running this with the options that we have that are, of course, we have our cooperation in Europe with through Horizon Europe, the new framework program that is very much oriented to innovation now through the European Innovation Council, for example. 

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Teresa Riesgo  9:57

We are also using this with our next generation EU program that is called, in Spain, the Recovery & Transformation Funds, which are very, very important for Spain. I’d say there is a budget of 300,000 million euros for science and innovation, just for science and innovation. And there's also a lot of possibilities that will happen with the structure of the funds that will start in this period now. So because money is very important, but apart from money we need more, we need talent. So Spain is a place where there are many talented people here, there are good universities. It was said this morning, by Carlos Grau in the open session, there are very good research centers, and particularly, Barcelona, I would say that is one of these places. And sometimes we have to bias a little bit and re-bias the topics where we have to work, because sometimes the talented people have to be educated in, in very, very important fields, and also in very scientific fields. So we need money, we need people and we need the ecosystem working. So that means that we need the connections of these people working together for this cooperation. One day, I was listening to a researcher working in anthropology in the Atapuerca Research Center, who was saying that they we’re seeing that humans 1000s of years ago who were the winners were not competing, they were cooperating. So the competent ones that are the ones that survived, were called because they cooperated, not because they were competing. So this is something that we have to consider also for our innovation ecosystems for the future. Afterwards, if I have the opportunity, I may talk about the applications and the things that we foresee. Thank you!

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Eduard Alarcon  12:25  

Thank you very much, Teresa. So it's cooperation, cooperation, cooperation, even with an evolutionary perspective. Yeah, thanks a lot. Professor Ferrari, we'd like to have a take on the theme of the panel with a first position statement?

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Andrea Ferrari  12:38  

Yes, I mean, this was very interesting. And in fact, you touched all the key points. And for me, I'm actually watching Pablo in front of me, somehow, I don't know if you can see, I can see you, I have this screen. So the more I look at him, anything this guy, you know, over all the years I've known him, every year he’s created some new and exciting direction of research. I don't want to lease at least all of them, neither the latest nor the first. And this is great. But actually, that's not innovation. That's a discovery. And that's great. And people like Pablo, we need them. And like Kostya and others, because they are sort of our beacon for the future. But then there is the artwork. For me the innovation is the artwork that comes after the fun of the discovery. And what we need to do is to stop making people in the university field, sort of second rate scientists. If instead of publishing one cover in Nature with one device that works at zero Kelvin for one millisecond, they actually can make a wafer scale, we just saw a previous talk on a wafer scale diamond, you can make hundreds of 1000s of the same devices that are all the same and do work. And that's a huge amount of work, a huge effort, the development effort, and it does require a big brain, not a small brain. 

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Andrea Ferrari  14:07

So the first thing we need to do is to say innovation is important, as important as the discovery and it takes hard work, and we need to do it. Then, of course, we know about the scotch tape. I remember when I visited Pablo’s lab when he just moved to MIT. He basically had at his office only some wooden tables with some tools there. And then he still managed to do fantastic work that has been science leading. However, that's not the kind of place where you can do innovation. Innovation requires infrastructure, requires innovation infrastructure. There are some in Europe and some worldwide. I remembered in the US the initiative called MUSA or MUSA, I don't know what's the pronunciation? So for example, Ames is a 1.6 billion investment in integrated photons that was done in the US. That's a fantastic initiative. And as was just mentioned, one of the side effects, but positive of COVID is this ginormous amount of money that Europe has now. For example, 209 billion just in Italy, in order to do recovery and resilience, and out of this chunk of money, a very significant amount is devoted to innovation, as it was mentioned. So what we need to do is to create this place that sits in between the university, and the companies where the discoveries and award-winning leading scientists, like Pablo, can be developed to the point where they can get to fruition. And I've been enjoying it more and more over the years, this part. I was looking down on this part of the work when I was younger, and I was looking at the talks of the older professors, and I thought these guys, they only give these talks because they have nothing new to speak about, every time they talked. So now that I'm doing exactly the same, I have to self justify myself and say, no, that's actually quite useful and I think we really need to do it. 

