Ceci n’est pas un blockchain

Is there really nothing else to talk about? The intensity of the hype is getting to a point where conference organizers put a blockchain session onto their program “just to get people in”, in many cases because they have nothing else valuable to say. So they sell hype instead of substance.

ceci no blockchain

Magritte’s painting, freely adapted by Petervan

You know when you are at the top of the hype-cycle, when the topic hits the WEF agenda as a cure for “The 4th Industrial Revolution”.

David Birch nailed it this week in Finextra when he wrote:

“It seems to me that in a relatively short time the word blockchain has become detached from its technological roots and from its location in the spectrum of shared ledger implementation options to become one of those almost generic chromewash terms, like “big data” or “cloud” (there is no cloud, remember, it’s just somebody else’s computer) to deliver a superficial veneer of futurism.”

In the “Path of least resistance” (Amazon Affiliates link), Robert Fritz says:

We live in an era of platitudes and mottos. Many of them are designed to manipulate people into action: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”. This one, popular in he late sixties and late seventies, was clever. No matter what you did, you were involved in the conflict. And if you happened not to be directly involved, you were the cause of the conflict

And later;

So many of the notions in human growth are filled with these kinds of conflict manipulation. I suppose it is considered good marketing. Create a perceived need in the prospective client. Encourage a sense of urgency. Make it seem as if there is no choice. But conflict manipulation has a structure that cannot lead to growth just to more extreme oscillation. Thus many of the people who attempt to cause change, often with real sincerity, do not change and do not grow. The structure of conflict manipulation does not support change.

Blockchain is nothing else than code that seems applicable in many use cases. Code is language. Code is culture. The only way to understand and learn code, culture or language is to practice it. That’s exactly what many of our institutions do, and i think that is great.

But let’s not confuse symptom and cause.

As already mentioned in my blog post on Magritte and The Ages of Machines, the image of the pipe is not a pipe. The picture of the pipe stands for the hype. The hype is not the real world, not the real pipe. The hype hides reality. What is it hiding?

It hides the underlying structural changes. Robert Fritz said :

“A change of underlying structure will lead to a change of behavior. Not your good intentions, your sincerity, your hopes, your goodness, or how much you care”

Structure drives behavior, and behavior drives culture.

The pendulum oscillates:

Capitalism > Postcapitalism

Platform Capitalism > Platform Co-operatism

Collaborative > Autonomous

Internet of Things > Interest of Things

But that underlying structural and hence cultural change is caused by ecological, social and spiritual divide (the three big divides in Otto Scharmer’s work).

That structural change becomes more and more visible in the evolution from centralized to de-centralized to fully distributed systems.

From Otto Scharmer’s U.Lab

The above structural changes deeply impact our quality of attending, conversing, organizing and coordination.

These are the things we should discuss. How we participate, how we organize, how we coordinate, how we set norms and governance to tackle the three big divides.

On the governance and regulation of “centralized networks” and “distributed systems”, there was recently a great post by @nickgrossman GM of Union Square Ventures, referring to his great Regulation 2.0 Whitepaper

regulation 2.0

Figure by @nickgrossman

“This is a fundamentally different regulatory model than what we have in the real world. On the internet, the model is “go ahead and do — but we’ll track it and your reputation will be affected if you’re a bad actor”, whereas with real-world government, the model is more “get our permission first, then go do”. I’ve described this before as “regulation 1.0” vs. “regulation 2.0”

The point I am trying to make with this post is that the pipe is a big distraction for the real work that needs to be done.

The real work and our bigger themes of discussion should be (for example):

How to become better banks, better in the sense of better for the world
How to deal with the power shift resulting from the structural changes
How to move from platform capitalism to platform co-operatism
How we attend, converse, organize, and coordinate in this new medium

This is post-platform thinking. Where centralized networks (like Uber, AirBnB, etc) could/can/should get replaced by fully distributed P2P systems.

The market that can be addressed is huge. The frictions to be sorted out immense. This attracts entrepreneurship and investment.

But we risk having the same wet dream of freedom and self-realization as we had with the Internet.

In the end, powerful players stand up and try to control the market, trying to get a grip on it through monopolistic and hyper-libertarian behavior. Who will be the Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, or Alibaba of this new monopolistic distributed nirvana?

The image of that pipe may create a big illusion of perceived freedom.

The time to boost innovation capabilities is now

KCIs help organisations to succeed in the 21st century

It’s no secret that many financial services firms struggle with technology and business model innovation.

With a customer base heavily influenced by their interaction with the likes of Amazon, Alibaba and Apple, and a whole range of new FinTech entrants, financial institutions know that they must adapt to changing consumer expectations.

To link company behaviour to outputs, management teams frequently use KPIs —Key Performance Indicators. KPIs help managers to align behaviour and incentivise performance around specific revenue goals.This works very well until an organisation has to change.

Management may then find itself in the unlucky position of incentivising counterproductive behaviour. As employees continue to focus on execution, the organisation runs the risk of becoming captive to its KPI programme.

