Check out this interesting company Recorded Future.
This is very relevant to my upcoming post on Digital Identity Tuner 7.0
Start thinking of this metaphor when looking at your digital footprint.
Recorded Future
Reply
Category Archives: global brain
Innotribe at Sibos 2010: Smart Data
Cross-posted on Swiftcommunity.net
Imagine understanding thousands of data-sources in real-time and do market correlations; or leveraging deep unstructured data analytics in order to derive financial intelligence from unstructured data; and render all of this rich information to your users in rich user interfaces such as iPhone/iPAD or even gesture based user interfaces to do slicing and dicing of massive data sets.
Imagine unleashing the power of SWIFT semantics and standards knowledge on structured and non-structured information, and what could happen then. That is what our “Smart Data” theme in Innotribe at Sibos2010 (25 – 29 Oct 2010 in Amsterdam) is all about. We decided to call it “Smart Data” , as – at least in our industry – the words “semantic web” have – ironically – little meaning.
The ability to understand the semantic meaning of data will improve business intelligence for financial services. In essence, today SWIFT already tags semantically the fields of the standard SWIFT messages. Tomorrow, we could tag ANY information, including non-structured information hidden in PDF’s or Word documents or other information streams, overlay that information with existing other structured data sources, and offer pattern recognition services leading to deeper intelligence about those data sets. If you’re interested, I have prepared a more detailed write-up on my personal blog here .
As always in Innotribe @ Sibos, also this Smart Data theme is supported by Keynotes, Face-to-Face discussions, interactive workshops (Innotribe Labs) and R&D demonstrations.
Smart Data keynotes: “Towards more financial intelligence through semantics”
on Wednesday 27 October, from 09:00 – 10:30 in the Interactive workspace.
As for the other themes, we have a great line of speakers. All presentations will focus on what is the possible value of applying semantic technologies with a high relevance for financial services. So, these are not theoretical presentations, but examples of applied semantics. With demos so that you get a real feel of what happens when you start overlaying different data sources.
- Nova Spivack, CEO, Lucid Ventures. We are very excited to have Nova Spivack with us. Nova is in my opinion a worldwide visionary on semantic web. Nova will give a vision presentation showing how semantic web applies to financial services. He will be assisted by somebody from the financial business.
- Stephen Mongulla, Associate Partner, Financial Performance Management & Analytics, IBM (www.ibm.com ). In this talk, Stephen will describe a joint effort between IBM’s financial services research and software solution teams to leverage deep unstructured data analytics in order to derive financial intelligence from unstructured data. He will describe the various data sources available (such as SEC filings and social media), we show some interesting entities to be extracted (such as ownership structures, lending activity or consumer sentiment). He will briefly touch on the system aspects of our data extraction and analytics infrastructure and will conclude our presentation with a demo.
- Gary Thompson, Co-Founder and President, CLOUD Inc (http://www.cloudinc.org ) will present a compelling story on how transactions (the what) and the participants to those transactions (the who’s) can be semantically tagged, and how that results in powerful iPhone/iPAD applications. For once and for all, you will understand there is no “where” on the Internet.
- Mary Ann de Lares Norris, General Manager, Oblong Industries, Inc, Europe (www.oblong.com ). Mary Ann will give a video-demo of Oblong’s gesture-based user interface, slicing and dicing massive sets of semantic data sets. This is Minority Report becoming real. Not to be missed ! Here is the TED video on that subject:
Smart Data Face-to-Face discussion: “Which semantic evolutions will transform financial intelligence? “
on Wednesday 27 October from 12:30 – 14:00 in the Interactive workspace
The Face-to-Face discussion will be kicked-off by a 20 min thought provoking presentation by Rob Usey, CEO of www.Psydex.com , who will give a mind-blowing demo of their PsyngFX application: this application listens in real-time to thousand of structured and unstructured information feeds, does semantic tagging on the fly, and correlates this with marketdata. Whether your topic of interest is Oil Refinery Explosions, Apple Computer or Mergers & Acquisitions, Psyng can instantly alert you to key news events, delivering correlations and projected impacts as the news happens.
After this scene setting presentation, Eghosa D. Omoigui will moderate a panel of smart data specialists:
Currently confirmed are:
- Nova Spivack, CEO, Lucid Ventures
- Gary Thompson, Co-Founder and President, CLOUD Inc
- Rob Usey, CEO Psydex
- As we speak, we have 3-4 additional invitations to representatives of financial institutions using smart data technologies. Follow our Innotribe tweet to stay up-to-date on speaker confirmations in real-time.
