look at all these happy graduates I bet
a lot of you guys have been in this same
place or it’s in your future 80% of New
Zealanders will do some sort of tertiary
education program that’s astonishing and
that’s global and so my question to you
is why why would all of these people go
to university why would you I bet it has
something to do with a career or a job
and I would bet even more that very few
of you went to university to broaden
your horizons or better yourselves this
is me when I went to university so I’m
graduating from high school here
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I’ve
got the University of Virginia firmly in
my sights I wanted to be a doctor this
is very much like the people in that
last picture I also wanted to read
Milton’s of Paradise Lost which was
really fun and I loved it
but I had no idea that I was right in
the middle of a massive culture shift
universities all around the world are in
a kind of midlife crisis and that’s what
I’m gonna talk about today so Thomas
Jefferson knew why people should get
higher education in 1786 just before he
was drafting the US Constitution he
wrote that the best new laws that were
coming out of the United States they
were underpinning the future of the
United States were the ones that talked
about educating the people for Thomas
Jefferson strong democracies require an
educated population now what Jefferson
imagined was a higher education looked
something like this but with different
clothes
well more clothes in the middle of that
we’ve got Plato and Aristotle arguing
about the aesthetic versus the empirical
and the students are kind of lounging
around discussing whatever they’re
thinking about except for that guy in
the middle if he was in a modern
University he’d be playing candy crush
that kind of intellectual exploration is
embedded in the very deepest ethos of
what a university is and it used to be
one of the main reasons people went to
university but World War one and World
War two taught politicians the value of
research academic research mostly in the
sciences and engineering and mostly
about power some historians think that
one of the reasons Germany lost world
war two was because Hitler didn’t
understand this and he dismantled his
science infrastructure in the name of
racial purity driven by this idea the
expansion of the university took off in
the 1950s initially it was relatively
untethered but over time as the amount
of money flooded into universities and
they began to act more like businesses
that changed and so then now today a
good many people not all but many on the
more conservative into the political
spectrum characterized Plato’s Academy
as a tremendous waste of time and money
and we look at that effect first-year
students at UCLA are asked to identify
the key things that they want to get out
of their university education and this
philosophy of life thing has become less
and less important as attention to the
commercial has gone up the trouble is
that the link between all of that
intellectual exploration the stuff that
Plato and Jefferson and I value so much
the link between that and the outcomes
for the students that graduate and go on
and get jobs
that’s indirect it’s really hard to draw
a straight line and governments and the
public increasingly want a palpable
measurable outcome and return for
taxpayer investment so here’s the crisis
in a nutshell universities have grown
they depend on revenue streams
government’s don’t supply quite enough
money the money they get is increasingly
has strings attached to it and now
academics are asked to cope with
questions like how do you handle a
student who’s a learner a consumer and a
product all at the same time our ivory
tower pure beautiful not very practical
is under threat now when I moved to New
Zealand
I was a two pillar professor you
probably don’t know what that means
that’s not surprising I just made up the
term this week it comes from how I read
the evolution of universities all the
way from Plato to von Humboldt who’s
kind of the father of the modern
research university when I say I was a
two pillar professor what I mean is that
universities should be places that train
the next generation and create new
knowledge period that’s it the trouble
is that transformation that we saw
reflected in the student survey is now
appearing in university missions all
around the world you can see it in the
University of Auckland you’ve got your
two pillars in there right create new
knowledge train the next generation
there’s this third thing cropping up and
that’s about service to local regional
national and global communities when I
came here in 2007 I lamented this I
resisted it okay universities I would
say are where knowledge should be
discovered for its own sake not in the
service of government or industry I
should have been wearing like you know a
court or a jacket with patches and
smoking pipe you can probably see this
coming though ten years later now I’m a
non apologetic three pillar professor
and that outward transformational focus
is something I believe very strongly