To counter this, a fresh line of thinking has been developed, promoting a new set of metrics called KCIs, or Key Capability Indicators. The essential benefit of a KCI is that it measures the capability of an organisation to change at a structural level rather than its ability to create new outputs. It is not an output metric. It does not provide an indicator of new products created, increased profits, or improved asset utilisation. Those types of metrics are already in place and can be adapted readily.

For Innotribe at Sibos 2014, Innotribe commissioned Haydn Shaughnessy, an expert on the topic, to produce a financial services specific KCI Index. This resulted in a compelling presentation at Sibos in which Haydn discussed the innovation capabilities needed by organisations to succeed in the 21st century. Based on the positive feedback of our audience, we decided to consolidate Haydn’s findings in a whitepaper – Innovation in Financial Services: The Elastic Innovation Index Report.

The paper highlights that most organisations lack a KCI set which can make change more manageable. KCIs can:

help leaders to understand the skills they need to have in place in order to effect change;
provide a model for change because capabilities map directly to a future, desired organisational competency;
benchmark their organisation against others;
apply to investment decisions;
be used as a barometer of capability development.

Developing innovation capabilities can prove challenging; however, once they are institutionalised, it has the advantage of strongly embedding innovation within the organisation. The paper asserts that there are a number of key measurements to assess the innovation capability of financial firms: namely content, platform, leadership, strategy and externalisation.

The white paper provides innovation leaders at financial institutions with a useful benchmark, at a time when developing a set of Key Capability Indicators has never been more critical. Download it here.

Innovation: from tactics to strategy

I was invited at the 7th Banking Innovation Forum in Vienna to speak on Innovation. The title of my talk was “Innovation: from tactics to strategy”

I have posted the deck on Slideshare

Innovation: from tactics to strategy from Peter Vander Auwera

It was an interesting audience, with most people coming from Central and Eastern Europe, with some interesting case studies from Paolo Barbesino from UniCredit in Italy, Carlos Gomez from Activo bank in Portugal, Marcel Gajdos from Visa Europe Czech Republic/Slovakia, Efigence in Poland, and Wojciech Bolanowski from PKO Bank Polski. I made quite some notes, and if i find the time to make a post on it, i will.

Luckily, my fans are out there to help me. I planned write something about my talk as well, but Wojciech Bolanowski already did that in his great LinkedIn Post here. I have cut and pasted his post in its entirety, as it captures well what i was trying to convey in that presentation. Thank you so much, Wojciech, much appreciated 😉

+++ Start post Wojciech

Inspire other people, think differently, create spaces where people come alive, ship to customers; as well as bravery, prototyping, events, capabilities and clarity – these are ingredients for successful innovation within big organization; at least according to excellent speaker and Innotribe Co-founder Peter Vander Auwera.

How to innovate in the shadow of behemoth?

Peter spoke on the first day of 7th Annual Banking Innovation Forum by Uniglobal in Vienna Marriott Hotel (as pictured above). He was keeping the audience extremely focused and interested. The subject was complex and of great importance: how to make really BIG organization innovative. As Peter put it in an outstanding rethoric figure: “how to make babies”. I would like to add: how to make the babies when you are well-known, established, serious and successful one with huge legacy and obliging history.

The questions are (usually) much more important than particular answers, so there is not my goal to report Peters’s solution in details. What I would like to point out is the question itself. Today, in the fast-running world of fin-tech start-ups and quasi-banking innovators almost every bank is big enough to raise this question to itself. Is it enough to inspire other people with your disrutptive ideas? Is such inspiring even possible in organization too big to change itself spontaneously? What could possibly happen if you think differently from dominant thinking styles?

Obviously, being innovative within mammoth-size organization is a big challenge and requires specific attitude and social skills. As I understood one of the Peter’s suggestion is to create appropriate team which become the centre and engine of the process. The brave, capable team with clearly set culture of “rather be failing frequently than never trying new things” to quote Peter’s presentation. Some important tools to do so are special workspaces, integrating events and ways of building true alignment.

Bravery – the slide of the presentation. Source: Uniglobal

How to gain executives’ support?

The presentation was full of insider stories with some of them concerning interactions between innovators and the board members. Those were a great lesson of struggle which, I think, at least to some extend, any innovator should expect and be prepared for. The very useful take-out was about prototyping and commercial launching of innovative products. The prototype should be, according to Peter’s best practice, as vivid and identical with the final product as possible. No more “Power Point Prototypes” unless you would like to fail. What’s even more – prototyping is just a step to the real strategic goal – to deliver real, commercial product and give it to customers. “Go out of the sandbox” is another great statement I heard from the speaker. Indeed, today environment of fast growing and alternating product propositions demand being “on market”. The Grand Jury of customers has no time to screen through pilots or prototypes; every company should be ready to risk and show its innovation as soon as it is delivered. In my opinion this is extremely important to realize. Shipment to customers what is already prototyped is the crucial part of execution process in innovation. I feel it is striking and true, therefore I tweeted this immediately with hashtag #BAIF2015!

