They Haven't Graduated Yet, but They're Already Tackling the Big Problems of 2045 - Duncan Kane, SVP at Toshiba

In this episode of The TechEd Podcast, Duncan Kane, Senior Vice President at Toshiba America, shares insights from nearly two decades of working at the intersection of industry and education. Drawing from his leadership in STEM outreach, Duncan explains why Toshiba sees early STEM engagement not just as a good cause—but as a strategic investment in the future of innovation and the workforce.

One way Toshiba brings this vision to life is through its long-standing partnership with the National Science Teaching Association on ExploraVision, a science competition that challenges K–12 students to design technologies 20 years into the future. But as Duncan explains, the program isn’t really about competition—it’s about creativity, purpose, and helping students see themselves as future innovators. The conversation explores what happens when kids take ownership of real-world problems, the importance of dreaming big (with or without big budgets), and how industry can play a more active role in developing STEM talent.

Listen to learn:

• Why students are more innovative when they don’t know what’s “impossible”
• How choosing personally meaningful problems changes how kids approach STEM
• What happens when students design technology for the year 2045
• Why Toshiba believes building a STEM pipeline starts in your own backyard
• What schools risk losing when STEM programs are first on the chopping block

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:

1. Students come up with more creative solutions when they haven’t yet learned what’s “impossible.” Duncan explains that younger students are often more willing to dream big because they haven’t developed the cynicism or constraints that come with adulthood. In ExploraVision, fifth graders have proposed ideas like AI-powered glasses that interpret sign language and wearable devices to predict seizures—solutions rooted in bold thinking, not technical limitations.

2. When students choose problems that matter to them, STEM learning becomes personal and powerful. Many teams in ExploraVision choose issues they’ve encountered firsthand, like a relative’s epilepsy or local environmental concerns. That personal connection drives deeper engagement and creativity, whether it’s robotic honeybees to help pollinate crops or fire-resistant materials inspired by mushrooms.

3. Building a future STEM workforce doesn’t require a billion-dollar initiative—it starts locally. Duncan urges companies to start in their own communities, supporting local students and educators in ways that feel personal and authentic. Toshiba’s partnership with NSTA and the success of ExploraVision demonstrate how consistent, community-rooted efforts can scale to national impact—reaching 450,000 students over 33 years.

Resources in this Episode:

• To learn more about ExploraVision, visit: exploravision.org
• ExploraVision partner NSTA (National Science Teaching Association): nsta.org

Additional resources from this episode

• ExploraVision Winners: See details on this year’s winners + previous years
• Discover more from the

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Transcript

Matt Kirchner: 0:00

Matt, welcome into The TechEd Podcast. This is Matt Kirchner. We're going to start this episode with a question, and that question is this, regardless of what world that you're in, regardless of where you make your living or where you spend your time, whether that's education, whether that's technology, whether that's manufacturing, wherever that is. Think about this for a minute. What is technology in that space gonna look like two decades from today, 20 years from today? And if you think about that question for a moment, and answer doesn't immediately come to mind. You're like, wow, that's a pretty deep question. I'll have to spend some time thinking about it. You'll understand exactly why today's guest is doing the work that he is doing with students and getting them to imagine their futures. We're going to go deep on that with the guests. We're really excited to welcome to the studio of The TechEd Podcast. My guest this week is Duncan Kane. And Duncan is the Senior Vice President at a company that almost every one of us have heard of, and that company is Toshiba. Duncan, such a pleasure to have you with us on The TechEd Podcast. Really looking forward to the discussion today. Well, I'm really glad to be here. Thank you. Let's start out with who is Duncan Kane. You've spent a great deal of your career at Toshiba. You've been in roles from HR to strategy to corporate services. So tell us about your career and also what led to now this fascination with this really important topic that being STEM education.

Duncan Kane: 1:37

I've worked for Toshiba about 16 years, but I've been an HR guy since about the beginning. So I've been doing it about 40 something Wow, for companies in the paper industry and Wall Street, other kinds of things. And as a HR guy, I'm a people person. My job is to find, encourage, motivate, talent. And so for me, where do you find talent? You grow talent and explore vision. And my work with Toshiba, both with explore vision and with our STEM Foundation, are all about, how do we get the children of today excited about STEM and considering that as a career and someday, potentially actually being a Toshiba employee?

Matt Kirchner: 2:18

Well, here at The TechEd Podcast, where we are all about securing the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. Whenever I hear somebody say, I'm all about trying to make sure that young people are exposed to and excited about STEM your mission and our mission super, super aligned as is. It sounds like the mission of your employer, Toshiba, where you see this talent development, you see STEM education and supporting STEM education as really a strategic priority for the organization, not just a way of doing good or giving away money or or what some might call philanthropy. So why is it that Toshiba has such a focus on STEM is it because you're growing your own talent? Are there other reasons why they're so focused on science, technology, engineering and math.

