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MALE SPEAKER: We've got a really fascinating 45-minute
session coming up with a great panel about how technology can
be used to conquer some of the big policy challenges which
have been facing politicians and policymakers for decades.
We've done some work in the past few years about how
technology actually gives policymakers a better chance
of conquering some of these big policy barriers and issues
that we've been grasping with for a long time.
We're going to introduce the panel and then we'll just have
five minutes each from each panelist before moving on to
questions from the floor.
To my right is Gi Fernando, who is a successful tech and
digital entrepreneur and an expert on social media, big
data, and education 2.0.
Jude Ower is the chief executive of Playmob.
And Nadhim Zahawi is the MP for Stratford and also the
co-founder with Stephen Shakespeare of YouGov.
Although Jude is going to kick off.
JUDE OWER: Good afternoon everyone.
So my name's Jude Ower.
I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Playmob.
Just a little bit about my background.
I've spent eleven years creating games for training
education and for awareness.
And basically, I set up Playmob as a way to start a
tech company.
But we believe that games can save the world
in a number of ways.
So currently there's about seven billion hours per week
are spent playing games.
And if we were to get this up to 21 billion hours we can
start solving some world problems like poverty, global
warming, for example.
Zynga are one of the biggest games companies in the world.
And they've already kind of proved that you can start to
make an impact on the world.
They've raised about $10 million so far
through their own games.
And basically kind of created this through--
raised the nation's own awareness through using the
communities that they have which exist
in their games already.
So we that we can teach people through games.
We can educate through games.
But also we can raise awareness and take action
through existing games.
Just an example of what we've worked on in Playmob so far--
so our platform connects games to charities.
As a way not just to raise money, but
also to raise awareness.
An example of this is one of our first campaigns was in a
game called Parallel Kingdom and the
charity was SOS Children.
And we were raising money for the East
African famine appeal.
We raised three and a half thousand dollars in a week.
It was 1,000,000 players, about 10,000 players a day.
And most of them are US based.
Now SOS Children Picked Marsabit in Kenya as the
recipient village to receive the funds.
Now I don't know if it's just me having really bad
geography, but I had never heard of
Marsabit in Kenya before.
But all the players that contributed to this campaign,
there was a flood of information
about this in the forums.
Going straight to the charity website, finding out more
about Marsabit in Kenya, and they even recreated the
village within Parallel Kingdom as a way to remember
the good that they did.
So this had a really powerful effect on a game that's a
small to medium-sized game.
And there's other examples out there.
So we could use games to teach people, to train people, but
also we could use it to problem solve.
It was mentioned, briefly, through the cancer research
presentation earlier-- which I thought was really
fascinating--
but there's a game called Foldit, Fold.it which came out
a few years ago.
And it's about protein folding.
And basically, they use the power of gaming communities to
bring millions of people together to try and fold
protein cells online in a virtual
space and solve problems.
So it shows the power of a community
within the gaming world.
And also, teaching people and raising awareness and doing
research through existing games.
And this is one of my passions, is how do we use
what's already there to create a movement?
And there's an example where in World of Warcraft it's
being used for scientific research to try and model
human behavior.
So the example is scientists were trying to figure out what
would happen if a virus or an epidemic started to spread?
And they'd modeled a few different types of behavior
like people would catch the virus and trying
not to spread it.
Some people would catch it and try and spread it.
But the one model but they didn't capture before doing
this test was curiosity.
So people who hadn't signed into the game but heard about
the virus just wanted to go in for a nosey and just check
what was going on.
Some people caught it, some people didn't.
But it was one thing that they hadn't expected to happen.
So that's kind of my angle on this, is that we can use games
as a really powerful tool for education, for raising
awareness, and for problem solving.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
Gi?
GI FERNANDO: Hi, I'm Gi Fernando.
I'm not texting my mum, by the way.
I'm actually reading from this.
I founded Techlightenment where I and a few
20-somethings in Shoreditch--
when it was actually uncool to be in Shoreditch--
developed, actually, the first automated advertising platform
for Facebook.
Beating Silicon Valley to the punch--
a British company--
and we did this without any external funding whatsoever.
And this was actually before Facebook was a global
phenomenon at all.
So it was sort of early and it was before anyone had even
thought about using Facebook to understand human behavior,
which was one of the drivers of what we are
trying to do as well.
We did.
We did have a look at how people behaved.
