Well, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back. I hope you've had a great morning. I'm delighted to be sharing this session with Matt and Tini. So without further ado, because we've only got 20 minutes, I'm going to hand over to them and they're going to talk to us about interactive courseware to connect discussion to course materials so hot. So over to you guys. Breil, I'll start. My name's Matt. I'm the principal investigator on this project, which is an Erasmus Plus project. And it is a kind of a large project across four European countries and we're looking to create opportunities for students to get away from being seated and situated only in a classroom and only with kind of stagnant texts and being able to use all the principles of co-creation and collaboration and asynchronicity online to work together. So I'm going to hand over mainly to Tina, who is one of my colleagues on this. She's going to take us through it. We hope to be able to use Poll Everywhere at a certain point in this. So make sure you've got your phone with you so that you can add some of your own points to it. Do write stuff in the chat and then at the end there will be an opportunity for us to do a little advertising pitch and hopefully to pick up on all your questions. Right, Tina. Thank you Matt for the introduction. So also welcome from my side. I'm Tina and let me introduce the needs while we are doing this project and what we will be discussing today. So what we see is we have a lot of course material hanging around everywhere. And then of course we want to differentiate our students according to their levels, their interests, the speed of working, etc. We want our students to become self-regulated learners. All of this is leading sometimes to asynchronous versus synchronous learning behavior. So we have doing things on their own. And on the other hand, we want to promote social learning because social learning really provides a nice environment for deep understanding of what's going on. So in our project we're thinking can we combine asynchronous and social learning or is there a contradiction? So the platform we are using inside our project is the Nextbook platform. And the Nextbook platform is a platform for so-called next generation textbooks. It offers quite some interactivity both regarding the content so you can add videos and questions and everything but there's also a social learning environment where teachers and learners can interact. So this is just a visual that is coming from the website and seeing these are next generation textbooks. So it has a couple of features. So we say offer quality textbook from around the world if an opportunity to create and organize your own notes. There's an integrated Q&A and there's an opportunity to analyze learning behavior. But to make this more clear let's do a small life presentation. So I'm going to take you to first the sample, the manual of the platform which is in fact also integrated directly on the Nextbook platform. So we come here to this handbook which is the manual and then you can see here the outline. And then you'll see a couple of things students can do. They can add marks to their courses so they can highlight things and they can add like that. I'll also even create automatic summaries of the book they have been reading. There's also some functionality inside to add notes for themselves. These are like private notes and to ask questions to the teacher. So if you have something that's unclear you want to discuss with your teacher with your student fellows you can just directly on the textbook add your question. Other students can like it and you can receive responses from both your teachers and from the other students. There's a set of some interactive features included. There is a video that's being able to include. There are multiple choice questions that you can include in the book and even some open questions. Okay so if you want to see how this has been happening on one particular course let's have a look just of one sample that I've been doing in my course on uncertainty and artificial intelligence. And that you see here this is a question that I had students to prepare for class. And then you have here a written solution that I've prepared to them. They can ask questions and I can directly interact with them connected to this course material that I have been creating. And there's also an additional explanatory video connected inside this course material. Okay so now that you have a little bit of an idea of what this next book platform is offering we want to ask you a question. So we hope to get really in touch already during our presentation. And our first question here is which of what are the possible affordances you see for using a platform for interactive courseware such as next book. To this end we are using a poll everywhere. So if you want you can go to pollf.com slash dine the lad which is my name. And then here you can add your responses there. Switching between platforms always take a couple of minutes. So take your time to go to this URL. So you see it on top of the slides it's pollf.com slash dine the lad. Excellent. Yeah that social interaction is a big one and you know especially at the moment when we have been forcibly ejected from our classrooms having that opportunity you know that one of the things that really worries us as teachers I think is losing that opportunity every five seconds or so you know every every couple of minutes every bit of instruction to say talk to your partner what do you think about that and getting that social construction of learning. So having that opportunity is really key. And then students interacting with their teachers absolutely discussing directly on the course material engagement. There's absolutely loads of really good stuff there. I'll attempt now to put the I'm not sure that I can actually put a comment in the chat because we're on a separate stream. So I don't think I can access it. So hopefully there you go. That's the way forward. I think we're already eight minutes in tennis. I think if we jump forward there will be another couple of opportunities to engage. There'll be another poll in a minute. But there's some brilliant things coming through. Yeah thank you for your interaction already. I think these are really great things coming in. So let's continue. So what are the affordances that we have been seeing? It's like you can have a collaboration directly on a textbook. You can enhance creativity. You can help steer cell directed learning of students and you can offer like personalized resources. They're plenty of theoretical underpinning of what you are doing. So like dialogue practice, UTEC OG student empowerment and nurturing agency in students. What we want to present to you is a small case study that we have been doing and to this end I want to explain you the context in which this case study happened and that's the context of where I'm operating. I'm a professor in engineering science at the University of Leuven and typically we're teaching in quite big classrooms like you see here where we're teaching theory and then we have smaller sessions where students solve exercises. Then we are using a flipped teaching approach. We're trying to put this as a part of our active learning strategy inside our university. This means that we will have some course material resources that students have to prepare beforehand before they can enter the interactive lecture where we typically do then a Q&A and a discussion. This is just of course one potential use case where we can integrate the course material where we can have students asking questions that can feed our discussion into the interactive lecture and the Q&A and discussion. But maybe you also see some other opportunities, some other potential use cases for this interactive courseware. Then we come back to you again. Another way of asking the question is if you were going to use this in your own course, how could you best make use of it? What would you do with it that could most affect your teaching and crucially of course your students learning? I'll take Roger's point in the chat there that traditional virtual learning environments tend to have those key elements of there's a tool for this and there's a tool for that and there's a tool for the other and they're often in separate areas. I know the one we use has a chat function but it's separated out from some of the other opportunities. So you can be reading something, you've got to go somewhere else to chat on it. So having that interactive nature hopefully we're looking to be particularly useful because you can do it all in the same place. There's silence where we start to panic but I'm sure this will come through in a second. Yeah, let's see. I will try to put something myself. So which potential use cases? I think they're not popping up for the moment. I don't know what's going on but maybe we should continue. Maybe you can put them in the chat or I can try to solve it quickly. Yeah, let's crack them. Okay. Okay, so the case study we have been doing. So the idea is that students can ask questions on the course material because what happened beforehand like Roger has been saying is typically our VLEs, they often have a separate discussion board and then you get a discussion like this with plenty of questions from the students and we don't get a nice overview of these questions and so both for the students and teacher it's harder to get an overview. Also they don't spot interesting Q&As or discussion when they are studying the content itself while there can be already clarification or nice discussion on the content they are studying. Also from our side we see that students ask similar questions multiple times because of this lack of overview. So what we have been doing then is that we have been doing this asynchronous discussion in Nextbook itself. So we have been creating our course material and then instead of having this separate discussion board then we have directly this Q&A on our course material. Like this I can also more easily spot potential improvements of our course and how I can improve my textbook for the next year and I can get an easy overview of one of the things I still have to handle in my Q&A. So what is positive on our case today? So we thought that it was very positive Nextbook can be integrated with our learning management system so students can directly enter it. Then students see the questions and discussion while they are viewing the course material. We see that we have fewer duplicate questions and as a teacher it's easier to get an overview of the difficult parts to be discussed in interactive sessions or points for improvement of the material. What still has to be improved? I think we need a feature to know which questions are new and we need some kind of analytics to know how and when students are using the platform itself. So this analytics is really the thing we are working on right now. So we want to get some data from the course, we want to do an analysis and then we want to take some actions. Of course this data will only be useful if we can collect meaningful learning traces. Then if we have meaningful