should be done in universities now
before I moved here I only did
fundamental science I’ve never even met
an applied scientist except by accident
quickly though I realized that in this
environment for me to be able to do my
expensive laser research I had to do
something very different and the
solution was to set up a bigger lab and
have it face outward towards the world
okay so I started the photon factory I
had to write a business case a business
case to get my equipment one and a half
million dollars or so and I did but I
didn’t really embrace it
Yunos means to an end I even put in a
cheeky little joke so I in my business
case we we charged industry by the hour
of time they used you know how many
hours they used of the equipment but we
were gonna charge academics by the mass
of the photons they use photons don’t
have math
and that got all the way up until the
final approval stage at the with the
accountants until some biochemists
dubbed me in anyway the photon factory
is established and equipped and now ten
years later we’re thriving
multidisciplinary group that does the
full spectrum of research so we do the
really fundamental stuff how molecules
convert light into other forms of energy
this is what I really love so this is
happening in your bodies right now
you’ve got light hitting the back of
your eyes and there’s a molecule back
there that shaped like this and it
converts that light energy into
mechanical motion that’s the first step
envision 700 femtoseconds millions of a
billions of a second we also target that
fundamental research towards high-value
improvements for New Zealand and
international industry this is actually
where most of our funding comes from
we’ve had sort of 30 million dollars
from industry and New Zealand government
so that’s like six dollars for every man
woman and child in New Zealand that’s
astonishing
and finally we spin out companies we
have several in the pipeline and the
photon factory is well on its way to
becoming a substantial innovation hub
pretty cool a like I’ve got the best job
ever the thing is I had given this talk
in 2010 I probably would have been
dismissive embarrassed even about most
of that applied entrepreneurial stuff I
used to say especially to my colleagues
in the US who thought I’d lost my mind
that I did stuff to fund my basic
science habit I can point to the moment
where that perspective changed 2010 I
sat on a panel in Wellington with Brian
Crump from Radio New Zealand as the
moderator and after the panel discussion
Katherine Moore an innovation rock star
from intuitive search will came up and
said did you just say that you can micro
machine anything without burning it yeah
I sure did we with our technology can
cut anything from diamonds to bone to
skin to plastic and she said fantastic
because we have a problem cutting bone
with a robot and so we started this
project and it’s a really
great project but that actually wasn’t
the moment the moment I’ll never forget
is when Simon a PhD student in my lab
who had been working on this project and
I gave a talk at Intuitive Surgical
about what we’d found and I looked
around the room and I realized that I
was sitting in a room full of really
clever scientists all of whom were
trying to make surgery better for
patients for real people and I thought
oh my goodness the stuff that we’re
doing in my lab it could help people
like in the next one to three years I
actually have goosebumps okay my whole
perspective on success changed and I
became a three pillar professor and so
by 2012 we had our first fully
entrepreneurial project not to create
new knowledge but to innovate with new
knowledge and that was in gender
technologies so in gender technologies
is all about giving farmers the ability
to choose whether their cows have male
or female offspring okay and we do that
with microfluidic and photonic
technology the key thing that we do are
key innovation is that we actually use
the fact that light exerts a force on
objects and we use that to move sperm
cells into different parts of the
channel in our microfluidic chips so
that we can separate their paths okay
it’s the same technology that nASA uses
to move sales and outer space and we’re
using it to move cells inside a little
chip and that chip is in the middle of
this picture behind me so it’s that
little plastic glowing thing the
business model is that we make those
chips for sort of two or three dollars a
pop and then they use them once and they
have to pay upwards of 500 bucks for
each one so it’s not a bad business
model all of that stuff that you see
around it will be inside a box that’s
roughly the size of a sort of tabletop
printer desktop printer now artificial
insemination is a huge business there
are more sperm cells sold to impregnate
dairy cows around the world than there
are stars in the Milky Way galaxy and
it’s not even close and when engenders
exceeds and I say when because I’m an
optimist when engenders exceeds were
predicted to raise the GDP of New
Zealand by 0.2% amazing huge business
in the developing world it’s gonna be
