Stephan Kuester: Wallis, do you want to make an introduction, or shall I?

Wallis Liu: I asked them to give some information about Tech Nation program, because it’s a national program for the start-up ecosystem in UK. They have achieved very great success during the past nearly a decade.

Wallis Liu: Probably we need Stephan to bring a little bit about Tech Nation and Parveen to draw special attention on the growth program. Parveen is the team lead of the growth program in the Tech Nation part.

Audrey Tang: Do you have any slides?

Stephan Kuester: We do, if you want to. Otherwise, we can summarize...

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, we can just talk.

Stephan Kuester: ...and leave you with a lot of background information, whatever you prefer.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we start with the brief introduction first.

Stephan Kuester: Maybe just briefly. First of all, Minister Tang, thanks very much for the time. We really appreciate it.

Stephan Kuester: Our contact came about two months ago when Wallis visited Tech City, Tech Nation, London. We had a very fruitful conversation that was including discussing the strength and possibly also weaknesses, opportunities to improve for Taiwan, with a right clear focus around this scaling opportunity.

Stephan Kuester: We understood there is an enormous amount of high tech and emerging start-up industry that’s quite successful, but it is lacking -- we re-confirmed that with a bit of research -- of the real scaling element. That, in the end, has the impact every government in the world wants in terms of tax and economic prosperity.

Stephan Kuester: Our story, we are a quasi-government agency, operating very independently, though. It’s about a 9 to 10-year story. In 2007, ’08, we had the fiscal crisis, global economic crisis, which hit London extremely hard.

Stephan Kuester: At that time, a number of grassroots start-up entrepreneurs and the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, called together to say, "Is there an opportunity for us to re-balance the economy from financial and professional services to something else?" Something else being tech, digital entrepreneurship. Now we look back 10 years later, and have with London the third largest digital tech center in the world.

Stephan Kuester: Silicon Valley, New York, London is the ranking. We are very strong, certainly in Europe, by a mile in the scaling part of it, so very good at taking companies through the different start-up phases, but importantly scaling them for international markets.

Stephan Kuester: What else do we do in terms of the day-to-day work? We have three pillars. The first one we call advocacy. We do research. We discuss with entrepreneurs basically every day, throughout the entire country, their issues, their problems, opportunities for improvement from a legislative and regulatory perspective.

Stephan Kuester: Take it back to government, the Prime Minister or the regulators, such as financial conduct authority for financial markets, to argue the case. What needs to be there in terms of standards, in terms of market opportunities, in terms of tax incentives, etc., to have the best possible environment? It’s quite sophisticated. It’s not perfect, but quite sophisticated.

Stephan Kuester: Secondly, digital skills initiatives, all the way from influencing formal educational policy to providing practical trainings for young people with a tech background. We help them to develop more the entrepreneurial skills. What do I need to know to start, scale, finance, market their business, hands-on training?

Stephan Kuester: Last but not least, we have a lot of, that might be interesting here, older CXOs, leaders of large private or public organizations to work with start-ups in a fruitful, collaborative way. Starts with funny things like language, different methodologies, different processes.

Stephan Kuester: The leader, the CEO of Barclay’s would come to us and would be educated in a way that he or she is a little bit more effective in collaborating with the innovators. Innovation, for us, very strongly comes out of the CXOs.

Audrey Tang: Also, capacity building for them, right? Not just as mentors?

Stephan Kuester: The words is almost funny, capacity building for these large industrial giants, but there has been traditionally a rift, a gap, particularly in methodology. I personally have experienced, and I’m coming from the big corporate world, that there’s a lot of misconception, misunderstanding of how to collaborate properly.

Audrey Tang: What the word Agile means.

Stephan Kuester: I had a large bank recently, for our co-innovation project, they sent 20 project managers. On the other side, we had three creators in blockchain who were hugely agile, with zero interest in a calendar and a project plan.

Audrey Tang: And the Waterfall model and everything.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah, and getting the right mix and the right level here was our road. It doesn’t sound very intellectually challenging, but if you don’t do it, the collaboration does not work.

Audrey Tang: It’s cultural, in a sense.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah, these cultural elements. Again, helping bridge the gap between old, large, but not agile, not fast and the young industry. We believe the young tech industry, in the end, will help us modernize the entire economy, including e-government, etc., really take it and flex it.

Stephan Kuester: Second pillar, it’s the digital skills, also including things like immigration policy. Particularly now, leaving the European Union, we do have an issue. It’s undoubtedly in tech. We want to be open to the world in order to invite very talented entrepreneurs to come.

Audrey Tang: About a year ago, I wrote a recommendation letter to one of my very good friends. She is the ex-president of the Open Source Initiative, and she applied for the tech CD immigration...

Stephan Kuester: Immigration visa.

Audrey Tang: I wrote a recommendation. By that time, I read through your brochures and things like that.

Stephan Kuester: Perfect.

Audrey Tang: At that time, we were working on our foreign talent with our programs. We liberally lifted some ideas. [laughs]

Stephan Kuester: I was amazed to see that you have a similarly, or possibly even better, open immigration policy. By the way also, when I talked about the regulatory environment, we are so proud about our open data environment. I looked at the rating of the open data environments, worldwide. Taiwan stands out by a mile, so we have to learn from here. That’s great to see.

Stephan Kuester: Third pillar, our growth programs. It’s largely mentorship-based, covering the entire business life cycle, from a young girl, a young boy with an idea, all the way to CEOs Parveen works with on a daily basis, who are the scaling companies, the unicorns, which we luckily enough have many these days. Growth problems, all the different life cycle phases are the critical point.

Stephan Kuester: Parveen, you possibly can contribute a few points to that.

Parveen Dhanda: We very much look at from early-, mid-, and late-stage. Early stage, we have a Digital Business Academy called DBA for short. We have 56 online course, completely free. We’ve done that in partnership with University of Cambridge and UCL. It’s really for those that either want to start a business or actually want to be part of a tech start-up, as well.

Parveen Dhanda: Typically, the courses would be, how do you do your marketing strategy? Even to the level of, how do you do your newsletter? How do you measure the response from the newsletter?

Audrey Tang: Is this individual basis, or is there cohorts, like virtual classrooms?

Parveen Dhanda: Right now, it’s individual basis, so you would take the course...

Audrey Tang: ...service, then?

Parveen Dhanda: Yes, absolutely, and you have videos. We also bring in not just the academics, but we bring in entrepreneurs or experts in marketing that would then do the videos and so forth. That’s for those that are looking to start.

Parveen Dhanda: Those that have just come up with an idea, and so they’re looking at producing their MVP or their proof of concept, we have something called Founders Network, which is a national program. The idea behind that is a peer-to-peer learning. A founder in Cambridge could connect with a founder in Birmingham or Brighton.

Parveen Dhanda: We also then bring those founders together in those areas. We’ll bring in the early-stage founders working with that region, that regional cluster, and do events where we bring in keynote speakers and so forth. Really, that is for us to make sure that we have a national message.

Parveen Dhanda: At the moment in the UK, we have different clusters. Cambridge is very strong in AI. Belfast is very strong in cybersecurity. What we want to do as Tech Nation is bring them all together at early stage and we do that by our Founders Network.

