speaker-0: I'm Srimad Dutta and I've been a professor for many decades in some leading institutions around the world. And today we'll be discussing issues around technology, around talent and on innovation, three important themes I think that are critical for our positive and good futures.
speaker-1: you Today, I'm really delighted to say that for the Stakeholder Impact Forum, we are joined by Professor Sumitra Dutta, who is a global leader in innovation and digital transformation working across academia, business, technology. With World Economic Forum, he's created the Global Innovation Index and the Network Readiness Index, which I think really help organizations anticipate challenges, strengthen resilience, and build future ready capabilities. We've got so much to cover today with Sumitra, so thank you so much for joining us.
speaker-0: Thank you very much, Jonathan.
speaker-1: And yeah, as a kind of mids in there in the top, there's a lot of things to cover from the high impact ecosystems you build, the helping organizations navigate global competitiveness, the countries you supported with the indexes. But I think first and foremost, it would be really interesting for you to just give us a little bit of a rundown of yourself and also the Portulans Institute, kind of what you do there and why you co-founded.
speaker-0: Thank you so much. ⁓ So, know, my life sort of has really taken me in a full circle. I started out with a PhD in computer science from Berkeley, specializing actually in artificial intelligence and on second wave back in the late 80s, early 90s. ⁓ And then I spent a whole career looking at how technology was being applied in business as a business school professor. And of course, the role of technology in business has evolved in a significant manner the last three decades. When I started out, technology was largely a back office function. And today you can't think of almost any function, any role in the organization that doesn't actually have a very strong technological component to it. And now sort of as I have transitioned from 36 years of academic life, have now gone back to my technical roots. really working in a lot of technology startups, all focused on AI. And my next 10 years, they're really going to be focused on AI. So that's really in a sense what I, you know, my career sort of has taken a loop. And of course I've had the privilege of working in, you know, numerous good institutions like, for example, INSEAD in France, Cornell in New York, Oxford in the UK and so on. Now, what is interesting, and you mentioned Port-au-Lance Institute. This is a think tank that I co-founded back, think, in 2019, just for the pandemic in Washington, DC. And the name Port-au-Lance comes from the ancient maps of the sailors before the continents were discovered. So if you look at the maps, Port-au-Lance maps of many centuries ago, they were very vague representations of what the landmasses could look like. And we use that name or that name of the map to represent the Institute because in many ways, I believe we are discovering the boundaries of how technology is affecting our lives. We don't know it precisely. We have some sense of what is happening or what may happen. But I think the boundaries of those impacts and interactions are still being determined.
speaker-1: Amazing. I really like that because yeah, if you think about those maps and you look at ecosystems, whether that's an organization, whether that's academic, whether that's a country even, so much of them are, you know, what we understand of these kind of ecosystems is defined by what we think we know, but actually how much do these organizations know? So I think that's really interesting. So as part of the Portulans Institute, It's mainly kind of education and nonprofit, but what's really your mission and how have you found that over the last kind of six years, helping develop companies and organizations for digital transformation?
speaker-0: Yeah. So I think, you know, the motivation for setting up Port-au-L'Ars Institute many years ago, you know, back in the late 2019 was really to provide an independent forum in which multiple stakeholders could get engaged on discussing issues linked to development, linked to future competitiveness. And those issues really revolved in three major buckets around talent, people. around technology and around innovation, how you essentially combine, you know, people, technology to create the right innovation, ecosystems, innovation, society at large. And I think those three elements are very important with the fundamental progress of society, of well-being of people globally, and also for the core technological progress that we wish to see, you know, happen in corporations and governments worldwide. So Portulant Institute was really designed to support those areas of focus. And we have inside the Institute, three of the most important global indices in those areas. You mentioned the Global Innovation Index. I created that in 2007. You mentioned the Network Readiness Index on technology. I created that at the World Economic Forum at, I think, 2002. And the Global Talent Competitiveness Index is something that my colleague, Dr. Bruno Landwar created at INSEAD. and it runs through the Portland Institute and that was done I think about 10 years ago.
speaker-1: That's really interesting there. You mentioned the three things there, talent, the people, the technology and was it the kind of innovation, the real kind of heart of everything that think people are working towards today. How did you kind of land upon those three? Was that through research and ⁓ reaching out to find out what these tensions were?
speaker-0: innovation that you So, know, it started out with my background in technology. So I come from a pure computer science technology background. And when I entered a business school in Seattle was my first sort of ⁓ career stop. I really started looking at how technology was impacting businesses. And in the early nineties was really when internet was getting commercialized and entering the public arena. And so the network readiness index really emerged at the world economic forum where the with the forum put together a group of leaders to really try to understand how is technology impacting our lives, impacting development. You know, we were the first back in 2002 to actually include metrics linked to regulation, linked to the social environment, linked to political environment in the evaluation of technological impact. Today seems obvious, right? Today you say that's normal. But if you go back years, decades, You know, most of the focus in technology discussions was around bits and bytes and, you know, number of PCs and, you know, the bandwidths. it was very technical discussion. People hadn't really linked the technology to the broader social implications. And so I think we were the first to do that. So I think that was a very important contribution. Of course, today it's become part of the normal thinking around technology. And of course, the technology side then led me to start delving more into innovation because as I was visiting different countries, especially emerging markets, saw that there lot of innovation taking place on the basis of mobile phones, internet, innovation was happening not necessarily by PhDs and by citations and publications, but by common people adopting technologies to actually innovate. And that forced me to think about how do we define innovation appropriately in today's era? And that actually what led me to found the global innovation index in 2007, where the contribution essentially was to broaden the definition of innovation. that product or process innovation is not important. They still are very, very important, but to broaden it to a broader set of factors and environmental issues that actually affect innovation in a country. So for example, in the global innovation index, we of course do look at venture capital, but we also look at microfinance. We look at, for example, the you know, the market, let's say, finance options available for a company. But we also look at general infrastructure. You know, you can have a great company, but guess what? The roads and railways don't operate in the country. You can't take your products to market or you can't actually ship them globally. So there's a very complex interaction between the classical known technology innovation factors and also more general economic factors. And I think that is what the main contribution the global innovation index has been to broaden the discussion of the global innovations in arena. The WIPO and the United Nations adopted it ⁓ in 2011. And I think certainly helped the spread of that whole broadened definition of innovation. I think that has happened today again is commonly accepted. ⁓ Similar story in the talent side. The talent side, you know, was very much focused only on degrees and a number of enrolled students in various levels of education. But really, when we look at talent today, a number of other factors are becoming important. Let's say, for example, the latest report of the Global Talent Competence Index, looking at resilience. ⁓ How do you actually build resilient talent pools in an economy? And that is something which is very important, especially in today's world, where AI is really... Making us question, know, what is the set of jobs? is set of skills? What are the talent? Essentials that are required going forward in the future
speaker-1: I mean, I think it's so interesting and the word resilience there. And just to hark back what you said about what you were doing in 2002, which is talking about regulation of technology. you know, from people we've spoken to, AI has been, you know, bit of the Wild West again of regulation, where this is coming from, who's in control of what these algorithms are creating. And now we're seeing the desire for regulation in that. So it's interesting that you were doing that back in 2002 and then, you know, we've still got the same conversations happening today. I mean, I really, I think we can go quite deep into AI, but hitting on there with the resilience and the talent pools, what have you really found in terms of organizations that has, you know, that marrying the technology with the talent to create more, more kind of resilient ecosystems? there? Any solutions that you've stumbled upon or is it really?