learning traces we want to use them to answer pedagogical questions and then of course this is key and is connected to instructional design. So we want to design our courses inside Nextbook such that I will provide meaningful learning traces, that we will have opportunities for interaction, that we have discussions, that you can look at the discussions that are going on. If you have these meaningful learning traces then you can use them to answer pedagogical questions. So in our project we really try to develop the pedagogical use cases and then to make sure we make an instructional design recommendation that will result in useful analytics. Okay let's see if this one will pop out or not and otherwise I'll present it in another screen. So Howard maybe you can introduce the question in the meanwhile. Howard was supposed to join us and hasn't so it's just us but never mind. So one of the things we're really interested in is working with the Nextbook platform they can essentially give us any learning analytics we want and the question is what should we be looking for and so to some degree for you if it was your course what would you want to know because it's not just about how much time someone spends on there necessarily but is it more about how many times they ask questions or how often they respond to each other or what is it? I guess it depends to some degree whether you're teaching ancient history or you're teaching chemical engineering or you're teaching primary teaching so what would you be looking for if it was you? We're really at the end of our presentation and I think the next slide is essentially us asking you or offering you the opportunity you are all extremely welcome to leave your either to get hold of us there on either of those email addresses or to just put your details in the side here it's up to you probably emailing us is better because you can just take the screenshot of that right now. If you would like to be an early adopter of Nextbook we can get you free logins to answer Clint's question yes instructors can share and reuse they can grab the stuff they can share it with each other they can keep it and there are also layers within it which we haven't talked about you can look at the you and your students can look at the work completely clean or you can overlay comments or you can overlay only a single person's comments and questions or you can put everybody's on there there's lots of ways that you can use it so if you would like to be to try it out get hold of us and we'll get you an opportunity to do that that'd be really useful. And we've just got another couple of questions relating to what kind of VLE or LMS you're using just now to connect with and that's from Daniel. Yeah the one that we have been using to connect we have a blackboard based system but I know that Nextbook has been connected to other learning management systems as well so they're using the LTI standard to do the connection so any platform that would use such a standard would be able to be integrated but you can definitely send us a question and we can get you in touch with the developers of Nextbook. One thing I wanted to ask and can you said there was different views for staff here Matt but can students download like if they had made if they had annotated something can they download and keep that after the course duration has ended or is it all just within the module space the notebook space when you're an actual student? So it depends and I think on how you set it and how which are the restrictions you have but you can either have they can allow them to download the content itself so they would still have an opportunity to have the content even after their course ends they can also still log in to the platform directly and not through the LMS and then the Nextbook could still be there if you allow it as a teacher. Yeah I was just wondering about the annotation aspect you know it'd be quite I mean I was just thinking that for me if I had taken the time to annotate something I would maybe want to keep that annotation as well so that's maybe. Yeah and one big positive is it's not it doesn't have to be just your annotation there'll be things that somebody else has added that you wouldn't have thought you know and then you're building a conversation about it and one of the things that we're looking to do with this is to actually extend it into becoming co-creation software not just commenting on but actually building their own textbooks their own use you know usages and their own case studies so actually producing a brand new piece of work each time that you use it each new each iteration of the module you'd actually create a new version of it that would be bespoke to the students on the course which I think is a really exciting opportunity. Yeah absolutely and if they could be openly available under you know an open license that would be fantastic wouldn't it yeah that would be really exciting very exciting yeah. Oh do we have any I don't think we've got any more questions but I guess that relates I suppose the other thing that we were asking you about about the analytics I think what was going through my head is I'm not quite sure for data I would actually want to snide because I'm not quite sure what's going to be most important so again what was going through my head was maybe speak having more indexed conversations with the student and showing them the the analytics that you've got just now and that there might be things that they see or they want that maybe are not so obvious to us from the from the other side of the textbook. That's true I suppose. Yeah there's a very simplistic version is that you know you can we often say at the students start of a course or a module there's a clear correlation between the amount of time you spend doing it and the grade at the end but it's not necessarily they don't all do it online so you might have a you know I spent one hour on the course on online the whole time but then a hundred hours reading and work offline and somebody else might have spent a hundred hours with it on in the background and spent the rest of the time looking at YouTube so you're never quite sure but it's about so what would be really meaningful uh analytical. Yeah and I think that leads to um to raise this question about how you protect students who don't want to share their steps in that way unfortunately I think we are going to be just we're just about at the end of the time but maybe quickly we can answer that question but if not that might again be something that we can follow up in in the discord spaces as well but just in case we're cut off um I just want to really thank Matt and Tina for an absolutely fascinating presentation lots packed in there guys thank you so much so everyone please do follow up get in touch if you want to see um this this in action and maybe we could just have a few virtual rounds claps and everything for our presenters and thank you very much everyone. Thank you very much and I'm pretty sure Warwick language is Teresa and you follow me on Twitter anyway so you can ask me there.


Hi guys, welcome to Brazil. My name is Jaco and I am from Finland, but at the moment I'm staying here in Sao Paulo, Brazil Here is my pinch flag always travels with me. I was going to take you out for a little sightseeing in Sao Paulo, but as you can see today, it's raining and We just have to stay indoors I'm here to tell you about the online course that I did Since I've been teaching for some time, I decided to Certificate myself. I did some research online and I ended up with the ITTTTFL course I did the 120 hours course, the online version with the tutor help and the extra video material. I Enjoyed a lot of the course. It was very well structured, well written and Basically, it was a good course. At some points I felt it was covering a little bit too much of the basic information, the basic things But after I finished the course and I thought back about my teaching I realized that those basic things were some some of them were very very important and In my teaching, I was not always covering them. So this course Even even the basic things Served as a reminder how important it is to concentrate what you're doing when you're teaching So honestly, I can recommend this course. It was a good investment So if you're thinking about the online course, go for it. It's a good one. Thank you


Okay, we're now going to take a look at the third form of heat transfer, and we've looked thus far at conduction and convection. We are now going to move into radiation and look at radiation briefly. Radiation is quite a bit different from the other forms of heat transfer that we looked at, where those were involved with either macroscopic fluid transport or electron motion, lattice vibration, gas, molecule movement within our liquids. So we looked at conduction and convection, and now we're going to look at radiation which involves things in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that's why it's a lot different, and we'll notice the equations are a lot different as well. And so I'm just going to give a brief introduction to radiative heat transfer. So when we're looking at radiative heat transfer, we're talking about things in the electromagnetic spectrum, and typically a radiative heat transfer covers a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we look at the infrared visible and then parts of the ultraviolet. Okay, so taking a look at the electromagnetic spectrum, we have the electromagnetic spectrum as a function of the wavelength and micrometers, and what we have, we go from the UV, which would be kind of on the purple side, that's not quite purple, but it's close. So we go into the visible, what we can see with our eyes is between 400 and about 760 microns, and then we move into the near infrared and then eventually the infrared, and that is in this region. Now thermal radiation, you could say goes anywhere from about 0.1 microns up to about 100 microns. So this is where thermal radiation exists, or is radiation heat transfer. And so visible, obviously, that's what we can see with our eyes. Infrared, that is if we are looking in the infrared spectrum, and so here I'm looking at you in the infrared, and you can see funny things, watch my nostrils.  So we can do neat things with infrared cameras as you're looking at right now, or we use things in the visible range, but what we'll be doing is we'll be looking at infrared radiation and radiative heat transfer, and for the most part it is in this range right here, and solar radiation is typically would be anywhere from 0.3 up to 3 microns. So our eyes are only able to see a small portion of the actual spectra that exists. So if we're looking at solar radiation from the sun, that would be the range of solar radiation. So for radiative heat transfer, however, the majority of the energy is going to be in the IR range, and that is where we have significant amounts of heat transfer. Everything is emitting and absorbing thermal radiation. So what we're going to do next is we're going to take a look at some of the equations that are involved with radiative heat transfer, and then we'll work an example problem.


