RIYADH: While close to 94 percent of so-called deep technology firms are signed up to Sustainable Development Goals designed to boost education and innovation, there is still need to do more, according to a leading European politician.
Speaking during the “Rewriting the global Resilience” panel at the World Economic Forum, Mariya Gabriel – the European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth – warned that despite the huge uptake in this area, companies still needed to view education spending as an investment, not a cost.
She also stressed the importance of accelerating procedures and continuing to invest in building an ecosystem that connects with local innovation.
‘Deep Tech’ focuses on tackling sizeable scientific or engineering challenges, and can be both start-up firms or present in the research and development divisions of established companies.
“The main challenge now really is to see investment in education not as a cost but as a real investment because behind all these good companies, good innovations, brilliant examples, we have brilliant people with the necessary skills and competencies,” Gabriel explained.
Looking through a resilience driven lens, she added that it is also important to not only produce technologies or prototypes but to see how those technologies can build and propel resilience.
Also speaking at the same panel, Egypt’s Minister of International Cooperation of Government Rania Al-Mashat stressed the importance of collective collaboration between the government and the private sector when it comes to building resilience.
“It's not just a government being resilient without the private sector being resilient, it’s really a collective action because, at the end of the day, we’ve seen that crises when they happen it’s the financial crisis that affects everyone. If it’s a crisis where the private sector and banks are involved, then again it affects growth and it affects governments and so forth,” the minister highlighted.
That said, the private sector should and must be aware of the Nationally Determined Contributions on as well as bigger plans and goals, she added.
“Governments today are putting out development projects which include private-public partnerships and are trying to catalyze the private sector,” Al-Mashat emphasized.
Also present at the panel, Robin Vince, CEO of American corporate investment banking company BNY Mellon, spoke on how being resilient is actually a commercial endeavor.
“Economies around the world rely on the financial sector to be resilient to be able to weather downturns in the general state of the economy,” Vince said.
According to the CEO, the eight biggest banking institutions in the US alone added $500 billion worth of capital to their balance sheets since the financial crisis as an investment in resilience.
Launched in 1971, the World Economic Forum is an international non-governmental and lobbying organization committed to improving the state of the world.
