Category Archives: Innovation

The Edge Becomes The Core

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A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with colleague Joe on the program for one of our upcoming main Innotribe events. My colleague is not part of the innovation team, but has shown growing interest in what we are doing: great! Joe is known in the company as rather a conservative, cautious person, making decisions on data and not feelings. So, like many human beings, when I go and see him, I already have put my projection biases on (shame on me).

Taking into account my manager’s request to start dancing with the company, I decided to use a different approach and asked Joe what sort of innovations got him excited. He was looking for innovations that were 1-2 years out at maximum, complemented the core, were easy to implement and had effect on the bottom-line right away. Joe felt that I was too much in science fiction territory, out “there”, looking at a horizon of 10-15 years, my head in the skies.

At first sight, this seems to be about different perceptions on what is important based on time-criticality of the innovations.

But then, another colleague Jamie, said it was also about being used to think in abstract concepts.

The whole discussion made me think, and I started making some notes on what was going on. I landed with the following high-level “concept” drawing:

In my opinion, there are 3 forces at work, all on the same continuum, and more or less the same scale:

  • Time horizon
  • Level of abstraction
  • Level of disruption

What I see happening all the time is that innovations start with adjacencies and evolve towards new territory:

  • If the product in the core is called “thing”, then the adjacency is smelling  “My thing”, the edge is trending towards “More thing”, and finally the new territory is really about the “New thing”
  • In SWIFT world there are many examples of “My Thing”: MyStandards.com is the “My thing” variation of the core Standards proposition. In the same way, the EBAM Hub is like “My EBAM” variation of the EBAM Standards, and Alliance Lite is a “My messaging” variation of FIN.

The point I am trying to make is that we rarely look at the next level of abstraction or disruption. Because deemed to far away from the core. Because that was not the way it was supposed to work. Or not fixing an immediate problem: why fix if it ain’t broken?

The other point I am making is that we risk becoming complacent and happy with adjacent innovations only. Tick-box innovation.

However, there is power living on the edge.

I’d like to refer to John Hagel in one of his latest posts on The Evolution of Design to Amplify Flow.

He comments on the new book “Design in Nature” by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane.

From the perspective of the authors, design is not static.  It is continually evolving in a quest to find more effective ways to support flows. “This evolution occurs in one direction: Flow designs get measurably better, moving more easily and farther if possible. This evolution can be observed at all timescales. Rivers evolve at a different rate than a lightning bolt or snowflake. If a design ceases to evolve, it will quickly become a fossilized flow system, tossed aside to make way for more effective flow designs.”

And

“Now that new digital technology infrastructures are emerging globally, we are witnessing a profound and disruptive shift to from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows as the source of value creation.  With the benefit of hindsight, we may come to realize that the powerful institutions that emerged in the last century and continue to govern our lives – whether companies, NGO’s, schools or government – were in fact a very brief detour in the evolution of institutional design to facilitate flow.”

It confirms my thinking that if we want to remain a powerful institution, we have to be part of this disruptive shift towards knowledge flows, and we have to create design as an institutional core value.

And who says “design” says “abstraction”.

In an older 2009 post, John Hagel talks about “How to bring the edge to the core”

“What’s the best way for companies to participate in this dynamic? Disruption theory suggests it’s by bringing the edge to the core. The approach we suggest is to instead bring the core to the edge, to expose your company to institutional innovations and new management practices that emerge on the edge.”

It’s clear from the above that I am not the first one making such reflections. And I am fully conscious that John Hagel plays in a different league that I do 😉 John seems to have landed on bringing the core to the edge, whilst I still believe in my maybe naïve enthusiasm that the result of our innovation work will lead to the edge eventually becoming the new core. Wisdom will probably come later 😉

John goes on:

“To exploit opportunities on the edge, executives must resist the temptation to prematurely integrate edge resources into the core of their operations. Instead, they should determine what resources they can offer to help SCALE the innovations being developed by edge participants. This could catalyze the development and deployment of growth platforms, platforms that edge participants can then use to more effectively design and deploy new innovations.”

