At the end of last month, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, gave a speech laying out a new national strategy for artificial intelligence (AI) in his country, and followed up with an interview with Wired technology magazine. Every few days there seems to be a similar type of announcement, in this case that the French government will spend €1.5bn ($1.85bn) over five years to support research in the field, encourage startups and collect data that can be used, and shared, by engineers, and public-led support for innovation, and industrial strategies being tried, including the creation of the Mission Oriented Innovation Network by UK-based UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose last month.
There is often a circularity to these public pronouncements. Fifty-five years ago, UK Labour leader Harold Wilson warned his audience that if the country was to prosper, a “new Britain” would need to be forged in the “white heat” of this “scientific revolution”.
Since then, and while some people might have had enough of experts, the argument is over the potential impact of AI and what roles will be left to people – “to create”, according to noted investor and expert Kai-Fu Lee. In an interview with Edge last month he discussed predictions of “$15, 20, 30 trillion of value in the next 10 to 15 years”, adding: “That makes for exciting areas to do investment, to do entrepreneurship.”
While, indeed, AI might indeed be important – Macron picked out mobility and healthcare as two of the most exciting sectors facing change through the technology, change is apparent everywhere.
As Macron told Wired: “The core basis of artificial intelligence is research. And research is global. And I think this artificial intelligence deals with cooperation and competition, permanently. So you need an open world and a lot of cooperation if you want to be competitive.”
Wilson’s scientific revolution, often utilised by entrepreneurs, has indeed forged whole countries. China has leapfrogged even the US – let alone Europe – in whole sectors, such as drones, or vying for dominance in others, from genomics to payments and communications.
This change throws up new dynamics. In the consumer sector (see sector focus), media companies such as Naspers are increasingly investing in startups even as their main advertisers reduce their traditional spending to follow consumers online. In turn, e-commerce companies such as Amazon are becoming more media-like. Amazon’s advertising revenue could reach $4.5bn in 2018, a 61% increase from $2.8bn in 2017, according to investment bank JPMorgan.
Skills in one area are applicable across other boundaries, too. Japan-based games developer Gree, one of the country’s most active and successful corporate venturers with more than 100 deals, has seen its visionary and co-founder, Kotaro Yamagishi, move to become CEO of Keio’s university venturing fund and apply his organisational skills to professionalising a part of the innovation capital ecosystem in the world’s third-largest economy (see innovative region).
Yamagishi joins Symposium co-chairmen Tony Askew, head of REV Venture Partners, and Jacqueline Lesage Krause, head of HSB Ventures/Munich Re, and others as a keynote at the Global Corporate Venturing Symposium in London next month.
Their exploration of the opportunities that abound and meeting of peers from across the university and corporate venturing ecosystem will spur the ideas and opportunities for collaboration and deal syndication that could help define the next generation of success stories.
As George Hoyem, managing partner at In-Q-Tel, the US intelligence community’s strategic investment unit, described our GCVI Summit in California at the end of January: “The content, networking, quality of people, contacts and opportunities to collaborate with the largest corporations in the world is frankly in my experience unprecedented.”
Or as Jose Catalan, head of innovation at Masisa, put it: “Este summit es una excelente oportunidad para entender lo que esta pasando por la cabeza de las grandes corporaciones en relación a la innovación y al corporate venture capital. Imperdible.” (“This summit is an excellent opportunity to understand what is going through the of large corporations in relation to innovation and corporate venture capital. Must be experienced.”)
Unmissable indeed.