And interestingly, how that behavior changed so
dramatically as a result of some of
the mechanisms digitally.
And it helped us to get game-changing insight in terms
of how people behave in their interactions
between each other.
And that understanding actually--
us and a load of other companies--
contributed to start to change how actually
marketing online works.
Which is quite a dramatic change in how money's spent.
It was a huge market innovation, allowed us to
rapidly expand--
again, self funded--
across Europe, US and Asia.
And then we sold it four years later to Experion, a
non-racey, FTSE 100 solid performing business.
What I'm getting at is that the technology understanding
behavioral change is inextricably linked.
And critical components of creating game changing
innovations and policies should understand that the
web, it's fundamentally changed the business and
public sector landscape.
It's allowing us to innovate at unprecedented speed.
And to innovate today, tomorrow, and the future you
need to understand and be part of this digital world as I
think we're all finding out.
But really in quite depth, this is actually where much of
the progress is going to come to tackle UK's big policy
challenges.
Growth, jobs, personalized health care, and so on.
I think we can do this in kind of three major ways.
We need to remember them.
One is what I found out is that people drive innovation.
It's a real buzzy thing to do.
But just think about it.
There's a huge skills gap in technology.
And this needs to be tackled pretty much head on.
Maybe in a revolutionary way not an evolutionary way if we
want to see the levels of innovation we
need in this country.
Skills, by the way, my view doesn't mean necessarily
education as it is now.
For example, a computer science degree that lasts
three years where everything you've learnt becomes obsolete
the day you finish, isn't what I'd call skills.
Maybe you could rename these courses to history of
computers or computer Latin, or something like that, I
don't know.
The second point is innovation comes from diversity.
I know this because at Techlightenment I employed
over 100 people from Harvard to Hackney.
I actually employed people from Tower Hamlets rather than
using them as a PR vehicle.
It's the diversity that fosters this creativity and
new ways of thinking.
And it worked for me.
That is the bottom line.
I think the other thing is you need to put community at the
center of your innovation.
And what I actually mean by that is it's not just about
focusing on individual and personal data.
It's about the interactions--
lightweight or heavyweight--
between individuals within communities.
And understanding that, actually, is
quite a lot of data.
But we can understand it, will allow you to kind of shape
solutions and win big
challenges around that knowledge.
I mean, at the end of the day the world, like the web is a
multiplayer game.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much for that.
Nadhim?
NADHIM ZAHAWI: Thank you David.
I feel like the odd one out here because I work in a place
now where we basically produce so much paper
that it feels obscene.
Literally, every single day I throw away-- or be it we
recycle it-- but just reams and reams of paper.
And only now we're beginning to adopt a sort of digital
platform for, for example, select committee meetings.
And even then there is resistance from colleagues.
Which I just find extraordinary as to why we're
doing this.
Because paper is so much more real.
So thank you for having me here.
I spent 10 years of my life working with Shakespeare, who
you've just heard from.
And I now represent Shakespeare in Stratford on
Avon rather than Stratford, East London.
I thought I'd just talk to you about my own observations of
the past two and a 1/2 years of being a newly minted member
of Parliament and elected onto the business innovation and
skills select committee.
That was actually quite a good innovation for the first time
in the history of our parliament, the select
committees were elected rather than appointed.
Which meant some of the new intake, the 2010 intake
actually had a chance of getting onto the select
committees because if it was appointed--
as it were in previous parliaments-- it would have
meant seniority and experience in the place-- rather than
outside of the place--
would have counted for a lot more and I would have probably
not got on to the committee.
Now, what do I think government is doing well?
And should do more of?
And what should it stop doing and look somewhere else?
The forecast at the moment is that the internet economy, by
2016 will be 12% of GDP.
And I think in one of the earlier sessions someone was
asking whether is that ambitious enough?
Where are we in terms of the world stage as
far as that's concerned?
I don't think that's bad.
I think we could probably look at doing more.
But what can government really do in that space?
Well, I think there are three main drivers.
One is opening up the data that it
collects on our behalf.
And you heard from previous speakers
about how that's going.
And not just opening up in PDF form, as someone said you need
to open up the raw data.
Of course you've got to have checks and balances around it
in terms of abuse and we've got to get our head around
that in terms of how you legislate for that.
But actually, the way you get the most out of it for the
economy will be to allow as many entrepreneurs, as many
challenger companies--
like Gi and others--
to have access to that raw data for it to really be
powerful in terms of moving the dial for the economy.