speaker-0: would not go as far to say the solutions that are clearly evident but I think the basic challenge is very important to recognize first of all. know, historically the issues with or the challenges of governments or of corporations adopting technological innovations has rarely been with technology itself. The technology usually works or it ends up working in a couple of years from today. The challenges almost always have been organizational. you know, people related, process related, organization, inertia related and so on. And I always, when I teach executives or I interact with students, I always begin with a very simple two curves that I transpose, you know, just visually. One is a linear curve, you know, at this gradient, you can just say, you know, human capacity is increasing linearly. Today, if you look at a 22 year old graduate from a, you know, from a university, that person, you know, is much more informed of the world and much more able to do different things than what I was, know, when I was 22 at his or her age. So ⁓ our capability is increasing in a linear fashion. At the same time, you put an exponential curve, is what technologies trend is like. What you see is that for a long time, the difference between an exponential curve and a linear curve is not dramatic. There is some difference and know the difference is modest but then there is a tipping point at which the hockey stick sort of takes off you know the vertical part takes off and once you're in that vertical part the gap increases dramatically year by year and we are so you know if you look at Moore's law as being a rough approximation of computational capacity you know which basically said that it doubles every 18 months and that's been true for the last 70 or 60 years So microprocessors were invented roughly in the 50s, so 70 years roughly ⁓ from now to today. ⁓ So the hockey stick kicks off around 60 years from the Moore's law trend of exponential ⁓ progression. So what we have seen in the last 10 years has this hockey stick rising. And that's going to continue. There's no signs of that decreasing. if you look at, for example, not just silicon-based computing, but even quantum computing and other kinds of technologies that might arise in the future, all signals and signs are that exponential trend will keep on continuing. So the gap between what technology is capable of doing and what organizations are capable of absorbing is growing significantly every year. And that's where the challenge is and that's where the opportunity is because if you are a legacy organization struggling to keep up, Yeah, it's a big challenge. You know, it's a big challenge and most legacy organization at the same time You have small startups that are coming up That really are able to do a lot with a small number of people you know, I recently was interacting with a startup in Seattle and The startup had two founders and I asked them where's the rest of your team? You know, so you're doing you know startup where's the rest of your team and then they pull out a computer screen and they said look There are these 200 agents that are working with us and they were always software agents. Okay. So the software agents doing different tasks for them, whether it's marketing or whether it's in other kinds of HR issues and so on. So what I'm just trying to say is that this notion that how will organizations adopt that? And now today, if you go to a legacy organization and say, know, like, you know, we'll replace people that is a very negative image, you know, and that's a negative connotation that most people are not comfortable with. It's different if you're starting on scratch. If you're starting on scratch, then you're fine. But if you're actually looking at technology and how it's potentially replacing people, that causes us to reflect more deeply on how can we really turn that around into a positive story. Because there's one side of it is a negative story, replacing jobs and denying people opportunities. On the other side, if you look at it in positive way, You can also say that well looked in the world there are so many unmet needs of billions of people and how can we satisfy those needs? If you take for example even basic ⁓ domains like education or healthcare, I'm not talking about energy and other issues, everything, ⁓ the needs of billions are not being met today. And then you can ask the question how can we change our mindset to actually look at growth? So for me, the solution for AI and skills really is that, of course, you've got to give AI training, skills, education to people, not only make the organization AI ready, but actually change the scope of ambition of the organization to be in a hundred X, thousand X of what you're doing today. You know, I take examples, you take, for example, the elite universities, either in America or in UK or anywhere in the world. You know, most elite universities admit a few thousand students every year, you know. between 1000, typically in the IB league or, know, three, four, five thousand and other good schools. But the demand is incredibly high. So, you can ask the question, we always take pride in the fact that we talk with selectivity and I know we only admit one in X number of applications. ⁓ But somehow maybe our pride should come to the fact that maybe we are educating not one, but thousand. So what it means is that instead of taking 3000, why not take 3 million?
speaker-1: I'll put him
speaker-0: These are numbers that are scary. If you go to elite institution, the leadership of the institution including the alumni base are not prepared to deal with those numbers. Not only are the processes and the mindset not prepared for that, you'll have pushback interestingly from the alumni themselves because they will say, we were part of the elite group and we struggled to get in and now you're suddenly opening the floodgates to 30 million people. But if you take from a global perspective, it's a very important question of what is the responsibility of our institutions to do global good. And I think that's the discussion which hasn't really happened. if you just, for example, ⁓ keep your boundaries contained to what you've been used to and say, okay, we serve X number of patients, we serve X number of students, and we can of course use AI to improve that. And guess what? ⁓ makes you or technology makes you inherently typically more efficient in what you do. So it is natural that if you do it correctly, you will in fact lead less of the people. I mean, it's quite natural unless you actually grow your services and you say, OK, if while for the same group of people, I know I don't just provide the regular set of services, I provide an additional enhanced set. So growth is, I think, the key issue. Technology allows you to grow. and not just grow incrementally, grow exponentially. And the question is, are organizations able to change the mindset to grow exponentially? Because growth is risky. ⁓ If you suddenly, for example, tell a chief executive that now you form your plans, so that you're to increase your customer base by 100x. Most people would shy away from that because that's a high goal. And you know people don't like failures, right? You you set out a public goal and then you fail and that you know embarrassing for you and for the organizations so the Natural desire of individual is to go for incremental growth. Okay, i'll increase the 10 person 20 person whatever But technology now today allows you to go Exponentially increase thousand times increase hundred times increasing, you know even more That requires a different kind of mindset, different kind of courage.
speaker-1: I there's some really interesting things there where I think with these legacy organizations, changing that mindset of themselves, of their stakeholders, ⁓ their proposition that they've been doing for, it could be a hundred years, say the IOD, what they offer. Actually getting everyone on board with that is a really significant change. But do you see what you just talked about there as... That's the key to resilience. Is that the pathway to resilience? And also, one of the things we've also heard about is relevance. Can an organization remain relevant if they're not going to listen to this kind of exponential growth opportunities and kind of keep their head in the sand?
speaker-0: You know, that's a good question. And we have seen the churn in, for example, you know, whether you look at the biggest companies in America and UK and any other part of the world churn through much more rapidly. The churn in the largest most successful, if you take size and success as being one proxy of success, you know, the churn in the largest companies globally has been incredible. It's rising, you know, it's rising every year and in many sectors, including media, including, you know, many others. The biggest players today are not the traditional incumbents that were there 20 years ago. So that churn is happening and that churn will continue to happen. And that's where the challenge will remain, is that ⁓ there will be organizations that ⁓ will be unable to make the transition and there will be other organizations that will make the transition much more in agile fashion. And I think that's where leadership comes in. People often ask me the question, what is leadership in this world of AI and so on. And to some degree it is being aware of technology and having some basic technology skills. But I don't think that's the most important thing. In my view, is the most important thing is having the courage to make bold decisions that go for growth, exponential growth, ⁓ in a responsible fashion. Of course, you you don't want to do things irresponsibly and for the planet or elsewhere. But I think I think that is very, very hard, very because systems don't actually encourage encourage, you know, in a system situation where if you're in a public company or being monitored every quarter, you know, or if you're a classical organization, your position is there for four years or whatever X number of years your tenure is. It's not easy to encourage people, especially politicians, politicians who are subject to the ballot in the vote every X number of years to make those kind of bold decisions because typically those bold decisions take a number of years to play out. They don't happen in two, three years. So you typically need 10 years to see a bold decision play out. And the time frame is reducing, but still I think that's a thing which requires some courage to be able to make the right decision. And of course, like anything, you can make mistakes. So you can also have errors out there.
speaker-1: What's your experience when you joined the Oxford Business School at SAID? You're leading that, as we say, a legacy organization. How did you kind of confront those same issues there of making change within a finite space of time and also kind of making them aware of the tensions that perhaps they weren't aware of?