I'm Ray Crowe, founder and CEO of Humble Impact, the nonprofit arm of the Humble Ventures Cooperative. Welcome to today's Gist Guru program on how to run your startup. For the next 45 minutes, my colleague, Melissa Perry and I, will be filling and answering your questions. We'll do our best not to suck. Melissa is founder of Products Labs, where she coaches, trains, and consults with clients on product management. I followed Melissa for some time now, and you're going to get some of the best advice you could ever get today, specifically with understanding lean, agile, and overcoming some of your biases towards both of those. You can join our conversation by sending us your questions, comments through the chat roll on the right side of your screen or through Twitter at hashtag Gist Guru. While we wait for your questions to come in, I'll open up with Melissa. This is one of the things that she's talked to for those of you who have been on her blog, who have viewed several of her conferences that she's been at and has been fortunate to video and hang out there in the open source web. And I think it's important for the audience specifically today. So, Melissa, why should people look at lean as a mindset and a culture rather than a method, a tool, or process? Hey, everyone. That's a great question, Ray. So, when we look at lean, a lot of the times we think about lean startup as Eric Grease actually wrote about it in the book. But what we have to understand is that lean actually came from way before that book was ever written. That whole methodology of lean really comes from Toyota, and that comes from all the way back to the mid 1900s. And Toyota had this methodology of lean ingrained in its people. And what they talked about there is that it was a culture of improvement. So, when Toyota actually founded this and when they had their employees working under these practices, their entire goal was to improve how people worked. So, they made it a culture that everybody would be analyzing what they do, how they can make themselves better, how they can make their processes better, and how they could grow as people. And they practiced things kind of called the improvement caught up. So, this is one of the things that Toyota did that was really great. And what it does is it looks at where are you now? Where do you want to go? And how can you run small experiments to try to get there, right? Like, what do you want to actually improve upon? So, they made everybody from the person who was on the shop floor, right? The person who was like sweeping up all the stuff at the metal factories and putting those cars together to the CEO actually practices. And they had coaches to do it as well. So, this became something that was really ingrained in their entire being as a company culture. And that's what we really need to think about for the startup as well. Now that we're into this other world and we've been applying these practices to software, it's not just about throwing up landing pages and seeing if people, you know, land on your patients side up for it. It's more about how do I systematically learn enough to make sure that my startup is what people want? How do I learn about my customers? How do I learn about business goals? How do I take small experimental steps? And with that as well comes this culture of one learning but also a culture of being safe to fail, right? We know that when we try things, it might not always work. But if we keep trying things, we'll learn more. So, we don't want to, you know, shy away from risk taking. We don't want to shy away from actually putting something out there and seeing what people think about it. And that's a really hard thing for people to adapt to with startup culture, with any kind of software culture, right? I work with some of the largest companies in the world and they are terrified of experimenting because when you put something out there, you might be wrong, right? But you won't know until you actually try. So they'd rather not try and just put it out there and be like, it's out. You know, we launch software, we're good, right? Because to them that's better than actually taking a step to see if it's right or not because that means you have to change. You have to be adaptable. So, Lean, we really have to think of as a mindset of getting comfortable with experimenting, of learning, of focusing on that rather than focusing on shipping features. Yeah, I was going to say, I know you've had a lot of experience before going into your own startup with, how does that look within the enterprise and specifically between the two different environments where some people, they get it and they understand it and they understand the value of it versus the ones who may not be interested or who have had bad experiences with people who wanted to institute Lean in their organizations. So I think that's helpful for everyone to understand depending on where they're coming from. They may work in an organization that's established a current business. They may work in a new business, so what we would oftentimes refer to as a startup if it looks or smells or tastes like a technology-based company, which most people I think get into trying to understand the difference between a small business and a startup. And so I think for the audience to understand that the application of this and the understanding of it as it's ingrained in their culture is important no matter what organization that they're in. Completely. And I think too, the differences with startups and enterprises is it's much easier to try to apply these practices in startups. You're smaller, you have less bureaucracy. You're not so constrained by the way you've always been working and I find that is the biggest mental block in enterprises. We've been doing it this way for 20 to 30 years, so why should we change now?  You have to learn or you will go out of business. So it's easier to try to adapt these processes, but it's also something that startups have to remember as they grow. Once you raise $40 million, you can't stop learning. That's not the end of a lean mindset. That's not the end of your startup sauce that you've been putting together before. You have to keep thinking about that. How do I learn about my customers? How do I take risks? How do I experiment to de-risk that we build the wrong thing? So it's very different between the two, but I love working with startups because they're usually a little bit more willing to try things. That's actually a good segue. I think we were just very serendipitous as the conversation led. One of our first questions come again, so those of you who are out there, we're actually fielding these questions and you're about to see it. Our IRC viewing group in Madagascar asked, what's the difference between a startup company and a business and what's the weight of technology in a startup? Yeah. I guess I'm trying to interpret what that question means. What's the difference between a startup versus a business that's been around for a long time? How are they different? I would probably even break that a little bit further. We deal with this within the humble community all the time as to what's enterprise versus what's an established organization. What's small business versus what's a startup? So I think it may be helpful for them to understand what is the difference between a small business and what's the difference between a startup maybe first. That's probably a good place to start from and then maybe we'll talk about established organization and then a startup. Okay, so let's start with that. So the difference to me between a startup and a small business, when we talk about startups, they're usually characterized in today's nomenclature as a company that is not profitable yet. So one that still has to rely on venture back, venture back funding to actually get going to become profitable. And it might have something to do with technology, although that's not always the case, but that's usually what you hear when you hear startup these days. I think to the difference between a small business is you might be able to get that profitable immediately, depending on what you do, but I still think there's a lot of parallels between them. So for me, example, I started my business, which is a consulting and training firm about three to four years ago, and I would consider it a small business, but I still had to use all the techniques I did when I was building a startup for technology to actually get it running, right? I had to make sure people wanted it. I tested the content. I tested all the things I did to make sure that whatever I was building, you know, there was demand for. So I think it just really classifies where you are in the stage of building your product and developing it. With startups too, usually you're somewhere hovering around this line of product market fit, and this is a really big term in startups. And product market fit means that you have a product that a market actually wants and demands, right? So you found something that the market desires, they'll pay you for it, and you're trying to get that established and grow. So some companies in startup world are