Parveen Dhanda: We have a competition, as well, called Rising Star. Again, it’s a national program. With that, it’s typical to any other pitching competition. You get mentorship, you get a prize package, and so forth. One thing we’re now focusing on, because if we look at the ecosystem in the UK, the digital ecosystem, we’re now focusing on sector-specific program.

Parveen Dhanda: We’ve just launched our first one in fintech, because the UK and London is very strong in fintech. We’ll then be moving on to cybersecurity. Then -- this hasn’t been announced -- it’ll be AI. We’re looking at sector-specific programs for early-stage businesses.

Audrey Tang: Do you see AI as a sector?

Parveen Dhanda: Sorry?

Audrey Tang: Do you see artificial intelligence as a sector?

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, just for the artificial intelligence.

Stephan Kuester: Maybe it’s, in my perspective, not exactly an industry vertical. It’s cyber and AI-enabling technologies that we need in everything, spanning from e-commerce to mobility to healthcare. We want as many early-stage companies in that as possible.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Parveen Dhanda: Also, with the regulation and whatever specific challenges they have, whether it’s...

Audrey Tang: Do you also do advocacy for people who are petitioning? For example, to change the regulatory rules of ethical AI or AI relating to children’s rights. There’s a lot of consultations that are going on. You are also active in that process?

Parveen Dhanda: Absolutely. We will be. Fintech’s launched, so we work very closely with HM Treasury. We’ll be doing the same with cybersecurity. We’re working with GHCQ and others. Really, for us, we can’t lobby, but we do policy convening. We bring in various entrepreneurs. We have round table discussions with Number 10, the special advisors to the prime minister, to make sure their voices are heard.

Parveen Dhanda: Talent has come up, especially with Brexit. We’ve done various round tables around that. We did round tables in terms of visas. Actually, from the policy convening, this is where the Tech Nation visa scheme came about from a few years back.

Stephan Kuester: There’s maybe a good example for AI. It doesn’t exist as yet, but when we look back to the financial services fintech environment, we are convening. since about two years, every six to eight weeks, a round table between incumbent banks and insurance companies and tech challengers.

Stephan Kuester: The FCA is observing the discussions. It’s all about common standards and level the playing field, because normally regulation is protecting the incumbent organizations. I think we are heading towards, as part of this AI program, a similar institution that would help shape ethical AI, some ground rules.

Stephan Kuester: The same might happen actually in blockchain, blockchain smart contracts, to have a bit of a regulatory framework around cyber, around the application of smart contracts etc. Again, with the tech challenges, only as start-ups having shaped these policies, so it’s really fit for purpose.

Audrey Tang: In the UK, when the fintech sandbox first came about, we see a lot of start-ups working on regulation technology or RegTech. I think that is one of the main thing that everybody wants nowadays. It’s less clear on RegTech works on blockchain, actually. Actually, very blurry. [laughs] I think, whenever there’s a regulatory challenge, there is a potential market official.

Stephan Kuester: To make sure we have this dial-up between sometimes old, established administrators trying to use regulation to block innovative services. We want to make sure this doesn’t happen, it’s a level playing field, eye to eye. Most likely it is going to happen in AI, as well.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, I think so. That’s very much our early-stage programs. Then we have our mid-stage, which is those companies that have raised, at sector or across state, Series A or have Â£500,000 in revenues. They tend to have 30 percent month-on-month growth based on their business metrics. That could be customer acquisitions and so forth.

Parveen Dhanda: What we do with them, it’s actually more of a master class. We have scale-up coaches. We’ve had the CEO and founder of PayPal, who would almost give a master class in scaling, like, "These are the things you need to be thinking about."

Parveen Dhanda: Or we’ll bring in somebody who’s a chairman for various late-stage tech businesses. They talk about what you need to look at when you bring a chair on. If you look at the challenges these companies are facing, it’s very much, "How do we scale internationally? How do we put our board together? What about the processes?" and so forth. That’s how we support our mid-stage companies.

Parveen Dhanda: It’s a six-month program, and we bring in only 30 of the UK’s top companies that fall into that bracket. Future 50, which is a program I’ve been working on for a few years, this is basically the UK’s top digital companies. We’ve had the likes of Skyscanner been involved, Farfetch, Deliveroo. There’s been 127 companies that have gone through the program.

Parveen Dhanda: It was launched by a previous chancellor, George Osborne, at the London Stock Exchange in December 2013. The idea really back then was for companies to list in the UK as opposed to the NASDAQ. Since then, the IPO market went down.

Audrey Tang: It really changed.

Parveen Dhanda: It totally changed. We’re on six. There was an IPO last week with Funding Circle. We’ve had six IPOs, but four of those were in 2014 with Just Eat, Zoopla, and so forth. We’ve had 29 M&As. I’ve mentioned Skyscanner, which was acquired for over a billion dollars. We’ve also had Matches Fashion, which was reported acquired over a billion.

Parveen Dhanda: Since the companies have joined the program, they’ve raised Â£5.5 billion in VC funding in capital markets. How we support them is really shining a light on these companies to say, "Look, these are the UK’s top-scaling digital businesses."

Parveen Dhanda: We also do, I’ve mentioned the policy convening. We help them with any press opportunities, scaling internationally, as well, but where the secret sauce is with that program is the networking. We’ll bring in the CMOs together every quarter, the CEOs, and so forth.

Parveen Dhanda: We have 50 in the cohort, but actually, all the alumni still want to come to the events. Even these companies that have really scaled, are making so much money, they still want to come to our events.

Audrey Tang: Is there an online community? Y Combinator is famous for their Bookface community. Is there a online part of this?

Parveen Dhanda: Yes, there is online. We use Slack channels and so forth. I think where they really see the value-add is when they come together.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Parveen Dhanda: We do regular dinners, or I’ll just put them in a room together. I said, "What do you want to talk about?" Then they discuss it among themselves. That’s the program, from early right through to late.

Audrey Tang: In the mid-sized, as I understand this, it’s sector agnostic.

Parveen Dhanda: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t have to enroll in earlier programs to enter. Is there any percentage of community interest companies or CICs in that stage?

Parveen Dhanda: Is that more social enterprise?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Parveen Dhanda: I think that’s quite interesting. In terms of our remit, our remit is to grow the digital economy, right?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Parveen Dhanda: The way the UK government looks at that is, how many companies are these people employing, and then revenues. Unless they meet the revenues, we don’t really tend to support more of those social enterprises.

Audrey Tang: I mean Bell Water is not super digital. I understand that. There’s no clear overlap between the two?

Parveen Dhanda: None.

Audrey Tang: When I visited the Ministry of Fun, DCMS, [laughs] they have a separate strategy, the civil society strategy. It looks like from their wording that their strategy and the digital economy strategies is almost like zero overlap, and I just want to confirm this on the survey.

Parveen Dhanda: It’s true, yeah.

Stephan Kuester: A few examples we have been dabbling in.

Parveen Dhanda: With the tech missions.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah, fintech, now fintech for Good.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, fintech for Good. Sorry, yeah.

Stephan Kuester: In using start-up ideas plus lunch bags, credit scores in order to do something for a fairly large part of the population that’s either unbanked -- would you believe it -- or are not really able to manage their finances properly, so it’s funny and...

Audrey Tang: It’s like an inclusion, financial inclusion.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, yeah.

