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Stefan Roever, President and Chief Executive Officer, Navio Systems, USA
 1) Briefly tell us what it is about your company/project that makes it so special?
Navio allows everybody to sell digital content.
Ten years ago, publishing on the Internet was a difficult and expensive undertaking. Today, the Internet allows anybody to publish information, and this has made the world a very different place.
By contrast, electronic commerce is still mostly restricted to a few central destination sites like Amazon or iTunes. Navio “democratizes” commerce transactions, allowing anybody to become a digital merchant, affiliate or reseller, and allowing those transactions to occur anywhere. We enable “commerce at the edges of the network”.
2) What country best facilitates starting a tech company? What single thing can a government do to encourage Technology Pioneers?
Silicon Valley is still a great place to start a company. It provides an abundance of talent, access to capital, as well as proximity of customers, technology and distribution partners and M&A partners.
The single thing that governments should do is what they generally don’t want to hear: Keep taxes and spending low and otherwise stay out of the way.
3) What makes an innovator?
Envisaging what the world will look like in 5 or 10 years and building the technology today to make that happen.
4) How does your company directly contribute to improving the state of the world?
In two ways:
- By democratizing transactions, we create commercial opportunities for everybody, not just for big corporations. Capitalism is often criticized as favoring concentration. Technology can counterbalance that effect -- just look at what the web did for publishing. Navio is taking decentralization one step further.
- More generally, any commercially successful company improves the state of the world by creating wealth for its shareholders, employees and customers. This is a far more effective means of wealth creation and distribution than any government program.
5) What value do you hope to gain from being a Technology Pioneer?
Meeting likeminded people who a trying to change the world one innovation at a time.
6) What do you think the role of technology should be in society?
Technology can be a great liberator. Technological advancements allow human beings to take control of their lives and rise to a state of independence. Society should have trust in people to choose good technology over bad technology.
7) What is the right balance in society between scientific interest and ethical concerns?
We must not allow ourselves to be taken hostage by minorities with narrow minded agendas. As an example, DNA research was met with the same fierce resistance 20 years ago as stem cell research is today. The amount of good that was done for mankind as a result of DNA research is enormous. Similarly great things will come out of stem cell research and society as whole must resist fundamentalist efforts to demonize this technology.
We can continue to have trust in the scientific community, which has historically done a very good job at policing itself through the establishment of ethical guidelines, frameworks and procedures.
Governments should show great restraint in regulating these matters. The German government provides an example of how things should not be done. It tightly regulated DNA research in the 80's and 90's and effectively drove that research out of the country. Today Germany imports a great number of medications developed internationally as a result of DNA research.
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