speaker-0: No, think, you know, I have faced similar challenges in my leadership roles in universities, both at Oxford and at Cornell University. And in both cases, I have actually tried to direct the organization the right way. So I'll give you one example from Cornell and one example in Oxford. And both, by the way, don't think, you know, I think universities everywhere, you know. are more conservative than private sector institutions and for good reasons. They have been successful many years and they have a lot of legacy and brand to protect out there. So at Cornell when I joined as a dean I noticed that education and business was being taught in multiple schools and there were somehow For legacy reasons, business education was being taught by different schools. And I made the proposition to the president to merge them into one college. And the reason was because I do believe scale is important. You know, if you're a small unit, it's everywhere in the university that doesn't actually portray the kind of scale and impact you have. Now I can tell you that is a very successful merger of three schools that I'd managed at Cornell, ⁓ successfully done in two years time, but it was. enormously challenging and painful. Because starting a new campus or a new school is much easier when you do it from ground up. It's a new thing. When you take three existing schools, there proud traditions, their own legacies, their own identity, even inside the university, at least in America, the individual schools have a much stronger identity than probably in other parts of the world. So when you have the identities and all getting merged, it was a very interesting challenge. But nevertheless, I proposed it, the president supported it and we actually implemented it. Okay, so it was successful and today the college exists and is successful.
speaker-1: You mentioned the opportunity there of when you bring them all together, as you say, it gives more awareness of what was the tension there? What was the challenge that you were trying to address by merging them together?
speaker-0: Now it was, you know, essentially legacy, you know, different schools. Even now today, if you go to a university, you find business education, not just contained at the business school. The medical school is doing some business education because when a business and medical science is coming together, the engineering school is doing business education, you know, because engineers that do entrepreneurship are the kind of thing. So you find business education entering into many different schools. And at Cornell, historically, which have very independent schools, It had grown into big programs, literally, big programs. So ⁓ Cornell individually wasn't seen as a major player in business unless you accumulated all of them together. So today Cornell is the third largest business school in America, which gives a certain kind of weight in terms of attracting faculty because what makes a school excellent is basically attracting the best students, attracting the best faculty. and building the say the right relationships with the corporation. That's essentially a simple sort of formula for excellence. So really skill gives you the ability to attract better faculty, better students and do that. So I think that's the reason why, and you see that already playing out today at Cornell. You asked Oxford, Oxford is a historic institution, a great, wonderful university, very proud legacy, but keep in mind the business education, the business school in Oxford is relatively new. And as we always said, it's a startup and an ancient university. When I joined only about 30 years old or 30 years young. And so I think the major challenge that I had and that I was focusing on was on trying to direct the school into the more mature sort of mold. When I say mature mold, a lot of the focus was on, for example, building of the research agenda much more in a stronger, more forceful fashion inside the university. Which of course is very much acceptance, controversial out there. Building out the whole fundraising component. Fundraising was very weak inside the school and you have to actually fundraise to be... So fundraising was a very important part of the changes that I proposed out there. And very important, I think this is very important, making connections to the rest of the university. Because when you look at Europe, because of course Oxford is in the Europe, well, quote unquote Europe and UK, and Cornell is in America. In America, most of the business schools are part of larger universities. So, you know, they're already embedded in universities, all the business schools, most major ones. In Europe, by contrast, most of the major business schools are independent. You look at INSEAD, you look at LBS, LBS is part of London, but still operates largely independently. You look at IMD, you look at... all of them are independent. So the uniqueness of Oxford really is you connect to the rest of the university. actually, know, the strength of the university. I really, know, and a large university, often happens is people are very busy doing their own stuff and they don't actually know what is happening, especially in a new part of the university. When I say new, mean, you know, the business school is still new inside the university. So part of my effort really was making more connection with the rest of the University and that's something which we did for example We should hold open days and which we invited the leaders from other parts university to come and see what the business school is doing But then we pushed innovative ⁓ Approaches like in digital learning the business school is a leader in online learning inside Oxford and you can probably imagine Oxford is not a place where online education is naturally welcome because it's a place where tutoring is the core of the heart of system. And tutoring has got us tremendous strengths, but guess what? In online education, you can actually reach a broader audience of people who cannot actually come to Oxford to benefit from the same traditional system. we pushed in innovative ways. We tried to actually, you know, professionalize the school along the lines of modern sort of top of state of the art, top business schools. And very important. I tried to put in the mindset of growth because the school is too small to have a global impact. So if you look at, for example, the side business school, ⁓ and I joined was roughly about one third the size of INSEAD, ⁓ roughly one third, one half, one half the size of, ⁓ London Business School. and roughly one fifth the size of the big American schools. So if you compare, for example, scale becomes important. If you take, for example, finance, know, the side business school might have, you know, 12 to 15 great faculty in finance, wonderful faculty in finance. You go to Columbia University in New York, Columbia has 60 faculty in finance, maybe even higher today. So what you have is, you know, you have 15 great faculty, but guess what? If you have 60 great faculty, the finance department can do more, can offer more courses, is more attractive to finance companies, like to work with you. So it's not that scale is everything. Of course it is not having too much of the wrong kind of people also not good. But if you have the right people, assumption of right people, scale is very important. So I think, you know, when I was there, it grew the school by about 30 % in three years, which is fairly significant in Oxford terms. it is something, actually the growth in revenue terms is almost close to 50%, 40, 50%. But in faculty terms of 30%. But in Oxford, the constraints and growth. The university doesn't allow you to grow as freely as one might in another situation. Because university constrains the number of students you can take and so on. So what I'm saying is that you try to... build on the excellence in the university and you try to make it even better in the business domain by forcing the system to change in the direction that is right.
speaker-1: Yes, yeah, and it's so relatable to other stakeholder-led organizations out there that aren't academic, but still facing, we hear in member organizations all the time of they're fighting losing membership. But if you turn that tension into an opportunity, it's ⁓ okay, ⁓ how can you compete with the larger organizations? As you said, Oxford compared to the big American universities, if size and scope is... is a massive tension and the value offering is Oxford, it's prestigious, it's legacy. But if you can offer both of those things and be growing, yeah, it's definitely a...
speaker-0: Keep in mind, Oxford as a university is huge as universities compares very well to the best and the size-wise. the business school is a... Yeah. And if you look at the departments where Oxford traditionally is very strong, let's say if it's a classic, so in philosophy, and you compare the department size and the kind of faculty they have in those departments to the other top American schools, Oxford is far bigger than the biggest American schools in those. So I think having a critical size of faculty is very important for elite business school that are research focused.
speaker-1: ⁓ But I suppose it comes back to what you were saying earlier with the changing dynamics, know, what technology and business was back in the 90s compared to now. And it's the same with the automotive industry. Was electric a big part? You know, was being talked about probably back then, but nowadays, you know, everything is mobility rather than, you know, gas-powered, cylindrical engines. And yeah, so I think it's, and this comes to a really interesting thing that I think the Porsche lands. Portulence Institute focuses on, is that kind of community learning. You've been talking there a lot about siloed business schools, the different parts of Cornell that aren't speaking to each other. What is it that drives you to that kind of cross-sector community knowledge sharing? Why do you think that's so important nowadays to face these types of tensions, whether that's ⁓ AI, whether that's capacity, or whether that's the scale of change in terms of new generations coming into the... the mix in business.
