The Three I's of Emerging Innovation Ecosystems: Infrastructure, Innovators, Investors

Benjamin Glenn  0:00  
Thank you, Scott for the three day wedding reception for the med tech industry that's Scott an LSI man every single year. And you know, Scott is absolutely right, you know, the, we're going to be talking about ecosystem. And I think trying to unpack that a little bit. And I think Scott helps us bring together a lot of the other pieces that are not really in your day to day I, you know, in my work with Stanford Biodesign and most of the technical founders I worked with, were really on the front end of the train. But I think as you look around the panels that Scott puts together, and you see the people that are here, you really get to see the entire swath of what goes on to get a product, you know, to go from ideas to idea into products, products that enter markets. And then once you're in a market, there's a whole lot of people here will tell you how to scale. So when I look at ecosystem, I think about it from that level, but then I also see it on a much larger level, that if you think about a landscape painting, where are you what's the whole panoply that's out there, and then there's individual portraits within that the the people that you work with your vendors, your suppliers, that physicians you serve, even the patients or hospital systems, but then down even lower than that much more intimate is the polaroid I like it a little snapshot. And as a gag some of you might have seen it, I brought a Keith Haring Polaroid camera, love Keith Haring, and, you know, if you just even holding a Polaroid camera, people will laugh immediately. I thought it was interesting at the Stanford D school that even though these are some of the most advanced students, and they're doing incredibly crazy, hardcore technology, when they take their teen pictures on a digital camera, they print it out in the format of the Polaroid. And they take a Sharpie, and they write their names on the bottom, just like they did with a Polaroid before many of these kids are ever even born. So I think it's it's very much fun to bring in that idea of prototyping. And for myself, just that prototype, none of those pictures came out. I even went out later last night a little bit earlier. So trying to get it's exactly like prototyping, just trying to get some of my friends together. Let's get one good picture. We tried to take a picture last night, it just never came in. And that happens too. But all those things happen. You know, the big picture, the little tiny prototype snapshots you try to take all of that takes place inside of your ecosystem? How big is it? How diverse is it? Do you have people, friends, relationships, colleagues, they're in all those other areas. Those are some of the things that we're going to explore here. So we've got three examples, I'm going to have my friends introduce themselves. But we've got three examples here of different systems at different times. And then a lot of it and the work I'm doing right now with all of them, trying to bring that deepening of relationship. So right now I'm gonna turn it over to Sue. And let her tell us about a little tiny project that she ran back in Massachusetts. So

Susan Windham-Bannister  2:49  
thanks. And good morning, everyone. I'm really happy to be part of the conversation. And I'll say really quickly, I'm from the generation when those Polaroids weren't that was really an innovative thing, so I'm glad to see them making. I'm Sue Windham-Bannister, a recent transplant to California from Boston, spent the first half of my career working with companies on their go to market strategies and helped launch a number of blockbusters. And then the second half of my career started when I got a call from Governor Deval Patrick, to ask if I would stand up and lead the initiative in Massachusetts, to transform ourselves from a research hub to a real innovation ecosystem. So let me just say a little bit about that at a at a very high level of spins that and then I'm really looking forward to this conversation. One of the most important points that I hope you'll take away from my comments this morning, is that the innovation ecosystem that you see in Massachusetts now, was not always there. All of those pieces, all of those resources, were not there. And our ecosystem did not evolve organically in a way that say the bay area has. What you see in Massachusetts now was really the result of intentional and strategic investment by a public private partnership that was initiated in 2008. It's a 15 year, $1.5 billion investment to really make Massachusetts an innovation hub, not just a great research center, but where we translate and develop and commercialize new technology in Massachusetts. The secret sauce for making that happen, is a highly collaborative ecosystem. And I want to show really quickly, many of us talk about an ecosystem. But what we're really talking about is a cluster. And we had a cluster in Massachusetts, we had, you know, our academic institutions and, and the like we had a fledgling biotech industry. But as someone said to me, a lot of smart people, we don't play well in the sandbox together. And so the real difference, and what we worked very hard on in Massachusetts with our investments is to transform the cluster, which is a collection of your assets. If you're counting, if you're talking about we have this many of that, this many of this, you're talking about a cluster. But in an ecosystem, all of those resources, all of those members work together. They work well, individually. They work well, collaboratively. And it's really through the ecosystem that you generate the leverage on the cluster. So as I like to say, 1+1 equals 11. Why does an ecosystem matter? It's because the resources, the support systems, the people, the infrastructure, the investors are available. They're working together, as I said, they're creating leverage. And they're building that platform of support and resources that the life sciences, it out, lifecycle needs from discovery all the way through development. Again, as I said, a cluster does not always organically become an ecosystem. There are five A's. And you can see them here very quickly, having a shared aspiration, vision, advocating and publicizing, advisory and mentoring resources participate. It's not just the scientists. It's not just the investors, it's the alignment of the stakeholders, competencies and value proposition and their incentives. There's a value exchange as a reason to be part of the ecosystem. So I'm looking forward to the conversation today, learning from my colleagues, and just sharing with you in a bit more detail how we did what we did in Massachusetts. Thanks,