Smart Data Lab
We are repeating the highly successful format of Innotribe Labs. One or more Smart Data Idea generation teams will be formed on the spot, and over the course of the 3 days they will prepare a professional pitch to be delivered on Thursday during the “Pitch your Lab competition, in front of the public and a very skilled Buyer’s Panel.
The Smart Data Innotribe Lab team will be supported by following professionals:
- Innotribe Leader Business: to be advised
- Innotribe Leader Technology: Nova Spivack, CEO, Lucid Ventures
- VC-Coach: Eghosa Omoigui, investor in Semantic Web start-ups
- Professional facilitators from The Value Web
- Your’s truly, as SWIFT representative
R&D Demonstrations:
We’ll have this year a beautiful Innotribe corner integrated in the main SWIFT Stand. We’ll have a packed program here as well. We are still looking at the many candidates, and will do a separate blog on all the presentations scheduled throughout the week.
Educational Resources:
I am a big believer of Semantic Web, and always on the look for good educational material to help me explain what it is and why it is important.Please find below some great resources:
– Video made by Cisco, by their IBSG group (Internet Business Solutions Group).
– One single link with many other educational resources here .
– If you want to get somebody interested enough to do some more research, this 14 minute film by Kate Ray is the perfect thing to give you the appetite for the subject: Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
Let’s start the conversation:
Innotribe is organised by SWIFT Innovation with the support of financial institutions, vendors and innovation leaders.
We just opened a Web-Storm on Innotribe.com to collect your idea on this Smart Data theme and the other 3 themes as we build up towards October. We will feed-back these ideas to the Innotribe Leaders before the actual Labs in Amsterdam. Check out www.innotribe.com
In the true spirit of less push and more pull, we encourage you to engage in a true dialogue with the Innotribe team. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam.
The Innotribe team
www.sibos2010.com
www.innotribe.com
www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe
innotribe@swift.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/innotribe
Techonomy: a new philosophy of progress
Last week, I had the privilege to attend the first edition of Techonomy, a fantastic new conference blurring technology and economy with an optimistic balance that technology in its broadest sense (not only IT, but also gnome sequencing, bio-fuels, big history, etc) can be the driving force for a better world.
First enjoy the announcing video below.
The conference was bringing together 3/4 of Silicon Valley’s leadership, including Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Steward Brand, Kevin Kelly, John Hagel, Deborah Hopkins (Chairman of Venture Capital Initiatives and Chief Innovation Officer Citi), Nicolas Negroponte, Sean Parker, Padmassree Warrior CTO Cisco), Jeff Weiner (CEO LinkedIn), and the list goes on, and only a couple of non-US leaders such as Nobuyuki Idea (Founder of CEO of Quantum Leaps Corporation, working on innovation, and previous CEO of Sony Corporation), Nellie Kroes (European Commissioner for Digital Agenda), Vineet Nayar (CEO HCL Technologies, India), and Ory Okolloh (Founder/Executive Director Ushahidi, South Africa).
How to describe Techonomy conference ? I would say “a super-TED with a technology focus and with an agenda”.
The agenda is “a new philosophy for progress”.
It’s a movement
Somebody asked “a movement against which enemy, against which barriers ?”.
I believe it is a movement FOR something.
For a better world. Finding techonomic solutions to tackle the global climate challenges, feeding the world, a better health for everybody, a new value kit for the current and next generation, not based on greed but on the concepts of creative capitalism as formulated some years ago by Bill Gates in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foudation.
In that sense, it should not surprise the regular reader of this blog how much this resonated with myself. Not only the personal inspiration, but especially how we with on organization like SWIFT can adopt and promote the techonomist values and objectives.
I also came across some leaders that could be subject of SWIFT’s CSR initiatives. Take Bill Drayton, Leadership Group Member Chair and CEO of Ashoka, the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs, men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems, encouraging everybody to be a changemaker.
It’s impossible to describe the intensity of the content and contacts of these 3 Techonomy days.
Some highlights:
- Evolution is incremental. Revolution is disruptive movement
- Collective learning is what makes us human
- The physical economy is sensoring a second economy of conversational plumbing
- As long as we draw boundaries (for ex US vs. China, we against them, etc) we will not be able to solve the world’s problems.