The second area is to be a facilitator.
I chaired a session at the Quoted Companies Alliance,
which is all the smaller mid cap--
some slightly bigger--
quoted companies.
And we had the treasury minister come and speak.
And my observation of that was there's a laundry list of
stuff that the government's doing at the moment.
So many different--
EIS schemes, taking them down to people who haven't found a
job in a day rather than after a year or six months.
Lots and lots of things.
And lots of people in the audience were putting their
hands up and saying, you know, we've benefited from this or
this other scheme.
But no one really knew where to go as a single touch point
in government.
And so one of these I fed back to the treasury team-- to the
chancellor is look, we need a brand that people recognize,
start ups recognize, businesses--
wherever they are in the cycle--
that they can go to.
And I'm glad.
I think what's going to happen is the business bank the
business department is now pioneering is going to bring
all that into one place.
So that anyone thinking about either starting a business or
needing funding to develop their business further can go
to one place inside government in the same way as sort of
Direct.gov has been for the citizenry.
And the third thing is making it the default setting that
government services are delivered online, that every
department is in that mindset.
We heard, again, in the opening session that only 50%
of the 650 different interactions of services
across government with the consumer are currently being
delivered online.
And 50% seems to be one of those figures which you get to
and it's hard to beat.
Because only 50% of MPs are actually on
Twitter, for example.
And I think everyone should be on it, it's an amazingly
powerful platform.
And I guess my two recommendations for
government--
one of which is to stop doing really badly--
is how we engage and consult with the public.
It is still unbelievably cumbersome and expensive.
I remember before, being a member of parliament, being
asked to give evidence-- as then the CEO of YouGov--
to the committee on standards in public life.
And I turned up there, and they'd commissioned a survey.
And this thing was just a static document about half a
foot in depth, that landed, you know, a thud
on everyone's desk.
And we're going through this survey.
And of course the natural instinct as look at some of
the answers, you think well, how can I
probe that even further?
One, you can't.
Because it is a traditional survey.
And so much of that is still done in that way partly
because Whitehall's nervous of the more digital formats
because they think it'd become another platform for those who
are just angry with government, and
will skew the data.
There's lots of methodologies--
not just at YouGov--
that you can sort of mitigate for that.
And I asked-- at the time on this panel--
how much did this cost?
This one survey?
It's 1,000 people, just 1,089 people at the time.
And it cost that committee 389,000 pounds.
Now, today you would do that for 1/100th of the
cost, if not less.
And the government needs to embrace that.
Whether it's through gaming, through some of the other
innovations of how we engage with people, and draw
information out of them that they want to share with us.
Rather than having these sort of traditional consultation
methods which really sort of go nowhere.
And the last point--
which I do think we really need to get a grip on--
is the skills agenda that Gi was talking about.
And I have a concern here, well, two concerns.
One is management bandwidth.
Warwick University's done a lot of work around this.
In the UK we've got some great entrepreneurs, we just sell
out too early.
One of my colleagues on the Treasury Committee, Jesse
Norman gave me this great line.
He says when a Brit sets up a successful company at the
first chance they sell it and buy nice home on the golf
course or a nice holiday home.
And when an American sells their business, they sell it,
they buy the nice home, but then they start up the next
business, and they keep going.
When the German thinks about it they just keep it for the
generations to come, rather than selling out too early.
And that's important to remember.
That we do need businesses to not just sell to the big boys,
but actually to become the giants of their industry.
And the other area when it comes to skills is
international students.
My big campaign is to make my government take international
student numbers out of the overall
integration target numbers.
I think it's a real danger in this country that we're
perceived to be closed for international students
to come to the UK.
We're not a friendly place now as we were before for
attracting the brightest and the best.
Although my government-- the coalition government will say
that we are, I think we ought to do what the Australians
have done in other countries.
We should be clever about how we effectively use that data
or how we target the home office in terms of its own
commitment.
So those are the sort of observations.
Thank you for having me here.
More than happy to take questions.
MALE SPEAKER: Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
MALE SPEAKER: We've got about 20 minutes for questions.
And why don't we just kick off by asking
a very quick question.
Nadhim, you talked about the hostility amongst some of your
colleagues about introducing electronic
select committee papers.
And a lot of what we heard so far today has been about how
fast-paced and how quick moving the change and
innovation is in all the sectors we've been discussing.