Stephan Kuester: Financial inclusion, not a bank account here, basically, not able to get proper employment, so there’s a social element.

Audrey Tang: Our first fintech sandbox case is also a very...

Stephan Kuester: I think it’s awesome to see that tech can be used, commercially successful, tech can be used to do something that’s actually good for society. We want to, we’re in a planning phase now. We’re making our first inroads, put it that way.

Stephan Kuester: We’re starting Tuesday, next week, with something we call Tech Nation Missions. We defined a number of problems that are too large even for a Siemens, a General Electric to address in their own right. It could be the future of mobility.

Stephan Kuester: Even a car ownership that we’re working with, Jaguar Land Rover is an example, and it could, not far more, the future of well-being as a proposition. How do you keep people healthy from cradle to grave, avoid chronic disease, avoid the cost that implies on the healthcare system?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yeah.

Stephan Kuester: We want to bring together the large corporations in that field in our vision. This would be stay with well-being a pharma company, a biotech company, somebody who’s good at data analytics, Google, somebody from the consumer space tracking data from your wrist, university hospitals, healthcare providers, health insurers, in order to first, ideate, create scenarios, and then start the development process.

Stephan Kuester: That will include ideation, incubation, acceleration, proof-of-concept, where the start-ups to a large degree would provide the ideas, the corporations deep tech knowledge, deep regulatory knowledge, a bit of funding undoubtedly, and most importantly, scaling opportunity.

Stephan Kuester: If you come up with something that’s really good, we want to use, let’s say, GSK -- GlaxoSmithKline -- in order to not scale it to the UK, but to scale it globally from day one.

Audrey Tang: What’s the name of this?

Stephan Kuester: Tech Nation Missions.

Audrey Tang: Missions?

Stephan Kuester: Missions. Again, it is a bit conceptual. Where are we today? We are working with single corporates to help them more in open innovation environments. That’s what we already do, bridging this gap between a large corporate and a start-up.

Stephan Kuester: We want to take it to the next level, which is really addressing problems. They would have incredible impact on society and quality of life, but they also would be very substantial commercial opportunities.

Audrey Tang: I liked the social impact angle, because just a few weeks ago...

Stephan Kuester: The word mission is a bit broader than just corporate innovation which everybody does.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I talked with the French Tech people, and they’re doing a very similar pivot. We’re brainstorming Fintech for Good or whatever, but I think Missions is a really good one.

Stephan Kuester: For us, I was always very insistent on doing good is fantastic to do, but unless you have a very substantial commercial opportunity, people will lose interest, particularly the big ones will lose interest. They could do it as a marketing activity, not as a corporate...

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Because people see good and they think, "Ah," or whatever.

Stephan Kuester: Give it to the marketing, it’s not what we want.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, but mission is about business development and with similar-minded people.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah. We want them to make billions for revenue, but we also want them to address the things that are bad for our environment, bad for our society. It’s their vision, so hopefully next year we can report back early successes, hopefully.

Stephan Kuester: Again, it ties into the scaling story, so with the growth programs, mid-sized, late stage, if proven that this mentorship-based approach is incredibly effective, it doesn’t sound that complicated. I’m from consulting background. It’s interesting to see that these entrepreneurs don’t want consultants. They want to speak to somebody who’s actually been in the same environment.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s all about the report.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parveen’s programs have enabled us to be in a situation today that, let’s say, five years ago only existed in the Valley. It’s people like Musk giving back to the next cohort. We do have that now since about three, four years.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: It’s very, very...

Stephan Kuester: In essence, it’s quite magical element. I travel a lot, and I don’t see many ecosystems that really manage the scaling opportunity. You got lots of great environments for a start-up, really rich start-up societies or communities, but even Tel Aviv does not scale properly. It’s very successful to a stage, but it doesn’t really produce the large scale-ups at that rate.

Stephan Kuester: That’s a little bit of magic, and where we want to assist if you can leverage our experience, expertise, as good as possible, or even entire programs like Future 50, to see if there would be an opportunity for Taiwan to strengthen the scaling part of it.

Stephan Kuester: Last but not least, we are start marketing, that’s more relationships if we want to fly the flag for our ecosystem. We would like to see more Taiwanese entrepreneurs to come to London, or if they are in robotics, maybe Bristol is a better place. If they’re in semiconductors, Cambridge is the best way to be to use the scaling to come, explore, and decide if they like it, the scaling opportunity the UK can provide.

Stephan Kuester: The other way around for more companies like Deliveroo, which I understand opened here last week to consider Taiwan also as a sales market as a manufacturing destination. A little bit of bad players, players with bidirectional awareness for a market, creating interest. That’s also part of why we are here as an exploratory mission, and we’re very, very grateful to Wallis and her team for making this possible.

Audrey Tang: I’m particularly interested in the Missions part which is reflected in my impart. It was the global bulletin. If you flip it around, it says [non-English speech] . [laughs]

Parveen Dhanda: You and global goals.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Yeah.

Audrey Tang: .

Parveen Dhanda: It’s fantastic.

Audrey Tang: We have a four-year social innovation plan. We are explicitly SDG indexing all our work. For example, in my own office we use the specific goals to identify our work. We work on 1718, 1717, and 1706.

Audrey Tang: The important thing of using these numbers is that it provides a very simple to use dashboard, almost like a common chat channel or a common language to discover mutual possibilities, because mission statements tend to be long, and it’s [laughs] very difficult to train AI to actually get a real mission for [laughs] our mission statements.

Audrey Tang: We just use the 169 or so SDG numbering for our social innovators, which why I ask about CRC, because in Taiwan we don’t have CRC. All we have is just regular companies. We are asking them now if they have specific products or services that is also mission-oriented, "Please give us some numbering so that we can register you and find you international opportunities."

Audrey Tang: For example, there’s a AI mission learning team working with the Taiwan Water Corporation, which manages the longest pipe in anywhere in the world. They have a problem with the detecting water leaks, and they used to have people going around and listen.

Audrey Tang: It takes a year and a half to tour around Taiwan, but then they use machine learning with SCADA and things like that, and then it shortened the time needed to detect a leakage by tenfold, which is a pretty good...

Stephan Kuester: We need this company in London.

Audrey Tang: Then we SDG index it as part of our presidential Social Innovation Hackathon, and then the people in New Zealand discovered. They didn’t have a water shortage problem, but because of climate change, they now have.

Audrey Tang: They don’t really have that technology ready, so it’s either buying a very expensive solution on the she from Tel Aviv, or co-create with some local start-up there, the Taiwan Water Company. The team is now actually in Wellington working with the water company.

Audrey Tang: This is one of the pieces that I think it makes a lot sense, just exactly as you said, to have the entry area still be a revenue-based or employment-based or whatever, but once you enter in it, we just demand some SDG numbers out of them, and then we start those natural collaborations.

Stephan Kuester: It’s actually a great thought. We didn’t really include that. If we may, we may steal your concepts...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, please do. Please do, because the more people use it, and I mean we can use it until 2030, so it’s [laughs] still quite on time to use this stuff.

Stephan Kuester: Because it’s a currency.

Audrey Tang: It is a currency. It really, really helps people to communicate their missions, because otherwise they spend two months and find their mission doesn’t have a luck and that’s a waste of time for everybody.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah.

Stephan Kuester: To prove the outcome in the end make it very communicable.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, and then also beautiful incomes is a winner.