speaker-0: You know, I guess it started out early on for me because when I was doing my graduate studies in computer science at Berkeley, I was interested in learning about other fields. So I started taking courses in the business school. ⁓ I liked what I was doing and essentially ended up getting a master's degree in business at the same time as a PhD in computer science. And then it wasn't planned, but I ended up by accident joining a business school. in Seattle, my first job. Again, I didn't plan to spend my whole career in a business school and that's what I ended up doing. You know, so it should ask me back in when I was graduating as a student, I was set out, of course, been in a computer science department. My career really has been at that integration of technology and business. And of course, what has happened is I got involved pretty early on in 2002 with the World Economic Forum, the technology index at this technology industry, which are really at a national level. So looking at how do nations put in place the policies for, you know, leveraging technology in the right way. Again, I didn't have a background in public policy. I didn't do public policy, but that sort of, the serendipity out there in terms of coming in contact with leaders at the World Atomic Forum at dealing with governments and discussing the index. Because many governments would come and talk to us and say, how come our country is not doing well? How can we improve? So what happened is I sort of got into discussions, not just at the corporate level with the business school domain, but also leaders and governments who were doing at a national level. So what I'm just trying to say is that somehow fate took me on a journey on a path that made me cross boundaries, a between technology and business or between corporation and the nations, the national governments. And I guess that is what, you know, piqued my interest and made me look at multiple things. Because obviously, if you look at our national level, you see many other different issues than what you see at a business level. And at a business level, you see many of the issues. And if you see on the technology level, you know, if you just look at building a next foundational model in AI, you are focused on one set of technical issues and metrics and algorithms. Looking at actually applying LLMs in a corporation. Looking at a whole different set of issues about, you know, integrity and trust and, know, and making sure it's all fitted in well with the processes. You're looking at it at the national level, looking at, you know, a whole set of issues of, you know, sovereignty and, you know, how do you actually maintain, you know, national independence and so on. Lots of different issues. So what I'm just trying to say is that these issues happen to arise in front of me quite naturally given the path I was following. And that has made me always very interested in these kinds of, you know, across disciplinary issues. So, another thing that I didn't mention about is I also started companies, I worked in companies, startups, and I like doing that because that gives a different perspective too. So it's a combination of perspective that really makes you, think, know, makes you, know, if you're curious, you learn from every single interaction, every single sort of situation, even if it's positive or negative.
speaker-1: Absolutely. And just before we wrap up, I really want to kind of just pick your brains about the indexes you've worked on, because I think they're so valuable in terms of stakeholder-led organizations. You know, we see them used, as you said, the World Economic Forum, we hear about them used in terms of countries and, you know, that kind of ⁓ nation focus. What do you think the benefits are in terms of, using that type of index approach for organizations. I suppose it's an assessment idea, isn't it? But that kind of ability to know your full picture, your full ecosystem and how that can help kind of build more resilient organizations going forward in same way that you've done.
speaker-0: Yeah, so it's a good question you're asking. Thank you. So, you know, there's a saying in management that says, what does not get measured does not get managed. And I think it's true, you know. ⁓ If you want to focus on something and make progress in that area, you typically have to understand it and you have to measure it and you have to, you know, improve it in a way in which you want to. ⁓ So what are the benefits of index? think the two benefits. ⁓ If you take a broader theme like innovation or like ⁓ technology today, you know, it's very hard for a decision leader to actually understand what are the levers to pull. ⁓ Traditionally, for example, in a technology discussion, most governments were focused on selling the one They would say, okay, the telecoms ministry would give out licenses and would sell spectrum, you know, because that's an asset they control and they could actually, you know, hand out. It did not realize, they did not fully realize that actually to get the benefits of technology, the country needed to do a whole bunch of other different things, whether it's, you know, focus in education, focusing on, you know, It's focusing on companies and focus innovation clusters or whatever. So what these frameworks do is they give you a mental model to even form a map. Going back to the Port-au-Lun's concept, if you're trying to navigate the world, you know what the map is. You don't know the boundaries are. So if you look at innovation and you put yourself in the shoes of a national leader, doesn't matter which country. And you say, well, I have to actually make my country more innovative. Okay. Or I have to make my company may our country make better use of technology. You need to have some con some map of, know, what you're trying to address and then have some controls and what are you trying to direct your country or your company towards. So the frameworks behind these models are very important because they give you the map. And then the measures give you. how you're performing. Now, if you actually are measuring multiple countries or multiple companies, then you can also compare your performance to others because people like that. People like comparing. It's a natural human tendency. And the benefit of comparison is not just, you know, being jealous of someone else, but much more understanding why is it that this country or this company is doing better and what can I learn from it? So, I think these indices are often criticized because people say they're incomplete. Of course, incomplete. don't cover the whole thing. People say they're not rigorous. Yes, because the data is very difficult to get. It's very hard to collect data for 130 countries. So you can poke holes in many of the indices and all those arguments are correct from a strict academic perspective. But at the same time, for the decision makers, They're incredibly useful. can tell you that myself from having spoken to, you know, dozens and dozens of national leaders around the world. They're incredibly useful. And today, for example, more than 110 countries around the world actively use and base a national policy discussions on innovation around the global innovation index. So they actually, you know, form their targets around the index and the framework of the index. And then they say, how are we doing on this and so on and so forth. So you know that gives you a frame of action and of you know progress that is very important. I think so
speaker-1: Again, it's bringing those ideas in, getting everyone to think about things differently, think about things that maybe aren't necessarily just there day to day and look at the bigger picture. I think absolutely. So Mitra, I know we've to let you go, but really just looking at the future, I'd really just like to hear short, simple answer of, we've talked about a lot of things, that's AI, whether that's universities at the top and at the bottom and all these different things impacting us today. Looking ahead, are you optimistic or cautious about how organizations will navigate these next decade of change as we hit another advent of, AI is not even new anymore, but a new level of technology.
speaker-0: So I would say I'm very optimistic, ⁓ mainly because I think we're entering an era of abundance.
speaker-1: ⁓
speaker-0: Abundance of what? Abundance of basically knowledge. Knowledge, if it's applied correctly, can lead to good benefits. So I think ⁓ with AI, with the growth of knowledge, with the growth of technology, ⁓ the abundance that we are having around us potentially in knowledge is incredible. Imagine if today you have in a research lab, maybe 200 scientists and imagine what you could do with 2,000. or 200,000 scientists and that is something which will be feasible in the not too distant future. So I think you have abundant knowledge. The challenge for us will be as society or as individually, how do we apply that knowledge and how do we ⁓ ensure that we don't misapply it or the applications are not sometimes misused. or we do not do enough to protect human dignity. let's say, in terms of ⁓ overall, I'm very optimistic in terms of what is possible. Where I'm a little bit hesitant to have the same level of optimism as whether we can be responsible enough to make the right decisions. And this is where I think, you you have a lot of challenges in global governance, lot of challenges in, you know, individual choices you make as society or as a community. It's like, you know, if you think about it, part of the reason, you know, we haven't had a nuclear war is because the nuclear powers got together some decades ago and decided that, okay, we should not have a nuclear war because... can be very bad. ⁓ There is no such similar governance happening towards AI right now. In fact, the two major superpowers essentially are diverging, so they're going in their own paths. Similarly, I think there's no proper discussion happening about how do we handle people and the impact on people. And somehow the...
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: Measurements that they're using right now of stock prices and you know and quarterly benefits and all that is all being directed towards I Would say outcomes that are not favorable people You know when when when people are getting eliminated from companies it's trading a Perception and a reality that the outcome is not a positive one, you know, and and and and I have seen it I have many friends Who have lost their jobs who are very well qualified in the best schools and It is tough for them very tough for them especially then the 30s and 40s, you know, you are at your prime and to lose your You know at least for some time, you know the possibilities of having a good career and because your identity into this society is so much tied to your career But there's right or wrong, there's a different issue, but at least that's the reality for many people. So how do you handle that? I think that's something that we haven't sorted out. Even today, if look at the accounting methods that I use for rewarding companies and stock prices, favor investments in technology over favor investments in people. Technology can amortize, it can depreciate, you can do other kinds of accounting tricks, and that makes it cheaper for you in the end. I think that's where I'm a little skeptical about whether we will collectively be able to make the right decision. But you know what, at the end of the day, you have to be optimistic. So I think the opportunities are huge. So I hope that we will individually collectively make the most of them in the positive way.
speaker-1: Absolutely. And that's why we're bringing people together to talk and to really focus on these types of conversations. And comes right back to what we said at the beginning, which is the people, the talent, the technology, what we're using to push forward those talent and the innovation to help us keep driving forward rather than just stop in the 90s. So I think it all comes together. And thank you so much for your time today, Professor Dattori. There's so many more topics we could go into.
