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I think there's a very natural tendency to celebrate inventors and that's terrific. Over 250 years we think about
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great names like Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graanbell, today's AI entrepreneurs,
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obviously they deserve enormous credit. But if you actually look at the whole history, this other parallel story
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emerges which is that America's greatest innovation may actually be more institutional
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innovation. That is we repeatedly invent better ways to transform discoveries into industries and those examples come
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up time and again patent system, the research university, how to organize corporate research, the whole notion of
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venture capital and today's startup ecosystem. So these are all social inventions. They create the conditions
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that allow scientific breakthroughs to really spread and be useful throughout the economy. My point is that the lesson
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of American history isn't simply that we are great at inventing technologies, which we are, but it's that we're also
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great at repeatedly reinventing the machinery of how to bring those inventions to market.