What about the reluctant middle-level-managers?

The next splendid remark is about mid-level managers’ attitude toward change. For them the main goal is “too keep any changes far away of the plan”. It is understandable and rational. For manager’s KPIs are target-related, they try to keep organization on the course to achieve them. However, any innovation process within organization creates the risk of change, which, possibly, could alternate plans and goals. This is the real challenge – to execute innovation in organization which mainly consists of medium-level managers. And execution itself is much more difficult and lasts much longer than whole creative process of gathering ideas, evangelization, internal promotion etc. What Peter stressed, and I agree fully, is thatin context of big organizations idea management process is easier and shorter than its incubation and implementation. In start-ups world there is exactly the opposite relation.

Start-ups as indicators

Start-ups in financial sector (dubbed fintech recently) occupied a lot of Peter’s presentation as he is involved in the well-known Innotribe@Sibos program. The event has attracted more than 340 participants this year. It is quite nice sample to show what’s going on in innovation. With four continental semi-finals (NYC, London, Cape Town and Singapore) it gives global overview and prime selection of activities. This could be a useful indicator for big companies to track the start-up trends and pick up something valuable from. For example in 2014 the leading areas of start-up activity were (despite a broad category of corporates/business services) investment management, lending, big data and personal financial management. It is a clear message to banks: there is innovation coming to your core businesses and it is technology-driven.

This post is inspired by presentation shown on of 7th Annual Banking Innovation Forum ; there is another one of this category, in case you are interested:

Collateral damage of 2008 – card revenues in CEE

Peter Vander Auwera on stage in Vienna. Source: Uniglobal

Linguistic disclaimer

I have written this text in English and I know my limitations. It is possible you find this post illogical, offending, unclear or too simplistic. It does not mean to be that way, so please blame it to my imperfect English skills. I am neither native nor perfect English speaking person . If you want to be helpful, do share your grammar, spelling, style and any other remarks with me. I would appreciate any contributing comment, especially if it came from native speakers.

+++ End post Wojciech

Last call for FinTech Startups Worldwide

Launched in 2010 by SWIFT Innotribe, the Innotribe Startup Challenge introduces the world’s brightest startups to highly qualified industry experts, banks and VCs.

The Startup Challenge is a year-round programme featuring regional showcases in EMEA, Asia and Americas where participants gather for fast-paced company pitches, insightful discussions on emerging trends and innovation opportunities, and social networking events.

There’s no charge to apply or participate, so whether you’re an early-stage or a growth-stage startup delivering innovation to the financial industry, the Innotribe Startup Challenge is the best way for you to connect directly with the most important investors, customers, partners, and influencers.

Over the past 5 years, the Challenge has helped over 150 startups initiate over $300M in deals with SWIFT member banks and notable fintech investors. This year, we’re adding more value to the program with a Semi-Final event in Capetown to cover African-born innovations, and dramatically increased exposure to the 7000+ decision makers who will attend Sibos (12-15 Oct 2015 in Singapore) for both our 2015 finalists and our program alumni.

There will be four showcases this year:

During each showcase, the semi-finalists demo their ideas or new products, pitching directly to an audience looking for the best in class and voting for the top 5 companies who’ll get invited to the Grand Finale, taking place at Sibos, the world’s premier financial services event organised by SWIFT.

Due to the support of our sponsors, the program continues to be free to startups, investors & financial industry decision makers. You can learn more about the 2015 program here: www.innotribe.com/startup-challenge/.

The deadline for submissions is 22 February 2015.

This is the last call for FinTech Startups worldwide to reserve their seat for one of the best FinTech competitions out there!

So, please spread the message to all FinTech startups to apply right away because there’s only 10 days left until our deadline.

The successful applicants will be announced in April 2015.

Why Disruptive Change Points to a New Humanism in Banking

Many use the term “disruption,” to describe the upheaval we’re seeing in the financial services industry. But I believe we are witnessing a “phase-change”—a deeper transformation of how banking and business in general are done, caused by the fragmentation of everything and an unprecedented and unsurpassed period of evolutionary innovation–what might be called a “Cambrian explosion”.

In the run up to Techonomy 2012, I contributed an article entitled “The Six Ways Organizations Can Survive Until 2100.” Six months later, my essays “Dystopian Futures” and “Drowning In Data, Banks Must Learn To Surf” elaborated on my thinking.

With a couple of weeks from Techonomy 2013, now I think we need to get back to our human sense of analog time.

We see the Net-driven fragmentation of work and hierarchies, even as sovereign states are stealing data and intruding into systems worldwide. We see the fragmentation of trust, privacy, and secrecy. Our organizations are no longer vertically integrated but fragmented into orchestrators of highly specialized functions, sourced from a diverse group of both incumbents and aggressive newcomers.

We need stories about the humans we try to reach and move—narratives, as John Hagel puts it so well in Edge Perspectives–that have a beginning, middle, and end and convey a clear purpose and call for action and progress.