even bigger
it takes three Indian cows to make the
same amount of milk as one New Zealand
dairy cow in gender will allow them to
accelerate their genetics reduce the
number of cows while still having a
really good protein source reduce animal
cruelty reduce the impact of dairy on
the environment and that’s really cool
we’ve been successful all over the place
we’ve won national and international
awards including a gold medal in Ag tech
in Silicon Valley and right now we’re in
a big fund raised because we’re moving
from sort of lab prototype to full-on
commercialization so it’s a really
exciting time it’s fantastic project but
in gender is a long long way from the
classical ideas ideals of Plato’s
Academy or the ivory tower so it’s true
I think that in a university it’s not
first and foremost anymore kind of a
modern version of Plato’s Academy if you
walked into the room where this fresco
is in the Vatican what you wouldn’t find
is medicine engineering business or the
more modern disciplines of innovation
entrepreneurship technology but these
are the things that universities now own
they now advertise as one of their
pillars of strength and I think that’s
the right thing for the universities to
be doing and in the photon factory we’ve
not just bought in we’re leading the way
and there are lots of reasons for that
first is the transformation in the
students that I’ve seen in my classrooms
just over my career these are some of
the some of the people from my group
from a couple of years ago and this
summer we’re gonna have 50 students it’s
gonna be a bigger pyramid and I think I
need to start selecting four really
strong ones to be on the bottom these
people have a palpable drive to make a
difference to solve important problems
to do something that has impact today’s
students are pushing and pulling their
universities to help them open paths so
that they can do that sure they want to
be financially secure who doesn’t that’s
not bad but first and foremost they are
make a difference driven and that third
pillar
provides students with a way to exercise
their maked different muscles with
a wrap-around of mentoring and expertise
and help
that’s what universities do best it
makes universities more relevant and I
can’t see anything wrong with being more
relevant the next thing has to do with
where all these clever students are
going to go when they graduate since
2010 I spent quite a lot of time outside
the ivory tower and I’ve noticed some
things that surprised me University
academics are seriously wise about risk
and immune to failure all of this we did
philosophers mathematicians Shakespeare
scholars chemical engineers all of us
are doing this we’re all imagining the
unimaginative our daily lives and
academics that we don’t even think it’s
all that extraordinary but it is
University academics spend their entire
lives reaching for a bar way up here and
working and failing over and over and
over to get there things that have never
been thought of before never been done
before a university academic at the top
of the game will have a funding success
rate of 20% that means failure four out
of five times I fail a lot I fail a lot
and that means that I’m really actually
pretty good at risk I know what ideas I
should be thinking and spending my time
on and it also means that I’m really
good at getting up off the ground and
having another go at that bar I never
want to be the CEO of a company the
universities where my values lie the
photon factory though is on its way to
becoming an innovation pipeline and it’s
sitting right in a university where it
should be we’ve got two companies now
and a third and a fourth or on their way
ten years from now I want to be able to
look back and see that my students have
graduated taking those companies out of
the university they’ve created their own
jobs and jobs for their mates that’s
part of my vision to do that we have to
be outwardly facing but it’s time for
people to recognize that the influence
the transformation that’s happening it’s
a two-way street
policymakers and taxpayers are all the
time pulling levers trying to get
universities to spin out more companies
change the economy drive the economy
with your science and technology but
it’s not the companies we spin out that
have the biggest impact it’s the people
the students and staff leave that three
pillar University they’ll have the
knowledge and understanding to be good
voters right good citizens they’ll have
the ability to chart a path so that they
can make the difference that’s driving
them and they’ll have the ambition to
imagine the unknown and be persistent in
the face of failure until they achieve
it so universities not going to go back
to their ivory tower we’ve evolved you
know sure we educate the next generation
we create new knowledge that’s part of
our core mission very important that’s
two of our pillars but now we also help
people stretch they’re clever
entrepreneurial wings and spread them
out so they can seed New Zealand and
beyond where they’ll make the world a
[Music] you