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Andrea Ferrari  16:10 

And let me finish with the two concepts. And now the words are really awful. So the spin doctors, they didn't do their work properly, but in Europe, we now speak about technological supremacy and sovereignty: two really bad words, but they're part of our sort of plan. So sovereignty always meant we need to be the first in doing something, okay. And we need to be the ones to do it here. So with supremacy, that was the previous, let's say, ERC style approach, is supremacy, if you send a grant application to ESC, and you don't come up with a completely orthogonal idea to what you have ever done before, and you cannot be orthogonal too many times, because you always get back to the beginning otherwise, then they say, oh, this is just some sort of incremental stuff, and so on. But now we have the European Innovation Council, where sovereignty, that means we should be able to do the things here, even if they're done in another country, are now important. And we are already seeing what has happened by losing track of these two concepts. Europe and the US are short of chips, they don't have enough chips for the cars. We have issues in using 5G technologies. Think about the 6G that will be the 5G boosted with artificial intelligence in it. Would you want to buy this from foreign country? So we are in a unique time now for Europe to really work for the next 10 years in innovation. And on this key point that was often overlooked before, and I'm sure companies large companies and small companies and universities are really happy about this, the final point is innovation cannot be done inside the university. Because clearly the university approach is different, but it cannot be done without the university. So that is why we are advocating a new type of public-private-partnership, PPP that should be the key for the future.

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Eduard Alarcon  18:21  

So thank you very much. So a clear difference between the fun part of discovery and the hard work of innovation. And then the type of instruments we have to address. So probably innovation is not an individual task. We go from ERC to Pathfinder instruments in the EIC for instance, very interesting. Professor Falco, would you like to have a take on the theme?

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Vladimir Falko  18:45  

Yes. I would like to draw a sick red line between innovation and research on one side, and facilities and management by authorities like ministries or the European Commission, on the other. The reason is because research and innovation are singular. And they're driven by individuals. By singular individuals who come up with new ideas and just make little revolutions or big revolutions in technology. And management operates like all management like finances, by extrapolation, and the only thing they can do is extrapolate from the past, and therefore listen to them on a regular basis as researchers and follow their advice. We'll end up with crises, like the economic crisis in 2008, when everyone is doing the same, and basically getting nowhere. The best way in my view to bring together the management and singularity of research is by creating conditions where an individual with ideas can come and use whatever is needed to deliver. 

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Vladimir Falko  20:03

So, facilities have to be there. So from this point of view, having facility infrastructure available is very important. And that's where large scale investments have to be. The conditions for calibration based around facilities should be already present. Facilities have to be maintained, regularly reinvested, academics and researchers doing this should not be running around collecting pennies and repairing, they have to be using them for delivering what they deliver best: the new ideas and the new discoveries, and from the discoveries innovation. In the UK, we are actually already in the process of making this work, in a way making some experiments with funding from the government. We have a structure focused on materials research, at the Henry Royce Institute of Advanced Materials, which is an organization a bit outside the universities. There are six universities and two research institutes that are partners in the structure. There are buildings or facilities that were funded by the government to do research in the Royce Institute. And we have the asset scheme that anyone who wants to use facilities comes up with an idea can come to us. The trigger point, of course, for everyone is actually to identify who are those bright individuals who should do things in the very best way. And I very much praise just one singularity that the European Commission did over the years, which is our European Research Council funding. The money which is given to individuals who go through the peer review process, judged by the academic community, judged by other innovators, and then based on the past credit, they just get credit to do whatever they want. And to do whatever they want, I believe is the key point in the innovation process. The moment you start creating conditions, and the moment ministry tells us you do this this way, it's dead. Believe me, it's absolutely dead. I'll stop at this point.

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Eduard Alarcon  22:23  

Super interesting. So try to go beyond the stereotype of uniqueness and innovation to the singularity of the individuals that have the talent. So unbound to no bounds for the talent, and you're calling for ex-post evaluation, just trust people who're really singular in their ideas. Professor Jarillo, you're from Cambridge, Massachusetts, we'd like to have a take on the theme. What's your position statement to start the discussion? 

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Pablo Jarillo-Herrero  22:54  

Okay, very good. So, and first of all, let me thank the PUZZLE X organizers and Zina for vacation and Eduard for the moderation. It seems like you guys are having great fun over there. And I just wish I could be so, hopefully next time. Now, I agree with many of the comments that the other panelists have made. I wanted to go back a little bit to the basics and say that, for me, there are essentially about three ways that one can innovate. And I think, you know, this is both for scientific and for technological innovation. 

