Former European Commission’s Chief Scientific Officer praises Converge Challenge role as beacon of enterprise success.
Keeping an audience enthralled is no easy task. Getting them to listen intently and hang onto every word is the hallmark of someone who has gained respect and is seen as a real influence on their ‘industry’.
When that person is Professor Anne Glover, the then Chief Scientific Officer in the European Commission and the invited audience is in place for the Converge Challenge final, then her sojourn and experiences that led to her achieving high office in a scientific role truly captivated the 200 strong Converge Challenge audience.
She started her keynote speech by remarking that she had observed the recent Referendum result from her base in Brussels. Not only did this make her feel proud to be Scottish and the outcome of the result, would, she said, have no bearing on Scotland’s rightful position as a world leader in science & technology – not because we remain a part of the UK, but because Scottish people are smart!
In discussing European research and Scotland’s place in it, she proclaimed that European Science & Technology has shaped the modern world through invention – areas such as the renaissance, the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. We have, she remarked, also discovered DNA and the Higgs-Boson. In Europe, we have also built the largest commercial aircraft and build the fastest trains.
Poignantly, Scotland has made major contributions to this progress, from the steam machine to car tyres, from making visible cosmic rays in Wilson’s cloud chamber to building the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Northern Chile.
These new technologies offer fantastic avenues for progress: we will live longer, happier and healthier, have sustainable energy supplies organise transport more efficiently and protect the environment.
However, Professor Glover commented that although Europe has an enormous capacity to create knowledge, she believes that we are lagging behind when it comes to turning our ideas into jobs and growth and making an impact on society, citing that there is another barrier to entry which needs overcome – mainly that we need a societal environment that does not only embrace, but actually demands innovation.
What we also need is a transition from a culture of knowledge transfer to a culture of knowledge exchange; involving science, industry, culture, and society.
She stressed that the Converge Challenge Awards are one way of achieving this. It provides an inspiration of what is possible.
Professor Glover also pointed out that to get a good job in the future, skills will be more important than knowledge because it will be the norm to change jobs various times in your life and to be faced all the time with new technological developments. That’s a paradigm shift for our educational system- to prepare our current and future graduates for this.
She concluded by stating that there is a need to put universities into the heart of our society again and the future is full of opportunities. We will see in our lifetime revolutions in the way we live, we move around, we interact with others, we cure diseases. It’s not a future that will come upon us, but which we are actually able to shape.
She challenged our winners to go and invent the future – something they are certain to take on board.
