Don Tapscott's Blog, page 4

Will Trump in Davos be the elephant in the china shop?

Last year I described him as “the elephant not in the room.” This year he’s more likely to be the elephant in the china shop.

The World Economic Forum starts in Davos on Monday – and there’s a star attraction, or distraction, in U.S. President Donald Trump. On the agenda of the Monday-to-Friday event: more than 400 sessions, with Mr. Trump scheduled to speak on Friday. On the minds of organizers: collaboration.

“We need collaborative efforts,” forum founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab said last week. “There is today a real danger of a collapse of our global systems. … It is in our hands to change the state of the world.”

Read the full article in The Globe and Mail

The Blockchain Research Institute Manifesto: Realizing the new promise of the digital economy

As many of you already know, my son Alex and I have founded the  Blockchain Research Institute  to investigate the strategic implications and opportunities created by this new technology.

I’ve been asked to explain what we stand for at the institute. As a result, we’ve created this ten-point “Manifesto.” I would love to hear your thoughts!

If your company is interested in joining the Blockchain Research Institute, please contact  *protected email* .

The Blockchain Research Institute Manifesto

Blockchain (also known as distributed ledger technology) represents the second era of the Internet; an Internet of value, and not just the value layer on the Internet stack. We’ve never had this capability before – trusted transactions directly between two or more total strangers, authenticated by mass collaboration, and powered by collective cryptography, clever code, and self-interest. It is the culmination of what Alan Turing started, a true paradigm shift ushered in by decentralized ledger technologies.
Like the Internet of information before it, blockchain promises to upend business models, disrupt industries for the good, and lower the barriers for entrepreneurs to compete against incumbents. It is pushing us to challenge how we have defined value, funded innovation, structured power, and rewarded participation. However, incumbents should view blockchain not so much as a threat but as a call to action.
This technology holds vast promise to solve many of the planet’s problems such as climate change. It also has the potential to address the unintended, unwelcome, or unlawful consequences of the first era, namely the erosion of privacy, security, economic inclusion, intellectual property rights, and freedoms of speech, press, religion, and cultural expression.
Central banks should convert their fiat currencies into digital ones, and governments should embrace this technology to improve their operations and increase transparency and accountability for those in office. We believe that government participation and even considered, light-touch regulation will likely have a greater role in preserving both the rights and powers of citizens and consumers.
All functions of management will change. We expect this technology to reconfigure the architecture of the firm and the nature of competitiveness. It’s already demonstrating its ability to lower transaction costs and eliminate the third parties needed to establish trust.
Competition between the many types of blockchains – permissioned/permissionless, open/closed, with a currency and not, using differing consensus systems and addressing different opportunities – is healthy and will take time to sort out. But protracted standards wars within platforms stall development and burn capital. Without standards, progress will be slow.
There is growing hyperbole, volatility, and this rush to innovation will produce countless failures and fraud – all which occur with any new, breakthrough communications medium. But the fundamentals of this new paradigm are sound and its arc is to proceed forward. Cynics dismiss this revolution at their peril.
The implementation challenges to overcome are many. The technology is relatively immature and arcane. It lacks not just transactional capacity for large-scale activities but also user-friendly interfaces for broad consumer adoption, both of which stifle network effects.
Beyond standards, stewardship of this resource is critical. Bottom-up, self-organizing global governance has worked well for the first era of the Internet and can work for the second. We believe that a multi-stakeholder network approach is the best protection from government interference or the emergence of invisible power dynamics. Decentralization does not mean disorganization.
New paradigms cause dislocation and are usually received with coolness or worse – hostility and mockery. Vested interests often fight change and leaders of the old have difficulty embracing the new. So, it is with blockchain. The new paradigm is calling forth a new generation of leaders. Leadership for this distributed future is and will come from everywhere – in organizations, industries, our economies and society. Leadership is an opportunity for each of us.