Do the three of you think that government is sometimes too
risk averse, to reluctant to move quickly?
To really embrace these possibilities as
much as they could?
Start with Gi and move along.
GI FERNANDO: Most definitely I think.
I think there's also a point about dealing with a nuance of
complexity like immigration.
We have lots and lots of variables.
It's not a paper solution.
Right?
And the other thing is, if you implement a solution to solve
existing more complex nuances you're
going to get into trouble.
So in my view, you need to really embrace technology and
make it work really obtrusively.
Otherwise you're not going to solve some actually pretty
complex solutions in the first place.
And I think it's actually riskier for the government to
be doing what it is now than being even more aggressive
around technology adoption given the macro impact in the
world and the negative results and the impact it's having on
our economy, especially against China or India.
JUDE OWER: Yeah, no I totally agree.
But also, I wonder if as start ups, we can teach the
government how to work in an agile way?
And apply our methods to try quickly, fail fast or learn
and move on.
Or just working with more start ups.
Could we try and test more ideas in a much quicker way?
And understand what works what doesn't work.
Yeah.
NADHIM ZAHAWI: Right.
You're right that we do need to do more.
I'm glad that those who are resistant to having their
committee papers on a tablet are in the minority.
Where we do need to do more, I think, is in government
procurement.
And if you look at some the IT projects--
and I haven't done a scientifically robust study of
this, but anecdotally--
we tend to-- very quickly in government--
the machinery of government reaches out to the usual
suspects, the big
consultancies, the big IT players.
They are not generally the most innovative.
And the challenge is how do you open it to start ups and
challenger brands?
Because around that whole thing, is then, how secure are
those smaller businesses in terms of surviving long enough
to be able to deliver the project in the first place.
And that's where, I think, we need to be much braver.
And just go for it.
Just open up and let these smaller
players get the benefit.
The Americans do it quite well.
You look at how they use-- for example--
their science budget.
In the UK the moment a project leaves a university and
becomes anywhere close to becoming commercial, the
government stops engaging.
It stops wanting to fund it.
The Americans go much further.
They keep going in terms of funding it.
But also, they get the departments within government.
So the Department of Defense in America is the biggest
buyer from start ups in the defense sector or in the
technology related to defense sector.
Now that's a massive client to have.
If you're a start up, the hardest thing when we were
starting YouGov was to get our first client.
Anyone who's started a business, that's really the
hardest basic.
If you can get your government to be that client, then that's
a great place to be.
GI FERNANDO: I agree.
I think there's another thing about the small business
versus big business in terms of risk.
I think very soon a big business will be riskier to
try than a small business which is more specialized and
agile in an area.
And I think that change is coming pretty quickly and we
might not be ready for it, but it is.
MALE SPEAKER: Interesting.
Does anyone have any questions?
We've got a couple of mics.
There's one at the back there.
And probably take two at once.
There's another one here as well.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
I find myself agreeing with almost everything that the
panel is saying.
There's one thing I'd like to challenge Nadhim on which was
his assertion that the best place for the single touch
point might be the business bank.
Having just made reference to the government digital service
and Directgov, which is really innovating in terms of how it
makes services available to citizens, I would've thought
that is a better model.
And in fact, that is the platform by which access to
business services should also be delivered.
I just would like to know what you thought about that.
NADHIM ZAHAWI: Maybe I didn't explain myself well enough.
What I really meant by that is we s need a brand that people
recognize as to where to come to when they're
setting up a business.
If you talk to SMEs, most surveys indicate that people
just don't quite know which bit of the Biz department or
UKTI, whatever it is that they need to go to.
How you then distribute it, I absolutely agree with you.
That you look at what's happening in direct.gov or any
other initiative, then you can do.
It's just we've had as sort of laundry list of announcements
in the last two and a half years of stuff.
And actually, you sort of almost want to stop announcing
more new initiative and just concentrate on delivery.
Just get some of those things working and for people to take
to be engaging with them and getting the benefits out them.
Because we're throwing billions and billions of
pounds into this stuff.
And you want it to go to the end user, the person who is
going to develop their business or start a business.
MALE SPEAKER: The gentleman here.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
Just to follow up on your point about whether it's soon
going to be riskier to focus on big
business or small business.
And I agree with your point that actually it will be
riskier to rely on older existing approaches.