- The economy is NOT recovering, consumer is running out of money
- Governments do not understand globalisation, businesses do.
- Employees first, customers second.
- Promote younger people must faster
- Building and tapping from tacit knowledge will become core skill
- Markets are like gardens: they need tending
- Innovation happens outside the regulated markets
- Banks make money on spread and opacity. They are by definition against transparency
- Currency is “the instrument of trust in a transaction”. Unfortunately the debate focused solely on the payment transaction and money as the trust element.
- Health agenda: from illness fixing to personal health prediction and coaching
- Some technomists are skeptical optimists that do not take progress for granted. One has to make progress. It does not happen.
- Recalibrating our assumption that form our perceptions. For ex we learned that world population will NOT grow indefinitely and probably max around 9 billion, and then go down.
- Innovation at Cisco: Looking at 30 ! adjacencies as a “portfolio” like a Venture Capitalist does.
- Computer Associates CTO: “a lot of leading edge innovation comes from financial services”
- Innovation requires a culture of taking risk and celebrating failure
- Change happens when the DESIRE not to change is greater than the desire to change. The power struggle to make this balance change is based on societal needs.
- Innovation requires 1) Money, 2) Desire, 3) Need
- There is no value in the idea, there is value in its commercialization
- We have a moral obligation of bringing less developed regions up.
- Cities are “intensities” that have a critical mass of people
- In a city-“OS”, no one single company can dominate. It has to be open source by definition.
- Generation-Y or whatever: you need the backing of 18 year olds. That’s “youth”. 25 years+ does not quite get it.
- Companies scale like biology, and in the end they die. Cities scale like networks, and do not die. The city is the framework model for the future.
- In the developed world, a disruptive innovation is something that can create the biggest disruption. In the developing world, innovation is a technology that is simple, reliable, and that can function as an integrated unit.
- Success in mobile in Afghanistan is because there was no legacy. They are willing to take the risk to jump to the next curve.
- The future is for (techonomist) entrepreneurs that are willing to work together.
The conference is so good. It cries for a European and an Asian chapter. Any European Leader should not hesitate a second to be associated with and sponsor it.
I was dreaming of hosting a European chapter of Techonomy at the fantastic SWIFT Headquarters south of Brussels.
El Jefe, do you hear me ?
The Value of Your Social Graph
If you have the time, please watch this presentation" How not to be seen” by futurist Mark Pesce. I mentioned it already yesterday in my post “The DJ with the Brainwave Helmet”, but now I took the time to watch the +/- 1 hour presentation.
Do it
It profoundly explains what’s going on in our ever more connected world.
It makes so clear that “your social graph is your most important possession”
No need to further quote, as the full transcript is here.
This guy is super-smart. Follow him on twitter and on his blogs.
Social Graph is also about Sibos 2009 winning project “eMe”, but then on steroids.
Completely revised. Definitely in the vision of Mark Pesce.
With privacy and user control seen in a distributed internet world. NOT one single digital vault, or even several digital vaults. Whether they are “owned” and “controlled” by Governments, Banks, FaceBooks, Googles and alike.
Completely revising the “business model”. Where the value flows to the users, the owners of their social graph. Not to banks. Not to governments. Not to some controlling party in the middle.
The is no “where”, no “middle” on the internet. That’s where we got eMe wrong.
No, we have to revisit the whole concept of eMe along the open Plexus lines that Marc Pesce is describing in his “How not to be seen” presentation.
I will talk to Peter Hinssen, when he’s back from down under. So that we have something to say about eMe at Innotribe at Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam.
Oh, and if you like this sort of stuff, here is another presentation “Dense and Thick” by Mark Pesce at Webstock2010. As a matter of fact, this presentation is even better, as Mark does a fabulous job in giving us a perspective of the current state of the web, how we got here and where this might lead us. Not just by throwing boring statistical data at us, but with deep insights and with a speaker’s passion that is difficult to match.
Without really mentioning (ok, only once), Mark Pesce is describing a vision of the semantic web that is not push-oriented like Tim Berners Lee, but truly “pulling” us – human beings – in this super-exciting world where meaning becomes explicit and exploitable and can be manipulated (hopefully in the positive sense of the word).