actually a post product market fit. They have something that people want. They found a solution, but they're not profitable yet because maybe the operations getting there have taken too much money compared to the profit they're bringing in, so they have to scale it. So then you're still in startup world when you're trying to do that. That to me is the difference between those two. Yeah, I always explain to people the lean mindset and why we look at it in that regards versus is it lean, think of the traditional Toyota model of being established in enterprise versus lean startup which may look more like Eric Ries and Ash Mora company, right? That no matter what and no matter what camp you may find yourself in, the philosophy, the methods, the tools that you use, you could use if you were writing the next novel, you could use if you were launching the next grocery store. It could range between small business or venture-backed businesses. It's making the best use of money more specifically and for us at least it's always time is the most valuable thing to do. Yes, that's a big thing because you don't want your competitors to swoop in there and disrupt you or more importantly like a big company. Google or Amazon could probably do what you're doing if they really, really wanted to very quickly. But if you do the right processes, if you have that lean mindset, you could probably operate faster than they are, be more in touch with the customer because you don't have as much corporation baggage waiting on you. Right. One of the follow-ups they had was what's the weight of technology in the startup? Yeah, so this is an interesting question and this is something that I feel like I teach a lot when I do lean startup training for startups. So technology is great but you have to remember that technology is a solution to a problem. If you don't have a problem that you are solving that is very clear for your customers and your customers are like, oh, this is a crazy problem. It's bothering me. I'm so frustrated by it. Then it doesn't matter what technology you throw at it, you will not be successful. So technology has a play and solving problems with technology is great but you have to make sure there's a problem there. But if you're a very early stage company, you can do a lot of the work without technology. You can go out and talk to users, you can observe them. You can figure out what context they have the problem and you can even do like paper prototyping or build small things with tools that you have on the web. I like to use tools like there's landing page designers out there that you can use yourself or you can put together a WordPress page. Actually, Zappos got together, got built, you can do a WordPress page to validate that people would buy shoes online. That is exactly how Zappos started. So Fred, who started Zappos, when will people actually buy shoes online? He put up a WordPress page, put a bunch of Nike sneakers on it, and then when people purchased them, he went to Sears, bought the shoes from the department store and then shipped them to people to fulfill the order. So very little technology there. There is no backend. There's no infrastructure. There's no crazy technology thing. He put up a $10 WordPress site and just tested it, and that is how Zappos started. So you don't need technology at those early stages to make you successful unless you are very tech... You know, unless your entire business model is based on technology, right? Google's algorithms were based on technology. They need technology. But a lot of startups, if you're working in a B2B area or even a consumer goods area, you might not need as much technology as you think to get started. I think that's important for people to understand just what exactly is out there. Good business models to maybe, for lack of a better word, to mimic, to understand how they used the low-cost small batch testing that they did. They even understand how big the problem really was that they were trying to solve. I think when we look at that, you know, what resources would you recommend? Especially, I think, for early-stage entrepreneurs they're looking to learn more about both, you know, how to run lean, how to adopt and incorporate, as well as agile startup. Yeah. The lean startup is the best place to start, right? That book is great. It gives you a lot of techniques there to really understand how to test things in a minimal way. That's a great place to really start learning. There's a couple other books that are out there, too. Dan Olson wrote the Lean Product Playbook, which gives you a lot more ideas on how to experiment in minimal ways. That's a great one. David Bland is another guy on the Internet who is awesome. He's one of my good friends. But he works with startups to get them out there and testing things. Another guy who does this, too, is Adam Burke. So Adam and I met doing Lean Start Machine around the world. We were traveling companions where we go from place to place and teach people how to start up a company over the weekend. These guys are great resources. They all have blogs out there. They will all tell you how companies have started with zero technology whatsoever. It's a really great place to start. Another one, if you're interested in landing pages and trying to understand that, Unbounce is a great tool to use to build landing pages very cheaply and very quickly. It's all drag and drop. You don't need to know how to code for that. There's quite a few other ones out there that do the same thing, if you look for landing page design. But I want to stress, too, it's not just about landing page design. You can validate your company with many different ways. We validated even in enterprises you feature ideas using Excel sheets. We would send people all the data they wanted on an Excel sheet and say, is this what you want? And they would be like, no. And then we would fix it and then send it back instead of spending six months building something hard-coded in there. So we would test things in very lightweight ways. It's all about I like to think it starts with the question, what do I need to learn next? So when you're building a company, ask yourself, what do I need to learn next? What's the most important thing I need to learn? How can I learn that as quickly as possible? And you get very creative when you put yourself like that. You try to figure out how can I learn in a week? How can I learn in two weeks? And it's all about just getting feedback from your customers. What I was going to say, and that's really the secret that I think a lot of times you can get a little bit enamored with what technologies exist out there, what new resources are. But I think if you have a clear understanding of empathy and how to conduct, I think, appropriate problem and solution interviews, most of your early, I think, time should be out the door actually talking to humans. Yep, exactly. There's a great book out there, it's free online, called Talking to Humans by GIF Possible. It's a great place to start if anybody's trying to figure out how to talk to people. Yes, I concur. For all the startups we work with, that's one of the things, free download PDF and then share with everybody. It's a quick read and it's fantastic. On that note, I guess technology is fairly popular out there. One of the things I think that's helpful for folks that are looking at doing this is with the emergence of Slack and Trello and others, what types of technology may be beneficial to helping, especially I think the more traditional startup when we think about those that may be bootstrapping to investment, but will be venture based. What are some of those, and I would say, I'd probably add to it, what's some of the pros and cons to that?  I just launched an online school for product management. It was just me and one other person building this thing. It was a big undertaking. I found that me, myself, I was strapped for time. I was trying to figure out how do I harness all these tools, how do I make things work together. One of my favorite things that I found was actually Zapier. What it does is it lets applications talk to each other. What I did is I hooked it up to the platform I was using for the school and every time somebody signed up, it would trigger an email and MailChimp. Then I didn't have to send each individual person emails. I could set everything up, I left it and I didn't worry about it. It works almost too well because I'm like, did that go out? I forgot about it. Let me just make sure everything's running, but it does. It runs perfectly fine. If you're bootstrapped and you're strapped for time, Zapier is awesome. It does so many things that can make your life easier. That automation piece is amazing. Also to get started, I'm a huge fan of MailChimp. MailChimp allows you to validate things very quickly. For instance, we were working with, I was working with a startup two summers ago in New York. We were trying to, they're still early stage, about a year old, 20 people working there. They were trying to promote women's career paths. They were a women-centered startup that was trying to promote people, teach women how to get promotions, how to