One of the challenges is how that risk is measured.
And if the way in which we measure risk is ability to
have delivered in the past, or how long they can trade them
for, then actually the measurement will always date
back to those existing organizations.
So there's a challenge there about how those measure risk.
GI FERNANDO: Big challenges.
I think it's the black swan thing going on as well,
because I mean, historical data-- as we know from
financial markets-- does not necessarily reflect future
performance.
And layman's is a case of that.
And so I think there will be more of those cases.
And that will increase exponentially along with the
increase in technology.
So I think you've got to make decisions based-- kind of old
school style--
on whether you think they have got capability.
Offset cost versus risk, work in smaller iterations which
reduce risk.
And that's the one thing that always reduces risk.
All right?
It's constant.
JUDE OWER: Even just consulting with a group of
entrepreneurs, I mean, I'm a member of something
called the E 20.
And the E20 was brought together the day before the
MADE Festival in Sheffield, where two and half thousand
people descended on Sheffield.
Either people with businesses or wanting to set up their own
businesses.
So the E20-- the day before--
basically got 20 entrepreneurs and 20 experts in a room
talking about what we do with the lost--
how we solve the problem of the lost million.
And it was just an afternoon where entrepreneurs just
thrashed out ideas.
So there was no risk there.
But at the end of the day we had to present ideas back to
the Duke of York and create a group to be able to start
action in these plans.
And the companies get involved as they can.
So bigger companies take on people like internships.
But I just think just having that type of set
up is a great way.
You know entrepreneurs love problem solving.
And I think the more we can do, that's completely a kind
of risk free way I've been able to bring out some ideas
and see how we solve them, and then see how we
can take them forward.
And even kind of testing out entrepreneurs and small
businesses to see who would be the right candidates to
deliver this.
But I just think it was a great way of working and I'd
love to see more of that happening.
NADHIM ZAHAWI: And it is a cultural shift.
There's a mindset thing which I think you're referring to.
And I think one of the ways is transparency and simplicity.
So if people can actually see what the procurement project
is, who's bidding for it, what you'll get is very quickly
other people saying to you, you know what?
This little company, they've got a patchy track record.
Don't go with them.
And everything is open and transparent.
Then that actually mitigates against the risk.
MALE SPEAKER: The gentleman here?
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
I just wanted to say something a little bit sympathetic to
the government's slow pace on--
governments' in general, slow pace on this stuff like I have
a brief point.
I mean, it's one thing to be an entrepreneur and say fail
fast, move on quickly to the next thing.
But entrepreneurs don't have everybody from the Daily Mail
to Private Eye looking over their shoulder.
And if a government tries something and it fails-- it
may, as it were, have been a perfectly legitimate failure,
a perfectly legitimate small experiment--
but the result is going to be an article in the Daily Mail
aware of this saying the government blows 50,000 pounds
on XY and Z. Or government wastes time and effort on
little start up no one's heard of.
So I think there's more required than a change in
attitude on the part of MPs or ministers.
There's actually a sort of a more fundamental thing about
how media and society in general and voters look at
this stuff that needs to be part of the solution too.
NADHIM ZAHAWI: I'd love to have a headline where
governance fails with a 50,000 pound project.
Because the NHSIT program-- which was 12 billion--
was as big a failure from some very reputable big brands who
gave us the assurance, or gave the previous government the
assurance that this will all be delivered.
Or there's so many examples of this.
The fire service response unit.
There are still building, are buildings in Wolverhampton
sitting there.
With I think, 6,000 pound coffee machine in it and 450
million pounds later no one's using it because the IT didn't
work inside it.
So that risk, it applies to the bigger bonafide companies
that are already delivering for government, as well
as the start ups.
I just think we just have to just be a bit braver about
this and go with the little guy.
GI FERNANDO: It's about courage, isn't it?
Imagine, just imagine every day there were 10 stories of
50,000 pound, 20,000 pound mistakes.
I promise you in about three weeks of that, the press will
be completely disinterested about coffee machines and
things like that.
Right?
So if you have lots of little failures they don't become
very big stories.
A 12 billion pound failure is a big story.
MALE SPEAKER: Jude, did you have anything to--
JUDE OWER: No, I'm just thinking about how many start
ups you can create from 12 billion pounds.
GI FERNANDO: I know.
That's good, yes.
I mean, uh.
JUDE OWER: It's insane.