The summary of his talk goes like this:
It may be hard to believe, but we’re only just at the very beginnings of the web revolution. In the first fifteen years (1994-2009), the human world of culture and civilization was sucked into the black hole of cyberspace. Now the real world is poised to follow. Augmented Reality (AR) shows that when we peer through a portal, and look upon the world, it’s almost embarrassingly empty of our annotations. That data is there – the world is the database of itself – but it can’t be brought immediately to hand with a search or a gesture. That’s the next place we will go: we will build a virtual body for the real world, a dense database of everything, both natural and artificial. In fifteen years’ time, we’ll wonder how we got along without it.
This means that the clock has been reset. Everything we thought we knew about how the Web works, what the Web does for us, and who controls the Web is up for grabs, once again. We will see bright shining stars – and sudden, brief supernovas – just as we did in the Web’s early years. The opportunities are breathtaking, the innovations will be flying fast and thick. All of this is now within our grasp.
This guy is a real discovery for me, and hopefully to you as well.
I will ping Mark to check whether he is interested in the eMe update and hopefully lively ensuing debate at Innotribe at Sibos2010 in October.
Might be a challenge, as his intellect humbles me deeply, and maybe he is just not interested in such a mundane conference.
The DJ with the Brainwave Helmet
Found this TED 2010 video via Kurt Vega’s tweets.
From the TED site: “Tan Le’s astonishing new computer interface reads its user’s brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications.”
Out-of-the-box support for facial expressions and emotional experiences, with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization.
The demo is focusing on the “cognitive suite”: the ability to move virtual objects with your mind.
And it just costs only a few hundred dollars. Like an iPAD, but it’s a hPAH “head-PAD”
Start mixing this with the ongoing discussions on personal digital identity. As you will notice, the demo starts with making a personal profile for this headset owner. And tuning to a neutral signal, a signal where you’re doing nothing particular, your are relaxed, hanging-out: a but like my holidays at home where I basically don’t do anything particular other than hanging around.
It’s interesting to see that the test is about “pulling” an object forward instead of “pushing”. I may be too influenced by John Hagel’s latest book “The Power of Pull” 😉
The cool stuff starts when the helmet man starts visualizing something that does not exist in real life: making something disappear.
Applications are obvious in virtual reality games, domotica systems, all sort of gesture and thought based interactions, control an electric wheel-chair. In banking it would be nice is I could raise the balance on my account just by thinking about it.
What I do NOT like about it is that the “system” has some built-in leveling system. It makes me think of Jaron Renier’s fantastic rant / manifesto that I mentioned in my previous blog “you have to be somebody before you can share yourself”
Start mixing this up with some of the cool ideas like Mark Pesce’s Plexus which is a quite novel way of looking and using your social graph in a sort of
event driven pub-sub system
where you decide as a user
what you listen to and
who and what you want to share
with
Sometimes, I think of myself as a disc-jockey (which I was as a matter of fact for more than 15 years starting in the late 70’ies), and I very much like Ethan Zuckerberg’s description of a DJ in this also great TED 2010 video on our distorted world-views.
His talk is basically about
getting you out of your normal orbit, of stepping out of your usual “flock” of people you normally interact with (both on- and off-line).
Around min 15:30, he describes a DJ as a guide:
A skilled human curator, who knows what material is available to her, who is able to listen to the audience, and who is able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another
Of course, I could now make jokes on Faithless “God is a DJ”, and/or refer to one of my previous posts called “We are as gods and might as well get good at it”, but I won’t do that.
Instead, I’d like to share with you the feeling of giving pleasure to my audience.
It’s something I feel while writing these blogs, and it’s a very similar feeling as being a DJ in front of an audience and pushing people forward.
Its has a same sort of stage-fright
when starting a gig,
and the same sort of excitement
when you see your crowd getting
excited
As a DJ, I was doing some quite big gigs for 3,000 people or so, and my following community is not that big yet. But the feeling is the same, and everyday there are some more folks following my tweets. Some more reacting to my blog. Some more getting inspired by what’s on these pages.
So, I just continue doing that, and hope to inspire you to dream and execute your dreams.
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself
It’s holiday time, and I have reduced significantly my blogging, reading RSS feeds, tweeting, mailing, etc
Time for hanging around, some biking, some good food, and… a good book. If you want to follow what I am reading, check-out my page on Goodreads.
For me, a good book is one that leaves you puzzled, that makes you think,
that re-calibrates your perspective,
that is a pleasant read, that has depth.
