Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Mr. Prime Minister, Madame Ministers, Distinguished guests from near and far.
As a fifth-generation member of the Wallenberg family – and as Chairman of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation – this is a tremendous and very proud moment for me to welcome you to our Jubilee Dinner, which marks the culmination of our Foundation’s centennial year celebrations.
On behalf of the board and management of the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, I wish everyone a warm welcome to the evening’s festivities, which we are celebrating in the spirit of science and with a belief in a bright future.
Earlier this evening, many of you have seen what the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology has to offer, and what the museum’s mission is. This is why you must surely appreciate why we chose this particular venue for our anniversary dinner.
So how do you actually celebrate a Foundation that has turned 100?
It was clear to us that we should dedicate the centennial year to our researchers. But we also wanted to devote the year to those who will carry our society on their shoulders and develop it in the future, our young people.
To this aim, we arranged six scientific symposia in 2017 in various locations in Sweden at the most prominent research universities in the country.
These seminars were attended by many outstanding and established international and national researchers, but also by future research talent in the form of young professional researchers and students.
For our young people, we made an anniversary donation to five science centers across Sweden. Thanks to this initiative, five new “visualization domes” will be built. These auditoriums, resembling dome-like movie theaters, will be similar to the Visualization Center that already exists in Norrköping.
At these domes, around 1.5 million visitors will be able to experience the magic of research and science. One of the domes will be built here at this museum. From my own experience, I can say that it is really cool to see an eight-year-old’s eye light up with inspiration at one of these science centers.
Let me take you back briefly in time, to 160 years ago. The year was 1856, when my great-great grandfather André Oscar Wallenberg founded Stockholms Enskilda Bank, called SEB today.
His son, Knut Agathon, became very successful and built a sizable private fortune. He was more than a businessman. Knut Agathon was also a local politician and he was involved in the Swedish suffragette movement. He also served as Sweden’s Minister of Foreign Affairs during World War I.
In their late years, Knut Agathon and his wife Alice increasingly devoted themselves to funding private individuals and projects that needed financial assistance.
The couple had no heirs and decided in 1917 to carry out their charity work through a non-profit foundation. The original endowment, the platform for the Foundation, consisted of mainly SEB and Investor shares worth 20 million kronor, corresponding to 500-600 million kronor today.
Today, the Foundation’s assets have grown to exceed 100 billion kronor. At the same time, more than 24 billion kronor has been distributed in grants over the years.
The Foundation’s statutes state that grants are to support basic research and education. But they are also to benefit Sweden as a country, as expressed in the old Swedish word “landsgagneligt”. This word has become a core concept in our grant program and social involvement.
Our lodestar has constantly been to fund activities that provide maximum benefits. During the first 100 years of the Foundation, the focus of our grant program has changed and evolved with society, and especially in step with the research and scientific community.
In the beginning, our grants were utilized for building premises for research and education purposes. Later, donations were made to equip these facilities, and in recent years, to support brilliant individuals, not least young star researchers.
The Foundation invests in activities that can really make a difference in research. We support researchers on a long-term basis and we give them the freedom to apply the most pioneering ideas. Ideas that can succeed – and fail.
One of these prominent researchers, who is here tonight – the astronomer Sofia Feltzing – expressed this very well in one of the Foundations’ video films. She said:
“We will discover things that we didn’t even know we were looking for.”
To me, this captures the essence of the Foundation.
Today, we can’t know what we will fund in the future, or how, or where, our grants will generate the greatest benefits. But there is one thing I am sure of: we will always give the best researchers the freedom to research things that might be impossible to achieve.
But this evening is also about taking a giant leap into the future.
This is why I am announcing with great enthusiasm a second jubilee donation.
We will be making a considerable grant within two fields that have the potential, in our opinion, for truly making an impression on science, but also on business and society at large.
We are granting 1.6 billion kronor for research initiatives in quantum technology and in artificial intelligence.
For this purpose, we are establishing the Wallenberg Centre of Quantum Technology, hosted by the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden.
Research activities in artificial intelligence – a field in which Sweden needs a strong international position – will be carried out within the already established Wallenberg Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP).
A substantial portion of the funding for these two initiatives will go to comprehensive research schools and to recruit young researchers to Sweden.
I believe these grants say a lot about the Foundation. We are not even certain that quantum computers can be successfully designed or capable of competing with today’s computer technology.
Despite this, we are prepared to take the risk to ensure that Sweden has the necessary competence.
The development of technology can bring many benefits but also create new challenges. The Wallenberg Foundations will therefore fund studies to investigate how these modern technologies will impact society.
As a representative for the Foundation and my family, it is with considerable pride that I stand before you this evening to tell you about our Foundation and the “ecosystem” the Wallenberg family has built and managed for 160 years.
And it is with enthusiasm that we also engage ourselves in the companies that the Foundation has holdings in.
The growth in dividends from these holdings creates the opportunity for the Wallenberg Foundations to this year alone, distribute a total of 2.3 billion kronor in grants for research and education in Sweden.
But we should not get too comfortable.
We live in a world of cutthroat global competition and we must constantly develop and improve the business environment here in Sweden.
This is a prerequisite for the long-term work of the Foundations and their grants for research and education.
Imagine if Knut and Alice had been able to experience everything the Foundation’s has achieved during its first century, and if they were sitting here with us this evening. I believe they would have been extremely proud to see how the Foundation has positively impacted Swedish research and education, and ultimately, Swedish society.
All of this makes me a proud member of the fifth generation of our family. We have the privilege to continue and develop the work that Knut and Alice began 100 years ago!
So welcome to this Jubilee Dinner once again and I hope we will have a great evening together.
Skål! Cheers!