GI FERNANDO: It's insane isn't it?
MALE SPEAKER: The gentleman over here, there's a question?
JAMES MORRISON: So just--
James Morrison, Greenberg Research--
two things.
One, we have that stat, 8% of GDP coming from the internet
economy at the beginning and everyone was very pleased
about that.
But it was from 2010, our financial services industry
had just crashed, we don't have much manufacturing, and a
lot of it was retail.
So I'm not sure we should be that
positive about that number.
Second thing is you were the first person to mention
defense spending.
And apart from in the video that we had at the beginning,
those pictures we had, Colossus and Turing, the
internet came out of DARPA.
How important is the Department of Defense in
spurring innovation in the areas that we're considering?
NADHIM ZAHAWI: Well, let me take the
first bit of your question.
I think in terms of manufacturing, most people
think that we don't have any manufacturing.
We've got 11% of GDP still manufacturing.
Now, that's halved since 1997.
It was about 22% in '97.
But we're now the biggest exporter of cars.
Now those companies are not owned solely in Britain.
But Tata's doing brilliantly in my constituency with JLR.
They will make a billion pound profit this year, and spend a
billion every year for the next three years on
innovation, R&D. Which is amazing.
And when you go in there and see some of the stuff they're
doing it is absolutely extraordinary.
And I'd want them to do more in reaching out to schools so
that kids can think of an alternative route, maybe to
university, to go into those sort of industries.
But I think you're right.
I mean, in terms of we need to get smarter at not picking
winners, but what sectors we look at backing.
And I was one of the handful of MPs who were part of
something called the 2020 Group that called for an
industrial strategy.
And specifically not about picking winners, but about
focusing on sectors that we can go for.
In terms of defense, I think it's an important department.
And you're absolutely right, it should play a part.
And I think, look at what--
for example-- the Department of Defense does in America.
Although the budgets are very different.
I mean, the quantum is just enormous in America.
But actually, it's not just that one department.
It's every other department.
So the Department of Health can be much smarter.
And one of my colleagues, George Freeman-- who again,
one of the new entrants into parliament--
has done a load of work on the life sciences side, where the
CEOs of some of the life sciences companies--
that I met with him, who came to the launch of this new
initiative where we're opening up the data within the NHS--
were saying this country will be the most innovative when it
comes to this.
And which is why some of them have reversed some of their
decisions that they were going to take, which is sort of to
place some of their research somewhere
else around the world.
But every department can play a role.
And actually, one of the areas is looking to the thing I
mentioned earlier about the science budget.
And where should the government stop?
And where should it keep going and back some of the start ups
that come out of our universities?
And I think that's an area we're missing.
GI FERNANDO: I find it very difficult, actually, to
understand how they classify the internet economy, actually
in the first place.
Is Burberry an internet company?
Or is Topshop or ASOS?
I thought it's a fashion retailer.
I mean, what is it?
Any sort of sports companies have got digital fridges,
which connect to the internet.
Is that a fridge or internet economy?
How do you class it?
You know?
And I think next year or the year after it'll be even more
difficult, I think.
And actually, what I'm trying to say is it's really
dangerous to say internet economy.
Because frankly, it's just going to be plugged into just
about everything.
So things are going to be connected, as people are going
to be connected to their devices and each other through
the devices.
So trying to sector these things off
is the wrong question.
And the wrong stat.
MALE SPEAKER: Jude?
JUDE OWER: Yeah, totally agree.
But also when we're talking about backing sectors, I mean
I think if you look at the games industry in the UK we've
gone from being number two in the world right
down to number five.
Because most people are moving to France or Canada where
they've got better tax breaks.
But I know that's starting to change in the UK now, but
there's various rules and restrictions.
Like you have to make a game which is British in order to
comply to the tax breaks.
And I don't know what that means.
We're still trying to get our heads oriented.
GI FERNANDO: Hugh Grant's got to be in it.
JUDE OWER: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
JUDE OWER: But yeah, it will get better.
But I think hopefully we'll start to see improvements.
When gaming is making more than films and TV right now.
So it's a really important industry for the UK.
And if you look at industry in terms of the makeup in games
we're still really heavily focused on console gaming.
Even though my belief is that console gaming and premium
games are dying.
It's all free to play and microtransactions, that are
the way forward.
But it's mindset trying to get around that.
But if we could be doing more to support game, like digital
games in the UK, we'll see.