At the same time, we see an explosion of nodes on the grid, with trillions of “things” joining the digital conversation; an explosion in the volume and types of data. Digital currencies are erupting with decentralized and distributed models. States engage in surveillance and companies deploy what Jaron Lanier calls “Siren Servers”: online powerhouses that betray our trust for profit. In banking, we see the advent of network-only banks, and peer-to-peer money exchange solutions like Paypal’s Cash solution–a simple way to email money between people.

Value is being redefined, and many are rethinking what constitutes real wealth and wellbeing, beyond money and GDP. We have to rethink how we measure wealth. Robert Kennedy said: “GDP measures everything…except that which makes life worthwhile.” Happiness Indicators like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, the OECD’s Better Life Index, and the UK’s Happy Planet Index are already helping the world define well-being and wealth beyond money. The H(app)athon Project www.happathon.com wants to go one step further by “hacking happiness,” and shifting the world’s view of value beyond the lens of GDP.

In the financial industry, “shareholder value” and “profit maximization” remain the main criteria for investment. Nevertheless, new investment trends are emerging as a result of global changes and new ways of thinking. Investors are starting to look for criteria beyond maximizing profit, shareholder value, and pure financial return.

We have to think about what may in fact be intangible assets, along with how to account for them and invest in them. We have to re-assess the role financial markets play or should play, and their future “design principles,” so that over time we can develop more transparency, self-empowerment, and permissive not restrictive organizations.

Recently, Michell Zappa http://envisioning.io/money/ published a fantastic piece of research on “The Future of Money” documenting recent changes accelerating transactions, leveraging crowds, undermining fiat currencies, and explaining how banking is evolving into just a layer, embedded invisibly in many sorts of daily conversations. These phase changes pose fundamental questions about the role and identity of networks, institutions, and individuals.

Zappa’s timeline infographic is illuminating.

The phase-change from centralized to decentralized to distributed networks is shifting how power is distributed: from favoring the connected few to an irregular distribution that favors some individuals, and to a horizontal distribution of power that favors the whole of the network.

We seem to live in a state of perpetual crisis, jumping from one incident to another, with no room to reflect or to assess. It feels like we are drowning in tactics and ad-hoc firefighting, incapable of interpreting the tsunami of change. The world enters a level of complexity that cannot be addressed anymore by conventional, binary, linear thinking.

With all these parts moving at once, we need new tools for monitoring change. We need new capabilities and more non-linear ways of thinking, and openness to new options. We need new tools to forecast, assess, and guide our choices. They should offer richer ways to express our options through visual thinking and other techniques.

This is way beyond flashy hyper-tech bank branches and “punchy-music-cool-sexy” banking apps or product videos. This is about bringing back the analog humanizing aspect into banking. I am not my device. The future of banking is analog not digital, and its focus needs to be on relationships, intimacy, depth, and human connection.

Cross-posted at Techonomy 2013

Future of Money TV – Kickstarter guest post by Heather Vescent

Futurist and past Innotribe member, Heather Schlegel aka @heathervescent, has announced an ambitious project: The Future of Money TV Series. Happy to offer her a guest post on my Petervan blog. We had great times together, and she is worth your attention.

While working with Innotribe, Heather created 3 scenario films and 2 documentaries: http://www.youtube.com/user/innotribefilms. Happy to let Heather explain herself what she is up to with this new project:

Heather: “While working for Innotribe, I was struck by the impact my films had on people. When I showed them at SXSW and other conferences, people would come up to me afterwards and tell me how the visions in my films changed their perspective. Over and over I saw people’s ideas about the future change after watching my films. It’s this response that inspired me to develop a TV series around the future of money.

The Future of Money TV Series explores the evolution of money by interviewing experts in financial innovation and showing futuristic reenactments of plausible scenarios based on facts and theories. I developed the TV series to share positive visions with a global audience to increase optimism about the future.

An international distributor green lit the project in May and has agreed to distribute the series internationally IF I can raise $35K to shoot the expert interviews. To raise the money, I launched a Kickstarter. I need your support to make it happen. I’ve spent years of love, sweat and tear on this project. Please back it.

This is her first Kickstarter and while it’s off to an excellent start – raising $12,000 of her $35,000 goal – your support is critical.

Watch the teaser and back the project – any level helps:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/heathervescent/future-of-money-tv-series

It’s been covered on Laughing Squid: http://laughingsquid.com/future-of-money-a-docu-series-that-explores-the-positive-forces-in-the-evolution-of-money/

Breaking Banks: http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/73153/and-the-next-big-thing-is

Houston Futures: http://www.houstonforesight.org/?p=3315

Innotribe at Sibos 2013 – Big Data Track

Here is the third weekly update related to our 5^th edition of Innotribe at Sibos in Dubai from 16-19 Sep 2013.

As you probably know by now, we’ve designed our programme like a metro map. Just like the underground or subway, it’s up to you to decide which “track” to follow, depending on your expertise, interests, learning objectives, and availability.

In this week’s post, we’d like to walk you through the Big Data Track at Innotribe@Sibos 2013.