speaker-0: Thank you very much. Pleasure.
speaker-1: you Today, I'm really delighted to say that for the Stakeholder Impact Forum, we are joined by Professor Sumitra Dutta, who is a global leader in innovation and digital transformation working across academia, business, technology. With World Economic Forum, he's created the Global Innovation Index and the Network Readiness Index, which I think really help organizations anticipate challenges, strengthen resilience, and build future ready capabilities. We've got so much to cover today with Sumitra, so thank you so much for joining us.
speaker-0: Thank you very much, Jonathan.
speaker-1: And yeah, as a kind of mids in there in the top, there's a lot of things to cover from the high impact ecosystems you build, the helping organizations navigate global competitiveness, the countries you supported with the indexes. But I think first and foremost, it would be really interesting for you to just give us a little bit of a rundown of yourself and also the Portulans Institute, kind of what you do there and why you co-founded.
speaker-0: Thank you so much. ⁓ So, know, my life sort of has really taken me in a full circle. I started out with a PhD in computer science from Berkeley, specializing actually in artificial intelligence and on second wave back in the late 80s, early 90s. ⁓ And then I spent a whole career looking at how technology was being applied in business as a business school professor. And of course, the role of technology in business has evolved in a significant manner the last three decades. When I started out, technology was largely a back office function. And today you can't think of almost any function, any role in the organization that doesn't actually have a very strong technological component to it. And now sort of as I have transitioned from 36 years of academic life, have now gone back to my technical roots. really working in a lot of technology startups, all focused on AI. And my next 10 years, they're really going to be focused on AI. So that's really in a sense what I, you know, my career sort of has taken a loop. And of course I've had the privilege of working in, you know, numerous good institutions like, for example, INSEAD in France, Cornell in New York, Oxford in the UK and so on. Now, what is interesting, and you mentioned Port-au-Lance Institute. This is a think tank that I co-founded back, think, in 2019, just for the pandemic in Washington, DC. And the name Port-au-Lance comes from the ancient maps of the sailors before the continents were discovered. So if you look at the maps, Port-au-Lance maps of many centuries ago, they were very vague representations of what the landmasses could look like. And we use that name or that name of the map to represent the Institute because in many ways, I believe we are discovering the boundaries of how technology is affecting our lives. We don't know it precisely. We have some sense of what is happening or what may happen. But I think the boundaries of those impacts and interactions are still being determined.
speaker-1: Amazing. I really like that because yeah, if you think about those maps and you look at ecosystems, whether that's an organization, whether that's academic, whether that's a country even, so much of them are, you know, what we understand of these kind of ecosystems is defined by what we think we know, but actually how much do these organizations know? So I think that's really interesting. So as part of the Portulans Institute, It's mainly kind of education and nonprofit, but what's really your mission and how have you found that over the last kind of six years, helping develop companies and organizations for digital transformation?
speaker-0: Yeah. So I think, you know, the motivation for setting up Port-au-L'Ars Institute many years ago, you know, back in the late 2019 was really to provide an independent forum in which multiple stakeholders could get engaged on discussing issues linked to development, linked to future competitiveness. And those issues really revolved in three major buckets around talent, people. around technology and around innovation, how you essentially combine, you know, people, technology to create the right innovation, ecosystems, innovation, society at large. And I think those three elements are very important with the fundamental progress of society, of well-being of people globally, and also for the core technological progress that we wish to see, you know, happen in corporations and governments worldwide. So Portulant Institute was really designed to support those areas of focus. And we have inside the Institute, three of the most important global indices in those areas. You mentioned the Global Innovation Index. I created that in 2007. You mentioned the Network Readiness Index on technology. I created that at the World Economic Forum at, I think, 2002. And the Global Talent Competitiveness Index is something that my colleague, Dr. Bruno Landwar created at INSEAD. and it runs through the Portland Institute and that was done I think about 10 years ago.
speaker-1: That's really interesting there. You mentioned the three things there, talent, the people, the technology and was it the kind of innovation, the real kind of heart of everything that think people are working towards today. How did you kind of land upon those three? Was that through research and ⁓ reaching out to find out what these tensions were?
speaker-0: innovation that you So, know, it started out with my background in technology. So I come from a pure computer science technology background. And when I entered a business school in Seattle was my first sort of ⁓ career stop. I really started looking at how technology was impacting businesses. And in the early nineties was really when internet was getting commercialized and entering the public arena. And so the network readiness index really emerged at the world economic forum where the with the forum put together a group of leaders to really try to understand how is technology impacting our lives, impacting development. You know, we were the first back in 2002 to actually include metrics linked to regulation, linked to the social environment, linked to political environment in the evaluation of technological impact. Today seems obvious, right? Today you say that's normal. But if you go back years, decades, You know, most of the focus in technology discussions was around bits and bytes and, you know, number of PCs and, you know, the bandwidths. it was very technical discussion. People hadn't really linked the technology to the broader social implications. And so I think we were the first to do that. So I think that was a very important contribution. Of course, today it's become part of the normal thinking around technology. And of course, the technology side then led me to start delving more into innovation because as I was visiting different countries, especially emerging markets, saw that there lot of innovation taking place on the basis of mobile phones, internet, innovation was happening not necessarily by PhDs and by citations and publications, but by common people adopting technologies to actually innovate. And that forced me to think about how do we define innovation appropriately in today's era? And that actually what led me to found the global innovation index in 2007, where the contribution essentially was to broaden the definition of innovation. that product or process innovation is not important. They still are very, very important, but to broaden it to a broader set of factors and environmental issues that actually affect innovation in a country. So for example, in the global innovation index, we of course do look at venture capital, but we also look at microfinance. We look at, for example, the you know, the market, let's say, finance options available for a company. But we also look at general infrastructure. You know, you can have a great company, but guess what? The roads and railways don't operate in the country. You can't take your products to market or you can't actually ship them globally. So there's a very complex interaction between the classical known technology innovation factors and also more general economic factors. And I think that is what the main contribution the global innovation index has been to broaden the discussion of the global innovations in arena. The WIPO and the United Nations adopted it ⁓ in 2011. And I think certainly helped the spread of that whole broadened definition of innovation. I think that has happened today again is commonly accepted. ⁓ Similar story in the talent side. The talent side, you know, was very much focused only on degrees and a number of enrolled students in various levels of education. But really, when we look at talent today, a number of other factors are becoming important. Let's say, for example, the latest report of the Global Talent Competence Index, looking at resilience. ⁓ How do you actually build resilient talent pools in an economy? And that is something which is very important, especially in today's world, where AI is really... Making us question, know, what is the set of jobs? is set of skills? What are the talent? Essentials that are required going forward in the future
speaker-1: I mean, I think it's so interesting and the word resilience there. And just to hark back what you said about what you were doing in 2002, which is talking about regulation of technology. you know, from people we've spoken to, AI has been, you know, bit of the Wild West again of regulation, where this is coming from, who's in control of what these algorithms are creating. And now we're seeing the desire for regulation in that. So it's interesting that you were doing that back in 2002 and then, you know, we've still got the same conversations happening today. I mean, I really, I think we can go quite deep into AI, but hitting on there with the resilience and the talent pools, what have you really found in terms of organizations that has, you know, that marrying the technology with the talent to create more, more kind of resilient ecosystems? there? Any solutions that you've stumbled upon or is it really?