Introducing CarbonX.ca: Fighting Climate Change with Blockchain

Climate change is indeed one of the critical issues of our time. Business managers should care because ultimately business cannot succeed in a world that’s failing.

The recent surge of superstorms that have been battering the Caribbean and the Southern US, the fires in Western Canada, and the extreme flooding experienced in many parts of the world have helped raised awareness of the impact of warming temperatures.

I remember a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland where Bill Clinton was talking about climate change. He argued that if we were able to decrease global carbon emissions by 80 per cent by the year 2050 it would still take 1000 years for the planet to cool down. In the meantime, he said, you can expect a lot of bad things to happen – like a billion people losing most of their water supply in the next decade.

I left the room mind-boggled about the human tragedy that would result – death, migration, wars, and increased terrorism just for starters.

Clearly (to anyone who believes in science) climate change is arguably the world’s most daunting challenge. Virtually every scientist now agrees that the debate is over. Rising average surface temperatures combined with rapidly expanding deserts, melting Arctic sea ice caps and ocean acidification now provide unequivocal evidence that human activities are fundamentally altering the Earth’s climate. In fact the planet appears to be changing faster than even the pessimists expected—way faster.

For many people, those consequences seem distant, and it’s certainly true that the worst of it will be inherited by future generations. Given the short-term thinking that dominates our political systems, our economy, our capital markets, and our day-to-day decision-making as individuals, it is easy to be dismissive of the notion that humankind will suddenly become motivated by a sense of inter-generational justice to make the deep and difficult adjustments that are required to avert global ecological disruption.

It’s one thing for governments or corporations to take action, but more is needed – a global change in human behaviour. But what will it take to cause all of us radically reduce our own carbon footprint?

Today, I’m pleased to share news about the launch of our latest initiative, CarbonX. CarbonX has the ambitious mission to combat climate change by using blockchain technology.

CarbonX will engage millions of people to help fight climate change by encouraging them to making smart choices about their carbon consumption. The company plans to purchase carbon credits, or invest in carbon reduction programs, then distribute the offsets via major retailers and brands as loyalty tokens that will help incent people to make carbon-friendly decisions in their day-to-day purchases of goods and services. The tokens earned will be tradable on the CarbonX platform, or can be exchanged for carbon-friendly goods and services, other reward program points, or other digital currencies.

CarbonX is a partnership of leading blockchain thought leaders, talent and technology – Alex and I are part of the co-founding group, as is my brother Bill, and global blockchain specialist firm ConsenSys, is our partner in this joint venture.

If you’d like to read more, check out the press release that came out today here.

We invited some of the world’s leading thinkers in blockchain to Toronto. Here’s what they had to say:

In the book Blockchain Revolution, we issued a challenge “to transform the economic power grid and the old order of human affairs for the better.” We had no idea so many people would step up to the plate.

The Blockchain Research Institute’s (BRI) first member summit in Toronto last week provides evidence that profound changes are in the works. On November 8 and 9, leaders from over 60 organizations—including the mayor of Toronto, John Tory, and more than one hundred people passionate about the transformative power of the blockchain—joined us to discuss how best to steward this nascent technology. The event opened with a session attended by 350 members, faculty and special invited guests.

“There’s a big distinction between hype and reality,” said Michael Casey, co-author of the forthcoming book, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. “We are in a bit of a blockchain bubble, and there will be a reckoning,” as there was with dotcoms in 2000. “But it is also a boom, with lots of ideas.” In his keynote address, he explained about how bitcoin “changed the paradigm” for what constitutes value by instantiating the concept of a uniquely identifiable digital asset, which makes digital scarcity possible. It democratized and centralized the assets of finance. “To think that it’s a crazy scam is to miss the opportunity,” he said.

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Tom Serres and Bettina Warburg of Animal Ventures said that a blockchain future was inevitable. “It’s not necessarily better, but it is inevitable,” said Serres, quoting Kevin Kelly, author of The Inevitable. How this future unfolds, however, is not inevitable. That’s why the theme of our summit was “Navigating the Blockchain Revolution,” to underscore how each member organization could shape this unfolding.

