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Alan Kramer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, UPEK, Inc.
 Video Interview
1) Briefly tell us what it is about your company/project that makes it so special?
In a matter of only a few years UPEK succeeded to drive a technology from one which was considered essentially experimental to one that is rapidly gaining mainstream acceptance by some of the world’s leading consumer brands. And we are doing this with a technology that has the capacity to touch a very wide and deep percentage of the worlds population.
2) What country best facilitates starting a tech company?
When it comes to technology and innovation the US is still on top. Though many other areas of the world have closed that gap significantly over the last ten years especially in Asia.
2b) What single thing can a government do to encourage Technology Pioneers?
Our strongest minds are in the universities. Our greatest problems are best understood by business. To have more technology pioneers government needs to increase the relationships and interaction between those two. Government can foster innovation through tax incentives and other programmes to increase the cross-fertilization between academia and industry.
3) What makes an innovator?
In innovator is someone who sees a problem as an opportunity to develop a new solution. An innovator is also someone who often sees hidden links between seemingly unrelated things and has the drive to tie those things together to develop new technologies and new solutions.
4) How does your company directly contribute to improving the state of the world?
New technologies such as the internet are continually changing the world in wonderful important ways. But with that new change in progress come many problems. The need for governments to secure their borders without sacrificing the privacy of their citizens. The need to address the growing problem of identity theft. The need to secure transactions in the virtual and the wireless world where the brick and mortar technologies of signature and pen and paper don’t apply are all examples of growing problems on a worldwide scale that UPEK and the technologies we are pioneering are aiming to address.
5) What value do you hope to gain from being a Technology Pioneer?
I hope to use this experience to extend my perspective and the perspective of my company to one that is more global in scope. We have an enormous capacity to innovate new solutions to challenging problems and I hope to understand how we can aim to do that on an even wider scale.
6) What do you think the role of technology should be in society?
It is pretty obvious that the primary role of technology to society is to help us improve the overall quality of our life. But I think there are at least two other important roles that Technology plays in society. First it helps us change a perspective and understand things from a different point of view. As an example: today we all understand that the world is round. But there was a time when the technologies of sailing and shipbuilding helped us to understand that the world was not a flat place. And finally technology attracts great minds. And I think it plays an important role in society as an additional channel for the artistic spirit and the human spirit.
7) What is the right balance in society between scientific interest and ethical concerns?
The role of science is to learn and to know while the role of ethics is more to help us in deciding which path too pursue as far as which technologies to industrialize and which are better to abandon.
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