Duncan Kane: 3:01

So, you know, look in the programs I'm involved with, K through 12 explore vision. I mean, we're not hiring third graders to work for Toshiba. What we're trying to do is create an environment in which the love of science, technology, engineering, math and those kind of related fields are something and they compete with all the other things that are going on in kids' lives, we're trying to figure out a way to make sure that that kid who has that interest in science, that that's promoted throughout their school time career, and that they eventually consider doing that in college and eventually decide to do that for a living, and if we don't encourage those kinds of things, There are lots of other forces out there, good and bad soccer good, but they compete. And so what we're trying to do is to make sure that those kids have support and interesting things to do in this field. You

Matt Kirchner: 3:53

know, as a parent of two kids, myself, it's really interesting. Number one, you're right. It's amazing the competing of priorities that they have, from athletics to academics to maybe other clubs or organizations that they're involved in, lots and lots of things, pulling at their time and making sure that they stay focused on, certainly all of those, but also in terms of what those competing forces might be, or the different options or considerations they might have in terms of where they're spending their time so, so important to make sure that STEM is at least part of that portfolio. You know, you used an interesting term in your in your last answer, you said a love of STEM. How do we foster that love of STEM to where a student really feels as passionate and as excited about their STEM coursework as they might be about being on the soccer team or the gymnastics team or going to that boy scout meeting,

Duncan Kane: 4:44

you give them an opportunity to do creative, fun and rewarding things, because positive reinforcement. So in some education, it's memorizing formulas and facts and stuff. That's not what we're about when we talk about explore. Vision we're talking about, how do you use those tools to solve problems? How do you use those tools to make a difference? I mean, part of our corporate ethos is making a difference in the world today. And so how do we extend that down to kids, so that they can actually see themselves making a difference, and they can bring those dry, necessary facts that they have to learn. But how do they bring them to life and do fun and exciting things with them? Absolutely, as

Matt Kirchner: 5:29

you talk about the ethos of an organization like Toshiba and saying, you know, making the world a better place as part of that, you know, it's another great word, the reason that an organization exists, in this case, to do good, really, really important aspect of the work that you're doing at Toshiba through explore a vision, and that's a term you've used now a couple times. Is deep into the podcast. Maybe we should take a moment to make sure our audience knows exactly what that's all

Duncan Kane: 5:52

about. It's been something we've been doing for the last 33 years. It is a K through 12 science competition that we've engaged with about 450,000 students over the last 33 years, and I've been sort of the corporate sponsor, the executive sponsor of the program, for a little bit more than a decade. I work with a great team that puts it together. But what it does is it asks kids the question that you asked at the outset of the program, which is, think about something a problem, and think about what it would take over the next 20 years to solve that problem using the principles of scientific method and mathematical analysis, whatever. But you know, those sort of STEM kinds of things come up with a solution. Consider the positives and negatives, consider what still needs to be done, and then communicate interesting.

Matt Kirchner: 6:47

So I want to make sure those numbers aren't lost on our audience. So just one more time, how many years and how many students?

Duncan Kane: 6:52

So 33 years, and by the way, we're already approved for 34 already working on it, and about 450,000 students over that period of time

Matt Kirchner: 7:02

that, I mean, that's the size of a large city. I mean, that's an incredible number of students that you've managed to touch over that period of time. Tell us a little bit more about the program you talked about students solving a problem that'll exist in 20 years, or thinking about what the future will look like in 20 years. Let's go a little bit deeper on the student experience and what they're actually

Duncan Kane: 7:20

doing a couple of things that make, I think, Explorer vision unique. We always work in teams. We're talking about groups of two to four kids working together. We have four different age groups, K through three, four through six, seven through nine and 10 through 12. They get together, they find the problem and the stories and how they find their problems are cool all by themselves. They either know somebody who has some dread disease, they've read something in the paper, whatever, and they take it as sort of a personal responsibility to take a look at it and figure out how to fix it. Example, our last awards winner, we had a fairly young group of kids in that three through six area that had read about that 62% of honey bees died over this last winter, and their solution was to create a robotic honey bee, huh? And those kinds of stories, they know someone who had cancer or they had epilepsy or whatever, and they want to help, and they want to use science to do that fascinating.

Matt Kirchner: 8:22

So, I mean, you think about, I mean, just your honey bee example, and the importance of their role in germinating agriculture and so on, and the risk that happens when we don't have a balance in nature as it would relate to honey bees as an example. And here are these students. And I mean, you talk about, how old were these students, third grade through sixth grade. Remind me on the age of those students. I think they were fifth graders this year. Yes, right. So 1011, year olds are like, hey, what if we create a robotic honey bee to do the same thing that? You know, not that we don't want to have honey bees, but if they're dying and we need more of them to make sure that our environment is in balance and so on, let's create an old robotic version of that. These are some pretty heady projects. And certainly, you know, anybody who's been around any individual who suffers from epilepsy certainly relate to the benefits of something like that. So they're coming up with a problem, a big, big problem, and then talking about solutions. How does that process work? Do they have a mentor that works for them? Are they going through kind of a syntax of steps, or how has that involvement come together? They have a coach, generally, as a science educator or someone like that, and they sometimes have another adult involved to help, some guide and provide and sometimes it's rides and cookies. As their work is, they spend a lot of time on this, right? But this is their stuff. And when you talk to these kids, it is really their ideas and that they're coming. They do research. They figure out what the big barrier to creating the solution is. They read about potential solutions. Those solutions come from all kinds of places. Someone had a project a couple of years ago, and it was a particular kind of. Beetle that created moisture out of the air, and they applied that biological principle to a machine that would create water. I mean those kinds of things. And by the way, I understand the fifth grade ones. By the time we get to high school, I barely understand what they're talking about. Absolutely, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a scientist. Met and then those folks, they are scary smart and scary innovative. Sounds like it, and it's a lovely thing. Yeah, without question. Anytime you see that kind of innovation with students that are that intelligent, it is magical to see and see some of these solutions, you know, in the terms of the beetle creating moisture and then applying that to, you know, so it's biomimicry, is what we call that. So taking something that's occurring in in nature and then mimicking it in a man made device to accomplish the same or a similar outcome, that's some pretty high level thinking. Also kind of speaks to anybody who's a mentor or a coach. You don't necessarily have to be an expert in something in order to be able to use it or facilitate it. And I think that's probably a really, really good message as well. So is this happening inside of a school program? Are you partnering with districts and schools, or is it separate from the traditional education environment? How do students and teachers get engaged here? Well,