negotiate, how to go out there. We're trying to figure out how to productize their site because it was all content right now. We were able to test things using MailChimp. One of the ideas that we had is that people would pay for these small bite-sized guides that would help them in different areas. What we did, instead of building all the stuff online, making new content, we looked at what we had, and we started sending out email chains, right? An automated drip that would go out every single day. We're able to validate that people were very interested in it through that, instead of building any code. We didn't need any developers to actually do that, which is a pretty cool thing. I'm a huge fan of using MailChimp. It's free for the first thousand subscribers on there, which is all you need when you're just trying to validate something. Trello is great to start figuring out how to prioritize your work. We get into these big debates, especially in the agile world, about what tools can I use to keep track of my work, right? Do I need Trello? Do I need JIRA? Do I need these things? To me, it doesn't matter. Use whatever's going to make your team keep on track. Trello is great to say, this is what we have to do. This is what we're working on. It really shows your flow of work so that everybody's on the same path. I like it a lot. My biggest issue with Trello, personally, is that I forget it exists. So then I have to go open the website and say, oh, yeah, that's it. If it lives on my desktop screen, that would be a different story. But I think a lot of those things can be replaced with really good communication, too. So the more you talk to your employees, the more you talk to your teams, the less you need all these tools to kind of handhold you, right? It's good to keep track of what you're doing, but you don't need anything fancy to do that. There's Kanban boards out there. They're called, and they just sit on walls. Like they're posted notes on walls, right? It's the lowest tech thing you could possibly get, but it works so much better than a lot of the technologically advanced solutions. So if you're interested in Kanban, a good place to start is Jim Benson's personal Kanban, and it's just really like, to do, doing, done, but it expands on that, and it helps you manage your work. I go into companies all the time. It's the largest companies in the world, like 88,000 employees. Walls are covered in these boards. They're not using stuff on their computer, or they might be, but they don't use it as much as they use that stuff on the walls. So to me, that's important. And the last thing you mentioned was Slack. I love Slack now. So when I started my school, a big thing I heard from people when I was doing the early interviews was we wanted to build a community. So how do we build a community around it? Slack is great for building communities when you're trying to launch a new product. So you can get people out there. You can get them talking to each other. A lot of companies have started this way. A lot of people have promoted their products this way. So for my school, we have all the students talking to each other. And it's, I don't even, like sometimes I'm like, oh, I have to respond. They already responded to each other, right? They're having like such a great time meeting each other. So it's a really powerful tool to build communities. It's also a powerful tool to keep in touch with your, with your employees at the start-up, right? If you're a remote team, especially, you use Slack to like talk to each other every day to communicate, to let people know what you're working on. I really love it for that. The best team I ever worked on was actually a remote team. My developers were the best developers I've ever, ever worked with my life. I love that team so much, but they were in Nashville and I was in New York, but we talked to each other every single day on IRC, which came before Slack. We had this rapport because we talked to each other so much and that made all the difference. Yeah, I think a lot of times it's, people don't start with what are the, you know, what are the processes that you have to have in your business. How much of that communication and flow and your project planning is done with just post-it notes, dry race wall, put your block paper, and then as you decentralize task and responsibilities and people, leveraging technology is there to optimize your ability to make gains. Yeah, and too often what I find with companies is they're so obsessed with trying to get the latest technology out there, it actually slows them down trying to adopt it because they don't need it, right? Like if you fix some of the other social issues about communication and, you know, good planning, you'll find that a lot of these technologically advanced solutions don't matter, right? You can solve them. So I would say if you are trying to adopt something, it's not working for you and everybody else is using it, it just doesn't work for you. Get rid of it. Go back to doing what you were doing. Right. One of the questions that came in is on that topic of project planning. They had asked, understanding these methods that we've discussed to this point, how do you go about writing a good project plan? Yeah, so that's really interesting. So most people are using planning in, they're using Scrum to do planning, which is agile. Scrum is great. Scrum has a bunch of, only when you understand why you're using it. So let me put this caveat out there. A lot of teams get into this habit of doing Scrum, which basically makes you the gist of Scrum, here it is, is that we have a product owner and we have the developers and we have a Scrum master. And every week we get together or every two weeks and we look at the backlog of work we have to do. The product owner figures out what's the highest priority. The developers figure out how long it's going to take and then we decide on what we're going to work. That should be, that is essentially what you should do with a project plan is figure out what are, what can we get done in two weeks and one week and in that much time. What happens with Scrum is that there's a lot of rituals that go with it. And too many teams get really bogged down by the rituals, which is doing daily stand-ups and talking to each other and they don't understand why we're doing it. So the whole reason Scrum was created was to force people to talk to each other and understand their work. So that is the key for big project planning, right? Break down your work into small increments. Try it, you've got, when you're starting a company, there's 70,000 things that you could possibly do and something will always get piled onto it. What you want to do is you want to sit there with your team and look at what you have to do and figure out what's the most important thing we do first, right? So break it down into small manageable chunks. Then try to give yourself a little bit of a time box. You're trying to release quickly. So Scrum works in two-week sprints, which means that we'll build things over two weeks and then we'll ship it to customers, get their feedback, see what happens. You can do that for experimentation. It doesn't have to be just software. So you can say, on week experiment where we put together this Excel sheet, bring it around to customers, get their feedback, iterate on that the next piece. So elements of a good project plan. Breaking down the work to small increments, right? That's a really big thing and understanding the work. In those meetings, you really want to say to each other too, if you don't know, I don't know how complicated this is going to be. We need to go check it out. And then as a team, you say, okay, let's go, let's spend a couple of days actually figuring out the complexity of this work, right? Let's figure out what we have to do. And then you can come back and say, okay, I think over the next two weeks, this is our top priority. This is how long it's going to take. This is what we're going to learn when we actually ship it. And this is our goal for the end of the two weeks. If you put that out as a solid project plan, you can usually get really good feedback on what you're trying to do. Great. I think as we've talked through, you know, the different methods and the different tools, some of the questions that now start to emerge, specifically from a couple of our groups, how do you not get discouraged, right? So, you know, as you're going through, you know, either you're just learning and understanding the application or you're working with others to make sure that they understand what you're trying to do. And it's a little bit longer in the tooth than what most people would like to hear.  