Benjamin Glenn  6:51  
Tiff, you want to tell us what's going on in Philadelphia?

Tiffany Wilson  6:54  
Yeah, yeah. So hi, everyone. I'm Tiff Wilson. I'm the president/CEO of the University City science center based in Philadelphia. So for context, you know, a little bit about my background, if you would ask me 20 years ago, would I be leading a nonprofit working closely with universities and healthcare systems in Philadelphia? And like, why would I ever want to do that. And so it kind of really leads to the importance of Sue's comments around the importance of ecosystem. So I spent the first part of my career in consulting and investment banking, and got involved in raising money for a tissue engineering company out of Boston, 20 years ago, joining the management team of that company, spent a decade into that company and another med tech company, living every single challenge that one faces on their pathway from concept to patient, and about 10 years ago, had the privilege of building to operationalize the Global Center for Medical Innovation in Atlanta, Georgia. And so when I read about the concept of a place that could help bring together the ecosystem, all the assets there, all the infrastructure is there. But you really needed someone to bring that together, I got it because had I had access to something like that when I was in DC, 10 years prior to that, it would have been a game changer in terms of speed to market. And so this was, that was my kind of entry into this weird world that I call the innovation, entrepreneurship and talent, and the the weirdness of bringing all these things together, but the importance of it to really help early stage companies get to where they need to be, and which is having an impact on patients lives. And so I've been at the Science Center for 18 months now I joined in October 2020. And that's a whole nother panel on how to join a new organization in a new city during a global pandemic. But the Science Center, what's inspiring to me about it, what really drew me to Philadelphia, is the Science Center has been around for 60 years. It is the oldest Urban Research Technology Park in the country. We're located in, in university city, West Philadelphia. And what's inspiring to me is that we have 31 shareholders. And so for those of you who are familiar with working with universities and healthcare systems, they don't always get along so much.

Benjamin Glenn  9:34  
No, they don't. Oh, that's shocking.

Tiffany Wilson  9:38  
But somehow, you know, these organizations have agreed that there's the importance of a innovation intermediary. You know, when we started off as a real estate play, to really build out lab space to house life science companies spinning out of Penn and Drexel, and Jefferson, Temple, and all organizations around us, that have really evolved into, you know, we've got the real estate and that that asset base, which is wonderful as a nonprofit, but we've developed a series of programs around four key pillars. And so those are really, you know, how do we help early stage companies commercialize their technologies and move from a prototype to first product, generate first revenue, raise first capital, hire first employees. The Science Center has built some tremendous work around STEM education and workforce development. So we have a program called firsthand where we bring middle school and high school students in underserved schools into the science center during the school day, where they work in a dedicated lab. And they're mentored by scientists that reside on our campus in all these cell and gene therapy companies, biotech companies, technology companies, and it's just wonderful to see. And then we've got a workforce development program engages with adults with a high school diploma or GED in West Philadelphia to really provide the technical training needed to go and work in the technical jobs and all of these industries that are growing. We were a convener. So we have, we're the venture Cafe partner. In Philadelphia, we have a mini conference every Thursday from 3 to 8, and have continued that through the pandemic, to really bring people together to inspire action. And then finally, we have a new pillar as part of the the strategic plan that I put together last year around capital. And so really, how do we address some of these, particularly in the emerging med tech, space, seed and series, a capital for medical device and healthcare technology. So we're just about to kick that fun off, that I'm excited about the path forward.