speaker-0: would not go as far to say the solutions that are clearly evident but I think the basic challenge is very important to recognize first of all. know, historically the issues with or the challenges of governments or of corporations adopting technological innovations has rarely been with technology itself. The technology usually works or it ends up working in a couple of years from today. The challenges almost always have been organizational. you know, people related, process related, organization, inertia related and so on. And I always, when I teach executives or I interact with students, I always begin with a very simple two curves that I transpose, you know, just visually. One is a linear curve, you know, at this gradient, you can just say, you know, human capacity is increasing linearly. Today, if you look at a 22 year old graduate from a, you know, from a university, that person, you know, is much more informed of the world and much more able to do different things than what I was, know, when I was 22 at his or her age. So ⁓ our capability is increasing in a linear fashion. At the same time, you put an exponential curve, is what technologies trend is like. What you see is that for a long time, the difference between an exponential curve and a linear curve is not dramatic. There is some difference and know the difference is modest but then there is a tipping point at which the hockey stick sort of takes off you know the vertical part takes off and once you're in that vertical part the gap increases dramatically year by year and we are so you know if you look at Moore's law as being a rough approximation of computational capacity you know which basically said that it doubles every 18 months and that's been true for the last 70 or 60 years So microprocessors were invented roughly in the 50s, so 70 years roughly ⁓ from now to today. ⁓ So the hockey stick kicks off around 60 years from the Moore's law trend of exponential ⁓ progression. So what we have seen in the last 10 years has this hockey stick rising. And that's going to continue. There's no signs of that decreasing. if you look at, for example, not just silicon-based computing, but even quantum computing and other kinds of technologies that might arise in the future, all signals and signs are that exponential trend will keep on continuing. So the gap between what technology is capable of doing and what organizations are capable of absorbing is growing significantly every year. And that's where the challenge is and that's where the opportunity is because if you are a legacy organization struggling to keep up, Yeah, it's a big challenge. You know, it's a big challenge and most legacy organization at the same time You have small startups that are coming up That really are able to do a lot with a small number of people you know, I recently was interacting with a startup in Seattle and The startup had two founders and I asked them where's the rest of your team? You know, so you're doing you know startup where's the rest of your team and then they pull out a computer screen and they said look There are these 200 agents that are working with us and they were always software agents. Okay. So the software agents doing different tasks for them, whether it's marketing or whether it's in other kinds of HR issues and so on. So what I'm just trying to say is that this notion that how will organizations adopt that? And now today, if you go to a legacy organization and say, know, like, you know, we'll replace people that is a very negative image, you know, and that's a negative connotation that most people are not comfortable with. It's different if you're starting on scratch. If you're starting on scratch, then you're fine. But if you're actually looking at technology and how it's potentially replacing people, that causes us to reflect more deeply on how can we really turn that around into a positive story. Because there's one side of it is a negative story, replacing jobs and denying people opportunities. On the other side, if you look at it in positive way, You can also say that well looked in the world there are so many unmet needs of billions of people and how can we satisfy those needs? If you take for example even basic ⁓ domains like education or healthcare, I'm not talking about energy and other issues, everything, ⁓ the needs of billions are not being met today. And then you can ask the question how can we change our mindset to actually look at growth? So for me, the solution for AI and skills really is that, of course, you've got to give AI training, skills, education to people, not only make the organization AI ready, but actually change the scope of ambition of the organization to be in a hundred X, thousand X of what you're doing today. You know, I take examples, you take, for example, the elite universities, either in America or in UK or anywhere in the world. You know, most elite universities admit a few thousand students every year, you know. between 1000, typically in the IB league or, know, three, four, five thousand and other good schools. But the demand is incredibly high. So, you can ask the question, we always take pride in the fact that we talk with selectivity and I know we only admit one in X number of applications. ⁓ But somehow maybe our pride should come to the fact that maybe we are educating not one, but thousand. So what it means is that instead of taking 3000, why not take 3 million?
speaker-1: I'll put him
speaker-0: These are numbers that are scary. If you go to elite institution, the leadership of the institution including the alumni base are not prepared to deal with those numbers. Not only are the processes and the mindset not prepared for that, you'll have pushback interestingly from the alumni themselves because they will say, we were part of the elite group and we struggled to get in and now you're suddenly opening the floodgates to 30 million people. But if you take from a global perspective, it's a very important question of what is the responsibility of our institutions to do global good. And I think that's the discussion which hasn't really happened. if you just, for example, ⁓ keep your boundaries contained to what you've been used to and say, okay, we serve X number of patients, we serve X number of students, and we can of course use AI to improve that. And guess what? ⁓ makes you or technology makes you inherently typically more efficient in what you do. So it is natural that if you do it correctly, you will in fact lead less of the people. I mean, it's quite natural unless you actually grow your services and you say, OK, if while for the same group of people, I know I don't just provide the regular set of services, I provide an additional enhanced set. So growth is, I think, the key issue. Technology allows you to grow. and not just grow incrementally, grow exponentially. And the question is, are organizations able to change the mindset to grow exponentially? Because growth is risky. ⁓ If you suddenly, for example, tell a chief executive that now you form your plans, so that you're to increase your customer base by 100x. Most people would shy away from that because that's a high goal. And you know people don't like failures, right? You you set out a public goal and then you fail and that you know embarrassing for you and for the organizations so the Natural desire of individual is to go for incremental growth. Okay, i'll increase the 10 person 20 person whatever But technology now today allows you to go Exponentially increase thousand times increase hundred times increasing, you know even more That requires a different kind of mindset, different kind of courage.
speaker-1: I there's some really interesting things there where I think with these legacy organizations, changing that mindset of themselves, of their stakeholders, ⁓ their proposition that they've been doing for, it could be a hundred years, say the IOD, what they offer. Actually getting everyone on board with that is a really significant change. But do you see what you just talked about there as... That's the key to resilience. Is that the pathway to resilience? And also, one of the things we've also heard about is relevance. Can an organization remain relevant if they're not going to listen to this kind of exponential growth opportunities and kind of keep their head in the sand?
speaker-0: You know, that's a good question. And we have seen the churn in, for example, you know, whether you look at the biggest companies in America and UK and any other part of the world churn through much more rapidly. The churn in the largest most successful, if you take size and success as being one proxy of success, you know, the churn in the largest companies globally has been incredible. It's rising, you know, it's rising every year and in many sectors, including media, including, you know, many others. The biggest players today are not the traditional incumbents that were there 20 years ago. So that churn is happening and that churn will continue to happen. And that's where the challenge will remain, is that ⁓ there will be organizations that ⁓ will be unable to make the transition and there will be other organizations that will make the transition much more in agile fashion. And I think that's where leadership comes in. People often ask me the question, what is leadership in this world of AI and so on. And to some degree it is being aware of technology and having some basic technology skills. But I don't think that's the most important thing. In my view, is the most important thing is having the courage to make bold decisions that go for growth, exponential growth, ⁓ in a responsible fashion. Of course, you you don't want to do things irresponsibly and for the planet or elsewhere. But I think I think that is very, very hard, very because systems don't actually encourage encourage, you know, in a system situation where if you're in a public company or being monitored every quarter, you know, or if you're a classical organization, your position is there for four years or whatever X number of years your tenure is. It's not easy to encourage people, especially politicians, politicians who are subject to the ballot in the vote every X number of years to make those kind of bold decisions because typically those bold decisions take a number of years to play out. They don't happen in two, three years. So you typically need 10 years to see a bold decision play out. And the time frame is reducing, but still I think that's a thing which requires some courage to be able to make the right decision. And of course, like anything, you can make mistakes. So you can also have errors out there.
speaker-1: What's your experience when you joined the Oxford Business School at SAID? You're leading that, as we say, a legacy organization. How did you kind of confront those same issues there of making change within a finite space of time and also kind of making them aware of the tensions that perhaps they weren't aware of?