So you only have a limited amount of money. You're trying to balance effort with also trying to inspire other people to join, as well as, you know, getting sources to the next round of capital. How do you not get discouraged? You know, what are some of the things that you do? And then, you know, how can you handle failure? And that failure, you know, maybe that, maybe you did run out of runway, right? Maybe you ran out of money. Maybe you weren't able to get the right teammates on board. Like, help us understand some of those things a little better. Yeah. For me, so for me personally, I can tell you my little story about failure. And it wasn't so much failure as a company, it was more failure with my teammates. So when I was in Italy, I was in a startup accelerator run by the Italian government. And we were trying to take a lean startup approach where they, you know, shoved 65 people together from around the world. We're from 10 to 12 different countries. And we had four weeks to find co-founders, come up with an idea and then pitch it to the government to get 25,000 euros and start it up. And everything went wrong. They could possibly imagine what wrong because it was Italy. And I loved Italy, but I do not like working with the government in Italy. So what happened was the, I found two co-founders that I will actually three at the beginning, right? Who I really wanted to work with. We had an idea and everybody was like, you are the best startup in this program.  You're such a strong team. But on the inside, we actually were very dysfunctional. And there was a lot of fights for power. There was a lot of cultural differences that got in the way. And eventually I was even kicked out of my own startup. I will say. So like at the end, it just got to be where there became like a power play, right? And it wasn't about the business. It was about egos. So I chose to left leave and start something myself. I wasn't really passionate about the thing that I was building. I was doing this more to build a startup because that's what we get into. And it took a toll on me, right? Like I came home to New York and I felt very discouraged because a lot of the reason we broke up was because of personalities. And my co-founders at the time were telling me that I didn't have a good personality, right? I was too strong. I was too, I was too curt with them, they said, when I talked. And a lot of that was social stuff, right? They were Italian. I was American and we're very straight into the point in America, right? Like the Italians, I'd go, I'd go in and they will spend 30 minutes talking to each other and getting to know each other, which is amazing. But it wasn't a culture that I really knew. And it wasn't a place that I really knew how to operate in. So when I came home, I took a lot of time to regroup. I kind of assessed, you know, is it me or was it the fit, right? And I think that's a big part of that. So when you're dealing with co-founders, you have to look for a fit, right? Like you have to be passionate about the same things and you have to be passionate about the company, not passionate about yourselves. I think that's like a really big thing I learned from that experience. So when you're feeling discouraged, it's one of those things, don't feel like it's just you, right? Everybody who's doing a startup right now is so discouraged, right? Like they're going through such a hard time at the moment. And there's millions of medium articles out there from the top founders in Silicon Valley who talk about how much it took a toll on their well-being. It's a really hard, it's a really personal thing. The way I manage it is I try to look at everything now as a learning experience and an experiment. And I feel like I experiment a little bit too much. So I'll go in there and I'll say, you know what? I'm going to try this company and even if it fails, I will have learned so much, right? I will have learned, and I did when I was in Italy. I learned how to pitch to VCs. I learned how to do corporate or startup finance, right? I learned how to go and incorporate something. I learned what happens when you do stock percentages and try to give out shares. And there's so many things I learned about that. But I also learned that I would not do a startup accelerator again unless I was at a certain stage in my company and that co-founders are the most important things that you can choose wisely. And I think if you're not sure about your co-founders now, it's time to sit down and talk to them and get that cleared up before you decide to move on. Like that's really your backbone. You have nobody else to help you, right?  I think that's important. And I'm going to bounce around in our questions. Audience, great questions coming in. Please keep them coming. We'll go through as many as we can until we run out of time. But I think as we're talking about the importance of you establishing the startup, what does it take to be able to do it? The importance of your team. Some of the questions that have come in, I'll kind of bunch these together a little bit and let you continue with that. How do we know we can start a startup? How do you know that you can do that? What are some of the fundamental things we need to have in place? Okay. This is all mindset, right? This is what, if I've learned anything, I've worked at very large enterprise like things. Then I worked at a startup that raised $40 million, and I was like the 30th employee. Then I worked at a startup that had $80 million. Still startups not profitable yet, even if it's got $80 million. That had 200 people. Then I started my own and now I coach startups. Honestly, after seeing all that, it really comes down. You can start a startup if you're passionate about what you're doing and you really concentrate on solving a problem. You try to be profitable. This is the biggest thing. Let me start from the beginning. Passion about what you're doing. The biggest thing I learned from that Italian experience was it's not just okay to have a good idea. You have to be willing to give up 80 hours of your life a week to work on that idea. I'm not for staying in the office until you drop dead when you're building a startup. I work a lot now, but I don't work nearly as much as when I was in a full-time job because I've learned to prioritize my time better. I can get way more done in five hours a day than 10 hours a day because I know I stopped being productive. It's not about time that you put in there.  The stuff I do now, love it. I have a mission. I want to teach the world how to do better product management. I want to get companies really structured about products. That's what makes me tick. That's the only reason why I like working on Saturdays. My friends will be like, why are you not coming out with us and going to brunch? I'm like, I like writing my stuff. I'm figuring out my school. I enjoy it. It's things that you have to feel excited to do during downtime. You also have to remember to take a vacation. I'm terrible at this. At a certain point, you need to give your brain a rest. Take a vacation, get out there. If you're passionate about what you're building, that's key one that you can do anything. The second part about it is you have to have a problem. Find a problem that you love solving. It's about that passion, but if you can find a problem where people are actually experiencing it, they say they need a solution for it. You've found something to work towards solving. Now you can iterate on different solutions. Don't fall in love with the solution. Fall in love with the problem. It doesn't matter how you solve it if you love the problem. You can start separating yourself from how you will solve it. I think that's the biggest trap founders run into. They get so hooked on the solution idea they came up with that they forget about the problem. Focus on that problem. Third, I forgot what I said for third. I was like one right out of my head. I guess the other thing too is that it doesn't take a lot of money to start a company. You have to focus on trying to make that company sustainable. That's it. A lot of people look at companies like Facebook and Twitter, and they say they got very big, but they had no money. So I work with some of my students who are in my class right now are startups, and they'll tell me, oh, we really need to just onboard as many people as we can onto our site so that companies give us money. That's really not how it works. You have to be careful with VC money. And you don't need VC money. I learned personally for myself I will not take outside money until I can prove that I'm profitable and I'm at a certain later stage where I need it to scale. That's the only reason I would take VC money. If you're in early stages, bootstrapping is the way to go because you retain a lot of control over a company. So that means you have to monetize it, right? Start charging immediately, figure out how to do that. Do freemium models if you have to, but figure out how to make money off this because it is not sustainable for you to keep working on things if you cannot figure out how to be profitable. Yeah, I think that's important, especially given the nature that if you are a user-centric product, the offering isn't complete until you have good pricing, right? And it's not, it's just you provide a solution to a problem. A lot of people lose sight of that. Well, we will make money. Well, tell me the model by which how you're going to make money because if you can do that even earlier on, you're in a better negotiating position with those venture-backed people. Being an investment arm ourselves, it's one of those things that we're