Embassy of the United States

Remarks by Ambassador Nancy McEldowney

as prepared for delivery

Microsoft Innovation Day
Sofia, Bulgaria, March 11, 2009

It is great to be here and I was confiding with some colleagues as I walked into this room that it is wonderful to be here. I feel very much at home in a university setting and part of the reason for that is that I, like you, spent a lot of my early life in universities getting undergraduate and then graduate degrees. I want to make sure that you all know that there is a graduate of this university sitting here on this panel and I mention that both because he is a wonderful person but also because for the students in this room as you think about your education what you’re working on now and where it’s going to lead you in the future being the senior representative of Microsoft in Bulgaria is not a bad outcome. 

I would like to begin by doing something that I think is very important and that is saying a very proud and very positive word about Microsoft.  The name of this company, when you hear that name – Microsoft and when you hear the name of Microsoft’s truly visionary founder Bill Gates immediately into your mind come the concepts of positive transformation and of creative advancement.  The projects that have been launched here today – both the Center for Innovative Education and the BizSpark program which you can see just outside of these doors - which is designed to support people just like you, people who are trying to set up IT entrepreneurial programs – these are perfect examples of what Microsoft and Gates are all about.  Both of these programs are designed to open access to sophisticated IT tools as well as to communities of practice -- peers and network partners throughout this country and around the world – which can share ideas and help you spur your own creativity.  By opening this kind of access, Microsoft is doing a very important thing - it is opening minds and it is opening the world.  And when the students at this University use this access to meet the challenge of this year’s Microsoft Imagine Cup, the challenge to imagine a world without hunger, or poverty, or disease and then to use technology to develop solutions for those problems, to make that dream of a world a reality – you have the potential to shape the future for all of us.  That is enormous power and I believe quite literally that through what it has done today Microsoft is placing that power in your hands. 

Doing so, launching these programs, supporting this University, supporting the people in this room, I believe Microsoft is embodying the very finest traditions of its enduring commitment to help Bulgaria achieve its fullest potential, just as the Gates Foundation is committed to helping make the world a better place.  And that’s why I am here because I wanted to be a part of it and I wanted to provide my strongest and most enthusiastic endorsement of what is happening here. 

But I would also like to take a brief moment to talk a bit about the broader context in which we find ourselves. I need to start by talking about where we are today. Each of you woke up this morning and either clicked online and read the news or picked up a paper newspaper and read it and you saw the headlines and they were all about the global economic crisis.  This crisis is not just driving headlines, but it is also devouring government budgets, and redefining corporate bottom lines, corporate imperatives.  Here in Bulgaria, the crisis comes on the heels of a transition that has lasted for two decades and that has placed an exceptionally heavy burden on the people of this country.  I remember what it was like when I was sitting where you are sitting two decades ago and I remember the crisis that we were facing at that time. And with so many things coming down on you simultaneously it is easy to try to tune some of them out, to feel overwhelmed and that it’s too much all at once.  While that is understandable, it is something that we have to resist and instead, what we have to do is to seize the opportunity, to use innovation, to use the tools that have been provided to you today and through your education to emerge from this crisis and from Bulgaria’s still ongoing transition in a way that is stronger and smarter and more successful. 

In my judgment there is absolutely no question that innovation is the key to addressing the challenges that we face today.  But innovation is not simply designing a solution to a problem.  You know this already but many people do not understand that innovation is truly a holistic approach to our world and the role that we play within it.  Let me take you back from today to a time earlier in our development  - from the moment when early man first picked up a stone and fashioned a tool, to the invention of things like the light bulb, the telephone and the combustion engine, to what we are doing today in research on stem cells and the creation of life in vitro, life in a test tube, each of these is a perfect example of  innovation and how innovation has defined what it means to be human and how  we live on this planet. 

In simplest terms, what many of you all have already defined, innovation is the process of turning knowledge and ideas into value.  The organic nature of innovation – the inherent quality of this as a developmental process in which one idea drives another – requires that we work together to create what I call and what others have used the term of an “ecology of innovation.”  Governments, business, and society need to work together to create and sustain this kind of ecology of innovation, to create the conditions that will spark curiosity, that will foster creativity, and that will accelerate the concrete applications of new ideas to existing problems.

Another word which I like to use for this ecology of innovation is incubator – we need to make our economies, our societies, and our political structures incubators that can hatch and bring to life better solutions and better outcomes.

A key component of this innovation ecology of creating this kind of incubator is what Microsoft has done here today, and what it does every day in developing its Bulgarian employees.  Providing tools and training and essential human development, this corporation has been a role model for what all corporations need to do in positioning themselves in the countries they operate within for greater success. 