Duncan Kane: 11:11

I was a little remiss. We have a partner in all this, Matt, and that's the National Science Teaching Association. Okay, they've been our partner the entire 30 years of this, and we partnered with NSCA, because what they are is science educators, and we wanted someone had reached into the grades that we were looking at. And so science teachers, elementary school teachers who teach science those kinds of things, was those are our folks that we reach out to as advocates and expediters kids do the work, but hey, like I said, You gotta get these kids together. You gotta provide them time. You've gotta provide them with some guidance and stuff. And so it's really important we have those kinds of people out there, and NSTA gives us tremendous access and reach in that environment.

Matt Kirchner: 11:59

Do you know how Toshiba originally got connected with the NSTA we were

Duncan Kane: 12:03

at about our 25th anniversary here in the United States. And so we were looking for is something to sort of celebrate that. And look, we're a tech company, right? Of course, we're known for lots of things, some of which we don't need to do anymore, but we're a tech company. And so when we said, hey, how do we celebrate and make a difference in our communities? How do we celebrate the kind of company we are? And we were looking for this kind of a program. The NSCA is someone that we reached out to, and they helped co found this program with a guy by name Arthur eisenkraft, who's, by the way, Arthur is still our head judge and is still involved in the program, and they came up with this format that has changed a little bit over time, but essentially is still true to that original concept that we came up with 33 years

Matt Kirchner: 12:51

ago. So I will tell you even more than 33 years ago, I had my very first if you remember the Walkman, right, you put your cassette tape in. I know I'm totally dating myself and probably embarrassing myself with this story. I got one when I was 13 years old. You know, I could put any tape in there that I that I wanted to listen to a ton of great music back then, still listen to some of that music today. That was a Toshiba Walkman, by the way. So that was my first introduction to your company, and certainly tremendous respect for the innovation and technology. And, you know, as I was just brushing up a little bit for this episode, the number of different market number of different market spaces and technology spaces that Toshiba is in is absolutely mind boggling. So amazing company doing amazing work. So talk about the competitive side of what you're doing at explorer vision, as these students are going through the process, is the end game to win a competition. Obviously, they're learning incredible technology and inspiring careers and so on along the way. But what are they after as they're going through these projects,

Duncan Kane: 13:47

it is a competition, though the value of it is in participation, frankly, but we do and a first stage of judging is actually we do it with the nscas assistants and stuff, and then we pair these all down they need to meet certain criteria. Then we have regional winners, and we have winners in each of six regions. And then we go to a final judging, where we actually use scientists and people from places like NASA and others to try to do a final review. And in the end, we pick one first place team in each of the four age groups, and then we pick a runners up in each of those four groups. And then we celebrate their winning by bringing them and their families to Washington, DC. They spend a day on Capitol Hill talking about their projects with their senators and congressmen and people like that. Next day, we bring them into the National Press Club, where they record radio and television. We usually have a science promoter who comes in and helps them do those kinds of things, Mr. Fascinator, this particular this year. And then we have an award ceremony. The Embassy of Japan shows up this year. The. Number two guy in all of Toshiba showed up. We have people from the US Patent Office show up. And then in the end, Bill Nye shows up, huh? The Science Guy. Love it, yeah. Bill Nye has been involved with us for about the last 23 years. Unbelievable as a real promoter and program. What

Matt Kirchner: 15:18

an amazing, amazing experience for those students is, you know, especially, I mean, all of them, right to your point, this isn't it's, Hey, you know, the winners get a trip to Washington, DC. They get to go up to the hill. And I've done that numerous, numerous times. There's nothing like the feeling of walking past the flags at the front door of your Senator, your congress person's office. It just has this incredible feeling talking about their project and so on, meeting Bill Nye, I mean that that's really cool along the way, though, for those students that maybe don't get all the way to Washington, DC, incredible learning that they're getting. They're learning about the scientific method, they're learning about planning. They're learning about ideation. I want to go a little bit deeper into that, but before we do, do you have any examples of projects that have maybe gone even beyond that? Award in Washington, DC, and maybe inspired a student to commercialize a project or to take it to a next step, anything like that.