“You are not a gadget” by Jaron Larnier is such a book. I discovered it thanks to a tweet of my friend Paul, who reacted to one of my enthusiastic Singularity tweets. The title of this blog post “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself” is very early in the book, and captures its essence.
Jaron Larnier was listed on The 2010 TIME 100 in the Thinkers category. His Wikipedia entry is here.
It’s a great read if you are in your over-enthusiasm mode about computationalism, the noosphere, the Singularity, web 2.0, the long tail, the hive mind, the global brain, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence and all the other buzzwords and trends and all the rest. It gives you some solid pushback and sound criticism.
I am not going to do a book review, but my experience of the book was like there were 3 stories interwoven:
- How technology is limiting our potential and who we are on-line. This of course resonated a lot with my work on Digital Identity.
- Our communication limitations. He has a great chapter on how cephalopods have the great ability to “morph” and how one could use “visual” communication and another dimension of communication, other than language. And how humans in virtual reality environments quickly adapt to a body with tentacles. Intriguing !
- The notion of “neoteny”: humans are born as fetuses in air, and our brain is being developed during childhood. Lanier compares this to a newborn horse that can stand on its own and already possesses almost all the skills of an adult horse. Humans – in modern civilizations – have an artificial, protected space called “the classroom, the extended womb”.
Neoteny opens a window to the world before our brains can be developed under the sole influence of instinct.
A similar concept related to neoteny – “generativity” – comes back in another great read Firms of Endearment: How World-class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose.
This is a book about
the pragmatic role of
love in business
It’s about the epochal change into the Age of Transcendence. The dictionary defines transcendence as a "state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits."
The second event is the aging of the population. For the first time in history, people 40 and older are the adult majority. This is driving deep systemic changes in the moral foundations of culture. Higher levels of psychological maturity mean greater influence on society of what Erik Erikson called "generativity"—the disposition of older people to help incoming generations prepare for their time of stewardship of the common good
The Firms of Endearment book in essence talks about a new form of capitalism that is not only focused on profit and shareholders’ value, but on value creation for all parties in a company’s stakeholders’ ecosystem.
Joran also has an opinion on capitalism when he says:
Visiting the offices of financial cloud engines (like high-tech hedge funds) feels like visiting the Googleplex. There are software engineers all around, but few of the sorts of topical experts and analysts who usually populate investment houses. These pioneers have brought capitalism into a new phase, and I don’t think it’s working… capitalism in a digital future will require a general acceptance of a social contract
He is also calling for “so-called AI techniques to create formal versions of certain complicated or innovative contracts that define financial instruments” and that setting standards for these could be facilitated by “a cooperative international body” that
would probably have specific requirements for the formal representation, but any individual application making use of it could be created by a government, a nongovernmental organization, an individual, a school, or a for-profit company. The formal transaction-representation format would be nonproprietary, but there would be a huge market for proprietary tools that make it useful. These tools would quickly become part of the standard practice of finance
What a great potential for my employer SWIFT ! We are indeed a full-blown cooperative international organization with our roots in financial services.
In essence, Jaron Laniers’ manifesto and rant is about “The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits”.
That should make us reflect deeply on how we want to engage as human beings in an on-line world, how we define digital identity in the relative and the absolute, and be very vigilant that we don’t loose our potential in our technology enthusiasm.
For me, the prospect of an entirely different notion of communication is more thrilling than a construction like the Singularity. Any gadget, even a big one like the Singularity, gets boring after a while. But a deepening of meaning is the most intense potential kind of adventure available to us
Finally, I also found some consolation to deal with my 3/4 Life Crisis. The following quote always helps:
If you are young and childless, you can run around in a van to gigs, and you can promote those gigs online. You will make barely any money, but you can crash on couches and dine with fans you meet through the web. This is a good era for that kind of musical adventure. If I were in my twenties I would be doing it. But it is a youthiness career. Very few people can raise kids with that lifestyle. It’s treacherous in the long run, as youth fades.
My blog is my “adult” way of doing gigs online.
Intelligence Multipliers
Great book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.
Summary here.
- Multipliers are Talent Magnets: They look beyond their own capabilities to see the deep capabilities —or genius—of others. And then they utilize people at their highest point of contribution.
- Multipliers are Liberators: They eradicate stress and fear from their organization and instead create an intense environment that requires people’s best thinking and work. They keep the pressure on but make it safe to make mistakes. The result is a climate that is intense without being tense.