Benjamin Glenn  11:59  
Thank you, Tiff. So now, magically, without traffic or having to change planes, we're gonna land in Los Angeles, Jennifer is going to tell us about Westwood and the UCLA, UCLA health system, which has been taking a leading role in bringing the biodesign principles into the UC Health System. So Jennifer, tell us more about that.

Jennifer McCaney  12:22  
Thank you, Ben. And of course

Benjamin Glenn  12:24  
There's five hospitals there? No, wait, six.

Jennifer McCaney  12:27  
Still four, but we are number three in the news. You know, I'm just excited to be here today with Sue and Tiff, and Ben, I, myself am a Boston native. So I'm a Los Angeles transplant. And the first thing I thought when I got here, how are we going to turn a cluster into an ecosystem when we have two basketball teams in the same town, and people can't even decide which one they're, they're they're rooting for. So I think, you know, it's really you Los Angeles as a unique region. And certainly thank you to Scott and the LSI team for bringing this conference to our backyard, because I think it's so fantastic to see all the investors see all the strategics see the entrepreneurs coming here to convene, like Ted said, and really help to build up that ecosystem from a global lens. Really what we're seeing here this week, one of the things that I that is unique about UCLA is that we're sitting in Southern California. So in Southern California, in the Los Angeles region, we produce more PhDs. So we've got Caltech that produces the most number of PhDs in the country. UCLA ranks number one for startups among universities grow globally based on university derived IP. And so we have some very unique assets. And of course, you couple that with the creative underpinnings of the entertainment and media industry, that are often considered sort of the hallmarks when we think about Hollywood, right, so we think about Los Angeles. And what we've seen most recently is Los Angeles actually ranked number four in the nation for health tech, because of those creative synergies that are starting to come together and build the ecosystem that Sue mentioned. Myself, I'm a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing. I'm a mechanical engineer who's a business school and a medical school professor. I think that is often an advantage. Because when I go and I kind of think, well, how do we fix it? How do we build it is sort of the lens that I look at it. And what we've done at UCLA is take a health system centered approach to cultivating innovation. UCLA health is an extremely unique health system. We're part of the UC Health, California wide health system, we have more than 21 million patients that we treat. And so in launching the biodesign program a few years ago at UCLA, we've really taken a patient centered approach to innovation, as well as a community centered approach to innovation. When we think about how do we build innovation ecosystems, we have to think about engaging community we have to think about diversity, and how do we leverage diverse assets. So for example, at UCLA, Biodesign, half of our leadership team is female, and half of our leadership team are persons of color. And so we want our leadership in our innovation innovation ecosystem to represent the community that we serve. And I'll pause there because I know we have a lot of other points to discuss that that Ben has on the agenda.

Benjamin Glenn  14:58  
Well, you know, I'll pick up with that Jennifer. And so I think in this last year, the group of fellows, I think we had the first time that we had the feedback loop, I always talk about the work I do with Jennifer, it's catch and release. And Jennifer hadn't made a post recently, which it didn't really occur to me. But we're actually doing is training the leadership within UCLA health, because we have clinicians coming in, we have engineers coming in, you know, Jennifers is like luring and I don't know about a wolf in sheep's clothing, but the pied piper luring all of those business school students over and even in programming that we had done, they're finding out that business students are not invited to talk with technical people, or the technical people are not thinking to reach out to business school students. So Jennifer was interesting to see that first feedback loop, where we had, how did you hear about the program, I always ask them, How did you hear about this? And how's it going for you? And they had talked to one of the early students, and now that word had gotten out. So I think that's another element of ecosystem is almost that evangelization. It was a good experience for me, believe it or not, I talked to data scientist, I survived the conversation. And that because people don't understand how other people think and talk. So Jennifer, can you pick up on that that feedback loop that's happening?