Duncan Kane: 16:07

We've had a couple of groups talk to the patent office, but we kind of step out. We don't own these ideas. The kids do Sure. Okay, so we kind of stepped out by that point of time. What we do know is that the kids that we talk to, the kids that we talk to, the kids that we know, our regional winners, our national winners, that we make a difference in their lives. By the way, we also give them a scholarship, money for scholarship, $10,000 savings bonds for the winner, 5000 for the and by the way, as expensive as college is, that may not sound like a lot of money. It adds up, by the way, over time that. But what we've been told by kids is that that amount of money made a difference about if they went to school, where they went to school, what they studied, those kinds of things, and that's all we're trying to do. We're not trying to to guide people in a particular area that Toshiba might be interested in. We're trying to encourage that broad participation in the science community well, and

Matt Kirchner: 17:04

it almost makes you wonder, I mean, certainly$10,000 I mean, depending on where you're going to school, can go a long, long way depending upon the choices that students are making. That's no insignificant amount of money. I also have to believe that the experiences that students have, and certainly the students that win, either regionally or nationally, those stories probably make it into a lot of college applications and probably inspire a lot of lot of career pathways into individual STEM programs at colleges and universities. Really, really important. And I'm sure you've got other students that are probably going direct to workforce when they're done with the process as well and taking their learning into the workplace or going to the military. I mean, there's all kinds of educational opportunities as we both recognize as students leave high school, and really important to recognize all of them, but also so important to recognize this incredible influence you're having on students careers. Do you have any specific or even general examples Duncan about where students are taking this learning post secondary? Any interesting career examples of either as a career a student chose, or were a student, a specific one, or in general, they ended up,

Duncan Kane: 18:03

oh, sure, we bring alumni back, by the way, we bring back people who have won the program before, and they're one of our guest speakers at our award ceremony. It's been something we've been doing for a while. Right now, this year in Washington, we had a two time winner. By the way, he can't use the same team has to be in a different team both times. He was in different two times. And he is now a PhD candidate, I mean, and he's won relatively recently. He's a PhD candidate talking about disease transmissions between animals and people. Wow, we've had people that were very involved in the COVID research and the COVID vaccine, we've had people who have done this in in rural areas, up in Alaska and things like that, I mean, and those stories are just so inspiring, and it's one of the reasons that I and my team remain sort of very excited about this, very enthusiastic and I'm kind of Chief cheerleader. Other people do most of the work. I'm kind of Chief cheerleader right now,

Matt Kirchner: 19:05

yeah, but fantastic advocate for the program and the work of these students. That's an impressive accolade and an impressive level for that student to reach and doing important work. As soon as you mentioned, you know, the transfer of disease between animals and humans, my brain went to the bird flu, or certainly to COVID, and you mentioned that you've got folks doing incredible work there as well. So it's gotta be just incredibly rewarding for you and for the people that you work with Duncan to know that you've been at least a part of inspiring those kind of careers. How does that make you feel when you hear stories like that? I'll go back to Toshiba values, and by the way, I had a small hand in developing the Toshiba values. So our four values are, do the right thing, find a better way, consider the impact, create together. And so I believe in those things as a member of the Toshiba executive team, and this is a program that hits on all cylinders for me. By the way, you mentioned Boy Scouts. Is one of those distracting things. I'm a long term Boy Scout and, you know, codes of conduct and things like that. I was raised it says you need to make a difference in the world, big or small. And look, I'm not going to be the guy who invents a cure for cancer or any of those kinds of things, but if I can help a kid be the person that does, then I've done my part. No question about it. That's personal. Absolutely. That's a great example, and it's a really you think about whether the leverage of a teacher in a classroom or you think about the leverage of a volunteer. It's not just the work that you're doing on any individual day, but that work repays itself over and over and over again. The Boy Scout example wasn't an accident. It wasn't just something that came to my mind. My father in law is an Eagle Scout. I'm an Eagle Scout, and my son is a third generation Eagle Scout, so on different parts of the family, but certainly proud of that, and not just because it's a great thing to be able to say you did, which is fine, but it's about all the values that you learn going through there and understanding a code of conduct and who you have a responsibility to, and that it's about so much more than yourself. And I think what you're you know, what you're finding, both individually and have found, and probably could teach people like me that lesson is just this incredible effect that you can have on people's lives when you're when you're doing the right things for the right reasons, as you talked about making an impact, finding a way. That's the process. I didn't get imperfect, but I got close. That's the process that these students are going through as they're thinking about the future. I mentioned that we wanted to get into a little bit Duncan, this idea of ideation and kind of thinking about where things can go. I was struck as we were preparing for this episode by this question. And you asked students at explorer vision, you asked students to imagine technologies 20 years into the future. And it really never occurred to me to spend time thinking about that. It's really kind of a mind blowing, creative, almost freeing, way to think about technology advancements, where you kind of just take whatever barriers you might be thinking about in terms of technology and say, What could things be like? You know, in our case, in the year 2045, why is it so important for students to think about technology, not just in terms of today or tomorrow, but 20 years out,

Duncan Kane: 22:04

I think, for a couple reasons. One, these are kids that are not even yet in college, and so their opportunities to contribute and things like that are going to be sometime in the future. There's a lot to learn in the meantime. The real challenge of science is figuring out what has already gone on and then applying that to some future problem. And we're trying to bring that kind of thinking to the fore, because if you're just thinking about, okay, how am I going to solve something tomorrow, you're not being as creative, and you're limited to what you can do today. What we're asking people to do is dream, and that's a word I use every now and again. It's not a very scientific word, but I think we need to get people to dream. And one of the cool things about working with these kids is they don't know it can't be fixed. As we get to be adults, we get a little more cynical. Sorry, but we get a little more cynical about what can and cannot be done when we ask a fifth grader to think about something 20 years in the future, by the way, that's a lifetime, more than a lifetime for them. But what it allows to do is dream and dream big. So it doesn't ask them to just say, hey, how do we fix this thing right now? It allows them to dream big. And I think that that's part of it. I've said this, and it's probably not original, but almost every technological thing that we use today in our lives at one point was someone's dream or someone's imagination, and we are trying to encourage that by that longer term thinking,