- Multipliers are Challengers: Instead of telling people what to do, they show them what they can do. They seed opportunities and let people discover needs for themselves. Then, they lay down challenges that cause people to stretch beyond what they thought was possible.
- Multipliers are Debate Makers: Instead of making isolated decisions that leave others in the dark, they engage people in debating high-stakes decisions up front. This leads to decisions that people understand and can execute efficiently.
- Multipliers are Investors: Instead of getting things done by micromanaging, they give other people the ownership for results and invest in their capability and success.
Let’s Prepare the Future !
This article is a cross-post of an essay that i prepared for The Fifth Conference and that was published this week.
The Fifth Conference is a forum for vision. Part publisher and part conference, The Fifth Conference tackles the ‘big issues’, the factors that drive our future. Think ten, twenty, even fifty years ahead and try to imagine how we will live and work. What will this world look like? How will we have solved the economic, social and environmental challenges that we confront today? To answer those questions we talk to entrepreneurs, policy makers and experts. We analyse the facts, the forecasts and the arguments. And most importantly, we collect vision.
As mentioned in my previous blog post “No more collateral damage”, this is so close to my idea of the Think Tank for Long Term Future that it was for me a no-brainer to passionately accept the invitation of Frank Boermeester (co-founder of The Fifth Conference) to draft an essay on Technology, with a focus on Technology Readiness in our region, and being conscientious aware of the “understream” that is driving all the changes and evolutions in Growth, Mobility, Green, Technology, Health. So here is the article:
Over the past 20 years we have witnessed a fantastic growth in and wealth of technologies. ICT technologies have started permeating our daily lives. Medical science and biotechnologies have increased longevity significantly. Other technologies (Nanotechnology, AI, Robotics, etc.) have kick-started.
However, in the last couple of years, we have witnessed the breakdown of a number of core systems:
- Our worldwide financial system is going through a “meltdown”. The old game of greed is being replaced by an all important requirement: trust.
- Ecological, ethnological and demographical shocks (see also Geert Noels, author of Econoshock) are turning our systems upside-down: Green and Energy conservation thinking are now the mainstream.
- The East-West shock: economic power is shifting from the Western world to the new economies of APAC and BRIC+ countries.
- New forms of communication via the internet (blogs, wikis, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Netlog, etc.) propose a new paradigm in respect to privacy.
All these fundamental changes give us feelings of discomfort, disorientation, confusion and loss of control. Although our “collective intelligence” indicates that our old models do not apply anymore, our “hardware” seems not to have caught on. We have not adapted the way we are organized hierarchically; how we look at governance. Our traditional ‘system thinking’ got stuck and did not follow our ‘collective intelligence’.
On the other hand a new set of systems and tools are emerging:
- Barack Obama describes it as the ‘audacity of hope’; innovators, planners, academics and authors are referring to ‘dreamtelligence’ as a new, vital, and visionary way to use play, fantasy, dream-thinking and innovation to kick-start ideas and stimulate community engagement.
- A fantastic call for and revival of authenticity for ourselves and our leaders. Furthermore, having true leaders; with charisma, the power to attract, integrity and authenticity.
- The Net-Generation (now young adults, 15-30 years old) have grown up as ‘digital natives’. They will be tomorrow’s leaders. What THEY think will co-form our future. The future will not be invented by today’s generation. This Net-Generation lives differently. They are “wired” differently. For them multitasking (multi-window chatting, gaming at the same time as listening to music, looking up information on the internet, being mobile, etc.) is very common. They also think differently (deeper and more authentically), and have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective and civic responsibility.
Our technological revolution has just started. To illustrate:
- Today our technologists are capable of crafting a human ear in their labs. We are now in a position to create and grow cells, tissues and even bodies.
- Artificial Intelligence is back: by 2030 our computers will be able to think, be self-learning, self-healing – some will even be able to have a consciousness.
- Self-learning robots will soon be mainstream technology. Mercedes and BMW already have cars in the pipeline for 2012 that can drive entirely automatically, better than a human counterpart.
- The emergence of Google brings forth the concept of the “Global Brain”. The internet today is already a tremendous source of information. Today’s search experience will pale in comparison to the mechanisms we’ll have in 20 years. All knowledge will be available anywhere, anytime, wirelessly via brain-implants.