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Pablo Jarillo-Herrero  22:31

The first way, which is largely bounded, is sort of goal oriented, incremental research, which is very important. Okay, for this, you can think of, essentially, taking small steps to have steady improvements in technology. This is something that, for example, you can think of Moore's law. For transistors, you can think about the improvements in, you know, the efficiency of silicon solar cells, these are small steps. It's very clear what the goal is. And often, it's more or less clear, also how to get there, so that you can plan even for decades ahead of you exactly what you want to do and you know, that you will most likely or it's a good challenge and we will get there. That is largely bound because the objectives are very clear. Then you have a goal oriented, but very high risk, high payoff type of research. This is something where you know where you want to get, for example, think nuclear fusion, or super capacitors with the energy density of lithium ion batteries, so that you can charge very fast, elliptical batteries, so, this is something that it's very difficult because we don’t know exactly how to get there. It takes decades and a lot of, you know, very brilliant scientists and engineers to get there, but still, you know what the goal is. So that's partially unbounded, you know, because you don't know how to get there very well, but you know, the goal. And then the last one is this sort of curiosity driven blue sky research, where you may not even have a clear goal, you're just studying, investigating for the sake of it, because you're curious about nature and you're curious about phenomena that occur. But, you also don't know exactly, you know, how to get there. It's very exploratory in nature. And I would argue that the biggest revolutions in knowledge and technology come from this last part of, you know, from this last type of research.

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Pablo Jarillo-Herrero  22:41

You can think of this as, you know, Michael Faraday and his, you know, investigation of electricity, Einstein and relativity, Niels Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and quantum mechanics. So, these are, you know, things where, you know, people were developing topics of research, they were just curious about nature, curious about the world, how does it work. And they were not thinking of the major revolutions in technology that they would cause, many decades, or even a century or two later. Now, to go to the theme of this conference, I believe that the discovery and isolation of graphene and other materials belong a little bit to this last type of research. It was unexpected. There were already theorems, mathematical theorems that said that, you know, graphene and other 2D materials should not exist, well, guess what they do exist! And now, you know, we find ourselves trying to develop the best, you know, technologies and innovation that can make the best use of the properties of this completely surprising, you know, family of, of quantum materials. So, I think that, you know, it will take long, because when you find something very unexpected, surprising, and very new, it takes a very long time to develop, you know, that technology and that sort of revolution. But I think that, you know, it's, it's a lot of fun. And I think that, you know, my colleagues, you know, my engineering colleagues and scientific colleagues, you know, are very creative, and they will be able to do a lot of this. And this is, you know, this last part, as you know, as much as it's completely unbounded. So I think that it is important for society and for politicians to invest in all these three ways of innovating. And try to allocate resources to the most creative people and the best scientists and engineers. And they might be different people for each of these three different ways, but all are very important. And I think with that, I'll leave it to my colleagues to continue the discussion.

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Eduard Alarcon  27:48  

This is very interesting, Pablo. So you claim in principle that disruption, which is a term that now has been utilized mainly in the field of innovation, belongs to the field of science. To disruption comes from science, in far-fetched unbounded science. And you said something very interesting. Not just guided by intuition, or spontaneity, by insistence and persistent perseverance, in pursuing the inside. That's very interesting. I think that after all, these original positions today, I think that we have all the components of the cocktail. And perhaps now the discussion could continue, if you allow, in how do we combine the different components? How do we try to trade off and balance the participation of unique singular individuals with other coronas of individuals that identify and observe that some of these disruptive scientific ideas have the potential and are likely to go into innovation? How to drive them, how to articulate solutions, how to create infrastructure, so can we talk about the combination of the different components?