Stephan Kuester: That, really, I truly believe I’ve seen it in a number of countries, last big project that it was in Switzerland, that this gap, which seems to exist here as well between larger corporates, larger medium-sized companies. Something that’s much more innovative but behaves very differently, in a framework where you have this big objective, brings people together in a very different way, in very mission-oriented ways.

Audrey Tang: When I visited the UK, there’s this nice advisor for the Department for International Trade who used to work for GSM. He also said that GSM, before he also used the same SDGs system to basically mark all the GSM-funded or collaborates each project.

Audrey Tang: You can click in any of these start-ups, and you see exactly which goal they’re working on. It’s a kind of dashboard. Of course, it’s still cold screen because they only use the 17 instead of the detail indicators, but I think this is pretty much, it is game currency, is what I’m saying.

Stephan Kuester: Great idea.

Stephan Kuester: We can consider to planning for the missions.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, yeah. Talk to me.

Stephan Kuester: It’s pretty much where we stand at the moment.

Parveen Dhanda: We went to see this space where the...What was it? The Social...

Audrey Tang: Social Innovation Lab?

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: This space?

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah. It’s great.

Audrey Tang: It’s my office.

Parveen Dhanda: Really?

Audrey Tang: Every Wednesday from 10:00 to 10:00, I’m there.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, yeah. They said.

Stephan Kuester: So you do open hours.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. People can come to my office how as long as they need for the radical transparency. Most of the time they just need a human face to really listen, and then because it’s practically transparent, and they’re SDG indexed, so my main work is just to introduce them with other companies, maybe in very different fields that actually are working on this mission. It has been pretty successful.

Audrey Tang: The people, of course...Yeah, you missed this, which was a few months ago. We have a lot of self-driving tricycles driving around in the social innovation lab. It’s from Media Lab, MIT, but it’s open source. It’s called PEV or Persuasive Electric Vehicles, and they’re tricycles. They’re very slow. They’re same ride of road with the pedestrian. It won’t cause accidents if they run into people.

Audrey Tang: They really gives people imagination of how AI co-domestication works like, because it’s open source. If you want to put some emotions on it, just talk to a local college student. If you want to put out AR or VR, see the world through the eyes, and explain why they stop in the road and whatever. There’s a lot of hackathon topics, because it’s very cheap. They use the cheapest LIDAR.

Audrey Tang: It’s a, I think, really good way to frame ethical AI, because it’s just that RegTech is very abstract for everybody involved.

Parveen Dhanda: Absolutely.

Audrey Tang: For AI banking or for AI vehicles, again, it impacts everybody. We don’t want to wait until it hits somebody, right?

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I think this norm setting is also one of the reason why we do the Social Innovation Lab as a kind of Lego lab.

Parveen Dhanda: That’s a great way for people to get used to.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It doesn’t take out jobs of anyone. [laughs]

Parveen Dhanda: I know. We always have this.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a domestic or companion animal.

Parveen Dhanda: Absolutely. I went to a really good AI conference in London called COGEX. It was one of the better conferences I went to. It was great, because you had a real mix of academics, entrepreneurs, but those that are working in philanthropy, as well, scientists, but also philosophers. It’s this whole discussion in terms of where AI’s going, the society impact, as well.

Parveen Dhanda: Who decides? It’s that train test, isn’t it? If there’s a family here and one man there, how does AI decide?

Stephan Kuester: I think it’s actually incredibly important when we look at entrepreneurship. [coughs] Excuse me, I apologize. It’s from the plane.

Audrey Tang: No problem.

Stephan Kuester: When we look at entrepreneurship culture, when you ask a young boy today, "What do you want to be?" A tech entrepreneur. If you ask a young girl today, it’s maybe the number four job, which is still very, very good. All the geographies in Europe, it’s governmental, a big company, being a consultant, etc.

Stephan Kuester: To have a similar discussion around AI early on, in order to prepare society a bit broader to embrace it, but also to be aware of the risks at the outset. At the moment, there’s too much fear amongst those who have a lack of understanding of what it would be.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Stephan Kuester: It’s just perceived as the job-killer for the middle class.

Audrey Tang: The Social Innovation Lab, actually just yesterday, [laughs] we’re using AI-powered conversations to get people’s feelings about various things. Yesterday’s topic was about non-consensual intimate images, which is a neutral term for revenge porn.

Audrey Tang: We used the same for people without professional driver’s license, drive people and charging them for it, which is a neutral term for UberX, and so on. For each of those terms, we used this online conversation space, where you can see your avatar among your Facebook or Twitter friends.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we present them with facts, crowdsourced, and then we ask how they feel about it. We use face-to-face deliberation, livestreamed, to ideate. The best idea are the one that take care of most people’s feelings. Then we turn it into law, which is how Uber became legal in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It works like this. When you go into it with a mobile phone, you see a feeling from your fellow citizen, you can click agree or disagree. As you do so, you move among the clusters. There’s no reply button, so you can’t troll other people or post cat pictures.

Audrey Tang: The only way if you feel like those sentiments doesn’t capture your feeling, you can just propose a new feeling for other people to vote on. We found that, with AI moderation, which is finding the most polarized orthogonal dimensions through principal component analysis and K-means clustering, we always end up with this shape after three weeks or so.

Audrey Tang: People agree to disagree on a few things, which defines the groups, but they don’t spend much time on it. Whereas, in Twitter or Facebook, they spend all the time on it. Because this space rewards resonance, they compete to make statements that resonates with more people.

Audrey Tang: We say we are bound by these consensus. Then we always hold ourself to account to have a multi-stakeholder conversation based on the consensus and asking essentially how people react to it. That’s how we regulated Uber, autonomous vehicles, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It is called the vTaiwan system. I think it’s one of the key things that people feel AI is something that is neutral, that can facilitate human discussion. If you use Q method or whatever other method, you can do the same thing, but it’s very labor intensive, and people will question the moderators’ neutrality. If we use a open-source AI system, people can audit it. They can set it up on their own laptop and confirm.

Parveen Dhanda: Wow. That is genius.

Stephan Kuester: That’s impressive.

Parveen Dhanda: That is really, really clever. The challenge now is like you mentioned with Facebook. It’s really difficult to reel out from the noise. There’s a lot of noise in terms of opinions.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s not designed for public discussion. It’s designed to keep you on it. It’s selling addiction.

Parveen Dhanda: It’s like that book "Hooked" and how Facebook have hired both from the gaming, like gambling, to make sure people are hooked on these devices. This is a great way to really understand, "What are people thinking?" That’s always a challenge, whether it’s governments or even companies, to realize.

Audrey Tang: That’s the vTaiwan system. If you had visited the Social Innovation Lab last night, that’s the weekly meeting.

Stephan Kuester: That’s fantastic to see how this informs public policy-making. For you, that’s a challenge here, to get public opinion.

Audrey Tang: Without this kind of neutral, multi-stakeholder space, which of course we took from Internet governance, but it’s now going through everywhere, because multilateral systems are not very well equipped to deal with AI, to be frank. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Through this kind of communication, we make these kind of spaces by asking common values, as SDG-indexed, and then innovations that deliver on these values. Otherwise, it’s like this. People want economic development and people want social solidarity, people want whatever. They talk to government agencies, and we’re like this. We are being in the middle. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s essential that we make spaces that are not Facebook that can serve this blank.