- Social networking is already revolutionizing the way people and companies are communicating. It is interesting to note that these technologies let us evolve from a system-to-system communication paradigm towards a human-to-human one.
- Today you can order your personal DNA genome sequence in the USA for only $399. The company doing this is a Google backed start-up. Think of DNA in the ‘cloud’, with DNA comparisons between ancestors, relationships, etc …
- Brain-wave helmets and chip-implants will give humans better sensory perception. By 2030 we will see the emergence of “super-humans”. In such a dramatically changed context, what will make us “human”?
A lot of these future scenarios are described by Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” concept. This is the moment when man and machine truly blend. Kurzweil claims this will happen around the year 2030.
And the pace of all these technological innovations is just increasing exponentially. In the next 20 years we will witness technological breakthroughs tenfold those of the same previous span of time.
All this evolution calls for a re-thinking of our value-compass for the future: We must carefully re- think how all this will influence the way we will work and live. What sort of quality of life should we aim for? What will be the socio-economic impact of all this? How will we want education to be structured? What areas of society will we still want (and be able to) influence?
How are we going to ensure that the
Technical and Value ‘Readiness’
of our region
are competitive in this new era?
Will we lead the change, as opposed to being mediocre followers? I believe it is time for action.
I believe The Fifth Conference and its organic network of inspiring leaders has deep within itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” addressing the long term future:
A movement and an energy
that prepares our Net-Generation
for the next 20 years,
with an emphasis on
our technical and value readiness
A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030, cross-pollinating each other’s disciplines. Indeed, “savants” from different contexts & worldviews can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live and work in 2030.
How our education is best organized will also be addressed. We will investigate what our ideal value kit for that era should be, beyond traditional corporate culture. Moreover, with a culture of sharing and exploring – where we live committed to teams, groups, communities, regions and countries –a deep respect for the participating individual humanistic identities will nevertheless be maintained.
We don’t have to wait until our politicians have made up their minds as to whether or not they should invest more in innovation.
We can do this ourselves
I cannot accept that it would not be possible to raise private funding for such an organization/movement/tribe.
The resulting new models and scenarios will demand speed, creativity, dynamism, perseverance, courage, knowledge and working together in a multi-cultural context. This new society makes a plea for the respect for individuality, freedom, mobility and quality of life.
This paradigm is all about designing, exploring and organizing change, learning and fine-tuning as we go. Giving guidance to teams, organizations and leaders on how to surf these waves is part and parcel with this. Missing the first technology wave of speed and creativity will result in loss of economic relevance. Missing the wave of the new value kit will result in losing our Net-Generation; our brains for the future.
This is about preparing ourselves and our region for 2030.
Who wants to join the tribe? Who is a believer? Let’s debate this idea on- and off-line for a couple of weeks. If there is enough interest, let’s meet and make this happen.
The Medici Effect
The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures.
Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.
These introductory words come from a book “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics” by Frans Johansson (Author).
The book is not that new (it dates from 2006), but it is very relevant to today’s innovation challenges. You can find the book on Amazon.com via the links above, but there is also a free PDF summary here and a Google Book edition here. And obviously, there is the website www.themedicieffect.com .
There was also a 2004 book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures
The core of these books is about two types of ideas:
- Directional ideas
- Intersectional ideas
Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. Examples of directional innovation are all around us because they represent the majority of all innovations. This is what we call incremental improvements (Innovation is in my opinion a bit on the optimistic, even window-dressing side).
The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards for doing so are reasonably predictable and attained relatively quickly. People and organizations do this all the time through increasing level of expertise and specialization. It is absolutely necessary if one does not wish to squander the value of an idea. Even an intersectional idea will, once it has become established, develop and evolve along a specific direction.
Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions. This is what Guy Kawasaki calls “jumping the curve”. These ideas are game changers. I am preparing a whitepaper on how NIBC (Nano, Info, Bio, Cogno)) technologies are major game changers.
Although intersectional innovations are radical, they can work in both large and small ways. They can involve the design of a large department store or the topic of a novella; they can include a special-effects technique or the product development for a multinational corporation.
In summary, intersectional innovations share the following characteristics:
- They are surprising and fascinating.
- They take leaps in new directions.
- They open up entirely new fields.
- They provide a space for a person, team, or company to call its own.
- They generate followers, which means the creators can become leaders.
- They provide a source of directional innovation for years or decades to come.
- They can affect the world in unprecedented ways.