Matt Kirchner: 23:33

well, there's no question, and I just I love what you're saying, because it really speaks to three or four of the things that I hold super, Super dear. There's a couple of things that I think about a lot when we're talking with educators. And I have a lot of conversations with teachers, and we see like these amazing stem labs being put together, or labs around applied artificial intelligence or advanced manufacturing. And in some cases, these can cost 1,000,002 million, $3 million don't have to, but can. And a lot of times we get teachers who will look at another district or look at another college or look at another school and say, you know, why won't somebody give me the money to do that? And my answer is always, well, you have to have a dream big enough for somebody wanting to fund it. And so we're not worried today about what your budget is. Let's come up with a dream so big that nobody can say no to it, and you're doing exactly that, which I think is really, really important. Another thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about is, and we get the question a lot in our ed tech companies, we have a lot of young people running around those businesses, as you can imagine. And you know, we can go out, and sometimes we do. You find people deep into their career that are super seasoned and really experienced and what it is that they're doing. And we hire those folks, more often than not, we're going out and finding 2223 24 year old kids, not because we're saying, you know, whatever your age is has an impact on whether or not you can be employed here. But a lot of times through the interview process, those individuals will rise up to the top of the. List, because specifically what you're talking about, which is, I can take somebody who's well into their career, and they've got a lot of experience, they've also got a lot of mental hurdles that say, Well, this can't be done, or that can't be done. I take a younger person and put the impossible in front of them. They don't know any better, and so they're willing to just dive in and say, Sure, I'll try that. I'll do that. They don't know that what you're asking to do is them to do is impossible. And really, in the same sense, that's exactly what you're doing at explorer vision, is you're asking these young people to do these things that might be impossible, or might be your word was cynical. Maybe somebody a little bit deeper into their life might be cynical about what is possible, but these younger people, they don't know what's impossible, and so you come up with a solution like, let's create a robotic bee, or you come up with a solution like, let's solve for COVID. Talk about some of these projects. You mentioned a couple of them. Do you have others that come to mind that might be really fascinating to our audience? I

Duncan Kane: 25:55

think so. But let me just back up a second. The other reason for the idea is you don't need $100,000 lab to dream for sure, and when we look across the school districts, there are different levels of funding all over the place. Okay, no doubt, what we're saying is it doesn't matter where you are, it doesn't matter where your school district is. It doesn't matter how cool your science lab is or isn't. You can think of an idea, and we're not asking you to build a robotic bee. We're asking you to dream about it and to think about it. And you don't need a big lab to do that. And so if the time frame was shorter, everyone would want to go in the lab and start doing experiments. That's not really our process. And I'll give you an example just answer your question. We had a young age group personal reasons. They had some people that were deaf and they were using sign language. And so their idea was to create glasses that would read sign language and translate it into the ear of the person wearing the glasses. Wow, because sign language is hard to learn, for sure, and is subtle sometimes. And so they had a problem, they came up with this solution. They said, hey, the glasses will great. The AI will can be embedded in the glasses, and it literally can talk in that person's ear and make communications between that person who's using sign language and someone who doesn't really understand it. That works, right? But, I mean, if you go back in our history again, we haven't seen anyone file a patent for worth billions of dollars, but we had a device in our early days that you could recognize as what we think of as a smartphone today. Those are the kinds of things we've seen young kids saying, hey, here is life preserving clothing a kid falls in the water, it senses that it's in the water, and it inflates, and it causes them to float. And I think there was a tragedy that may have occurred, or they read about some sort of a tragedy, and they wanted to find a solution to the problem. We saw kids using it's a big thing with my Cillian these days, and they're building fireproof housing materials that not only are sort of fireproof, but actually help suppress the fire. Have been a bio Mimic, mimicry kind of a thing. And those are the kinds of things that we look at and just go, Oh my God. What a creative idea. And 20 years from now, maybe that's possible, like the mobile phone, the smartphone is today, and maybe not, but maybe it, it opens up a path that leads to a solution that is an off branch of that idea, absolutely, and that's what we're trying to encourage. There are lots of things that don't work out. In science, you have an idea, you test it, theory is not right? And that idea that not every great idea you have is going to work out is a little bit part of this too.