We could hopefully get our ranking back up to two or one
would be even better.
MALE SPEAKER: Interesting that both Jude and Nadhim mentioned
something around industrial strategy and some kind of
industrial strategy.
And that's something, policy exchange we were doing, a fair
bit of work on over the next few months just to throw a
plug-in there.
I think we've got time for another couple of questions if
anyone would like to?
Gentleman at the back?
AUDIENCE: About skills, if IBM and Google struggled to get
the people with the right skills in their organizations,
how does government get people with the right skills to
provide innovative services, or services in a new way?
How would that work with the Daily Mail and people being
paid more than a prime minister does.
What's the innovative solution to getting the right people in
government?
Taking risks and providing new services?
MALE SPEAKER: Gi, do you want to go?
GI FERNANDO: Yeah, so there's a million unemployed young
people in this country who've got lots of digital skills.
And I'll just tell you a little example.
So about two months ago, a young girl called Jintara who
came to the UK from Lithuania and was an artist, community
kind of work, art history.
She came to a course which taught how to make technology
related apps, advanced ones, actually.
Facebook, Open Graph, all sort of really complicated things.
And then a month after that she entered the Facebook World
Hackathon against 200 of the best engineers in
the UK and won it.
So you've got someone who's learnt English,
couldn't speak English.
Who's gone from art to making computers in five days doing a
bit more work and then winning against 200 computer science
proper Ph.D. Engineers.
So if you follow that hypothesis through and you try
it, and you do it more and more with people from
disadvantaged communities or unemployed youngsters who
actually had inherent digital skills by the fact that
they're connected and mass consumers of this stuff.
And you try and unlock that talent-- not through sitting
in a classroom for four and 1/2 years learning something
that's obsolete--
but by making consistently.
You've got two drivers, right?
One, you're building their portfolios.
So just imagine a degree course was make
an app every week.
By the time you'd finished in a year you would have made a
lot of apps.
That's a big portfolio.
It would have been spread across lots of technologies.
And the chances you get a job are very high indeed.
And so you've got to balance out in terms
of the skills issue.
That's what I mentioned earlier about it's not an
evolution of education we need now.
I think it's a complete revolution.
Because technology has changed what teaching means to a
certain degree.
There's another case in point where--
I don't know if you saw the news, it was on TechCrunch--
where they dropped in a whole bunch of tablets to some
remote communities in Africa.
And got some youngsters self teaching on these tablets
without any teachers.
And their numeracy and literacy just went through the
roof in a very short space of time.
That's not to say we don't need teachers.
I think there's other things which are knowledge
transferred in terms of fact.
It's more like I think maybe teachers' roles need to change
to do with more facilitation, coaching,
discipline, things like that.
I think there's a revolution needed in education otherwise
we're in real trouble.
MALE SPEAKER: Jude?
JUDE OWER: Yeah, no but one of our investors, he co-founded a
group called CoderDojo in Ireland.
And that's kind of taken the world by storm now.
but it's coding school on a Saturday for kids.
So they've got kids as young as young as seven coding,
building apps, launching apps in iTunes.
It's amazing.
We want to hire them.
But they're too young.
But just to see the kids, on a Saturday, it's like for them
it's not even going to school.
It's learning, it's building, it's doing stuff that they
love in a safe place where, if they can't do that a school or
maybe it isn't the environment to do it at school, they've
got to do it elsewhere.
And they absolutely love it.
So I think we've got to see more of
that to get good coders.
I know that one of the problems that we've got is
trying to find good coding skills at Playmob.
Everybody's kind of vying for the same people.
So we are looking at home growing people ourselves.
We've just hired somebody who--
he's not a coding guy, but more from business, on the
business side--
from the Peter Jones Academy.
And he's 18.
So entrepreneurial.
Will literally just turn his hand to anything.
and has been a fantastic resource for us on all of our
social media.
And he's 18 and I've never seen anything like it.
So our doors are completely open to bringing in young
people and home growing them to what the business needs.
GI FERNANDO: I also think there's a nuance about
learning to code and learning to make.
It's a big, vast, huge difference.
There's a 16-year-old guy in San Francisco that we're
partnering with.
He's created this thing called MakeGamesWithUs.
At 16 he taught himself to make an iPhone game.
That game went ballistic.
And he made a lot of money.
So what he did was then get his whole high school class
into his living room to just make games.
Three of them went ballistic.