a lot of you guys have been in this same
place or it’s in your future 80% of New
Zealanders will do some sort of tertiary
education program that’s astonishing and
that’s global and so my question to you
is why why would all of these people go
to university why would you I bet it has
something to do with a career or a job
and I would bet even more that very few
of you went to university to broaden
your horizons or better yourselves this
is me when I went to university so I’m
graduating from high school here
bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I’ve
got the University of Virginia firmly in
my sights I wanted to be a doctor this
is very much like the people in that
last picture I also wanted to read
Milton’s of Paradise Lost which was
really fun and I loved it
but I had no idea that I was right in
the middle of a massive culture shift
universities all around the world are in
a kind of midlife crisis and that’s what
I’m gonna talk about today so Thomas
Jefferson knew why people should get
higher education in 1786 just before he
was drafting the US Constitution he
wrote that the best new laws that were
coming out of the United States they
were underpinning the future of the
United States were the ones that talked
about educating the people for Thomas
Jefferson strong democracies require an
educated population now what Jefferson
imagined was a higher education looked
something like this but with different
clothes
well more clothes in the middle of that
we’ve got Plato and Aristotle arguing
about the aesthetic versus the empirical
and the students are kind of lounging
around discussing whatever they’re
thinking about except for that guy in
the middle if he was in a modern
University he’d be playing candy crush
that kind of intellectual exploration is
embedded in the very deepest ethos of
what a university is and it used to be
one of the main reasons people went to
university but World War one and World
War two taught politicians the value of
research academic research mostly in the
sciences and engineering and mostly
about power some historians think that
one of the reasons Germany lost world
war two was because Hitler didn’t
understand this and he dismantled his
science infrastructure in the name of
racial purity driven by this idea the
expansion of the university took off in
the 1950s initially it was relatively
untethered but over time as the amount
of money flooded into universities and
they began to act more like businesses
that changed and so then now today a
good many people not all but many on the
more conservative into the political
spectrum characterized Plato’s Academy
as a tremendous waste of time and money
and we look at that effect first-year
students at UCLA are asked to identify
the key things that they want to get out
of their university education and this
philosophy of life thing has become less
and less important as attention to the
commercial has gone up the trouble is
that the link between all of that
intellectual exploration the stuff that
Plato and Jefferson and I value so much
the link between that and the outcomes
for the students that graduate and go on
and get jobs
that’s indirect it’s really hard to draw
a straight line and governments and the
public increasingly want a palpable
measurable outcome and return for
taxpayer investment so here’s the crisis
in a nutshell universities have grown
they depend on revenue streams
government’s don’t supply quite enough
money the money they get is increasingly
has strings attached to it and now
academics are asked to cope with
questions like how do you handle a
student who’s a learner a consumer and a
product all at the same time our ivory
tower pure beautiful not very practical
is under threat now when I moved to New
Zealand
I was a two pillar professor you
probably don’t know what that means
that’s not surprising I just made up the
term this week it comes from how I read
the evolution of universities all the
way from Plato to von Humboldt who’s
kind of the father of the modern
research university when I say I was a
two pillar professor what I mean is that
universities should be places that train
the next generation and create new
knowledge period that’s it the trouble
is that transformation that we saw
reflected in the student survey is now
appearing in university missions all
around the world you can see it in the
University of Auckland you’ve got your
two pillars in there right create new
knowledge train the next generation
there’s this third thing cropping up and
that’s about service to local regional
national and global communities when I
came here in 2007 I lamented this I
resisted it okay universities I would
say are where knowledge should be
discovered for its own sake not in the
service of government or industry I
should have been wearing like you know a
court or a jacket with patches and
smoking pipe you can probably see this
coming though ten years later now I’m a
non apologetic three pillar professor
and that outward transformational focus
is something I believe very strongly
should be done in universities now