Matt Kirchner: 28:46

There's no question about it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we always go back to the Thomas Edison finding, you know, 10,000 ways not to develop the electric light bulb before he finally figured it out that one's used so often. It's, it's almost cliche, but, but it's a perfect example. And as somebody that spent my entire career. Now, I don't even know any 35 years whatever, it's been trying to be innovative, trying to come up with new ideas, changing manufacturing spaces, changing production models, coming up with new products. You're right. Not all of them work. You learn something, though, from every single one of them. And I would say that you almost learn more from your failures than you do for your successes. And the other things that I found over the years is that the more times you fail early on, as you get a little bit deeper into it, you recognize what to steer clear of, and so your success rate goes up as well. And we're just starting that that much earlier with these students, which is, which is absolutely, absolutely incredible. You met, you mentioned the funding a little bit. And of course, the example that I was offering was in terms of getting teachers dreaming about the future and what could be, and whether they're seeking money or they're seeking a great idea or they just want great outcomes for their students, all of which are important. Nobody's going to invest in you. Nobody's going to jump on board unless you have a dream that's big, and certainly you're teaching these students how to dream big at a at a really, really early age. Doesn't mean that. The funding isn't important. In fact, I know Toshiba recently released a report that talks about how Americans view the importance of STEM and then funding of STEM. And one of the things that you found was that that funding, at least in the eyes of the American people, is a huge barrier to great STEM education. What do you think that tells us talk about that study a little bit, or about that report and what Toshiba learned from that.

Duncan Kane: 30:23

We're still trying to digest the findings a little bit, but I do budgets all the time. Matt and budgets talk about priorities. So I can argue, and I believe that there are some funding issues out there, but for me, what I think it's telling us is our priorities may not be in the same place, because we're not putting our money where our mouth is. And I'm just going to tell you, Toshiba as a company, the United States as a country, we need to continue to invest in science and science education, because it is, in fact, the foundation of our success over decades and decades and decades. By the way, it doesn't matter if we're talking about Toshiba or the United States or the world, today's society is what it is because of the investments that have been made in technology and technology education. It just is, and we are believers of fact. And so from a funding standpoint, look, I think we need to use the money wisely. I think that our priorities sometimes get a little it gets a little obscure about where money is going and things like that, but the funding problem will be fixed if, in fact, our priorities about what's important get fixed. I was just in a group of interns that we have in our Texas facility, and about half the interns are engineers. But if you take a look at how many kids are deciding to go into engineering or hard math kinds of things. Those are things we need to worry about. We need to continue to invest in those things, because the pace is accelerating all the time. And Matt, you mentioned you've been doing what you've been doing for 30 something years. I've been doing what I've been doing for 40 something years, you and I tell you, the day I walked into corporate America, there wasn't a cell phone, laptop, fax machine to be found. And the change in the 40 something years I've been doing this, but not only how we do but how we think about work, we don't do work the way you used to do it, and technology is the difference. The biggest thing I worry about is we live in a technological society, and I'll make this simple. I have a really complex car, but I'm not sure I have anybody who knows how to fix it when it breaks, and that may be an oversimplified example, but we live in a technology world, we need to make sure that people that are there to support that technology, because even though history may sound fun, the 18th century was not as good as today.

Matt Kirchner: 32:52

Yeah, no question about that. We talk about funding in in technical education and STEM we certainly are 100% aligned. And the incredible importance of continuing to invest as technology advances at rates faster than it has ever advanced before. It's just mind boggling. What's happening in all these spaces, including, but not limited to artificial intelligence. So so much advancement there super, super hard to keep up with the rate of advancement. But what we find when we talk to public policy makers, and this is always interesting to me, you're right. You're gonna have differences on where we invest and how we invest the money, and how we measure the impact and the outcomes we've had three or four weeks ago, maybe a little bit longer. Senator Tammy Baldwin, senator from my home state of Wisconsin, joined me on the podcast. You know, nobody would argue that on the political scale. She's certainly further to the left. We had Doug Burgum, who's now the Secretary of the Interior, former governor of the state of North Dakota, on with us. Nobody's gonna argue that he isn't to the other end of the spectrum. It's interesting, though, as I talk to public policy makers, as I've talked to people both at the state and federal level, making the really, really important decisions for where money gets spent in education, nobody tells us STEM is a bad idea. Nobody tells us technical education is a bad idea, which is awesome. The American people told Toshiba that stem and tech ed are a great idea. So we all agree on that, and so we've got that going for us. It's just a question of how we put that money and investments to work. Because you're right, in this age of AI, when answers can come to us at our fingertips. We're so so far beyond the the age of the calculator, which is probably just emerging as you were talking about being around before the fax machine, and I was certainly around before the ubiquitousness of cell phones and laptop computers, although we did have the compact computers that were about the size of a small suitcase that you carry around to do work early and in my career, certainly incredible changes in technology, we need to continue to invest in STEM and technical education. When you kind of dream about the future, 20 years from now, and the importance of innovating, what are some of the risks do you think to our country and to our students if we don't make the kinds of investments that we're talking about? I

Duncan Kane: 34:58

think that if we slow down. Progress, and there are real problems in the world. And by the way, all good solutions tend to have consequences. Okay, which is what one of our values is consider the impact. So new energy sources, great. We have new energy sources, but they come with some challenges with them, and that ever evolving technology with people, then who can essentially deal with these new consequences is we don't have those folks, then those consequences get bigger and bigger and bigger the world changes. The solutions that we have that work for a world of 5 billion people are not going to work for a world of 10 billion people, and so I think we need to continue to innovate in those kinds of ways. I think that things that we have taken for granted in our generation, if we don't continue to progress, maybe we don't continue to take some of those things for granted. Yeah,

Matt Kirchner: 35:55

do you don't take them for granted because you don't have them, and all of a sudden it's like, wow, remember when, or you know you're not advancing at the same rate as as we were, or that the rate of other countries and other cultures and so on. So, so tremendous risk

