Science and Technology Panel - Clip 4: Transcript

JERRY HULTIN

...the big picture on innovation in this city is get the science and tech thinking about products and get the market talking about what it needs, and then marry those two. The money will follow. And we've got, in all the industries I named, we could be doing that a lot more than we are.

You can name other things you need to be, like Silicon Valley. There's no question. You need to have bars where people hang out and talk deals. You need to have real estate that you can chop up in little enough pieces that you can have four people in a company and rent it for a year and then get big and rent, you know, double the size or triple it, or quit and go broke and not have it chase you for 10 years.

All that, I predict, will follow if we got the big pieces of the engine going. And you see it but it's - that we are.

The fourth place is where's academia in this? I'm not an academic. This is a new job for me - seven years, two years at this university, five as the dean of a business school. I am just amazed at how distant most academics are from what I would call entrepreneurial, innovative, inventive conduct.

Now, granted, they discover things and they talk about things that have been discovered, but the idea of taking risk, handling risk, understanding markets, fathoming how to bring money to bear on an opportunity is surprisingly weak. And so we see licensing predominantly. What we ought to see is incubators. We see some. There's two or three in this city. And they're fun. You ought to go see one.

This weekend at Poly, we had what I would call speed company for a weekend. A hundred people get together on Friday night and by Monday morning they're supposed to have a new company they invented, structured, figured out the ownership and are in business. I think it took them till Tuesday.
[LAUGHTER]
But that's very entrepreneurial, and it's good for young people to see.

The interesting thing is, it's not just an engineering issue. Engineers ought to be more entrepreneurial. We're really working on that. But think about even, I'm going to say, liberal arts. If you teach young people to understand risk, to understand the tension of future things which don't exist, to handle life as more ambiguous, you've raised a second set of players - not just the scientists and engineers who care about the future but the people who populate the board rooms and the corporate leadership of advertising agencies and others - that understand risk.

If we had a risk-based culture, you'd see more deals going on this city than we do. And part of that starts right - I'm going to argue with Joel Klein - right in high school, let alone in college.

Now, finally, just briefly, three reasons why I think this is important for New York. I mentioned one, which is diversity of the economy. Second, I think we owe it to our young people. It is, in my view, not enough to say to a young person, study hard in seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, learn calculus, learn physics, and then say, and by the way, you're kind of in a box. What are you going to do?

Teach them to be innovative, to create companies, to handle risks. We've got students in this city who get patents. Get more students to get patents. Let them understand what that means. Let them create companies in seventh and eighth grade that are different than the companies you and I might create but they're still companies, and get the feeling for that, handling risk and ambiguity, making money, making things happen.

And, finally, the third reason to do it in New York is it's a fabulous city to be in to do it with. We have all the pieces. The money's here. The science is here. It's a dense population.

And, finally, think of this about New York. It's in some ways different than a lot of other places. I say it this way. You can go to the global marketplace through two doors - the front door and the back door. The front door is through Wall Street. Big capital. You can see the world. You can understand the world through that door.

But the second door is the back door in this city, which is back out through Skype and the Internet, through every kitchen in this city, because this city connects to every nation in the world. I've got students essentially that talk to every country in the world every day because that's where their parents are or that's where their uncle is. They know this global marketplace. And we have it here, and a lot of cities don't have it. A lot of cities, basically the back door goes nowhere, and the front door doesn't go very far. We have both doors.