before I moved here I only did
fundamental science I’ve never even met
an applied scientist except by accident
quickly though I realized that in this
environment for me to be able to do my
expensive laser research I had to do
something very different and the
solution was to set up a bigger lab and
have it face outward towards the world
okay so I started the photon factory I
had to write a business case a business
case to get my equipment one and a half
million dollars or so and I did but I
didn’t really embrace it
Yunos means to an end I even put in a
cheeky little joke so I in my business
case we we charged industry by the hour
of time they used you know how many
hours they used of the equipment but we
were gonna charge academics by the mass
of the photons they use photons don’t
have math
and that got all the way up until the
final approval stage at the with the
accountants until some biochemists
dubbed me in anyway the photon factory
is established and equipped and now ten
years later we’re thriving
multidisciplinary group that does the
full spectrum of research so we do the
really fundamental stuff how molecules
convert light into other forms of energy
this is what I really love so this is
happening in your bodies right now
you’ve got light hitting the back of
your eyes and there’s a molecule back
there that shaped like this and it
converts that light energy into
mechanical motion that’s the first step
envision 700 femtoseconds millions of a
billions of a second we also target that
fundamental research towards high-value
improvements for New Zealand and
international industry this is actually
where most of our funding comes from
we’ve had sort of 30 million dollars
from industry and New Zealand government
so that’s like six dollars for every man
woman and child in New Zealand that’s
astonishing
and finally we spin out companies we
have several in the pipeline and the
photon factory is well on its way to
becoming a substantial innovation hub
pretty cool a like I’ve got the best job
ever the thing is I had given this talk
in 2010 I probably would have been
dismissive embarrassed even about most
of that applied entrepreneurial stuff I
used to say especially to my colleagues
in the US who thought I’d lost my mind
that I did stuff to fund my basic
science habit I can point to the moment
where that perspective changed 2010 I
sat on a panel in Wellington with Brian
Crump from Radio New Zealand as the
moderator and after the panel discussion
Katherine Moore an innovation rock star
from intuitive search will came up and
said did you just say that you can micro
machine anything without burning it yeah
I sure did we with our technology can
cut anything from diamonds to bone to
skin to plastic and she said fantastic
because we have a problem cutting bone
with a robot and so we started this
project and it’s a really
great project but that actually wasn’t
the moment the moment I’ll never forget
is when Simon a PhD student in my lab
who had been working on this project and
I gave a talk at Intuitive Surgical
about what we’d found and I looked
around the room and I realized that I
was sitting in a room full of really
clever scientists all of whom were
trying to make surgery better for
patients for real people and I thought
oh my goodness the stuff that we’re
doing in my lab it could help people
like in the next one to three years I
actually have goosebumps okay my whole
perspective on success changed and I
became a three pillar professor and so
by 2012 we had our first fully
entrepreneurial project not to create
new knowledge but to innovate with new
knowledge and that was in gender
technologies so in gender technologies
is all about giving farmers the ability
to choose whether their cows have male
or female offspring okay and we do that
with microfluidic and photonic
technology the key thing that we do are
key innovation is that we actually use
the fact that light exerts a force on
objects and we use that to move sperm
cells into different parts of the
channel in our microfluidic chips so
that we can separate their paths okay
it’s the same technology that nASA uses
to move sales and outer space and we’re
using it to move cells inside a little
chip and that chip is in the middle of
this picture behind me so it’s that
little plastic glowing thing the
business model is that we make those
chips for sort of two or three dollars a
pop and then they use them once and they
have to pay upwards of 500 bucks for
each one so it’s not a bad business
model all of that stuff that you see
around it will be inside a box that’s
roughly the size of a sort of tabletop
printer desktop printer now artificial
insemination is a huge business there
are more sperm cells sold to impregnate
dairy cows around the world than there
are stars in the Milky Way galaxy and
it’s not even close and when engenders
exceeds and I say when because I’m an
optimist when engenders exceeds were
predicted to raise the GDP of New
Zealand by 0.2% amazing huge business
in the developing world it’s gonna be
even bigger
it takes three Indian cows to make the