Jennifer McCaney  16:11  
Yeah, but and it's a great and there's a few pieces, I think of that feed loop that feedback loops are so important. One is to kind of see leaders interact with leaders that kind of look and share the same experience as you do. And so one of the things that we are involved in here in Los Angeles, there's a consortium called pledge LA, which is a group of investors that are committed to building a diverse group of stakeholders in our ecosystem. And so we're part of that pledge LA, bioscience LA is of course involved. And the other piece in that in terms of building diverse leadership, and then building that network. So whether or not it's an organic network, like Silicon Valley, or some of us are having to actually do the analysis, build the strategic plan, identify the gaps, and really fill those in. And so creating those opportunities for connection are so important, especially when we're now in kind of a decentralized workforce environment. We're all working virtually, how much harder do we have to work and how do we create those tangible touch points. I think it's something that we've been able to successfully do through the pandemic because we were pulled in by that center of gravity at the health system where we had that urgent need. We had fellows going out traditionally, in a bio design program, many of you know you go you do an externship, you go to a strategic you go to a design firm, our fellows came in, they 3d printed swabs, they built masks, they, they did it all over the course of a year, and they really came together. So we're always pulled in together by that patient driven mission that we have at the health system. And I think that many of us are here at this conference, because we ultimately want to impact patient care. And that creates that feedback loop because you have that shared enthusiasm, the shared mission. So did you have something?

Susan Windham-Bannister  17:48  
Well, I I'm really resonating with what you're saying with what you both have said and thinking of it in Massachusetts, one of the ways in which we sort of coalesce this ecosystem was to make investments that require collaboration. So as an example, we'll take infrastructure as an example. Massachusetts, believe it or not, was lacking commercial lab space. incubating space, accelerating space. So one of the investments that we made was to provide the seed funding for something called lab Central, which some of you may have heard of, it's it's in Kendall Square, it's a co working space, industry and investors wrap around it and sponsor the companies that come in. So they they curate them, they sponsor them to come into lab Central, and that money provides the operating costs, but who was going to actually create a space like that? I mean, who would see it as their responsibility. So having this public private entity, the Life Sciences Center, gave the seed funding and three rounds of expansion money, and that, you know, lab Central's has a 200 plus alum company, they've created 1000s of jobs, 70% of them have stayed in Kendall Square. So all of these things, again, just adding to that ecosystem. One more example is, we were missing a lot of venture capital, hard to believe, but we really were. And so one of the things that this Life Sciences Initiative did was to actually make money available, we funded young companies not in a traditional venture model, but as a way of partnering with strategics and institutionals, to de risk early stage companies. So moderna, that's one of the first companies that we put some money in Bluebird Bio in there a lot of companies out there that you will have heard of, we helped get them down the pathway so that they were less risky investments. And so you begin to build your ecosystem in that way. You know, you have investors who say, Oh, well, too early for us, but maybe this public private partnership, will we'll put some money, they will think about filling in some of our gaps. In workforce and in an infrastructure, so you build this ecosystem, in part by providing resources, but making it a requirement that people work together collaboratively to access those resources. So that was a big part of our strategy.

Benjamin Glenn  20:16  
Tiffany, are you seeing that I always think about as I've gotten to know, the Science Center more with Tiff being there, I almost see it as this Switzerland, that, you know, you want to make this neutral ground. I'm wondering if you're, as you're hearing these comments, if you're thinking now about your fund, you've pivoted to be completely to dedicate the center to, to the life sciences. Yeah. Are you seeing any models there that you might adopt? Or you're already seeing in play?