Then he got funded by Y Combinator.
He's now the grand old age of 18 sitting on
several million quid.
He will not finish school.
He will not get a degree.
He's one of the most numerate, well spoken--
I mean his maths is incredible.
He's taught it himself.
And he's partnering with us.
Because he reckons he can get a non coda to Angry Birds,
creating Angry Birds level one in eight hours.
So we're trying it.
Mad, mad.
He's made enough though, fair enough.
But I think there is a thing, it's about making.
Because the other thing is if you're learning about the
history of code or whatever else, it's quite boring.
Especially to a disenfranchised 14-year-old
who's got the attention span worse than me.
Then you've got some issues.
Whereas if they're getting adrenaline rushes every five
minutes, you're gaming it-- you're gaming the learning of
making a game--
then they're creating something from nothing.
There's a hip hop film coming where it's almost like that
sort of street style called Hip Hop: Creating Something
from Nothing.
That's the name of the film.
And it's about how the hip hop industry created musicians who
weren't formerly trained, who weren't educated in music.
They used technology.
They mixed samples together to make music.
And there's a great quote from the guy
called Grandmaster Caz.
For those you who might be familiar with him.
And he says, hip hop invented nothing.
It reinvented everything.
And I think that's what we're kind of on the zone about
talking about, I think with getting skills.
It's get them making.
Not learning how to code.
Get them making something.
JUDE OWER: Yeah.
And it's showing what they can achieve as well.
So if you show young people that they can make a game but
these are the things that you have to do to be able to do
this, then that's going to be a bigger driver rather than
they might learn to code and they might play games, but
they haven't made the link between the two.
GI FERNANDO: That's the competition.
Right?
So competition, for all of us here, is Call of Duty 2.
Right?
Because we want them to be rather making Call of Duty 2
than playing Call of Duty 2.
And I believe we can make it as interesting to be making
Call of Duty 2, or modding World of Warcraft which people
are already doing right?
To give them an advantage.
And building that into the games is more likely to get
people to make and create something out of nothing.
NADHIM ZAHAWI: You've just noticed your question and how
animated the two entrepreneurs were in terms of how you get
and embrace the sort of disruptive nature of
technology and not be frightened of it.
We need the same thing in government.
And I'm going to plug a pamphlet I'm working on, which
is about how we govern ourselves.
How, with the relationship between politicians and the
civil service-- which will come out hopefully in a few
months time--
because I think there are lessons to be
learnt in there as well.
But just a quick point from my own experience.
I've got a great primary school in one of my market
towns in Stratford, Shipston--
Shipston Primary School.
The head teacher is incredibly innovative.
So he's basically managed to get--
through sponsorship and a bit of funding--
tablets, iPads for all the primary school kids.
And also, this little robot that comes into the school.
And if you watch those little children and how they are
interacting, learning online because there's something with
the tablets.
They're opening the whole world up
online in that one school.
You've got to free up more schools.
And again, this isn't the party political point.
But labor did start the--
well, actually John Major did, but labor effectively
pioneered the academy's status which allows schools' head
teachers to be free from the dead hand of
local authority control.
There were 200 two and a 1/2 years ago.
There's now over 2,200.
And you've got to open that up to allow them to make those
sort of decisions.
One of my kid's friends at school, he's 16.
He invented Summly, this thing, I don't know, some of
you would have read about it.
The headmaster allowed him a two-year sabbatical because he
wants to continue with his education.
He wants to come back to it.
But he's so busy now being funded by Li Ka Shing and a
load of tech funds to develop this thing.
But he's allowed to do that whilst maybe wanting to come
back to his education.
And of course, the other thing is non-conventional routes.
You don't have to go to university.
Apprenticeships is a great way of doing this.
And again, we're now up to a million apprenticeships.
And not just technology, in all sorts of
other sectors as well.
So those are the sorts of things that you need to do in
government.
But we should do more of, I think, in terms of how you
make the civil service more interactive.
MALE SPEAKER: I'm very sorry to say we've run out of time.
I'm being pointed out and asked to close
down from over there.
It's been a really fascinating discussion.
Thank you so much to the panelists for
making it really riveting.
And something that's really come across to me is the
importance of agility, the importance of adaptation.
But also the importance of entrepreneurs and enthusiasm
to digital government and the digital economy.
Thanks again to Google for putting on such a fabulous
event in such a great space.