speaker-0: No, think, you know, I have faced similar challenges in my leadership roles in universities, both at Oxford and at Cornell University. And in both cases, I have actually tried to direct the organization the right way. So I'll give you one example from Cornell and one example in Oxford. And both, by the way, don't think, you know, I think universities everywhere, you know. are more conservative than private sector institutions and for good reasons. They have been successful many years and they have a lot of legacy and brand to protect out there. So at Cornell when I joined as a dean I noticed that education and business was being taught in multiple schools and there were somehow For legacy reasons, business education was being taught by different schools. And I made the proposition to the president to merge them into one college. And the reason was because I do believe scale is important. You know, if you're a small unit, it's everywhere in the university that doesn't actually portray the kind of scale and impact you have. Now I can tell you that is a very successful merger of three schools that I'd managed at Cornell, ⁓ successfully done in two years time, but it was. enormously challenging and painful. Because starting a new campus or a new school is much easier when you do it from ground up. It's a new thing. When you take three existing schools, there proud traditions, their own legacies, their own identity, even inside the university, at least in America, the individual schools have a much stronger identity than probably in other parts of the world. So when you have the identities and all getting merged, it was a very interesting challenge. But nevertheless, I proposed it, the president supported it and we actually implemented it. Okay, so it was successful and today the college exists and is successful.
speaker-1: You mentioned the opportunity there of when you bring them all together, as you say, it gives more awareness of what was the tension there? What was the challenge that you were trying to address by merging them together?
speaker-0: Now it was, you know, essentially legacy, you know, different schools. Even now today, if you go to a university, you find business education, not just contained at the business school. The medical school is doing some business education because when a business and medical science is coming together, the engineering school is doing business education, you know, because engineers that do entrepreneurship are the kind of thing. So you find business education entering into many different schools. And at Cornell, historically, which have very independent schools, It had grown into big programs, literally, big programs. So ⁓ Cornell individually wasn't seen as a major player in business unless you accumulated all of them together. So today Cornell is the third largest business school in America, which gives a certain kind of weight in terms of attracting faculty because what makes a school excellent is basically attracting the best students, attracting the best faculty. and building the say the right relationships with the corporation. That's essentially a simple sort of formula for excellence. So really skill gives you the ability to attract better faculty, better students and do that. So I think that's the reason why, and you see that already playing out today at Cornell. You asked Oxford, Oxford is a historic institution, a great, wonderful university, very proud legacy, but keep in mind the business education, the business school in Oxford is relatively new. And as we always said, it's a startup and an ancient university. When I joined only about 30 years old or 30 years young. And so I think the major challenge that I had and that I was focusing on was on trying to direct the school into the more mature sort of mold. When I say mature mold, a lot of the focus was on, for example, building of the research agenda much more in a stronger, more forceful fashion inside the university. Which of course is very much acceptance, controversial out there. Building out the whole fundraising component. Fundraising was very weak inside the school and you have to actually fundraise to be... So fundraising was a very important part of the changes that I proposed out there. And very important, I think this is very important, making connections to the rest of the university. Because when you look at Europe, because of course Oxford is in the Europe, well, quote unquote Europe and UK, and Cornell is in America. In America, most of the business schools are part of larger universities. So, you know, they're already embedded in universities, all the business schools, most major ones. In Europe, by contrast, most of the major business schools are independent. You look at INSEAD, you look at LBS, LBS is part of London, but still operates largely independently. You look at IMD, you look at... all of them are independent. So the uniqueness of Oxford really is you connect to the rest of the university. actually, know, the strength of the university. I really, know, and a large university, often happens is people are very busy doing their own stuff and they don't actually know what is happening, especially in a new part of the university. When I say new, mean, you know, the business school is still new inside the university. So part of my effort really was making more connection with the rest of the University and that's something which we did for example We should hold open days and which we invited the leaders from other parts university to come and see what the business school is doing But then we pushed innovative ⁓ Approaches like in digital learning the business school is a leader in online learning inside Oxford and you can probably imagine Oxford is not a place where online education is naturally welcome because it's a place where tutoring is the core of the heart of system. And tutoring has got us tremendous strengths, but guess what? In online education, you can actually reach a broader audience of people who cannot actually come to Oxford to benefit from the same traditional system. we pushed in innovative ways. We tried to actually, you know, professionalize the school along the lines of modern sort of top of state of the art, top business schools. And very important. I tried to put in the mindset of growth because the school is too small to have a global impact. So if you look at, for example, the side business school, ⁓ and I joined was roughly about one third the size of INSEAD, ⁓ roughly one third, one half, one half the size of, ⁓ London Business School. and roughly one fifth the size of the big American schools. So if you compare, for example, scale becomes important. If you take, for example, finance, know, the side business school might have, you know, 12 to 15 great faculty in finance, wonderful faculty in finance. You go to Columbia University in New York, Columbia has 60 faculty in finance, maybe even higher today. So what you have is, you know, you have 15 great faculty, but guess what? If you have 60 great faculty, the finance department can do more, can offer more courses, is more attractive to finance companies, like to work with you. So it's not that scale is everything. Of course it is not having too much of the wrong kind of people also not good. But if you have the right people, assumption of right people, scale is very important. So I think, you know, when I was there, it grew the school by about 30 % in three years, which is fairly significant in Oxford terms. it is something, actually the growth in revenue terms is almost close to 50%, 40, 50%. But in faculty terms of 30%. But in Oxford, the constraints and growth. The university doesn't allow you to grow as freely as one might in another situation. Because university constrains the number of students you can take and so on. So what I'm saying is that you try to... build on the excellence in the university and you try to make it even better in the business domain by forcing the system to change in the direction that is right.
speaker-1: Yes, yeah, and it's so relatable to other stakeholder-led organizations out there that aren't academic, but still facing, we hear in member organizations all the time of they're fighting losing membership. But if you turn that tension into an opportunity, it's ⁓ okay, ⁓ how can you compete with the larger organizations? As you said, Oxford compared to the big American universities, if size and scope is... is a massive tension and the value offering is Oxford, it's prestigious, it's legacy. But if you can offer both of those things and be growing, yeah, it's definitely a...
speaker-0: Keep in mind, Oxford as a university is huge as universities compares very well to the best and the size-wise. the business school is a... Yeah. And if you look at the departments where Oxford traditionally is very strong, let's say if it's a classic, so in philosophy, and you compare the department size and the kind of faculty they have in those departments to the other top American schools, Oxford is far bigger than the biggest American schools in those. So I think having a critical size of faculty is very important for elite business school that are research focused.
speaker-1: ⁓ But I suppose it comes back to what you were saying earlier with the changing dynamics, know, what technology and business was back in the 90s compared to now. And it's the same with the automotive industry. Was electric a big part? You know, was being talked about probably back then, but nowadays, you know, everything is mobility rather than, you know, gas-powered, cylindrical engines. And yeah, so I think it's, and this comes to a really interesting thing that I think the Porsche lands. Portulence Institute focuses on, is that kind of community learning. You've been talking there a lot about siloed business schools, the different parts of Cornell that aren't speaking to each other. What is it that drives you to that kind of cross-sector community knowledge sharing? Why do you think that's so important nowadays to face these types of tensions, whether that's ⁓ AI, whether that's capacity, or whether that's the scale of change in terms of new generations coming into the... the mix in business.