Tiffany Wilson  20:39  
Yeah, I mean, the importance, and I don't think we think about this enough as an industry and, you know, granted, you know, all of y'all are building your companies, right. So you're not thinking about this stuff. But we understand kind of in the background, what needs to happen to bring these ecosystems together. And it's like the importance of, like, state government, right? And then election cycles and, and how do you convince, you know, state legislators who aren't in the life sciences industry, and they may only care about, like, in their district, agriculture, or something like that, but recognizing why it takes so much money to build out this infrastructure. You know, and certainly over a 60 year period, the science centers, and Philadelphia has been able to figure that out. And there is tremendous business and civic leadership in Philadelphia, I don't know, you know, prior to moving there, like, I had no idea all this stuff was happening there. And there's a certain level of I mean, everybody's seen Rocky, right? I've seen it like, five times since I joined the science center, I'm just inspired by the story, and the grit and the coming togetherness of it, to figure it, figure it out.

Benjamin Glenn  21:59  
And the stairs are really there. There's a really there. So is the statute, right? So

Tiffany Wilson  22:05  
 it's, it's, it's, it's fantastic. There's been a tremendous investment in the community, you know, by the state, and the federal government, EDA has played a big role and providing grant funding for our programs. But I do, you know, look at playbooks of other cities and how they're doing it. And it is a quirky space to be in to figure out how to get all these people together. You know, Jen, you talking about how all these different disciplines come together. You know, we've seen in this industry over the last decade, just the convergence of everything, and the need to see technologists and clinicians work together in a way that they haven't in the past. And I see that continuing in Philly, you know, we have tremendous cell and gene therapy platform. And, you know, you can raise your, raise your hand if you're a steam faculty member at Penn, and all of a sudden $100 million will fall out of the sky. And that doesn't really happen in our industry. But there's tremendous opportunity for kind of ancillary stuff. And that's where I'm really excited to bring my med tech background, to bring that structure to the Philadelphia region where there is a tremendous amount of medical device innovation, tremendous amount of digital health innovation, it just needs to come together more as a cohesive ecosystem.

Susan Windham-Bannister  23:39  
Kind of like, really a quick comment that both both of you have made and Tiff because you talk about the the academic institutions, the medical centers, and our universities. And one of the I think, really important levers and push points in building an ecosystem is getting the academic institutions to realize what an important role they play, not just in training talent, and not just in their basic science, but really getting them engaged, as in recognizing that their partners in translating and developing and be and being more collaborative, right, recognizing that they are a source of, of most of the new technology that becomes young companies. And so expanding the culture, and the interest to think about the role that they play as MIT calls itself a factory for young companies, which very few academic institution do not would think of themselves that way. Yeah. But I but I'm really very respectful and understand so much the hard work that you're both doing to really get those institutions to think of themselves more broadly.

Tiffany Wilson  24:53  
And that's really hard. And so some universities get it and some just absolutely do not

Benjamin Glenn  24:59  
You know, Sue said the T word translation. And it really, I think what I'm beginning to see, so I credit Moose O'Donald there's a few people that I credit for I call my radicalisation, which was, oh, yeah, Ben, you know, there's a whole lot of other parts of that health tech system, other than the very front end, helping people protect their shiny objects. And you look at Moose, who's great attitude, right? Well, Berkeley, we've got all these engineers, we've got all this technology. We're a little bit short of hospitals, UCSF, saying, we've got all these hospitals. We're alarmingly short of engineers and technologies, and moose and the MTM program, masters of translational medicine is bridging that gap. And then there's initiatives now at at NIH, they also look at the translational sciences, and one of the problems we're facing. And you'll see it talked to any of the companies that are here. And even, even some of the initiatives that are down here in octane, you know, the southern end of California, and all the universities are here, we can pump out all the computer scientists in the world, we can ravage Carnegie Mellon, of every graduate they have, who's going to teach them about health care? Who's going to show these young kids these brilliant minds, you can make more difference in a patient's life? Don't think about a consumers life. And so I wonder how we're going to do it. How do you think translation is going to help us you know, is that is ecosystem where translation happens? That's a question for any of you