Parveen Dhanda: That’s really good.

Stephan Kuester: That’s fascinating. You see lots of so-called open e-governments, where policy drafts are being published. Basically, every second country in the world does that now. You can comment as a citizen. There are five people giving you feedback, and they are maybe interest groups.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s already 80 percent cooked and everybody knows about. What this process is is basically we don’t know anything about it. We just ask people how they feel. It’s really early in the process. In terms of design thinking, it’s very early, in the first diamond. The result is a how might we question.

Audrey Tang: This is not a referendum. This is just a pre-ideation, a how might we. If we don’t have that, actually it’s very easy to get polarized.

Parveen Dhanda: Absolutely. Actually, it’s very nice to be asked how you’re feeling, because people don’t ask anymore. [laughs] It think it’s nice for government to ask.

Audrey Tang: For months, we just ask for feeling, because there’s no right or wrong feelings.

Parveen Dhanda: Exactly. Wow, I like that. It’s very good. Thank you. Thanks for sharing it.

Stephan Kuester: We should bring this example back to the mayor of London. We just had a very confrontational discussion in the public between the mayor and Uber, revoking the Uber license. The public, I believe, but I’m not representative, is loving the service, so what’s right or wrong here?

Audrey Tang: We have a advocate for this methodology in the UK called Geoff Mulgan.

Parveen Dhanda: Jeff Morgan?

Audrey Tang: Geoff Mulgan of Nesta.

Parveen Dhanda: Oh, OK.

Stephan Kuester: Yep.

Audrey Tang: He wrote this book, "Big Mind." He used the vTaiwan example to illustrate an entire section. I think Nesta has a team that works with DCMS — the Ministry of Fun — on innovations in democracy. That’s the new project they’re working on.

Audrey Tang: There’s a slice of people from Policy Lab, Nesta and so on, aware of this book, but I don’t think it’s very well-known anywhere in the UK.

Parveen Dhanda: Innovation and democracy.

Stephan Kuester: They never raised it to us.

Parveen Dhanda: We know Nesta quite well. We did a previous report jointly with Nesta.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Parveen Dhanda: I should definitely shout out to them, find out a bit more. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Have you visited the Start-up Terrace here?

Stephan Kuester: Yes, yesterday. The Start-up Stadium or what was the name?

Wallis Liu: TTA, and Startup Terrace, as well.

Audrey Tang: You visited both?

Wallis Liu: Yes, yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon.

Audrey Tang: I haven’t been to Linkou yet.

Wallis Liu: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It was early stage. [laughs] It’s mostly a resident place, but they are being renovated into start-up incubators and things like that. People worry about the lack of display space. There’s plenty of work space, co-working space, and residential space. I am curious what you feel about it.

Stephan Kuester: I actually thought I saw a few parallels to something that seems to be working well for us. We had the Olympic Villages, ’12 Olympics. That’s been turned into a center, and it’s operating, where creativity and e-tech meet.

Audrey Tang: Almost the same thing.

Stephan Kuester: It’s really funny. There’s Tech University’s UCL departments, there’s a school for ballet, school for creative, and there’s a large co-working space/innovation center called Plexar, very much addressing mobility as an example. Developing part might well be there in the future.

Stephan Kuester: The Terrace has a similar feel to it. Plexar, though doesn’t have loads of exhibition spaces to it. The concept of work/life in one place, shops downstairs, a community of innovators that’s coming together. If you’ve got innovators, start-ups, there’s the creative and academic part of it in one site.

Stephan Kuester: There’s also space for corporations. We see that more. Even Microsoft or Google is setting up 20 people in that environment.

Audrey Tang: It’s not for casual tourists? It’s all people working there for business, for their purpose.

Stephan Kuester: Yes. The ultimate goal is to create more...There are no early-stage start-ups really. It’s more scaling businesses.

Stephan Kuester: It’s a very interesting mix. We talk so much about digital and tech. Then you come in such an environment, where there’s a school for ballet or for performing arts. Thinking a little bit further, what’s the future of digital entertainment, AR/VR plus some creative content? You’ve got a very interesting proposition again. This mix and this collision, they produce that on Stratford in this environment.

Parveen Dhanda: I think that’s something that they’re very much encouraging. Even if you look at Shoreditch, that was that mix. Clerkenwell was renowned for design, and then the media companies that they said that would develop in these apps. You had the universities close by, and then you had a bank, which was just down the road, so you had all the big corporates, and it was that real mix.

Parveen Dhanda: That’s something that we really focus on in terms of even the speakers that we bring. I was just mentioning before, we brought a negotiator. She was the negotiator Taliban and in the government.

Audrey Tang: Wow. [laughs]

Parveen Dhanda: She came in and gave a talk on, "How do you really do negotiation?" We brought in Ben Saunders, who’s a polar explorer, footballers, really for them to talk about how they manage stress, but also goal-setting and everything. It’s this cross-pollination of ideas, about thoughts, but key learnings, as well. That’s something that we really focus on in the program.

Parveen Dhanda: Going back to your question, I was actually saying to Wallis I love this area. I can live here.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Parveen Dhanda: I really liked it, and she was quite surprise. It’s, for me, because it was quieter. It wasn’t as hectic as downtown.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Parveen Dhanda: You felt like you could breath and be more creative. It depends, but I think if you get a community there, a nice community, then people will come to that.

Audrey Tang: I think that is right. Basically, it’s in the curation.

Parveen Dhanda: Yes.

Stephan Kuester: Which would be my point, which you can influence. Maybe you have two or three sectors that you really want to push, like IoT and biotech. Then it curates a community that would be supporting that vision. Plexar, Olympic Park started as a work space where everything is possible.

Stephan Kuester: Then realized there are a hundred companies, but they don’t really interact that much and changed the strategy towards, "There are a number of things we really want to drive out of here because environment and the community is right for it."

Stephan Kuester: It could be digital entertainment. It was certainly mobility. The environment and the different people and the institutions that are there is really conducive to it, in one, confined physical space. You don’t need to travel five miles to find the next expert. You meet them at the coffee store downstairs.

Stephan Kuester: That’s maybe the curation of this community, if you’re worrying about the Terrace, which I understand is a massive investment, the largest one.

Audrey Tang: It is a massive investment. Also, I think that the main thing is that when I visited in New York last week, we had a pretty good entrepreneur there called RentHub. It’s a kind of AI-based Craigslist. They work also in a NYC-sponsored, very much like the space you were talking about.

Audrey Tang: They mentioned that there’s little to no interaction between the tenants. It’s not based on the real cohort. Because of this, then becomes apparent that they will need to make their own events or maybe the ask for exhibition space comes from that, because they don’t get sufficient solidarity with their neighbors. They have be more public-facing.

Audrey Tang: I think with the right curation maybe we can focus more inward. I think that’s a great suggestion.

Stephan Kuester: Not to say it’s just angel-funded entrepreneurs, software entrepreneurs. A bit of a broader mix to make sure it’s really vibrant. I was very impressed with what has been done. Here East is the hub which is miles out of town. It is Stratford, so it’s not the center of the city.