The Medici Effect is about bringing together people of different fields of expertise and
let the magic of
cross-fertilization of ideas
happen
What sort of people do we need to invite ? In essence, we are looking for people who succeeded at
breaking down
their associative barriers
because they did one or more of the following things:
- Exposed themselves to a range of cultures
- Learned differently
- Reversed their assumptions
- Took on multiple perspectives
The explosion of concept combinations at the Intersection can offer a myriad of uniquely combined, extraordinary ideas.
I have a dream
That we can turn Innotribe.com into a Medici Effect: the place where different disciplines find each other, and through that intersection come up with intersectional innovations.
I have a dream
That we can turn the SWIFT Campus into a hosting environment, where we facilitate those intersections to happen.
I have a dream
That i can blend my personal interest of creating a Think Tank on Long Term Future with my professional endeavors at SWIFT.
I have a dream
That together we can write The Readiness Manifesto. The strategies and focus areas to prepare the Net.Generation – the 20-25 years old of today – to stand up as our leaders in 20 years from now in 2030.
But NIBC technologies are not the holy grail. There was a fantastic quote in one of Fred Destin’s latest blogs on Venture Capital 2.1:
The fundamentals of the business have changed. Technology is a quasi-commodity, the spread of ideas is instantaneous, competition is global, in other words the market is more efficient.
“Technology is a quasi-commodity”
Wow ! So what will be your differentiator ?
I believe it will be in the HOW of delivering products and services. And i can’t help re-quoting Umair Hague in his Good to Great Manifesto and my related post some days ago. Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:
- First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
- The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
- Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
- A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
- Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”
So, the question is not only “What will be the technical readiness kit that we will need to provide ?”.
The question really is:
What will be the value kit
that will have to underpin
this highly technological environment ?
As i mentioned in a previous post, I have accepted an opinion article/essay on technical readiness for The Fifth Conference. See also my posting “No more collateral damage”.
Below an extract of my initial input for this essay:
We must carefully analyze and think-through on how all this will influence the way we will and want to live and work in the future. What sort of life-quality we aim for? What the socio-economic impact of all this may be? How we want education to be organized? Where we still can and want to influence? How are we going to deal with the Technical and Value Readiness of our region to be competitive in this new era ? To lead the change, and not only be mediocre followers?
I believe it’s time for action. I believe The Fifth Conference and its natural network of inspiring leaders bears deep in itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” on long term future. A movement and an energy that prepares our Net-Generation for the next 20 years. To focus on our technical and value readiness. A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030. Cross-fertilizing each other’s disciplines. With “savants” from different contexts & worldviews that can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live, work in 2030.
Or will we find ourselves in 2030 like this medieval knight trying to get his cup of coffee in the local deli ?
No, in 2030 we want our children to be in a position to lead and not be the “behaving” followers in some old-European country that is by-passed by countries and regions that work at the speed of light, that have higher education standards, higher ethical standards, in other words who have found the “how-differentiator”.
My desire is to create
a movement
a tribe
a Medici Effect
where the dream can come true.
Who feels connected ? Who would like to join this tribe ?
Let me know via the comments of the blog, or contacting me directly. Please also let me know where the model flaws. What you would add to it ? Do you believe i am on to something or just living an illusion ? Let me know.
iPAD what’s next ? Oblong !
Seen at many blogs and feeds during the last week. Of all, i like most the post of MG Siegler of Techcrunch.
MG Siegler writes:
The demo I saw a couple years ago was stunning, but it was still just a video. Apparently, at TED, the audience got to see it in action. NYT’s Bits blog detailed some of it in a post yesterday. For those not at TED, Oblong has also made a few demo videos in the past, which I’ll embed below. Again, this is Minority Report.
Oblong’s coming out party couldn’t come at a better time. Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, there has been a lot of talk about the future of computing at a fundamental level. That is to say, after decades of dominance by the keyboard and mouse, we’re finally talking about other, more natural, methods of input. The iPad is one step to a multi-touch gesture system (as is this 10/GUI awesome demo), but this Oblong system is the next step beyond that.
So how does it look like ? I found 2 videos, and waiting for the video of Underkoffler when he unveils the interface, called the g-speak Spatial Operating Environment, at Friday’s annual TED conference.
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
and
oblong’s tamper system 1801011309 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
More cool stuff from Oblong on their home page.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://i0.wp.com/img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png)
Petervan Studios 