Jennifer McCaney  26:33  
why don't I when I take it first, and I'll pass it down the line? Sue, I'm so glad you're brought up translation. I'm an Associate Director, Clinical and Translational Science Institute in Los Angeles, which is a hub between Cedars, UCLA, Charles, Drew and Harbor. And one of the things that we do is we work together to translate new technology. And so when we're thinking about innovation ecosystem, you know, the classic seat that I said is right, that Biodesign, we're going to spin out new technology. And, you know, I think that's fantastic. And we all know the model works. But at the end, you have to be able to translate it and bring it back in. And so it usually by design, we actually have a third program, we have a traditional post grad fellowship, we have a Faculty Program, we have a third pillar, it's our translational fellowship. And it's specifically focused at recruiting fellows to help bring technology back into the health system. Because for all of you in the room, I'm sure you've spent, we're at a time where it's 12 months to get an IRB, two years to get a pilot launch, maybe three years during COVID. And if for some reason, that translational tipping point of bringing technology back in whether it's due to reimbursement, or you know, workflow or infrastructure challenges, it's extremely difficult. And so one of the gaps and Sue does this great sort of metaphor, which talks about finding the gaps in your cluster and addressing those, one of the gaps that I've seen, and this is not specific to Los Angeles, is how do you get the tech back in? How do you get it into the hands of the physicians so they can get it to the patients. And so this translational fellowship that we launched, is specifically looking at training folks how to do that. And we have two projects we've piloted this year. One is with a small startup. One is with a large corporate that's under NDA. So I can't say more than that. But it's been going swimmingly well because we're not already training people how to do this. How do you execute this on a timeframe? That makes sense? Right, you know, some things like getting an M tap is only going to happen once a year. Some of those things haven't changed. But our job is in terms of a health system center, is to do it better and do it faster.

Susan Windham-Bannister  28:32  
That's a really good point. And getting back to your question to this, adding on to what what Jenna said, I think that an ecosystem enables translation, because translation, development, commercialization is a collaborative process. And it you may have some of the resources in your cluster, but if they are not integrated to create that platform, that runway that it takes to do the translation to get to commercialization. What often happens is you don't have any stickiness, entrepreneurs say I can't stay here, there's no operating talent. An investor says I love that you started your company here, but I won't I need you to move to x because you will find the community the resources, the operating talent, etcetera, the mentors that you need to grow and so we are going to invest in you but you cannot stay here. So I think that the ecosystem enables it to happen because the resources are coalesce their leverage, people know each other, they know where to get things, they know how to get things done, people take your phone calls, people will mentor you. And otherwise it it stalls. It never gets started or it migrates you know, capitals migrate people migrate. So the ecosystem I think enable that that's what that's the secret sauce.

Tiffany Wilson  29:55  
Yeah, and I'll just add, you know, what, what's neat. So in Philidelphia, in the tri state region, so Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, there's like 12 million lives under care. And so just the density of and the willingness to collaborate there. If I'm thinking from an mindset of a early stage, med tech company, you know, the ability to get inputs from supply chain inputs from key opinion leaders, inputs from not only academic medical centers, but community healthcare centers, too, right. So all the different points of care quickly, you know, over the last decade, as I've been in this, as I refer to the weird world of innovation and entrepreneurship, around healthcare, you know, I've heard increasingly I know, all of you all have experienced this as well, hey, to you know, getting through FDA is like, not not a thing anymore. It's not, you know, we're not whining about that anymore. But I can't get into the healthcare system, I can't get sales. And then at the same time, I've seen a lot of new innovation platforms in health care systems, where everyone wants to see innovation, but they're not including the operating side of it. And so there's all these new ideas that clinicians are coming up with, and then they bring it to the I'm gonna make that I'm gonna bring it into the O R, and test my prototype, and then supply chain finds out and they're like, No, you're not going to do that. Right? And oh, by the way, I don't want to buy that ever. And so you know, that you have to like, if we think about innovation ecosystems, like we've got to include not only the shiny, sexy part of innovation, but the hard pragmatic integration for how do you actually get that in health care system. And I think we understand that more now. But I think that's an important part of the, the translational equation, if you will,