Parveen Dhanda: Stratford, nobody goes there. It used to be a very rough area, and it has still got that association. However, I think because the Olympics was there, and also where Here East is was the press office for the Olympics, so you can imagine the fiber connections and the WiFi. It’s the best, because the Olympics was only in 2012. Things like that help.

Parveen Dhanda: You’ve got a nice canal. They’ve made the most and developed the parks and everything, as well.

Stephan Kuester: Actually, if there’s a worry about the Terrace, I’m most happy to make the connect with the CEO of Here East, who runs the Olympic Park.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Stephan Kuester: A very transformational guy, who’s really been responsible, the driving force behind, "Let’s not forget this park, this multi-billion-dollar investment. Let’s make something creative out of it," and he has succeeded.

Audrey Tang: It’s not so much worry as we need to settle on a certain message. If you want to do curation, the most important thing is the curator’s vision, like what we want to make out of this. At the moment, I know most of the Terrace team, actually. [laughs] They work really hard, but to attract investors and attract people who work on the scaling part of the investment innovation.

Audrey Tang: What’s really needed is a clear message to investors and the ecosystem that you can see this kind of cohort here, so it’s worth your time to put 10 people here as the resident team. Without this, of course everybody says they will visit from time to time, but then people will need to run exhibitions, because they don’t have sufficient ecosystem.

Stephan Kuester: Which is always a bit artificial.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Stephan Kuester: I’ve run an acceleration program in the very conservative Swiss environment five years ago with UVS, Credit Suisse, and 20 other of these traditional companies. In the end, we had them, for the CEOs, to come. You go into the open innovation space for open house, come every week. They have their board sessions there.

Stephan Kuester: It was just the informal collisions we had that were really valuable, much more valuable than the actual program.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: The social capital is hundreds times more than the capital.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah. To your point, it was not exhibitions. It was almost unplanned -- planned/unplanned. We created an environment that attracted and enabled these collisions to happen. It was really in a very conservative society, so I was quite surprised, actually, positively surprised something like that works.

Audrey Tang: We need all the help to help formulating [laughs] that core message. Thank you for the offer to make the introduction. We may just take you up on it. [laughs]

Stephan Kuester: Please do. I think they would be delighted. They are quite proud about what they’ve done...

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Stephan Kuester: ...and happy to share, I’m pretty sure, their pride, to tell the story. For Wallis, if we have the opportunity to run something or share something, like Future 50, it could very well be in such a space as the physical representation of it, to run it in such a place. Would possibly also give it a bit of an uplift.

Stephan Kuester: It’s a very clear proposition. It’s one of the world’s best scaling programs. Marketing, branding and having these examples also drives excitement about it. Just ideas, but maybe it could be something.

Wallis Liu: Yes, a very good ideal. We can think about it. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’m super happy to help.

Wallis Liu: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Anything from you guys?

Wallis Liu: Let me share about why I brought them here. Actually, I come from the SMECF. Last year, I just worked for the III. My major responsibility is take charge of the large-scale R&D subsidy program of IDB. We call it TIIP. Previously, it’s a leading technology product program. In total, it has been 25 years.

Wallis Liu: For this program, we just helping a lot of hardware manufacturing enterprises or corporate in Taiwan achieve very successful achievement. This year, because some director generalswitched posts, officials just shifted from IDB to SMEA.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The entire team horizontally migrated, including the director general Wu and Betty Hu.

Wallis Liu: That’s the ones I work with, the IDB now. Now I just re-work with them in SMEA. Of course, because, at the SMEA, they have their own mission.

Audrey Tang: They’re going to be the start-up administration, which is very exciting.

Wallis Liu: Yes. Apart from my major TIIP program, now I have the chance to take part in the SMEA part, especially for the start-up ecosystem. The other part is for the township revitalization. I think you must have heard about it?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Wallis Liu: I take part in that [laughs] program, as well. I have three programs I’m charged. What I go to the UK, because for the SMEA ecosystem innovation part led by the doctor say I have a program cooperated with the III, the operator of Social Innovation Lab.

Wallis Liu: The main program, they like to be with the forum and put a lot of resources on it to help the start-up and SMEs in the very early stage because of lack of resources. I’m responsible for building the national mentor. Where is my mentor? Of course, it’s my TIIP database, because we have very large corporate and we have the C-suite level.

Wallis Liu: They have a very close relationship with my director. My director, she worked with this program for 25 years, so she has very deep relationship with the C-suite level of the big corporate. That’s why we would like to be with the national network.

Wallis Liu: Why I go to UK, because the I choose the Tech City as their benchmark. I just read some information about their growth program. Previously, I just chose probably the Upscale is very suitable for me because of the master mentor part.

Wallis Liu: When I really, really went to UK, the timing’s very interesting. I visited the UK about June. Actually, in the beginning of this year, they were still Tech City, but in the beginning of May, they upgrade. [laughs] They change to Tech Nation.

Wallis Liu: I think there’s a very good chance to see, because a program change their name, change their focus and broaden, that means they must have some very successful experiences as their base. What I want to do next that really interests me, firstly, I just traveled to Edinburgh to listen to their national tour in Edinburgh.

Wallis Liu: I saw the CEO of Tech Nation, Grech. The presentation is very short, about five minutes. The CEO just say everybody know about Tech City, because they around about 10 years. Only one...

Audrey Tang: Even I know about Tech City. [laughs] It’s very famous.

Wallis Liu: Yeah, so I just want to mention something very important is our visa scheme. Before, we are looking for the patent, to have the IPO. Now we are looking for something more professional for the price of the technology. Especially I’m focused on the group in the Silicon Valley. Valley people right now have this kind of person can apply on visa scheme to come to help us.

Wallis Liu: After the five very short presentation, they have two launch forum. The first topic is, "Does the UK really need a unicorn?" They invited three companies, of course, unicorn company and a very early-stage company. The very early-stage company, of course, they lack resources. They say, "I think UK has enough unicorns, so the government resources, please pay attention to us. We need support."

Wallis Liu: Finally, I just see the CEO, Grech, stand up, "I appreciate your opinion and feedback, but everybody, I need to tell you, UK need unicorn. That’s why I bring us so much about the international investment and why we have the job opportunity and very prosperous, because the unicorn bring us." I just have that very big image I just kept in mind. Then I went back to London.

Wallis Liu: I’m very happy that Stephan have 90 minutes to talk to me. I just asking him about unicorn program. Of course, he said Future 50, which is led by Parveen, is the most successful unicorn producer in the world. You see, actually for the Future 50, just launched in 2000...

Parveen Dhanda: December 2013.

Wallis Liu: Now it’s 2018, but how many unicorns they created? Of course, a unicorn, for me, now is a term for the very good international investment and very good performance of economic growth. During the dialogue between Stephan and me, he is talking about it probably the technician would have the international Future 50 country name.

Wallis Liu: I just thinking about, "Oh, are you interested to have a Future 50 in Taiwan?" We have the start-up ecosystem, like a dedicated goal, but actually we, from my point of view, still see there’s some problem just for the scaling up. Everyone’s still in the very early stage. "I have a very cool idea that I can save the world," something like that, but in the end, actually we didn’t see any very good result.

Wallis Liu: I think probably we need some assistance from the scaling up part. I’m just talking to Stephan. I’m very appreciate about support from my director and the officials of SMEA. They support it. I just try to invite them to come to visit us. I think before we have a real cooperation relationship, I would like to show what Taiwan’s is and how our ecosystem works for you.

