3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
yourself. It's similar to learning to write — a way for kids to organize, express and share
ideas. But instead of putting words into sentences, now they can create animated stories.”
6.3 Educate the educators. The teacher pipeline is one of the biggest issues in teaching
computer science. Currently in Luxembourg, there is no certification for teaching computer
science. We're merely taking people who trained to be teachers and giving them some CS
knowledge so they can step into a classroom and help kids. Luxembourg needs to ratchet
up the qualifications of teachers overseeing computer science instruction.
6.4 Involve the local tech industry. Luxembourg should better mobilize companies and
research institutions to engage their engineers and scientists to volunteer in schools, to talk
in the classroom, or run a whole-day hackathon – like Google did last year at the Academy
for Software Engineering – or job shadowing, or taking students on as mentees.
7 Research, Development and Innovation
7.1 Strengthen partnerships with applied science organizations such as Fraunhofer Society to
foster the transfer of E-Luxembourg academic know-how into the economy and society.
LIST is on a good path but not yet sufficiently focused, staffed, funded and embedded in
international applied science structures to fulfill its role as intermediary between academic
R&D and concrete E-Luxembourg business, society and government applications.
Therefore, partnerships with larger and international applied science networks will be
necessary.
7.2 LUX-TIR Decentralized Exploration. Luxembourg’s approach to providing financial support
to R&D and new entrepreneurship has been characterized so far by a high degree of
centralization. The main emphasis has been placed on firms that drive economic growth
and job creation, with a strong pre-screening role enforced by LuxInnovation, tasked with
the objective of eliminating immature project ideas even before requests for funding. This
approach is both sensible and rational; the only problem is that it very rarely leads to
disruptive innovation, as one would expect to come out of the United States, where
“failure” is very much tolerated in favor of taking very significant risks towards disruptive
objectives (Silicon Valley being the first example). The aim of the LUX-TIR Decentralized
Exploration project is to introduce a new balance in the financial support of RDI to
encourage the funding of more unfiltered risk-taking and potentially disruptive innovation
actions. An 80/20 split (or even 90/10) might be appropriate: 80% of the resources could
remain in line with current risk standards, while 20% of the resources could be dedicated to
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