Duncan Kane: 36:08

there basic things like potable water, basic things, I mean, those are things that as the population gets bigger, and I read the big thirst, I think was the book I read on water scarcity in the world, and it's going to take really bright people using really powerful tools to solve those kinds of problems that continue to emerge. By the way, I wrote a really small little thing. We're AI people too, by the way, by the way, AI is nothing to be afraid of. It's a tool. It's a little less understandable than maybe some of our other tools. But I'll be honest, I don't understand really how the internet works either. I just use it, yeah. And one of the things we go back to explore vision, what I said about AI is it's not how it works, it's the questions we ask it and how we ask the questions. They call that query engineering. Now, sure, I think yep, or prompt engineering Yep. And so what I say, it's asking good questions and asking good follow up questions and testing the answer. And that's what we're trying to do with explore a vision is to get people who know how to do that ask good questions, ask good follow up questions, think about what the answer is and say, hey, does this really make sense? And it's not just AI that's always been true at some level, it just happens faster. Incredibly

Matt Kirchner: 37:28

important, as you're talking about asking great questions, is a couple of things that come to mind. First of all, just this last weekend, my daughter, who's a data scientist, works in consulting in Chicago, was home and introduced me to an app, and we'll link it up in the show notes. It's an app where you literally go in and you're trying to trick an AI into giving you the password to something, and so you have to ask it questions in certain ways that you trick it into giving you the password. And the whole idea behind that app, it's actually a website, is that it gets you to ask better and better questions of your AI. It gets you to do your query engineering or your prompt engineering in more effective and more efficient ways. And that has applications in real life too. Not that AI isn't real life. It's certainly a, you know, it's an integral part of so many of our lives now, but asking great questions, knowing, thinking, how to synthesize exactly what you're asking for, coming up with creative ways of asking those questions. Really, really important. And on the on the topic of creative questions, I've got another one for you, Duncan, and that's this. Certainly Toshiba has made it a priority to invest in STEM education and technical education, and to volunteer and to fund this program and to have the vision, literally 33 years ago, incredible, incredible foresight. What advice would you have for other companies and large and small, certainly Toshiba as a behemoth, but large and small in terms of why it's so important to take an active role in investing in stem with your time and your treasure? I

Duncan Kane: 38:54

think the answer might be a little different, depending on your business, but maybe not. The answer is, you think again, cliche. You got to think about the big problem, the global problem. But my advice to companies is starting your own backyard. Start in your own communities. However you define that. Okay, is that an industrial community? Is that a geographical community doesn't matter, but work in your own backyard make a difference in your place where it's important to you and to your employees. One of the things that explore vision does for us is it's something to be proud of for our employees. When we ask, Hey, are we making a difference in the world? We can point out. And so I would say to other companies, find stuff that your employees, one, you can make a difference, and two that your employees can be proud of your participation. And if I'm not an accountant, I can't measure that if I'm an accountant, but I can tell you, as an HR guy, I absolutely can measure that in engagement, in morale and all those kinds of things. And it makes a difference. It makes a difference in how people see your company. It makes a difference about. How they see your products. It makes a difference in how they see your reputation in the world. And those things, if I talk to my marketing people and stuff like that, they tell me, Hey, these things make a difference in the success of the company. And if we're successful, then we can contribute even more.

Matt Kirchner: 40:17

So many of the things that make successful companies successful are, in fact, immeasurable. I agree with you 100% I mean, we talk about a lot of times people are like, well, what is the ROI on our marketing? Or what is the ROI doing one more event? Or what is the ROI on on having a technical education podcast, for example, is just one more example. The truth of the matter is that the magic inside of a company, the culture of that company, what it finds, is important, the values that it lives those are things that are almost important to measure economically on a micro scale, but in terms of the macro scale and the overall success of that business, not just economically, but in terms of the impact that it has on the world. Really, really important. So you and I are are certainly aligned on that idea as well. Duncan is that some of the most important things we can do aren't necessarily measurable in terms of pennies and dollars, but are measurable instead in terms of the way they inspire our team to do even greater things, in the way they inspire our customers, our suppliers and and the people with whom we do business. So that aspect of it certainly very, very important. You know, I have a good friend, actually several good friends, as I'm thinking about it, that have large companies, billion dollar companies, that sponsor race teams. You know, it's whether they're sponsoring a NASCAR team or they're sponsoring a funny car team, whatever it is. And I've asked them, you know, how do you justify that investment? And they're like the engagement that our employees have with a sport like NASCAR, and the fact that they see our logo on a car, they can cheer for that team. They can be a part of that. They can wear the apparel. The impact of that is immeasurable in terms of the pride that they have in their organization. Is just one example. I've got to believe the impact that Toshiba is having on the world of STEM and technical education and technology in general, just immeasurable experiences and pride for your teammates and for your employees and for everybody connected with your brand to be a part of that. I know the educators that you're working with have that same feeling and are incredibly proud of the partnership and the work that you're doing with exploravision. I asked you for advice for companies. What advice would you have for teachers who are interested in learning more about explore