Wallis Liu: Of course, for me, I will persuade a lot of them to visit you, but I think you need to witness yourselves. I tell Stephan that we are very good in manufacturing. Now, the world trends go to IoT smart machine. It must apply the hardware manufacturing and for the software, digital scale, as well, for the integration.

Wallis Liu: I think that Taiwan might be a very good choices for them. During my TIIP program, I just have a very close cooperation relationship with the French part. As you know, there is the ICC bilateral between the French government, DGE, and IDB.

Wallis Liu: Actually, I just work with the bank people last year. This year, we have the company in French side and in Taiwan side to joint apply for us. We are just a R&D subsidy program. French company likely earn the loan from Bpifrance. This year, it just happened.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of that program. It’s one of those programs that really, I think, is a win-win program for both sides.

Wallis Liu: That is my major charge right now. I think that, based on my previously experience, I’m very looking forward to having the cooperation relationship with Stephan. During this week, we’ll still have some discussion, because I need to briefly...

Wallis Liu: As I have told you, I have the three program. Now the three program work very separately. I think I maybe use this endpoint as the corporate innovation. As Stephan just read briefly, talking about the corporate innovation and ecosystem now is totally separate.

Wallis Liu: For my job, for the mission of TIIP, we are helping the Taiwanese corporate to upgrade, to upscale, so that innovation is very important. If the innovation only occur internal, actually I don’t think something would happen. It might be minus. They need to do a lot of connection and relationship with the outside ecosystem.

Wallis Liu: What really, really surprised me for Parveen, the Future 50 program, actually they didn’t provide any real resources like co-working space, money...

Audrey Tang: Social capital is the real resource. [laughs]

Wallis Liu: Yes. Actually, she mentioned to me several times, emphasize, network is very, very important. Future...

Audrey Tang: No, it’s everything. Everything is just...

Parveen Dhanda: Connections.

Audrey Tang: Other things are just a byproduct. You get a unicorn because you have the right connection between the business...

Audrey Tang: ...ecosystem. It’s not you have first unicorns and then you do BD. It doesn’t work like that. [laughs]

Wallis Liu: Yes. That’s my observation about a real corporate situation in Taiwan. I think most of them, lack of the connection, because people all focus on theirselves. Because of my sister, she’s working for a TIIP as well, this year, she held several open house event. We invited them to have an open house event as well.

Wallis Liu: For us, it’s very interesting. If the open house event, the attendants are all start-ups, that would be great. Everyone is very enjoy in networking exchange messages and talking about the corporation. If we invite a traditional corporate visit, that they’re together, nobody, no one want to say anything. That for me is a very interesting phenomenon.

Audrey Tang: Actually, the MLEA did actually mix Taiwan, which is explicitly designed to bring those different generations together. I’m not saying they’re super successful. I’m saying their hearts are in the right place. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We managed to find some breakthrough in the social innovation lab, I think, mostly because the Director General had previous connections. He basically chose people who care about actually the kind of long-term healthcare, the biomedical information or whatever. They were very successful CXOs already that they’re getting old or their parents are getting old.

Audrey Tang: Now, they care about this much more than their original company. I may have to edit this part.

Audrey Tang: In any case, they then become very interested in engaging with the latest developments in long-term care and telemedicine.

Stephan Kuester: That’s great to hear. I was sometimes wondering corporate innovation as we know it, everybody in the world does it or many people do.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Stephan Kuester: That’s looking at the quick productivity gain or a product fix or whatever it is. Should we be much more ambitious addressing these big companies such as Google? It excites people.

Audrey Tang: There’s a start-up that there works with universal design, I think that’s the term now, accessibility design, that engage people with different abilities, physical abilities like wheelchair users, to become designers of spaces using iPad or whatever. They do BIM or whatever, which is innovative.

Audrey Tang: Then, this company also partners with a travel company to basically plan traveling for elderly and the people who are in wheelchairs so that they can enjoy transportation and so on. They always said it was very difficult if they launch an exhibition or an event and convince their large investors to come.

Audrey Tang: If they managed, for example, to work to plan with a CXO of a major bank’s mother on a road trip [laughs] that makes her comfortable and so on, and suddenly, the connection is being made. They don’t need exhibitions or whatever, they need this kind of huddled cohort that cares about the same thing. I think Director General is a great curator for this kind of themes.

Wallis Liu: Yes, because TIIP is the program under IDB. Now, the Director General is Mr. Liu. What I want to do, because from the corporate innovation standing point, for the ecosystem builder’s perspective, I’m talking about Parveen. Probably I will have a mutated Future 50 Taiwan with the TIIP. I want to bring the innovation part from the start-up ecosystem into the corporate.

Audrey Tang: It’s both of those two programs under Deputy Minister Kung?

Wallis Liu: I’m not quite sure of TIIP, because we’re already direct to just General Liu. I know the Deputy Minister, Mr. Kung, is charged for the start-up ecosystem, as well.

Audrey Tang: Asia SB is his idea.

Wallis Liu: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It makes all the sense if all of you work with Kung, and then of course Minister Tseng, to make sure that there’s a coherent message. That’s what we care the most about. We really don’t want separate messages. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

Wallis Liu: Yes. That’s why I brought them. Actually, the private word I need to say is that I didn’t report to anyone or I’m afraid that we don’t have the very free talk. Probably, the reference I need to prepare one month or two months ago, and probably the original one is not I want to share right now. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s good. We are now realigning all the science and technology budgets. They have to make sense on the whole Ministry of Economy level instead of just separate projects from each bureau. I think the expert review board need all the help to make connections with people who have already done integrations of the angel seed, series A, B stages, so that the message stays coherent.

Audrey Tang: I think each bureau individual is doing a great job. We just want to make sure the message carries into the next stage.

Wallis Liu: Yes.

Stephan Kuester: If you break the life cycle you get stuck with...

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Stephan Kuester: I’ve seen some examples where there’s great being done, Eastern European examples, up to angel seed finance, and then they’re completely missing the elements behind. Then you get this kind of brain drain. People who are really talented all go off to...

Audrey Tang: At least they will set up offshore business units.

Stephan Kuester: Yes, it’s directly off to Berlin or London.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like they physically move. They don’t physically move, but they disappear from the radar. That’s what happens, actually a lot in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That’s the kind of thing we’re trying...

Stephan Kuester: You possibly don’t want somebody who has been nurtured and fostered here then to relocate to the Valley. That’s maybe not what you...

Audrey Tang: It’s OK, if they bring people back like AI Labs, like Ethan, that we work on people like him. What I’m talking about mostly is the people who become Cayman Island companies. They become OBUs. They receive foreign investment, which is great, but then they don’t participate back to the seed-level people who could actually benefit.

Audrey Tang: Actually, they then engage with a different sort of people, even though they’re physically in Taiwan. I think that’s the main problem she’s spotting now also.

Wallis Liu: Yes, that’s right. Our open house event was a very good example for the small township revitalization I want to show them. This is a very different way for the innovation in Taipei City. I try to show the real ecosystem looks like.

Wallis Liu: This morning, we go to the NanKang Incubation Center so they can see a lot of our support for the biotechnology part, because it is part of our strengths.