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Teresa Riesgo  28:58  

If I can say something? I say I like very much the point that Pablo has started because of these three things. It’s true that if we in the government, we have to cover these three things.  And it is sometimes not that easy, because particularly in the third one, we are normally working with public money, at least in Europe, because maybe in the States this may be quite different. So it's money that is coming from the taxes of the citizens. So sometimes it's not that easy to convince the citizens that this science is because you have said it, I say three or four cases that are very successful but they are successful, is something that maybe we don't know because it was maybe lost in the part from that. So saying that it is very, very important that also the discoveries that are or the scientists that are working for just the discovery, just for getting knowledge or having new knowledge be somehow in the bounds of some ethical issues that cannot be forgotten in any case. Because now the planet is not in a very easy situation. I’d say we have 10 years to achieve the SDGs, but also the scientists of the of the climate change are talking about the emergency that is happening and the point of no return, in some cases, so, for me the unique bounds, or the bounds that we can talk about are those bounds related with ethics, with the planet, and with the things that are very emergency that we are running. And on the other side, I think that the other two research or innovation aspects that Pablo has mentioned, which I think is a very good analysis. And in that sense, this is easier for us to convince the citizens that we are putting money in developing a vaccine or we are putting money in developing new batteries, or we are doing something like that, because at the end this is easier to convince everybody. And remember that in this fourth Alex model that you talked about at the beginning, citizens and the society at large is there. So, we cannot work or look into another place. And so we think this is more or less. And talking about material science, I think there are many things that come from very basic knowledge. But there are some other things that come from the adaptation of the basic knowledge, or the basic materials that are used for one thing can be reused or remanufactured for other uses and that can be very, very innovative. So from this point of view, I think this field is something that we have to consider. But in any case, this takes time. And I always say that for people maybe that are thinking of investing in one or know the project. It takes time. Things that come from knowledge to the market takes time.

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Eduard Alarcon  33:09  

So it seems clear that whatever we do as a society, it's a collective endeavor. Right? So can we have the approach that you are trying to advocate for, like the science for science, blue sky research, coexisting with innovation, to who articulates solutions? Do we need scientists who have individual moral compass so that their science is the outcome of the science is ethical, or is it always so? Or is it the final purpose and application that requires the ethical boundary? That's a discussion, we can go from ethics to politics. I identify a bit of a tension between what your position Teresa, you talked about cooperation, and Andrea, you're talking about sovereignty? Is sovereignty at a regional level at national level? Do we talk about Europe wide sovereignty? How do we balance cooperation with sovereignty?

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Andrea Ferrari  34:02  

So sovereignty, as I said, is a very bad word, they cancel the EC, and it is used in very many bad meanings everywhere. However, there is, let's say, a positive byproduct. You know, in order to ensure sovereignty, you need to ensure that each country in the EU has the means in order to develop the technology, especially cutting edge technology. Let's think about quantum cryptography. So the moment new technologies will exist, that we'll be able to break all the unbreakable codes, would you want to have this technology now? So buy it from a foreign country. So both for protection and for breaking. So and then, of course, there's ginormous, ethical issues that come out here. So clearly a scientist who has no particular ill will, we need to do the best for the situation we are in. And what I argued before is that there's never been a better time due to this need to have local produce, let's say, to develop innovation. And if we go back to science per science, if I look at myself, did I do better science when I had no money? And the answer is for, for sure, yes, not just for me, but also for Pablo, also for Frank and many other people sitting here. So whenever we are full of money, as Volodya said, it comes with management responsibilities, and so on. So I don't think that we need ginormous amount of monies, to do science for science. I think in Europe, you know, the European Research Council is almost as good as it gets. I will be hard pressed to say that it’s bad or it doesn't work. I mean, clearly, everything can be improved. However, in order to go for the [unintelligible], to have the graphene inside your mobile phone, it takes a ginormous effort, a large amount of money and brain. So that's the other thing I want to stress that by achieving your technological sovereignty, you also harness the clever people who are present locally or internationally, in order to ensure that all the steps are done. I have started a few spin up companies, whenever I speak with these people that take something that we did in the lab in some tool that you can almost buy in the shop. It's amazing. I mean, I am in awe of their experience and capabilities. So I think there are very, very few people who can put together all the qualities that you need to go from completely disruptive ideas in science, to selling something to the masses, and a few exist. 

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Andrea Ferrari  36:48

And in most other cases, you need different skills. And what we need to make sure that we don't harness, only the two ends of the skills. So there's this completely disruptive science, or the mass production on the factory floor. We are now in the year of innovation, where in Europe, we need to harness the skill in the middle, which is the one to take one to the other. And to say that's important, you need to be clever to do that. And of course, to do this thing in the middle, you need money, you need pilot facilities that can be accessed by you know, universities and companies to do new types of whatever batteries, devices, and so on. And this can now be done in Europe. And as Volodya mentioned, the politicians, now the politicians have the money, the money is there, it takes like a singer to say I give you X millions, because the millions are there. And not only next generation things, but there is InvestEU and another 60, that should be 320 billion, there is the CHIPSAT that we are waiting to know how much money is going to be there. So Europe is in an exciting place. And we need the politicians to work with the scientists, or the innovators not against each other. But together in order to make the most, otherwise it will be the biggest waste of public money ever is going to happen in the next five years. If we are going to waste all this money and get nothing out of it.