Big Data track

Big Data is an industry trend that the Innotribe team has been monitoring for some time now. We had session about Big Data at Innotribe Sibos Toronto in 2011 and Innotribe Sibos Osaka in 2012.

People, businesses and devices are hyper-connected through highly pervasive networks, creating unimaginable amounts of information. What if we could tap into the intelligence and insights buried in these networks to devise better strategies for growth? This new environment will require extraordinary insight and adaptability.

This year, we’ll explore how you and your organization can derive new insights through Network Analytics from all the data that surrounds us.

Toolkit: Planning for Unpredictable Futures

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Another “Toolkit” session: an immersive learning experience to help you internalize the basic principles of scenario thinking in support of better future planning. This session will lead into the Network Insights session later that day.

Daniel Erasmus – one of the world’s most renowned experts on Scenario Thinking – will give an in-depth introduction to this methodology that helps making better decisions and sense of an unpredictable future.

After the intro, Fabian will relate this back to why this is relevant for our community.

We have designed a practical interactive exercise to familiarize the audience with scenarios of high impact, but low probability; this is all about getting comfortable with uncertainties in business.

Speakers:

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, Digital Thinking Network. Daniel brings the unique combination of scenario thinking and big data.
Fabian VandenReydt, Head of Securities Markets and Core Business Development at SWIFT

Big Data creates network insights for growth – Part-1 – What is Data?

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 12:30 – 14:00

This is a highly interactive session, where we will let the audience discover the expanded definitions of what we mean with “data”. We will cover following dimensions:

What do we call data?
How do we see/visualise data?
How do we analyse data, how do we draw conclusions?
How do we layer data and apply pattern recognition?

We will close this part-1 highlighting the domains of applicability for our business: Fraud, Risk Management, Growth opportunities, etc. We will then move into part-2 about tools that can help spot us unknown growth opportunities or unknown threats.

Big Data creates network insights for growth – Part-2 – Overview of tools for growth.

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 14:30 – 16:00

After having set the scene in the two previous sessions (“Planning for Unpredictable Sessions from 09:30 – 10:30am” and “What is Data? From 12:30 – 14:00pm”), we will demonstrate how different analytics and big data tools can be used to identify growth opportunities or unknown threats.

In a very engaging story telling format, you will see demos, videos, animations and other explorations of the latest state-of-the-art tool for big data analytics and visualization. This is a high-paced session with 7 different showcases.

Speakers for Part-1 and Part-2 are:

Neil Bartlett, CTO And Head of Development of Risk Analytics, IBM
Daniel Erasmus, Owner, Digital Thinking Network
Matthew Gordon, Forward Deployed Engineer, Palantir
Walid Jelassi, Transformation Consultant, HP
Simon Small, Founding Director, Arria
Kimmo Soramaki, Founder & CEO, Financial Network Analytics
Michael Warner, CEO, Quantum4D
Special commentator: Fabian Vandenreydt

More information about the Innotribe@Sibos 2013 programme can be found in our programme Brochure (PDF flyer), on Sibos.com and of course Innotribe.com. The full Innotribe 2013 speaker list with bios is here.

By @petervan from the Innotribe Team

Innotribe at Sibos 2013 – Innovation Track

As from now, we offer you weekly updates related to our 5^th edition of Innotribe at Sibos in Dubai from 16-19 Sep 2013.

In this week’s post, we’d like to walk you through the Innovation Track at Innotribe@Sibos 2013.

We’ll move away from the traditional polarizing discussions such as old vs. new, startups vs. incumbents, incremental vs. disruptive, close vs. open, core vs. non-core and we will help you discover the richness of the options in the middle of the extremes and help you identify which model to best apply in your company. All examples will have specific relevance to financial services.

The track will open with disruptions impacting the traditional banking model. We will also offer you some practice sessions about new non-linear ways of thinking to help you succeed in the ever faster changing world. The track continues with a session that offers deep insights into what else is out there beyond open innovation. The track ends on Thursday morning with a selection of “Power Talks” illustrating how new players are already significantly disrupting banking – and not just the fringes of our industry, but already heading for the core with early signs of scale. We’re not talking about the distant future, but what’s happening right now!

Future of Money

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

This session is also part of the Value track.

We had a post about that last week: http://innotribe.com/2013/08/05/the-value-track-explained/

Toolkit: Better decision-making through creative techniques

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 15:30 – 17:00

Decision-making is “making sense” of things. This raises issues of what criteria we bring to decisions when contexts change. Most of economic history industry has been driven by new developments in sense awareness.

This context changes are very significant because what digital does is alter decision-contexts. It makes us have to respond to more changes, more often and make more decisions in a more delegated way, against a backdrop of criteria that we are having to capture and describe.

This is a “Toolkit” session: an immersive learning experience to help you internalize the basic principles of creative thinking to help improve judgment and decision-making. The audience will learn to internalize the difference between linear and non-linear decision taking, complemented with practice exercises based on creative decision-making based on colour, word, and sound.