in the same boat where we encourage people there's probably a time and no two business models are really the same, but there's a time where you'll likely need money, but you also want to be in the best position possible. I think not only to receive and use that money to scale accordingly, but I think also to make sure that the business in itself is still sustainable. If you're interested in that problem, if you're in love with that problem, the worst thing you can do is go back and trace the history of some companies where they get a merger and acquisition, Enterprise X bought them, fell out of love with whatever they were doing, put the offering to bed, and now there's that whole host of people who are still out there that now don't have that problem solved. I think that it's the balance and the weight and understanding why you even started this to begin with and probably not be revolving around money as a subtle thing. I think you can probably attest to this too. The only thing investors like more than a sizable market that you have acquired onto your platform is that you made money. Investors like it when you make money. I would go for that because that's more of a sure thing rather than acquiring 10,000 people onto your site. Absolutely. What's the amount of users you need to close the first revenue exchange deal? That's the thing I think whenever you talk about earlier about this small batch testing and the experimentation of assumptions that if your model requires users and paying customers, traditional advertising, et cetera, you still have to have those two things closed, right? You can't just say, well, oh, we're on a path. We'll explain and help me understand what that path looks like. Some of the other things that have come in that's along the lines of your team and early stage and how you make some of these decisions, and I talked about this with your own experiences of being in companies, how much do you pay your first employees? I think it's maybe even better to take a step back and say, how do you even look at that? How should you look at the talent that you bring on to your startup? Is that a founder? Is that partial equity for salary? Is that full salary? Maybe to help them understand that maybe a little bit more. And then also, when should you establish a physical presence? One of our viewers out there are working specifically with remote teams, and so when do you need to have a physical presence, if ever? Yep. To me, with the employee thing, you should always pay your employees enough to live, right? And this is something I see startups not do and it really makes me upset. I see this happen in the U.S. as well, where we have unpaid internships. Employees cannot work well for your company if they cannot feed themselves, right? Or house themselves, and they have to worry about paycheck to paycheck. So make sure you understand that. I see a lot of companies to try to pay people just in equity when they're very small. I've gotten this to as a consultant.  We'll just give you equity in exchange for your time. And a lot of people who are not well-familiar with startups would say, oh, great, because this could be the next Facebook. And I really know, equity rarely ever turns into cash. Even if you get acquired, you have to pay back all the investors, all the founders, all the outside money that came in first. And there's usually very little left over in 99.9% of the cases for the employees.  And then you might not even get a lot. So really understand that. You trading equity for somebody's time is not the best deal for that. So I always try to make sure that it's very ethical and fair when we hire employees on. You want to make sure that you're giving them a salary that might be slightly below what the standard is out there. If you're going to do that and you're still strapped for cash, that's OK. But maybe make a deal with them. Maybe you don't need those employees to be full-time. Maybe you can make them four days a week if you only have a certain amount of cash and they can freelance on Fridays. Like try to figure out how to work it out that way. So it's really interesting to really figure this out. For equity-wise, it's always good to give somebody who's spending a lot of time who's dedicating some share in the company. That's great. Equity should be a bonus. It should not be looked at as the sole way you're going to pay people. So when you are looking at equity and how much to give, I'm not an expert on this. There's a lot of documents out there that will tell you how to do it from investors. The thing to remember is you want to make sure that they're spending enough time in your company for that to actually invest. So that was the biggest advice I got in Italy. It was like make sure these things don't invest immediately, which means that you just hand them shares. Make sure they invest over two years so people don't just work for a week. Take the shares and leave because if they leave, they will then have those shares forever. So you want to give them options and you want to make sure they invest over time. The right amount, I'm not exactly sure. Something that you probably find on the web. But it's really important to have that cliff, to have that two-year cliff, one-year cliff, whatever you're going to look at for that. But knowing that to make sure that you have a salary that actually matters and will attract the right talent. For me, when I was starting these companies, it's the biggest, I had, I started them very frugally. Like I put a little bit of money into it, not much. But I tried to just focus on monetizing, getting as much profit in, and it got to a certain point where I couldn't do everything myself. So that's when I started hiring people onto my business and working with them. And it was scary for me to actually trust somebody with that amount of work. That was my biggest fear, it was like, oh no, are they going to be as good as me? Are they going to be dedicated? And when you pay people a decent salary, that they're happy with and they don't feel like they're struggling. If you pay people under what they're worth, they're not going to be happy and they're not going to be dedicated to you. So you want to pay them what they're worth. Then you will get people who are dedicated to you. Then you also have to trust them. You have to let go. That was my biggest thing. I had to just say, okay, this is where we're going. How do we get there? And I asked for their opinions and I let them participate. And then they feel like they have a share in building something. So that was one of the hardest things for me to actually learn was hiring those employees for the first time. But it's amazing when you get good people, right? Like hire slow, fire fast is a big thing. But make sure you have the right people working with you. That's awesome. Well, I know that we're getting close to time. There's a handful of other great questions that are out there. I promise we'll snag them. We'll draft up some response, either to hang on one, both, or multiple blogs.  Just to make sure that we've closed the loop for everyone out there. And please keep them coming in too. I mean, now you have our Twitter handles. You know where to find Melissa and I. And so before we wrap up, I do want to leave it with Melissa to just say, you know, what's one of the most important takeaways that folks could leave with today? Yeah. I think one, remember that the most important thing in a startup or any company is a mindset of learning. Just always be curious. Always try to learn about your business, your customers, if what you're doing is right, right? Like focus on learning. That's the biggest thing, not building, just learning. Two, startups are hard. You're not alone, though. There is a big community of people building startups out there. So if you feel like you're alone or if you're a little discouraged, reach out to those people. I felt like that as an independent consultant before my company grew. And I found other networks of independent consultants to talk to. And that really, really helps. So you're not alone. A lot of people are going through this and just focus on that problem, right? So fall in love with your problem and not with your solution, which is what I just realized Ray's shirt says. It's really 45 minutes. But really focus on that problem. If you focus on the problem and you're passionate about that, you can start a company. That's awesome. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today. It's been a great conversation. A big thanks to the guest team for making this all accessible to everyone and to overcoming, which is something that I always have a hard time doing, technical glitches. And so we haven't had any of those today, which is great. Please tune in again, February 14th for those of you who aren't out enthralling in the Valentine's Day celebrations. We'll have an incubator or accelerator. Does your startup need one? I think we'll just attach on that a little bit earlier as to her experiences. I think it'll be a great conversation and you definitely won't want to miss out. So thanks for joining us again and we look forward to seeing you again soon.