same amount of milk as one New Zealand
dairy cow in gender will allow them to
accelerate their genetics reduce the
number of cows while still having a
really good protein source reduce animal
cruelty reduce the impact of dairy on
the environment and that’s really cool
we’ve been successful all over the place
we’ve won national and international
awards including a gold medal in Ag tech
in Silicon Valley and right now we’re in
a big fund raised because we’re moving
from sort of lab prototype to full-on
commercialization so it’s a really
exciting time it’s fantastic project but
in gender is a long long way from the
classical ideas ideals of Plato’s
Academy or the ivory tower so it’s true
I think that in a university it’s not
first and foremost anymore kind of a
modern version of Plato’s Academy if you
walked into the room where this fresco
is in the Vatican what you wouldn’t find
is medicine engineering business or the
more modern disciplines of innovation
entrepreneurship technology but these
are the things that universities now own
they now advertise as one of their
pillars of strength and I think that’s
the right thing for the universities to
be doing and in the photon factory we’ve
not just bought in we’re leading the way
and there are lots of reasons for that
first is the transformation in the
students that I’ve seen in my classrooms
just over my career these are some of
the some of the people from my group
from a couple of years ago and this
summer we’re gonna have 50 students it’s
gonna be a bigger pyramid and I think I
need to start selecting four really
strong ones to be on the bottom these
people have a palpable drive to make a
difference to solve important problems
to do something that has impact today’s
students are pushing and pulling their
universities to help them open paths so
that they can do that sure they want to
be financially secure who doesn’t that’s
not bad but first and foremost they are
make a difference driven and that third
pillar
provides students with a way to exercise
their maked different muscles with
a wrap-around of mentoring and expertise
and help
that’s what universities do best it
makes universities more relevant and I
can’t see anything wrong with being more
relevant the next thing has to do with
where all these clever students are
going to go when they graduate since
2010 I spent quite a lot of time outside
the ivory tower and I’ve noticed some
things that surprised me University
academics are seriously wise about risk
and immune to failure all of this we did
philosophers mathematicians Shakespeare
scholars chemical engineers all of us
are doing this we’re all imagining the
unimaginative our daily lives and
academics that we don’t even think it’s
all that extraordinary but it is
University academics spend their entire
lives reaching for a bar way up here and
working and failing over and over and
over to get there things that have never
been thought of before never been done
before a university academic at the top
of the game will have a funding success
rate of 20% that means failure four out
of five times I fail a lot I fail a lot
and that means that I’m really actually
pretty good at risk I know what ideas I
should be thinking and spending my time
on and it also means that I’m really
good at getting up off the ground and
having another go at that bar I never
want to be the CEO of a company the
universities where my values lie the
photon factory though is on its way to
becoming an innovation pipeline and it’s
sitting right in a university where it
should be we’ve got two companies now
and a third and a fourth or on their way
ten years from now I want to be able to
look back and see that my students have
graduated taking those companies out of
the university they’ve created their own
jobs and jobs for their mates that’s
part of my vision to do that we have to
be outwardly facing but it’s time for
people to recognize that the influence
the transformation that’s happening it’s
a two-way street
policymakers and taxpayers are all the
time pulling levers trying to get
universities to spin out more companies
change the economy drive the economy
with your science and technology but
it’s not the companies we spin out that
have the biggest impact it’s the people
the students and staff leave that three
pillar University they’ll have the
knowledge and understanding to be good
voters right good citizens they’ll have
the ability to chart a path so that they
can make the difference that’s driving
them and they’ll have the ambition to
imagine the unknown and be persistent in
the face of failure until they achieve
it so universities not going to go back
to their ivory tower we’ve evolved you
know sure we educate the next generation
we create new knowledge that’s part of
our core mission very important that’s
two of our pillars but now we also help
people stretch they’re clever
entrepreneurial wings and spread them
out so they can seed New Zealand and
beyond where they’ll make the world a
[Music] you
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