We will setup 3 separate experimentation stations:

Art school with Dave
Word school with Haydn
Music school with Petervan

Speakers

Dave Gray, Author, The Connected Company: Dave is world authority in visual thinking
Haydn Shaughnessy, Author, The Innovation Lifestyle. Haydn is a deep thinker and expert on innovation.

Toolkit: Planning for Unpredictable Futures

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Speaker:

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, Digital Thinking Network. Daniel brings the unique combination of scenario thinking and big data.
Fabian VandenReydt, Head of Securities Markets and Core Business Development at SWIFT

Toolkit: Thinking in Images

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Tuesday 17 Sep 2013

Time: 16:30 – 17:30

Visualization is increasingly used in business and science to simplify complexity: a picture is worth a thousand words. Drawing is a natural process for thinking, exploring ideas and learning. Every child enjoys drawing — but at some point in our lives we learn that drawing is the province of artists. We begin to say things like:

“I’m no artist”
“I can’t draw a straight line”
“I can’t draw a stick figure”

This is a fallacy. You can draw, and when you were a kid you knew it. You just forgot. It’s time to remember what it was like to draw as a child — and to rediscover the joy of exploring ideas and learning without boundaries. It’s time to forget that you don’t know how to draw. Play isn’t just for fun. It’s how we learn. You can practice your visual thinking skills and have fun at the same time. Enjoy yourself, and take some new abilities back to work with you.

The room will be set-up like a classroom, with the audience as students. Like a Zen-master with his disciples, Dave Gray – one of the masters in the field of visual thinking – will help his students discover step by step their hidden power of visual expression.

New Innovation Models

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Wednesday 18 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Our speakers will first give you a fascinating overview on what’s new in innovation models: from “castle and sandbox” one way of doing Open Innovation, to incremental innovation, disruptive innovation, narrow innovation, Jugaad innovation, Reverse innovation, Shanzai innovation (copycatting), computational innovation, radical adjacencies, and algorithmic innovation.

After the intro, we offer you two immersive learning experiences:

Copycatting feels like a taboo in innovation. What if we could get rid of these taboos, and innovate again like kids? In this exercise we will actually train you to copycat, by copying one of the newcomers in payments space. In the coming days, we will also publish here and on swift.com an op-ed by Jaspar Roos, based on a research he did on copycatting.
Crowd-source everything. We will practice how to involve crowds in innovation decision-making: how can a crowd shape a product? How can we crowd-develop, crowd-manage and crowd-design for example. You will be invited to pick one of your existing processes and crowd-source it. Also here, an article based on Haydn’s research on crowd-activities will be published soon.

Speakers

Jaspar Roos, Chief Inspiration Officer, ABN AMRO Dialogues FutureIdeas.eu and Ventur.es
Haydn Shaughnessy, Author, The Innovation Lifestyle

Powertalks: Best innovations in Fintech

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Thursday 19 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

Inspired by TED Power Talks, we have invited some awesome innovators from the financial industry to present real, live innovations, which are in the market and starting to scale. In other words, this is not about Star Trek, but actual innovations, where the “rubber meets the road”.

Patrick Griffin, Head of Business Development of OpenCoin, the organization that first built the Ripple protocol. A Ripple is a unit of the native currency that exists in the Ripple network. The Ripple network is a peer-to-peer payment network. It enables free payments to merchants, consumers and developers, and to send and receive money in dollars, euros, yen or Bitcoin without having to do extra work for foreign exchange transactions and without charge backs. Ripple is also an open source protocol created for anyone to build on top of or use.
Kristoffer Lawson, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist, Holvi. Kris will talk about Holvi’s upcoming European launch and his work as initiator of the Popup Society movement: setting up a company, forming a team and building a product, all within 48 hours. In true popup fashion many of these ideas die immediately, but not all. Some have gone on to become great companies.
Jaspar Roos will showcase some of the latest innovations in financial services his teams build over the last year in his different roles as Chief Inspiration Officer, ABN AMRO, Dialogues, FutureIdeas.eu and Ventur.es
Manu Sporny, Founder/CEO, Digital Bazaar and Chairman PaySwarm will share what happens if payments get commoditized to the level of the W3C protocol? Manu spends most of his time creating open standards and open technology that will integrate payments into the core architecture of the Web. His vision is to democratize finance, making the financial tools that are only available to large organizations today, available to everyone on the Web.

Closing Plenary Innotribe: “Around the campfire”

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Thursday 19 Sep 2013

Time: 14:30 – 15:30

Later in the afternoon on Thursday – at 14:30pm – we will all join the Closing Plenary Innotribe: “Around the campfire”, where we will share the lessons, tools and techniques learned during the week. We are very proud to confirm our two tribal wise men:

JP Rangaswami (Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com and direct report of Marc Benioff) and;
Andrew Davis (Global Head of e-Commerce Strategy and Innovation, HSBC).

By @petervan from the Innotribe Team

Innotribe at Sibos 2013 – Value Track

As from now, we offer you weekly updates related to our 5^th edition of Innotribe at Sibos in Dubai from 16-19 Sep 2013.