I'm very pleased to be here and to talk about the triple helix. I spoke about the triple helix in my interview in the end of last year, and I just joined St. Mary's in January, and I remember that I was asked, what is this? And I realized that being in a Catholic institution, the metaphor of the triple helix resonates very closely with the Holy Trinity. And what you may find from my presentation is that actually the metaphor still represents something which we don't quite understand, what it is. So I hope that with my presentation I will give you a little bit insight into what is this, the triple helix, and how we can benefit from research in the field of triple helix. Now these are the academic origins. These are the science and technology policy research, a field which always has been interested in the government, what the government does in terms of policies, policy instruments, and then the universities being subject to governance. The first triple helix conference took place in 1996, so the community of triple helix scholars has over 20 years experience, and we celebrated our 20 years with our annual conference in Heidelberg, to which I was chair of the scientific committee. Now what is the triple helix? It's the government, the academia, and the industry, and often the academia is understood only as a tertiary sector. However, everybody knows that academia is the knowledge institutions, and much of the writing and the models, the triple helix models, sometimes they talk about universities, but they really think about the knowledge institution, any institution which contributes to knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination. And what the initial thinking was, is that what is the role of government? Subsidies for innovation, paying the universities huge grants to do their research, to do their teaching, the primary mission of the universities to do teaching, the secondary mission to do research, and now within the literature we are talking about the third mission of the universities, to go out, outreach activities, and to do something for the community, or to have an impact on the policy process. The first static model is that the government is using monetary policies, some other instruments, orchestrating behavior, behavior of industries, and behavior of universities. Now, what apparently came about is, and it is acknowledged as the second model, or less a fair triple helix model, that first the government wanted to release this control. And they, to some extent, decided, okay, we have to find financial instruments or other policy instruments not to keep everything under control, but to let the universities develop. And I think from UK perspective, our universities have always been autonomous. We have no problem with that. But the rest of Europe had real problem with that because their university systems in many countries were totally dependent on local governments, local authorities, central authority. So this laissez-faire triple helix model basically acknowledges that the innovation system has three big components, and these components need to be made to work together. We have private sector innovation, we have public sector innovation, academies of sciences in addition to the university sector. So we have a complex stage, innovation stage, and the triple helix became the governance model behind innovation systems. Now the next stage, third stage, which is mode two and mode three. Now this is a model, theoretical model, which says that these disengaged actors and players actually they have to start to coordinate activities and to collaborate in policy settings, in strategic decisions, and it is not so much what the state does and what the academia does and what the industry does in terms of innovation, but it is what they do together. And in this model we have institutional spheres, this is the, ah, I didn't know this is a touch screen, okay, sorry. So these spheres operate independently. What Hefke does, they do by themselves, but they engaged in consultation. What academia does, we do by ourselves, we are autonomous entities, but we actually try to interact with the state, we try to interact with industry and very often this interaction between industry and academia has lots of tensions because we speak different languages. They have much shorter time horizon to commercialization, we just wander around wonderful ideas. And there is a lot of friction in these spaces of overlap, but this is where we see the effectiveness of the triple helix. And this is where we see economies or where we have coordination engagement where we have more efficiencies emerging. Now there is another magic triangle here, which is called the positive overlap. A multi-stakeholder engagement where all these three parties sit together around a table and they make decisions. And even though this looks like a dream world actually does happen in some regions in Europe, the so-called entrepreneurial discovery process. When regional authorities brought their knowledge providers, those that have got some European research funds, they brought some key stakeholders from the industry and they sat together and decided on smart specialization strategies. Where are their competencies, what is their competence base and how to organize the investment process around this competence base, including the universities have actually to introduce new programs that are in demand by the private sector. So we have some positive interaction here. We have many interesting examples, for example in Russia they require all programs, degree programs to have on the validation panel representative from the industry. And the input from industry is critical in terms of who needs this degree. Now what you see here is these interactions are very complex, very complicated and they hold a lot of tensions. Now triple helix has been embedded in a lot of policy thinking. This is the World Bank index for the knowledge economy and what you see here, very clear vision of the role of the state, very clear vision of the role of the knowledge institutions and unfortunately what they see in terms of contribution to the knowledge economy from the private sector is to build the infrastructure, to develop our internet. And somehow if we have the internet, magically we can build the knowledge economy. However, there was something very important here which emerged at very early stage in the late 90s called innovation systems. And the vision of what an innovation system should contain has evolved quite nicely. And this is the global innovation index. I don't know whether you are familiar with it. Anybody heard of the global innovation index? Yes? No? Okay. Now it's a wonderful catalogue of performance, innovation performance. And this is their matrix, how they actually measure innovation performance. And this is the innovation output by the public, the private sector. This is the innovation input and output. That comes out our publications, patents, citations and including online creativity. Which means how many videos we upload on YouTube. If we upload these videos, UK will score higher. So I think we need a commitment from all of us to generate content, knowledge content. We want UK to score higher, don't we? Okay, so what we see here is the concept of innovation system which has input and output. And the question of efficiencies. Now we have innovation efficiency ratio calculation which gives a country a very particular score. And based on their performance, the countries go up and down the innovation index. Now this is another instrument to measure innovation performance. Which is developed by the European Union. And this is called innovation union scoreboard. And the indicators are defined similar but different. And again we have a very clear view that there is a role of the state, there is a role of knowledge institutions. However, what we have here is very clear distinction what the private sector should do. And not very clear distinction between the knowledge institutions and the state. What the state should do. So somehow the role of the state became blurred. What is the state responsibility? And in one of my last slides I will comment on that. Everybody expects the state just to pay for our innovation and creativity. Now the interesting thing about the triple helix is that it needs something to drive these interactions. It needs driving forces. And there is a question, who drives the triple helix? Is it the state through financial instruments? Is it the university through particular community action? Or is it the business with particular critical innovation, key enabling technologies? And this question hasn't been answered. What these different helixes should do to optimize the communication and the conversation. And what is critical here is that the drivers of the triple helix are still individuals. So it's not the institutional spheres by themselves. That's what the state does or state institutions such as Hefke or UKRC or institutions like that. But it is individuals that circle through spheres and circle across spheres. So the magic of the triple helix is in the hands of a few people that actually can make sense of these complex relationships. Two very quick definitions of innovation, very complex. What we know is that innovation is magic. It's purposeful, but it requires open mindset. And when we create borders and boundaries, these are all barriers to innovation. This is another very complex diagram, just very briefly. That the innovation process is entangled in market process, particularly which drives the private sector, and in political process. And what we see all of this political process behind our REF, which is critical for the functioning, for the short-term and long-term horizon of the university sector. Now, the final two, three slides. Where does this lead us? The triple helix model. The old model, how we support innovation. The old model suggested that you should invent. These are the factors of production, whether the public sector or the private sector. If you put these factors of production, somehow innovation will spur. The new model says that even if you put more money, you don't necessarily get more innovation out of the system. So you should create enablers to drive this innovation. And what the final model is talking about is leadership. So free flow of information, open boundaries, global platform outreach, cross-border mobility of researchers, people traveling across borders. So anything which puts boundaries will have a negative impact on innovation. And I will finish with the final slide, which is basically their critics of triple helix model. And this is coming from one of my favorite institutional economists, Mark Casson, for those that know him. He honestly tried to believe in the triple helix. But he raised some very important questions. So why do we need three-way collaboration? Is it more cost-effective? Or basically we need to make sure that each of these actors do what they are supposed to do. And what exactly is the role of government from economic policy perspectives? Talking about subsidies to higher education or intermediation in these triple helix engagements, RCUK, or some subsidized intermediation and what this may look like. And what are the unintended impacts of the triple helix? And he raised an issue that there are many unintended impacts of the current engagement of the state with the functioning of the universities, prioritizing applied science, which puts pressure on basic science. And these kind of distortions which we see in the university sector being direct impact of inappropriate state intervention. So the critics of the triple helix are there. But this raised the question is how can we do more research on this topic? Thank you very much for your attention. I don't know how much I managed to bring this back to ground level understanding. But I hope you get my passion about the triple helix.