First and foremost, I give my great appreciation for Kerala.   You are a progressive state, you’re doing many interesting things. The interesting thing now is that the digital world, the virtual world is becoming universal. Even in agriculture, even if you don’t know how to read and write, you can still use mobile phone.
What does it mean to have digital skill?  Do we do it through school or through otherwise? How do we do it is a very interesting challenge. In other words, our people who are in agriculture, they can do digital agriculture. So is digital manufacturing and digital services. So, the skills, the reskilling, the upscaling issue is a serious one.
I just want to tell you that in South Africa, I have been running Technology venture creation course this semester, and I did it virtually. I formed the students into groups, they have created certain new venture startups. Also, I suggested them not work on the previous activities, but on the new ones. In other words, the sustainable Development, the green ones. Be innovators, inventors, creators of venture, create the startups, and things like that.
And then the idea is, I don’t want the students to just get grades. By writing papers, I want them to do something practical. In other words, they produce some venture. I must tell you what one of the groups did.  The initial seed capital they needed was not available. Sometimes if they don’t get, they used to get some support from my networks. But you know what they did.? They sold their cars and started building their own venture startups. Can you imagine something like that is happening now?
So, an interesting time is on us. So, what I’d like to do is that even the courses we are developing now, we’re thinking of making it global virtually because when we did it virtually, it is possible that the whole world can join our courses. So, I’m now thinking how I can motivate my university to see if we could make it next time.  So that all of you could get involved. So, I like some collaboration, very genuine collaboration, where all our students if they’re all engineering students and they’re all interesting students, and they’re all motivated, and I like us to develop some news skills, and it is where we collaborate. And I think Kerala can come into this picture and I think we could do that. The other interesting thing is what our Professor Charles Edquist said, the concept of holistic Innovation system. I’m not interested in national innovation system since in the digital world, there’s no boundary, boundaries are finished!.  As humans are becoming machines, machine learning is more important.
All activities are changing and the work world is also changing. The speakers also put it how many new jobs are created that is digital. Things are different for the physical world and the physical work, what we used to do are changing dramatically. Our classrooms are changing, what would be very interesting now is the innovation system should be developed more with the theory of unassigned.
And there is loss of jobs from our young people, we must be careful because if you lose jobs, unemployment comes, poverty comes and inequality comes, it means danger comes. For people many risk comes like environmental challenges, many things. So to avoid it, we need to rethink, unthink innovation system by using what I really like what Charles Edquist said, the concept of holistic innovation system. I prefer to call it differently. The social innovator.
Let’s get a few more names. Earlier we used to have regional and local innovation systems etc. Let’s move from geography to the social world, the unified world. The validation criteria should not be economics, economics for profit alone is not good. What does it do? When you create some job, you lose some job you create sociological loss. We must make a win-win link.  Some new approach, some new vision, some new idea.
I must tell you, I call Kerala my homeland I must say that from all the progressive things you have been doing. Can I just challenge you now? Now with this digital knowledge economy, you create a new innovation system. The new concept, the holistic one, the social one, the social innovation system, not the local Kerala innovation system or anything like that, or Indian innovation system. Let’s move towards that. Let’s change.  I’m saying to rethink. Unthink to rethink, unlearn to relearn, un-engineer to reengineer, un-science to re-science and un-economics to re-economics. So, we’re in a new world.  Going for the new world. Kerala, Thank you so much. Thank you, all of you.