We agreed that job number one was to restore trust in our markets and institutions. “Trust is the currency of government,” said Maryantonett Flumian of the Institute of Governance.

“Blockchain is all about trust,” said Jerry Cuomo of IBM. It provides a means of creating a single shared and immutable version of the truth that enables us to unlock value, create new opportunities, and minimize risk in our economy. Those are huge benefits. According to Tony Scott, Federal CIO under President Obama, the two big questions are how to modernize and decentralize legacy systems that are centralized and siloed, and how to govern and finance them going forward?

The governance of standardization at three levels—platform, application, and industry ecosystem—is critical at this early stage, and BRI members have embraced their role in influencing the development of standards in their domains. Cuomo described how IBM was “dreaming big” about its future in a blockchain-enabled world, and “acting incrementally” to achieve this future. That meant developing a blockchain strategy that included strategic experiments and pilot projects with partners.

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“It’s a very generative space,” said Warburg. “There will be great experiments and great failures, but not because the ideas were bad.” Marley Gray of Microsoft said, “Fail fast, fail cheap.” The point is to be experimenting and learning from everyone else’s experiments, and that’s what the Blockchain Research Institute is all about: studying those who are boldly living into their blockchain futures, reporting on what worked and why, and then gathering together to share leadership insights.

“Supply chain may well be the killer app,” said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an Internet pioneer and MIT fellow. He was commenting on Serres and Warburg’s keynote on the future of supply chains as friction-free, blockchain-enabled, and an always learning “shared state.” As such they become “Asset Chains” – a cognitive supply machine. Nearly everyone in the room was nodding.

Companies such as Fedex, for example, are exploring blockchain for supply chain dispute resolution, which costs a lot and ties up enormous sums of money. Serres smiled, “We created a sticker, ‘Supply chains are sexy.’” Warburg added, “Think about it: everything has a supply chain.” That’s why every company should be developing its blockchain strategy.

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“The issue isn’t getting started,” said Kevin Humphries of Fedex. “The issue is getting to scale.” So where should leaders drive capital? “Toward infrastructure,” said Serres. That’s where early funding went in the Internet, and that’s where standardization and interoperability are key. However, to agree on standards, develop business cases, and build out infrastructure all require collaboration. Serres and Warburg believe that the leaders of this blockchain revolution will be coalition builders, like many of the leaders at the summit. Large firms that want fully-baked business cases before they begin experimenting might miss out on the opportunity to learn, said Iliana Oris Valiente of Accenture.

As I reflect on my last 36 hours with the members of the Blockchain Research Institute, I can’t help thinking of the words of Sir Harry Lauder, echoed by Robert F. Kennedy: “The future is not a gift, it is an achievement.” Just as the first era of the Internet was inevitable, so is this second era, powered by blockchain. But we need to shepherd it so that it indeed alters the economic power grid and reorders human affairs for the better. The expertise of our faculty and our members as well as the quality of the discussions over these last two days has convinced me that we will achieve a future that is inclusive, respectful of human rights, and perhaps the most creative ever.

“These are of us, they are with us, All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind, We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, Pioneers! O pioneers!”

– Walt Whitman, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” Leaves of Grass, 1865

About:

Don Tapscott is the author of 16 widely-read books about technology in business and society, including The Digital Economy, Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics. With his son Alex Tapscott he is the co-author of Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business and the World and the co-founder of the Blockchain Research Institute, a think tank conducting 70 projects about blockchain opportunities and challenges.