In this week’s post, we’d like to walk you through the Value Track at Innotribe@Sibos 2013.

The Value track will explore different aspects of the great value discussion:

What is the future model of banking?
What is wealth beyond money?
Can everything be measured?
And are we even measuring the right things?
Can we valuate companies based on their intangible assets?
How does all this drive happiness and well-being?

Future of Money – Opening Plenary

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 09:30 – 10:30

In this session, we will identify how the current model is being disrupted and how the impact on cost and revenues. We will co-create the corporate banking business model of the future, using the Business Model Canvas methodology of Alex Osterwalder.

Innotribe co-founder Mariela Atanassova (Mela) recently posted a great article on this subject on the American Banker blog “BankThink” as part of their series “The Future Model of Banking”.

To guide us, we have invited six awesome speakers, each highlighting one dimension of disruption of the existing corporate to banking model:

Scott Bales, Chief Mobile Officer, Moven will focus on Social and Mobile;
Dave Gray, Author, The Connected Company will focus on organizational change and how his principles lead to “The Connected Bank”;
Hank Uberoi, CEO, Earthport and Dan Marovitz, Founder & CEO, Buzzumi and previously Head of Product Management, Global Transaction Banking at Deutsche Bank will articulate what has changed in infrastructure;
Patrick Murck, General Counsel, Bitcoin Foundation will ignite us on transparency and transaction costs;
We are in discussions with a major bank, which has experimented with hybrid business models in the Corporate to Banking space.

Two host moderators will guide you through this exercise and will ensure a deep interaction between audience and speakers in an exciting TV Studio type format. One moderator (Udayan Goyal, Partner and Co-Founder of the Anthemis Group) will work the stage; the other moderator (Chris Skinner, Chairman of The Financial Services Club) will work the audience.

Design Thinking

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 11:00 – 12:15

This is a “Toolkit” session: an immersive learning experience to help you internalize the basic principles of design thinking with hands-on practical activities. We will practice process step by step the different stages of design-full thinking and apply them to examples from the financial industry:

Human observation, particularly using extreme users to inspire idea
Looking at a larger context – analogies from other fields; examine interaction touch points
Multidisciplinary teams
Experimentation, prototyping
Engaging others in the process to build enthusiasm for your idea

Speakers: We have invited two world-class experts to guide you through this process:

Vince Voron recently joined Dolby Labs as their VP, Executive Creative Director. He has more than 20 years of marketing design experience from two of the world’s most iconic brands: Apple and Coca-Cola. At Apple, he developed and led the human factors and color teams responsible for iMacs, PowerBooks, iPods and the iPhone. As head of Industrial Design at Coca-Cola, he led the form and user interface design for the Coca-Cola Freestyle platform.
James Moed is the leader of IDEO’s work in financial service design across Europe. In that role he advises clients and design teams, combining observations of human behaviour with inspiration from other services, new business models, and emerging technologies.

Investment Management 2.0

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Monday 16 Sep 2013

Time: 12:30 – 13:30

In the financial industry “shareholder value” and “profit maximization” are still very much the main criteria for investment. Nevertheless, new investment trends are emerging as a result of global changes and new ways of thinking,. Investors are starting to look for criteria beyond maximizing profit, shareholder value and pure financial return – many of which are based on ‘intangible assets’.

To put all this in context, we strongly recommend Otto Scharmer’s latest book “Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies” (Amazon Associates Link).

This session is designed to be highly interactive, applying the design thinking methodology to investment management. The session is designed as a political campaign debate, where two protagonists will prompt the discussion through at times provocative statements and trying to convince the audience of their deep insights.

During this debate, we will look into following aspects:

Definitions of intangible assets, how to account for them and how to invest in them.
What role do financial markets play/should play, and their future “design principles”
We will paint a broader evolutionary context and the role of technology in all this;
Leading into transparency, self-empowerment and permissive organizations

Each of the protagonists will then detail their personal actions for change.

Speakers:

Mary Adams, Founder of Smarter Companies, expert in accounting for intangible assets
Stephen Richards, Principal of Ability Capital Solutions, who is launching a Pension Investment Fund, based on crowdsourced recommendations for investment by the pension beneficiaries.

Accounting for Intangible Assets

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Thursday 19 Sep 2013

Time: 11:00 – 12:00

Is it possible to make investment decisions based on intangible assets? In this session, you will learn that the financials used as a measuring stick are being generated out of a new kind of factory, a new kind of infrastructure. Most of investment and asset managers understand this intuitively.

We will give you practical hands-on exercises to empower you with a vocabulary and a framework that helps you change what you do and how you evaluate companies.

Speakers:

Mary Adams, Founder of Smarter Companies, expert in accounting for intangible assets

Beyond GDP – What is real wealth?

Location: Innotribe Space

Day: Thursday 19 Sep 2013

Time: 12:30 – 14:00

Happiness Indicators like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, the OECD’s Better Life Index, and the UK’s Happy Planet Index are already helping the world define well-being and wealth beyond money. The H(app)athon Project www.happathon.com wants to go one step further by “hacking happiness”, and shifting how the world’s view of value can move beyond the lens of GDP.

