A scaffolding that connects people: Transcript of Remarks by President at the Launch of Vidacity on 14 May 2024

    Thank you for inviting me. I really came to learn about what Vidacity is spawning, and to listen to the entrepreneurs who are here.

    I think it's a very good initiative, Vidacity, in a few ways. First, it's a good repurposing of an old school building. That itself, I think, is an act of creation by SLA.

    Next, the theme that underpins most of the start-ups and enterprises that are located here - sustainability. Sustainable agrifood businesses, and the circular economy in particular. 

    There's a broader angle to this as well. We are a small country. We know our goals here - promoting sustainability, including a sustainable agrifood industry and circular economy. And we know it requires innovation.

     And that means more innovation coming out of different ideas, different technologies. But it also requires an ecosystem. Particularly as a small country, that's really important. As we know in innovation, most innovations don't succeed. There’s the element of chance, there’s an element of the merits of each technology and we only know when it finally hits the commercial road, what works and what doesn't. But we have to try to increase the chances of innovation succeeding, so, it's not just serendipity, not just luck. And one way to do that is to build a scaffolding that connects enterprises. Scaffolding that's not so far apart, so you are not merely being co-located in the same place, but where you have real interaction and a real bouncing off or learning of ideas between the enterprises. That’s what you’re trying to do here, and you’re off to a very good start.

    The ideas we have here are themselves fascinating. Several of the start-ups are working with food waste, converting it into something valuable. One is using fungi to upcycle food waste into a growing medium for premium mushrooms. Another using beetle larvae, the worms, to consume agricultural waste and Styrofoam, again to create new products.

    And another converting unavoidable food waste into something valuable. In fact, about 40% of food waste is the unavoidable food waste - the fruit skins and peel, the eggshells, the left over from making coffee or beer and so on. We met an enterprise that's converting this waste into clay products.

    Many different ideas, being experimented on or already on the market and wanting to scale up. With entrepreneurial energy behind all of them, and that willingness to try. You're providing a supportive ecosystem to help them to go to the market and to grow.

    What is also fascinating about the people I met is that they came from backgrounds very different from what they were doing today. One was in the Air Force, as he said, switching from wearing green now to working on greens. The couple of persons who are running, Soil Social, another very interesting enterprise, came from backgrounds way outside of science.

   But you know anyone can really get into this. Learn something new, learn like hell, and start working on it. But it helps to have this scaffolding here that connects people.

   So, we need this, and I think you're off to a very good start. Thank you very much.