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30 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2021 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE ple are now beginning to understand the real potentials of modern digitalization. Goldman: Yes. A great accomplishment. Now, one of the things with the Dieter Bergman Fel- lowship Award is a scholarship to the univer- sity or school of your choice. Have you made a choice yet? Ford: I have. e core of our company, Aegis, comes from Villanova University in Pennsyl- vania. I thought it would be very nice to give back a little to that univer- sity. I really hope that we can use the scholar- ship to inspire someone who may otherwise find it very challenging. It will be very satisfying to see the advantage being created there. Goldman: at's great. What are your other thoughts on not just the award, but on contributions? How would you advise someone new in the industry or fairly new to IPC who is thinking about getting involved? Ford: It's critically important now to help younger people coming into the industry. Older guys like myself, who have been in the industry for too many years, find it easy to forget exactly how hard it was to get started in our careers. Roles evolve, however, and I would love somebody to be able to achieve in say one, two, or three years, what has taken me 30 years to achieve, in the same way as we today package millions of transistors into an IC. A lot of what we learned over time is now embedded within hardware and soware, so the application and further development of modern technology is the most important, not where it came from. Young people in the industry add value in new ways without having to reinvent obsolete wheels, and therefore rep- resent excellent team members. Having confi- dence in what has been achieved, we should encourage people to develop their own ideas on top of ours. Some ideas may be better than others, but all should be given the opportunity and receive an intelli- gent discussion. e way I found it works best of all is to put yourself into the position of the people that you are talking to. Quite oen we see at meetings that people come along with some incredible ideas, that nobody can understand. To communicate ideas effectively, you've got to really start to under- stand the perspectives of people that you are talking to, so that they can see the value in their own terms and context of what you're talk- ing about. If much of your reasoning in what you're trying to say stays in your mind, rather than being positioned simply for others to understand, success depends on the assump- tion that people will see your idea in the same context as you do, which is most oen not the case. It took a bit of trial and error for me to appreciate this, and I would encourage people to really have a think about not only their core original idea, but also to think how best to present it in a way that is going to get the value across, and aer that, get into the detail of how it can be achieved. Goldman: One of the things I always believed was whatever you have to say, make sure it's