Benjamin Glenn  32:01  
Even over breakfast this morning, I was talking about, you know, I'm going to see our hospital systems, you know, those are becoming incredible networks that are already integrated. But how do we make them innovation ready, so we can actually deploy that I'd love to see the US turn into a team of teams, you know, Kelly McChrystal talked about? So it really is that difficult it is, I look on a lot of my navy experience, you know, Joint Force with all the different operating units, were not really made to work with each other, when you have common mission. It's very clarifying, particularly when you're being shot at. So I think if we can get that kind of that spirit of you know, we're all focused on the patient, we're all focused on advancing the standard of care that can help kind of bring some

Tiffany Wilson  32:43  
And how do we link together all these ecosystems? So I think Philly is a living lab, right. So we've got all the assets, the infrastructure, the talent, you know, for better or worse, we have problems. A lot of healthcare disparity is something that I'm focused on, we learned that, you know, it learned it's a big spotlight on it kind of like these bright lights on, you know, health disparities.

Benjamin Glenn  33:06  
Well, based on what we did last night, I thought we were back in the lineup and Sheriff's Department, we showed that last night that we sat down to sort of gather our thoughts, we could talk all night, but we've got a few minutes left, I want to see if we can, we'll do we'll we'll be polite and throw it out any questions. And for the house manager? Do we need a mic? Or how do we gonna do this? No microphone for you. Oh, good. Use your outside voice.

Question 1  33:36  
I live in the greater Philadelphia area. And one of the it's more of a comment, right? If you look at Seattle, and if you look at Boston, every one of the healthcare ecosystem organizations, is now competing with Google is now competing with meta aka Facebook. In fact, both those buildings went up in Cambridge over the last 10 years. So what a beautiful opportunity you all have as a link to students to get them interested as an undergrad and grad level in what's going on in health care, and solving patient issues. Right? Because if you don't get them involved and interested early on, they're going to go work for Google, they're going to go work for Amazon, one out of every 170 employees in this country works for them. I know a lot of warehousing, one out of 100 work with Walmart. And this is only going to increase so you're in an unenviable and really critical position and opportunity to get people interested in.

Tiffany Wilson  34:41  
Well, even if we do that even at the middle school and high school level, you know, you can't be what you can't see it's right. Right. And so, you know, really kind of getting that in there to do well and to do good, which is such a, you know, common thread across this industry. But I'll just kind of end by saying you know, kind of on the living lab concept and kind of bringing together the ecosystems, you know, let's we can pilot stuff out in Philadelphia, but that doesn't equate to successful commercialization. So to be able to know, Jen, right and have the tie in to LA, and to say, alright, this is what we did here, what do we need to, you know, to infuse into that process? And how can we do a pilot with you? And how can we go to Massachusetts and do that, because that really kind of creates that competitiveness for US med tech.

Susan Windham-Bannister  35:32  
Two quick thoughts stuck to what you said, when I agree with you. And  the life sciences was really coalescing in Massachusetts, guess who showed up? A lot of the big tech companies came right. And so you're absolutely what we did at Massachusetts, the Life Sciences Center, I think, since 2008, maybe has spent 20 plus million dollars on internships. So literally, giving stipends for young people to go and work in startup companies, because again, we want them to have the exposure to young companies to think about entrepreneurship to help build operating talent. So one way is to actually build ramps into the industry and get to see all the different skill sets that that our industry uses, and real world experience for folks. So that's just one way that we begin to address that, Massachusetts.

Benjamin Glenn  36:28  
Thank you so much for that question. And thank you all so much for coming in here on day three of Scott Pantel's, three day wedding reception, where I'm sorry, to the LSI tech 2022. And I want to thank Tiffany Sue and Jennifer for coming out on and braving this, this terrible, terrible, beautiful morning and down here and Dana points. So thank you all very much for coming. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.