The Blockchain Research Institute’s All-Member Summit featured sessions on the following topics:

The Token Economy
Climate Change and Sustainability
Blockchain and the Internet of Things
ICOs and the Future of Finance
Unlocking Healthcare on the Blockchain
Asset Chains – The Future of Supply Chain Management
Quantum-Safe Blockchains
Triple-Entry Accounting and CFOs of the Future
Navigating the Legal and Regulatory Landscape
Distributed Energy
Government Transformation

Tapscott named the world’s most influential digital thinker by Thinkers50

Don Tapscott has been named the world’s most influential leader in digital thinking, as well as the second-most influential living management thinker overall, at the Thinkers50 awards ceremony and gala.

Founded in 2001, Thinkers50 provides a definitive list of the 50 most influential thought leaders in the world, published every two years. They also provide special awards for leaders in categories such as strategy, innovation and digital thinking. Previous winners include Peter Drucker, CK Prahalad and Clayton Christenson.

This is the ninth publication of the Thinkers50 rankings, and the fourth time Tapscott has been included in the top ten. The number one rank this year was claimed by former Rotman School of Management Dean Roger Martin, making this the first year that both the first and second-place rankings are held by Canadians.

At the gala, Don was also honoured with the “Digital Thinkers Award” alongside his son and co-author, Alex Tapscott, recognising them as the most important thinkers about the digital age in the past two years for their work in Blockchain Revolution.

“This is, among other things, a vote of confidence from the thought leadership community in the potential of blockchain technology to change management,” said Don Tapscott.

“It is my hope that this will encourage even more people to think about the ways blockchain can be used to build a better, more prosperous world for everybody.”

Two Canadians top the 2017 Thinkers50 List of Management Thinkers

13 Nov London, England Two Canadians led the rankings of the top 50 management thinkers in the world. Roger Martin of University of Toronto’s Rotman School was ranked number one, and Don Tapscott was a close runner up, coming in at the 2nd most influential management thinker at the Thinkers50 Gala.

Tapscott was also recognized for his pioneering work with his son, Alex Tapscott, on their book Blockchain Revolution. The duo received the Digital Thinking Award.

Other nominees in the prestigious category included Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee of MIT, Kate Darling of MIT, Jose Esteves of Spain’s IE Business School, Martin Ford, futurist, Anindya Ghose of NYU, Sherry Turkle of MIT and Hu Yong of Peking University.

Read the Thinkers50 Press Release

Digital Transformation: Interview with Don Tapscott, Author of “Blockchain Revolution”

Don Tapscott talks about the dark side of the digital age and the need for a new social contract.

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WEF Report: Realizing the Potential of Blockchain

At today’s World Economoic Forum Annual Meeting of the Champions, the WEF published an in-depth report on Blockchain, written by Don Tapscott. The paper talks about bitcoin and how it should be governed to maximise the the potentially huge benefits to society.

The meeting, first established in 2007, “convenes the next generation of fast-growing enterprises shaping the future of business and society, and leaders from major multinationals, government, media, academia and civil society.

Watch an outtake of the meeting:

Creating a New Social Contract for the Digital Economy

Friends.  At the end of Blockchain Revolution, Alex Tapscott and I call for the creation of a new social contract.  Technology is breaking down our the agreements that grew from the industrial age  – about employment, economic opportunity, public discourse, the integrity of democracy and other profound  issues.  Over the last year I’ve been thinking about this and have worked with researcher Joan McCalla to get an initial draft on paper.

 

 

I’d like to know your thoughts!  If you have quote worthy insights you may well end up in the document. I don’t know what this will become.  I could be anything from a book or online community to a manifesto for a political party.   What do you think?

My New Social Contract

Friends.  At the end of Blockchain Alex Tapscott and I call for the creation of a new social contract.  Technology is breaking down our the agreements that grew from the industrial age  – about employment, economic opportunity, public discourse, the integrity of democracy and other profound  issues.  Over the last year I’ve been thinking about this and have worked with researcher Joan McCalla to get an initial draft on paper.

I’d like to know your thoughts!  If you have quote worthy insights you may well end up in the document. I don’t know what this will become.  I could be anything from a book or online community to a manifesto for a political party.   What do you think?