But in addition to corporate contributions, there must also be government action.  And that’s the harder part. Now, when I say the word government action I want to be very clear about what I am NOT talking about. And I’m not talking about the traditional kind of government action that you and I have come familiar with of more bureaucracy and more obstacles.  I’m talking about just the opposite.  Governments all our governments need to make innovation THE national priority and then PROVE their commitment to achieving this priority.  Here in Bulgaria, that kind of concrete proof that I’m talking about should come in four forms:

First and perhaps most importantly is ironclad protection for intellectual property rights.  Why should anyone in this room or elsewhere bother to try to market a new idea if you know that that new idea can be stolen by someone else?  It is critical that Bulgaria place itself on the cutting edge of IPR enforcement, so that the government works together with industry to protect intellectual property and to shutdown piracy, especially internet piracy which has reached such staggering proportions. 

And as each one of you think about what you’re going to design what projects you’re going to take on and the value that your knowledge is going to bring to your life and to your society this kind of IPR protection will either ensure your success or its absence will ensure failure.

Second, the government needs to invest substantially more in research and development in your research and development the work that’s underway at this university and elsewhere throughout the country, in the Academy of Sciences, and at other universities. According to what are called the Lisbon Goals from the European Union, Bulgaria is supposed to increase its spending by 600 percent if it is to comply with the EU mandate to devote 3 percent of GDP to research and development by the year 2013.  That is a tall order, and it is going to take time to implement, and it’s not going to be easy.  But the government can start right now, it can start immediately with incremental increases in research funding and it can get much more benefit from the money that it is currently spending by seeking input from private industry and from people like you about research that’s underway and solutions that are needed most urgently. 

Third, the government has in its hand immense power via its public procurement contracts and the government can use that immense power to shape the quality of products that are delivered to market and quality of services that are delivered to society.  It is critical that the government use its stewardship of public procurement resources to stimulate innovation and economic growth by reaching for cutting edge technologies rather than propping up outdated and outmoded structures.  More transparent and more integral oversight of public procurement with an explicit package of incentives to promote innovative products and services is really essential. 

But fourth and finally, what I would argue and what I advocate for here in this country with the government is for Bulgaria to open its doors – literally and figuratively.  Because aggressive and completely transparent policies designed to attract investment and ideas from beyond Bulgaria’s borders – this is the way to bring the kind of diversity and vitality that are essential to an innovation incubator.  So that instead of battling bureaucracy, instead of battling corruption, both you and foreign and multinational companies should be able to find this economy as one of the easiest to work in any in the region.  And foreign workers, your friends from other countries, people from around this region who have a new idea who want to start a new company or want to start a new life, they should be drawn here by the magnets of opportunity and encouragement.   Bulgaria has a tremendous advantage in its strategic location, but it should make itself not just a geographic hub but also a center of economic vitality and flexibility.

These four steps, they are not perfect, they are not the totality of a solution but if they are taken, and taken together, they could represent really significant progress.  They could take this country forward in ways that you understand it needs to go. Once the government working together with private industry, working together with educational institutions like this university, once it has done these things  then it should, if I may use an American expression,  it should get out of the way and the reason it should get out of the way once it has taken those steps is so that individual creativity can blossom and that’s where each one of you  come in.

 Because the other indispensible component, the true core of innovation is the individual.  The students in this room and people just like you all over the world, you are the true core, you are the engine of innovation.  As researchers and entrepreneurs and consumers of new ideas, you are the people who are going to set the pace and drive the standards of what happens next.  And to put it very frankly the limits of your imagination are the things that are going to define the parameters of our world in the future. And these things like your courage, your intellectual courage, your willingness to take risks and sometimes to fail, your discipline in implementing your ideas, your vision for the future, and your passion for success –these are the things that in the final analysis are going to be the most decisive factors.  You’ve already made a tremendous start with your education here at this university, and the programs that we are launching today will also take you one big step forward. So those are two enormous advantages that you have in your favor.  

But I’d like to urge you to do one more thing that will also help you as a final request to you.  I want to share a very heartfelt and a very genuine hope that you will refuse to accept the status quo that you will refuse to accept the world and your country as you find them now. And instead, do what is behind the driving force, behind the Imagine Cup, behind everything that you’re working on which is to dream about, imagine a better solution, a better way, a better world and then dedicate yourselves to making those imagined things a reality. Because that after all is what innovation is really about.

Thank you very much.