speaker-0: You know, I guess it started out early on for me because when I was doing my graduate studies in computer science at Berkeley, I was interested in learning about other fields. So I started taking courses in the business school. ⁓ I liked what I was doing and essentially ended up getting a master's degree in business at the same time as a PhD in computer science. And then it wasn't planned, but I ended up by accident joining a business school. in Seattle, my first job. Again, I didn't plan to spend my whole career in a business school and that's what I ended up doing. You know, so it should ask me back in when I was graduating as a student, I was set out, of course, been in a computer science department. My career really has been at that integration of technology and business. And of course, what has happened is I got involved pretty early on in 2002 with the World Economic Forum, the technology index at this technology industry, which are really at a national level. So looking at how do nations put in place the policies for, you know, leveraging technology in the right way. Again, I didn't have a background in public policy. I didn't do public policy, but that sort of, the serendipity out there in terms of coming in contact with leaders at the World Atomic Forum at dealing with governments and discussing the index. Because many governments would come and talk to us and say, how come our country is not doing well? How can we improve? So what happened is I sort of got into discussions, not just at the corporate level with the business school domain, but also leaders and governments who were doing at a national level. So what I'm just trying to say is that somehow fate took me on a journey on a path that made me cross boundaries, a between technology and business or between corporation and the nations, the national governments. And I guess that is what, you know, piqued my interest and made me look at multiple things. Because obviously, if you look at our national level, you see many other different issues than what you see at a business level. And at a business level, you see many of the issues. And if you see on the technology level, you know, if you just look at building a next foundational model in AI, you are focused on one set of technical issues and metrics and algorithms. Looking at actually applying LLMs in a corporation. Looking at a whole different set of issues about, you know, integrity and trust and, know, and making sure it's all fitted in well with the processes. You're looking at it at the national level, looking at, you know, a whole set of issues of, you know, sovereignty and, you know, how do you actually maintain, you know, national independence and so on. Lots of different issues. So what I'm just trying to say is that these issues happen to arise in front of me quite naturally given the path I was following. And that has made me always very interested in these kinds of, you know, across disciplinary issues. So, another thing that I didn't mention about is I also started companies, I worked in companies, startups, and I like doing that because that gives a different perspective too. So it's a combination of perspective that really makes you, think, know, makes you, know, if you're curious, you learn from every single interaction, every single sort of situation, even if it's positive or negative.
speaker-1: Absolutely. And just before we wrap up, I really want to kind of just pick your brains about the indexes you've worked on, because I think they're so valuable in terms of stakeholder-led organizations. You know, we see them used, as you said, the World Economic Forum, we hear about them used in terms of countries and, you know, that kind of ⁓ nation focus. What do you think the benefits are in terms of, using that type of index approach for organizations. I suppose it's an assessment idea, isn't it? But that kind of ability to know your full picture, your full ecosystem and how that can help kind of build more resilient organizations going forward in same way that you've done.
speaker-0: Yeah, so it's a good question you're asking. Thank you. So, you know, there's a saying in management that says, what does not get measured does not get managed. And I think it's true, you know. ⁓ If you want to focus on something and make progress in that area, you typically have to understand it and you have to measure it and you have to, you know, improve it in a way in which you want to. ⁓ So what are the benefits of index? think the two benefits. ⁓ If you take a broader theme like innovation or like ⁓ technology today, you know, it's very hard for a decision leader to actually understand what are the levers to pull. ⁓ Traditionally, for example, in a technology discussion, most governments were focused on selling the one They would say, okay, the telecoms ministry would give out licenses and would sell spectrum, you know, because that's an asset they control and they could actually, you know, hand out. It did not realize, they did not fully realize that actually to get the benefits of technology, the country needed to do a whole bunch of other different things, whether it's, you know, focus in education, focusing on, you know, It's focusing on companies and focus innovation clusters or whatever. So what these frameworks do is they give you a mental model to even form a map. Going back to the Port-au-Lun's concept, if you're trying to navigate the world, you know what the map is. You don't know the boundaries are. So if you look at innovation and you put yourself in the shoes of a national leader, doesn't matter which country. And you say, well, I have to actually make my country more innovative. Okay. Or I have to make my company may our country make better use of technology. You need to have some con some map of, know, what you're trying to address and then have some controls and what are you trying to direct your country or your company towards. So the frameworks behind these models are very important because they give you the map. And then the measures give you. how you're performing. Now, if you actually are measuring multiple countries or multiple companies, then you can also compare your performance to others because people like that. People like comparing. It's a natural human tendency. And the benefit of comparison is not just, you know, being jealous of someone else, but much more understanding why is it that this country or this company is doing better and what can I learn from it? So, I think these indices are often criticized because people say they're incomplete. Of course, incomplete. don't cover the whole thing. People say they're not rigorous. Yes, because the data is very difficult to get. It's very hard to collect data for 130 countries. So you can poke holes in many of the indices and all those arguments are correct from a strict academic perspective. But at the same time, for the decision makers, They're incredibly useful. can tell you that myself from having spoken to, you know, dozens and dozens of national leaders around the world. They're incredibly useful. And today, for example, more than 110 countries around the world actively use and base a national policy discussions on innovation around the global innovation index. So they actually, you know, form their targets around the index and the framework of the index. And then they say, how are we doing on this and so on and so forth. So you know that gives you a frame of action and of you know progress that is very important. I think so
speaker-1: Again, it's bringing those ideas in, getting everyone to think about things differently, think about things that maybe aren't necessarily just there day to day and look at the bigger picture. I think absolutely. So Mitra, I know we've to let you go, but really just looking at the future, I'd really just like to hear short, simple answer of, we've talked about a lot of things, that's AI, whether that's universities at the top and at the bottom and all these different things impacting us today. Looking ahead, are you optimistic or cautious about how organizations will navigate these next decade of change as we hit another advent of, AI is not even new anymore, but a new level of technology.
speaker-0: So I would say I'm very optimistic, ⁓ mainly because I think we're entering an era of abundance.
speaker-1: ⁓
speaker-0: Abundance of what? Abundance of basically knowledge. Knowledge, if it's applied correctly, can lead to good benefits. So I think ⁓ with AI, with the growth of knowledge, with the growth of technology, ⁓ the abundance that we are having around us potentially in knowledge is incredible. Imagine if today you have in a research lab, maybe 200 scientists and imagine what you could do with 2,000. or 200,000 scientists and that is something which will be feasible in the not too distant future. So I think you have abundant knowledge. The challenge for us will be as society or as individually, how do we apply that knowledge and how do we ⁓ ensure that we don't misapply it or the applications are not sometimes misused. or we do not do enough to protect human dignity. let's say, in terms of ⁓ overall, I'm very optimistic in terms of what is possible. Where I'm a little bit hesitant to have the same level of optimism as whether we can be responsible enough to make the right decisions. And this is where I think, you you have a lot of challenges in global governance, lot of challenges in, you know, individual choices you make as society or as a community. It's like, you know, if you think about it, part of the reason, you know, we haven't had a nuclear war is because the nuclear powers got together some decades ago and decided that, okay, we should not have a nuclear war because... can be very bad. ⁓ There is no such similar governance happening towards AI right now. In fact, the two major superpowers essentially are diverging, so they're going in their own paths. Similarly, I think there's no proper discussion happening about how do we handle people and the impact on people. And somehow the...
speaker-1: Yeah.
speaker-0: Measurements that they're using right now of stock prices and you know and quarterly benefits and all that is all being directed towards I Would say outcomes that are not favorable people You know when when when people are getting eliminated from companies it's trading a Perception and a reality that the outcome is not a positive one, you know, and and and and I have seen it I have many friends Who have lost their jobs who are very well qualified in the best schools and It is tough for them very tough for them especially then the 30s and 40s, you know, you are at your prime and to lose your You know at least for some time, you know the possibilities of having a good career and because your identity into this society is so much tied to your career But there's right or wrong, there's a different issue, but at least that's the reality for many people. So how do you handle that? I think that's something that we haven't sorted out. Even today, if look at the accounting methods that I use for rewarding companies and stock prices, favor investments in technology over favor investments in people. Technology can amortize, it can depreciate, you can do other kinds of accounting tricks, and that makes it cheaper for you in the end. I think that's where I'm a little skeptical about whether we will collectively be able to make the right decision. But you know what, at the end of the day, you have to be optimistic. So I think the opportunities are huge. So I hope that we will individually collectively make the most of them in the positive way.
speaker-1: Absolutely. And that's why we're bringing people together to talk and to really focus on these types of conversations. And comes right back to what we said at the beginning, which is the people, the talent, the technology, what we're using to push forward those talent and the innovation to help us keep driving forward rather than just stop in the 90s. So I think it all comes together. And thank you so much for your time today, Professor Dattori. There's so many more topics we could go into.
speaker-0: Thank you very much. Pleasure.