Innotribe has partnered with The H(app)athon Project to co-deliver this customized, super-interactive, not-to-be-missed game experience, where several imaginary countries based on new economies will work together to increase their collective progress. We have gone full-blown for the design of this session, with light and sound-scapes to immerse you 100% in this real live experiment, where you are the subject of research 😉

The results of this experiment will be fed into the development of the Happathon mobile app that will be launched in March 2014.

Speakers:

John Havens, Founder, The Happathon Project.

Closing Plenary Innotribe: “Around the campfire”

Right after the Happathon session – at 14:30pm – we will all join the Closing Plenary Innotribe: “Around the campfire”, where we will share the lessons, tools and techniques learned during the week. We are very proud to confirm our two tribal wise men:

JP Rangaswami (Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com and direct report of Marc Benioff) and;
Andrew Davis (Global Head of e-Commerce Strategy and Innovation, HSBC).

More information about the Innotribe@Sibos 2013 programme can be found in our programme Brochure (PDF flyer), on Sibos.com and of course Innotribe.com

By @petervan from the Innotribe Team

Drowning in Data, Banks Must Learn to Surf

The question every bank should ask itself is: “Am I a creator or a remover of friction?”

John Hagel hit the nail on the head in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post: “The cost and difficulty of coordinating activities across entities, on a global scale, is far lower now.” Today’s hyper-connectivity not only makes it possible to coordinate across entities in a more efficient way, it also causes a deep disintermediation of players that were able to maintain their monopolies through sheer scale and power.

A really good example of this is Uber.com, the well-publicized peer-to-peer limousine and taxi service directly connecting drivers and customers, disintermediating completely the dispatching taxi companies that proved to be the friction in the system.

The same phenomenon is now happening everywhere, including in banking, as we see the advent of more peer-to-peer (mobile) payment systems.

Besides disintermediation, we have disintegration. What we witness is the end of highly vertically integrated organizations, and the birth of organizations whose chief strength is to pick and choose best-in-class functionality from outsiders and mix and match those with their own internal world-class capabilities. For that to happen, you need a decomposition of previously highly integrated functions into smaller chunks (for example risk management, payments, securities, reference data, even identity and trust) and the ability to expose those functions through application programming interfaces. Externalizing your core competencies has become an economic imperative.

Sean Park from the Anthemis Group suggested all this five years ago. Back then, you still could create a competitive advantage with these methods. Today you are a plain loser if you do not have this in place yet.

So if all this is commonplace, what’s the next big disruption? In my opinion it’s peer-to-peer, the ability of two or more entities to share data and do business without a central orchestrator. P2P changes everything. It changes product and service offerings, it changes how companies are organized; it fundamentally changes the business models we are used to. This is very quickly leading to a “fragmentation of everything”: the fragmentation of work, of applications, of hierarchies, of states.

To illustrate how deep the change is, I’d like to use the metaphor of a camel in the ocean. The camel is the bank, and the water is data. Until now, the camel was carrying its own water through the desert. Now the camel is in the ocean, surrounded by data. We will require a new kind of species that can survive in this data ocean, can cope with the advent of trillions of nodes on the grid, all hyper-connected, hyper-fragmented and 100% distributed.

The world needs a new kind of bank, way beyond a money-bank, probably a “trusted data bank” that can help human beings store, change and transact data, and in doing so create new authentic value. Not just gimmicks, tricks, quick wins, or dirty fixes.

We seem to live in a “perpetual crisis,” jumping from one incident to another, where there is no room anymore for building a story with a beginning, middle, and an end; no room for reflection, no room to assess and, like a surfer, scan the waves of change on the surface of the data ocean. It’s like the camel is under water, drowning in tactics and ad-hoc firefighting, incapable of interpreting the tsunami of change.

The world enters a level of complexity that cannot be addressed anymore by conventional, binary, linear thinking. We need new tools, capabilities, and more non-linear ways of thinking, to be prepared to open up for more options. These new tools are about forecasting and assessing in different ways, deciding our options in different ways, ambitious design thinking with focus on what needs to be achieved versus what is the problem to be solved, and richer ways of expressing our options through visual thinking and other techniques.

This is way beyond the flashy designs of hyper-tech branches and “punchy-music-cool-sexy” apps or product videos.

The bank of the future is a humanizing bank,

where “I am not my device” and where the focus is on relationships, intimacy, depth, and human connection – supported by technology. It’s about deep human behavior, about deep culture change. But that does not happen through top-down instruction. What is needed is viral change at scale of specific behaviors, seeded and nurtured bottom-up from deep within the fabric of the organization.

Behavior creates culture,

and not the other way around.

Cross-posted on American Banker

Structure drives behavior, and behavior drives culture.

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The deadline for submissions is 22 February 2015.

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The bank of the future is a humanizing bank,

Behavior creates culture,

and not the other way around.

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