Audrey Tang: I don’t worry about the biomed part [laughs] or the revitalization. They’re in very, very capable hands. Deputy Commissioner Tseng Shu-cheng is a top-notch expert on regional revitalization.

Audrey Tang: I also want to share, if you haven’t seen this already, we are changing our messaging. It used to be that every ministry have their own website on their programs.

Audrey Tang: Now, BioTaiwan is just bio.taiwan.gov.tw. If you want to look at our AI strategy, then it’s just ai.taiwan.gov.tw. It’s very easy to remember now. Still it’s, of course, updated by individual ministries, but we make sure that the messages cohere into each other.

Audrey Tang: There’s AI Taiwan. There’s CI Taiwan for collective intelligence. There’s social innovation, SI Taiwan, and there’s SmartTaiwan and BioTaiwan. We talked about Start-upTaiwan for two years now, [laughs] but we need to get a message right before we can put something like that out.

Stephan Kuester: Particularly when you want to promote Taiwan abroad, then they want simple and clear. When you look at London from our perspective, it is such a variety.

Parveen Dhanda: It’s hard to navigate the system.

Stephan Kuester: We’re not so good at combining that into one message. Lots of foreign corporations coming to us saying, "We would love to participate in particularly the London ecosystem. To be fair, we’re really unsure where to go." At least where they recognize us, it’s somebody who can take them by the hand, a sign post, "That’s where you need to be."

Stephan Kuester: They needed this kind of umbrella or this point of contact that really is capable of pointing them in the right direction, because the variety is so enormous. That’s certainly helping with clarity. That’s great, cool.

Audrey Tang: Anything else you would like to...

Stephan Kuester: Just one to two, and inform you a little bit about why are we here, spreading ecosystem relationships...

Parveen Dhanda: Because it’s a very successful story related to digital economy, and because you’re all digital ministers.

Audrey Tang: I’m actually the digital ministry.

Wallis Liu: I think that is actually leading to have some sharing with you. It must be very interesting and helpful for both sides.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Stephan Kuester: From our perspective, can we help scaling? Yes, we have got the experience. We would love to do that. We want to have a closer relationship with such a sophisticated tech environment as Taiwan. We would not do that Future 50 or other scaling activities in an environment that’s not so developed. We would be really proud if we would have a stronger collaboration.

Audrey Tang: When I visited the GDS and also, of course, Nesta, the DIT, and the other folks, when I talk about AI ethics, which is one of the main focus I’m working on right now, I think we have very similar ethical standards, which is not entirely regulation or conservative.

Audrey Tang: Rather, in a way that balances the social needs and the innovator’s needs, but with a very strong focus on the basic human right that carries into the digital area. I think that is one of those common languages that we can talk about. We can’t say that for many other countries. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Particularly in the realm of AI, I think there’s a lot of bilateral collaborations that we should do, just like when we do very much the same thing with NSTAC with New Zealand or with the French Tech, now French Tech for Good. Maybe I should convince them to say missions.

Audrey Tang: I think such bilaterals are very strong, and it’s much more substantial.

Parveen Dhanda: It’s great that we’re having these conversations, because a key concern at the moment is the AI ethics. The more we can talk to each other, hopefully we can come a common way of doing it.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah, but also the bilateral element is really interesting. If you take that to a bigger context, say the EU, the UN, it’s possibly going to be a 10-year process of deliberation. By the time, AI will have had...

Audrey Tang: People will be like, "You know, we don’t even have a Internet exchange point. Why are you talking with us about these things?"

Audrey Tang: It makes sense that we’re sophisticate on the same level.

Parveen Dhanda: Yeah, absolutely.

Stephan Kuester: Great.

Parveen Dhanda: Thank you so, so much for your time.

Stephan Kuester: Yeah, for making time.

Audrey Tang: Feel free to email me directly. There’s no need to go through secretaries or...

Parveen Dhanda: OK.

Stephan Kuester: Much appreciated.

Parveen Dhanda: Thank you so much. Would be OK if we could have a picture with you?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Audrey Tang: You can take several.

Stephan Kuester: There’s a story behind it, right?

Parveen Dhanda: We send in daily updates to our colleagues.

Wallis Liu: Personal channel for the job. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I have to...

Parveen Dhanda: Oh, no, don’t hurry.

Audrey Tang: SDG pin. Look, it is very important.

Stephan Kuester: Of course.

Parveen Dhanda: We have a Slack channel, but everyone puts their daily updates on...

Stephan Kuester: It’s not enormous. It’s not a government department, but we have 70 people, and we want to...

Audrey Tang: Are you engaged with the Wanting Gov people, which is this mid-level public service for innovation?

Stephan Kuester: Not really.

Parveen Dhanda: Unless Gerard is, our CEO.

Audrey Tang: It’s called Wanting Gov.

Parveen Dhanda: Can you get someone to take a picture?

Audrey Tang: We’re working with the GDS, Policy Lab, and so on, of course on the upper level. What we found particularly fruitful is just working with mid-level public servants and just work in a operation-level collaboration. We can then really share new code in programming, regulation, and things like that.

Stephan Kuester: Please let us know if you’re visiting on a official or unofficial mission again. We’d love to show you around a bit, possibly also introduce some entrepreneurs that could substantiate what we presented.

Parveen Dhanda: Especially around if you’re very interested in the AI and ethics, that discussion. We can introduce you to some of the people that are really talking very much in this space, as well. I’d be happy to do an intro...

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Parveen Dhanda: ...around that.

Stephan Kuester: It’s really interesting, because we are just starting to shape this dialogue. It hasn’t really happened. There’s about 500 pages of government policy already written.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I’m part of this called the Global Council of Extended Intelligence, which is a Joi Ito and IEEE thing, and also all the GDPR and the usual suspects.

Audrey Tang: We write, for example, recommendations for your consultation about the right to data agency of minors, of people who are young, which are particular susceptible to manufacturer addiction, for lack of a better term. It’s perhaps the best term. When we talk about AI, it’s toys and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Apart from participating on these consultations, I would greatly also benefit from the thinkers who are developing their own lines of thinking. In open consultations, we see the status quo, we see what’s going on the next year. I would very much appreciate engaging with people.

Stephan Kuester: These entrepreneurs possibly have a vision from today and five years...

Audrey Tang: They will want to bring it into existence, good or not. [laughs] Then I would really appreciate talking to these people.

Parveen Dhanda: Absolutely. Happy to do an intro. More of like the futurists...

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Parveen Dhanda: ...that practices entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I talked, for example, with Vitalik Buterin. When he was visited Taiwan, we had a very long discussion and so on. I wouldn’t say Vitalik is "just a futurist."

Audrey Tang: He has a very strong opinion on how the world and civilization is going. He’s working really hard to actually make that happen.

Stephan Kuester: ...but his team, his number two or three. I never met Vitalik personally, but his number two, five years ago. He just portrayed a world of, "We want to bring the world where we put the lawyers out of business, the notaries out of business."

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Stephan Kuester: With crude language.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Stephan Kuester: It very much described what they are — with smart contracts.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Stephan Kuester: In two years’ time they really have...

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Stephan Kuester: Like this kind of acting futurists. [laughs]

Parveen Dhanda: OK, fine. Yeah, I understand.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Stephan Kuester: Thank you very much.

Parveen Dhanda: Thank you.

Wallis Liu: Thank you.