Speech by NTU President, Professor Subra Suresh, at the "Public-Private Partnerships for Research and Innovation” NTU-AmCham-EuroCham kick-off event

Welcome remarks by

Professor Subra Suresh

President & Distinguished University Professor

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Good morning everyone

NTU alumna and Ministry of State for Trade & Industry Ms Low Yen Ling

Ms Lisa Liaw, Chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce in Singapore

Mr Federico Donato, President of the European Chamber of Commerce in Singapore

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

 

Thank you all for coming to this very special event. There are two themes leading this event that I would like to highlight.

One is when there is partnership among academia, industry, and government, one has much more successful outcomes than when either one of those three entities in isolation work.

The second observation I would like to make is when there is a collection of people who bring diversity in every sense of the word into disciplinarity in research and perspectives – geographical, national, gender, and more – enriches innovation intrinsically.

So innovation is the theme using those two factors I just mentioned.

I want to go back to the US history because this is a wonderful lesson in innovation. The year was 1862. That was the time the US was going through a civil war in the north and the south. Abraham Lincoln was the President of the US. Many many Americans had died in the war already which started in 1860.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln, right in the middle of the war, realised in order for innovation to thrive, it was extremely important for education. And at that time, there were two areas

of education where one needs emphasis – agriculture and technologies. So he signed the land-grant act, created what we now know as public universities. And many of those public universities became some of the best in the world – the University of California Berkeley being the most well-known public university in the US. The first land-grant college that was created was the Iowa State University. Next month I have the privilege of visiting there. So that was 1862.

In 1863, still in the middle of the Civil War, President Lincoln established the US National Academy of Sciences as an independent entity that would provide advice to government, unbiased and uninfluenced by political forces so that real scientific findings can inform policy, which was pretty remarkable. And that academy in 2013 celebrated 150 years of existence. It has been very influential.

I want to fast forward to the Second World War. Mr Vannevar Bush, the first dean of engineering at MIT, was invited by the then President of the US to come and provide advice on how to create innovation in the US. This was right after around 1945, 1946.

Dr Vannevar Bush came to Washington, and you know the report called ‘Science the Endless Frontier’, and it was all about innovation and societal benefits. And the report had the following pieces, most of which was not controversial, but there was one item that was highly controversial.

The report said the following:

-       First, innovation is essential not only for the economic success of a country but also its national security and prosperity of its citizens.

-       Second, innovation is best fostered at universities and colleges because that’s where we train young minds but they have to work with industry and government to create a collaboration. So that was not controversial.

But the third point, he argued, that it is the responsibility of the federal government to support innovation cos only the government has the long-term perspective and has the resources that fosters intrinsic innovation. That was controversial. The report was rejected by the White House.

He worked on it, never gave up. In 1950, the President Harry Truman accepted the report, created the US National Science Foundation, created the NIH, and eventually NASA came out of it, based on one report by one person.

But he was so controversial he was never made either President of MIT or the director of the NSF. He was the Chair of the Board of Trustees at MIT at one point. He is also one of the co-founders of what we now know as the Raytheon Corporation.

What is the impact of all of these? So let me just take the US NSF, which I was privileged to lead in the Obama administration, as an example.

It was founded in 1950 based on the report by Dr Vannevar Bush. Since 1950, approximately 250 American Nobel prize winners have had some significant portion of their Nobel prize-winning work funded by NSF. The current annual budget of the agency is about US$10 billion. There is no other agency in the world that has produced more Nobel prize winners than that one small agency. The economic impact on society is also quite profound. That is the power of innovation. And that is the power of the policy that fosters innovation. NIH is about four times bigger than NSF, and that’s a different flavour.

Now, enough about innovation. More broadly, I want to come to Singapore & NTU. One of the things I was very pleased to see when I first got here is the manner in which NTU has the unique ability with full support of the Singapore government to connect academia, industry in partnership not just with the Singapore government but also with other entities for e.g. collaboration in France, with the entities supported by French government, and many other countries.

And the output is very clear. In a relatively short period of time, in about 30 years, this

three-way collaboration among academia, industry, and government has not only created a rich and vibrant intellectual ecosystem that provides basic discoveries that come out of the labs by faculty and students and staff, but equally translating at scale for the benefit of industry and society.

So today we have 16 partnerships – corporate labs, joint labs and other major labs with some of the biggest companies in the world. HP’s largest corporate lab is not in Palo Alto, but on NTU campus. Alibaba’s largest university collaboration in the world is outside of China, inside NTU’s campus. Rolls Royce has 29 university collaborations and their largest university collaboration is at NTU. This could not have happened without government partnerships and academic engagement.

So these are really powerful examples and the outcome of these three-way collaborations is that universities in Singapore and NTU in particular have been able to rise on the global stature and impact in a relatively short period of time, which is unprecedented in this history of universities where it takes decades and centuries to achieve this.

The second aspect, which goes back to my earlier point, is also that this provides a rich array of diversity of perspective and thought that would not come without three-way collaborations, because academia alone has a very different time concept that industry does.

I highlight that from both the origin of some of the most successfully agencies in the world especially in the US to what Singapore has been able to in a relatively short period of time and what this university has been able to do. This is very much the focus behind our next five-year strategic plan, NTU 2025. One of the key pillars of the strategic plan is to take the output of basic discovery that come out of our labs, come out of our students and faculty, and translate that at scale in partnership with industry, with the support of government. And this is something we are determined to do. NTUitive which is the technology transfer arm of NTU, our plan is to significantly bolster its impact. We have a new Chairman of the Board, Dr Shi Xu, who became the first unicorn founder who was previously an NTU professor – first deeptech unicorn to come out of NTU and is listed in the stock exchange.

So with that, I want to welcome all our colleagues to this event. I want to thank the chambers of commerce and also my colleagues Prof Lam Khin Yong and his team for their efforts in organising this event, and I wish everyone a productive session ahead.

Thank you.