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Eduard Alarcon  38:21  

You're reinforcing the message of cooperation. So economic resources are indispensable, but they're not enough. We need the very rare resource of talent, singular talent. So the question would be how do we educate that talent? How do we identify it? Which are the attributes that define the singular talent? And once you have it, do you ask that singular talent to alter the innovation? Or is it something that others do for us as I was saying, like as Andrea was saying, we need to do this outside of the university, but with the university? So can we talk about the balance that we need?

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Vladimir Falko  38:57  

So I think the bullet point here is information. Those who produce new research, this research has to come to the society to other researchers, to the industry, to assess usefulness. For example of COVID situation and vaccine development, there will be no vaccines, there will be no understanding of the problem, if there would be no genetics, no DNA analysis, no genomics before that, and one that started was absolutely blue sky, absolutely unexpected. And it was at the discovery level. Without that would be nothing that would solve the problem. The other bullet point is to have the focus. So when the recent knowledge, when there is an understanding, you can focus on the result of this understanding with sufficient resources to solve the problem. So this is when the businesses and the government can come together to focus on the problem solution. I hate this example, but the first positive example of how it works was the Manhattan Project. There was a fundamental understanding of what you can do with nuclear power, there was a need, maybe not a good need, but there was a need. There was a focus, academics, businesses, everything was brought together. Another better example is space. Sending people to space, building all the structure of satellites, and then giving basis for GPS and telecoms, that was all due to previous understandings of fundamental level information available, and then governments then picking out of that working and with companies and creating a focused effort. So that's where the focus effort can be guided by the governments. I'm not sure whether it has to be done, like Andre said in each country separately, I think he speaks Italian from Italy's point of view. And there are some small countries that may not have such capabilities. But that is for politicians to address. To achieve this focus, working with companies combining resources, and then providing this focus attention to solving the problem. Identification of that problem that's already even the trickier bit, that's where scientists probably cannot determine what to do. They give the input, but the selection of the problem at which focus comes from the need. And this is for other brains to identify.

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Eduard Alarcon  42:12  

These examples, you're mentioning, they are very reminiscent of European Union missions, the moonshots, right, we can just have a more pro-bono orientation of them. So I've been told by your organization that running out of time, I know that Pablo, you have not been participating a lot, if you would like to have any of you a final 10 seconds of glory or golden minute, before we go to the coffee break. And we try to write the PUZZLE X Manifesto on the future of innovation, Pablo, any final words or comments?

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Pablo Jarillo-Herrero  42:43  

Yeah, maybe just mentioned, perhaps, that I think that different, you know, entities in different sectors can have the highest impact in different areas. I don't see so much the tension between, you know, public and private innovation, I think they have different interests and capabilities. So I think that blue sky research is best funded by, you know, public sources by philanthropists, you know, private foundations, because there's no clear game, it's too risky, you know, we don't know, we're gonna discover something amazing, that will revolutionize technology in 100 years, and companies don't have such long term horizon. On the other hand, you know, when you want to do something, where you know what the goal is, even if it is very risky, I think that their industry might be better positioned very often. One example that I like is SpaceX, who develops the technologies, you know, to send, you know, rockets, and then have them back to Earth at a fraction of the cost of what NASA, could have done, and that's because you allow much more, many more people with less constraints to explore the possibilities for a well defined goal. So I think that the role of, you know, public versus private, you know, versus industry, innovation and research and support for research is different and complementary. And I don't see it as one against the other. I see it as, you know, trying to, you know, making use of the best of both worlds, you know, to advance, you know, knowledge and technology in society. So I think that they shouldn't be them versus us, kind of, you know, to be all together.

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Eduard Alarcon  44:29  

Absolutely. So, it seems that despite the different standpoints with which we started the discussion, we reached a sort of a consensus. And so with that, I would like to close the discussion panel. I understand that there has been a graphic summary as we were speaking, that captures the essence of our interactions today. I would like to reiterate it was a pleasure and privilege to have you here on stage. Thank you very much this closes the panel, thank you!

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