Duncan Kane: 42:16

vision? So exploravision.org, www, dot explore vision. We have a web page, those kinds of things. I'll also make a pitch Matt, a little out of scope, but I sit on this foundation of the EVA America Foundation, we give grants to STEM teachers. So if you've got one of those STEM teachers that's out there in Midwest America looking for a place for money to do something cool, exciting, and we do that too, awesome, and you look up Toshiba America Foundation, explore vision is aimed at kids, aimed at teachers. But if you're a teacher that's looking for a cool idea or a way to make science interesting, explore vision is one of those things, and we provide guides and instruction and ideas about how to get a team started. And if you're one of those teachers that are saying, hey, look, I've been doing this the same way for the last 10 years, and I'm looking for something to do a little different, my advice is, check us out. And maybe this is something that will resonate you

Matt Kirchner: 43:14

for sure, and we spend a lot of time around educators, and we'll make sure to sing those praises loudly as well, and make sure folks are aware of the great things happening at the foundation. And of course, as you suggest, we'll make sure to link that up in the show notes. It's going to be a full set of show notes this week, which is absolutely terrific. We've got time Duncan, I think, for two more questions to squeeze in. You've been in the workforce for a number of years. You've acknowledged the period of time that you've been involved in the workforce and building an incredible career across HR and strategy and all the great work you're doing with exploravision. Every one of us has our own education journey, our own kind of way of going through life. As you reflect on yours, is there something that you believe about education that would surprise other people?

Duncan Kane: 43:55

I believe that education is absolutely ongoing. I tell people now I have a degree in HR back in the day, okay, everything I learned in college is obsolete about five times, right? Okay, and so I think the thing that people get surprised at when I talk to them, especially is that learning needs to continue, and I'm a lifelong learner, and I think it keeps me young. I think it keeps me informed. It allows me to use these new devices that every time they put out a new thing, I'm going, Oh, my God, how do I do this? But education is not something that stops. And by the way, that doesn't mean you need to go back and get a master's degree or a PhD or whatever. It means that you need to continue to keep your mind open. You need to continue to keep your mind flexible, and you should take advantage of the technologies that are out there, or the local library that has that stuff.

Matt Kirchner: 44:53

No question this importance of being a lifelong learner, certainly something we live every day here at The TechEd Podcast. In fact, that's kind. Why we exist here is, is because we're all lifelong learners, and we want to continue to inform our audience and others. Your education, you're right, doesn't stop at the end of high school. It doesn't stop at the end of technical community, college, university, whatever level of education you choose to attain, it your education doesn't stop there. In fact, in many ways, it's just starting, and you're a perfect example of that. So we think about where we are here at this point of your life, Duncan, with all the experience that you've been through, I want to take us back for our final question. It's a question we love asking every single guest here on The TechEd Podcast. Let's go back to that 15 year old Duncan Kane, and if you could go back in time and give that young man a little bit of advice, knowing everything you know now, what would that advice

Duncan Kane: 45:43

be? So at 15 years old, I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau, yeah. Okay, underwater. Explorer, absolutely. Well, Explorer, just in general, I remember watching Jacques Cousteau, and I look back on it now, and I had a real love of math and science at the time, and I moved around in high school, went to three high schools, and probably because of that discontinuity, got a little disconnected from it. My 15 year old self, I would probably say, hey, stick with it a little bit more, and maybe you can be a rocket scientist. Maybe you can be that guy that's exploring at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Maybe you can be the guy that's launching a probe to Mars, those kinds of things. By the way, I've had a great career being a words guy, but I still my 15 year old really did love that stuff. I'm a bird watcher right now, so I there is still that affinity for that side of my brain and my 15 year old, I probably I might have ended up in a slightly different place and been as happy or happier working in stem like I thought I was done

Matt Kirchner: 46:50

well, fair enough. And certainly that value of saying maybe I should have stuck to stem, maybe I would be that. Jacques Cousteau, you look at all the lives changed through your work here these past 16 years in the 33 years of explorer vision Duncan, and I will tell you that whether it's somebody exploring the Marianas Trench or creating that next missile or that next rocket ship, I should say to Mars, regardless of what that is, the impact that you've had as you've explored STEM education, you've explored the ways to change the lives of young people and their teachers in many ways as impactful, if not in some ways more impactful than some of those other great scientific endeavors that you might have explored, and who knows maybe you've In fact, I probably have no doubt that you've created at least a handful of the individuals that are doing exactly that kind of exploration and advancement through your incredible work at explorer vision, This has been a really fun conversation, not just about your work at Toshiba, not just about your work at explorer vision, but also these really incredibly well thought out and deep opinions and beliefs about STEM and TechEd. So Duncan Kane, thanks so much for being with us. Well, thanks for having me. It's been a real pleasure. It was in pleasure indeed to have Duncan Kane from Toshiba, Senior Vice President, by the way, of that organization on The TechEd Podcast. On this week's episode of The TechEd Podcast, we may have set a record this week for the number of different things we are going to link up for you in the show notes, all kinds of resources that Duncan mentioned over the course of our conversation. Check those out. As you know, we tell you every week we have the best show notes in the business, and this week will be no exception. When you're done there, as always, head on over to social media. We are all over LinkedIn. We are all over Tiktok. You'll find us on Facebook. You will find us on the gram That's right, we are on Instagram as well. Wherever you consume your social media, you will find The TechEd Podcast. Stop by. Say hello. We would love to hear from you. Can't wait to see you again next week on The TechEd Podcast. My name is Matt Kirkner. Thank you so much for joining us. You.