“By seeking to mobilize and engage with a large number of edge participants, core players can reduce the risk of prematurely locking into edge resources or of overwhelming smaller edge players with the demands of much larger core assets.”

We at Innotribe are looking into the edges in our incubation initiative. Is it enough focus on the edges? Maybe not. In my personal opinion, incubation has to focus exclusively on the edge and the new territory. The continuous improvements to the core and the creation of “My things” should be part of the normal product evolution/enhancement cycle and should not be funded from the incubation fund.

And it’s about putting in place a well-balanced innovation portfolio, a yin/yang of core and edge, and a continuum of different types of innovation. It’s fairly “easy” to do stuff at the left side of the continuum. It is usually a stretch to work on the far right side of the continuum. Innovation is NOT about launching the next cool mobile app. Real innovation is about moving to the right. Where the edge has the potential to become the core.

Real innovation “hurts”, disturbs.

It has to disturb something: be it the core, the market, the hierarchies, the power balances, whatever… but it has to disturb. In some ways, innovation is rebellious. Rebels are needed. Not rebels as in “anarchists”, but rebels as in change makers, the ones who relentlessly challenge the status-quo.

On the other hand, innovation is about holding hands, showing different sides of the coin, and inviting each other to come and see at your end of the wall. Having empathy for the other’s opinion, for their lens on the topic. And taking them on our innovation journey from that empathic moment.

It’s not one or the other. It’s sensitive dosage on the continuum of challenge and empathy.

TEDxNewWallStreet

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On March 11th, 400 people will gather in Mountain View, CA, to map out a new banking system fit for the Information Age, with new technologies, transparencies and values… at TEDxNewWallStreet.

Just down the street from Google, some of the brightest minds locally and internationally are coming together at the famed Computer History Museum to re-imagine banking for the Information Age at TEDxNewWallStreet on March 11, 2012. This audience routinely disrupts Industrial Age paradigms, and will be encouraged to do so for banking, by inventing new technologies and processes that make banking a game that people can win.

Mobile deposits and bill pay, online stock market quotes and trades show people will use technology to do the banking they used to do, faster. Re-imagining banking changes the guts of how money is created, priced, moved, saved and transparently tracked to its impacts.

More than 400 venture capitalists, serial entrepreneurs, technologists, inspired bankers, Stanford faculty and students, politicians from the San Francisco Bay Area and Pacific Northwest, and a global online live-stream audience in the thousands using Facebook, Google and Twitter are expected to attend TEDxNewWallStreet. Speakers will give talks on a number of topics, including:

  • banking as a facet of civil rights so as to raise personal wealth,
  • virtual/peer-to-peer banking,
  • how bank technologies can protect customer identity and increase global sustainability,
  • reframing how banks use customer data to price credit and investments, and
  • how public finance accounting and bond offerings can evolve to value what matters to people and community in an economy.

Speakers on the day include Silicon Valley industry leaders and upstarts, venture capitalists (VCs) and serial entrepreneurs like Bill Harris, formerly of Intuit and now of Personal Capital; Joe Lonsdale and Rosco Hill of Palantir; Macarthur Fellow and European accountancy historian Jacob Soll; Peter Vander Auwera at SWIFT Innotribe and startup micro-investment entrepreneur Shivani Siroya of InVenture. Many more speakers will outline their “wish lists” for Information Age banks and banking, and how to build it now.

TEDxNewWallStreet is organized by Bruce Cahan, an Ashoka Fellow and Stanford University Engineering Visiting Scholar. Bruce is creating a new bank paradigm through his high-transparency, impacts-aware bank project, known as GoodBank™(IO). Living in Palo Alto, Bruce saw that as disruptive as Silicon Valley is, it was missing a huge opportunity to move banking from its Industrial Age camouflage to the Information Age paradigm for user experience, transparency and social media.  “Banking should be what customers co-create for their own needs, not the ‘one size fits all’ take it or leave it choices most banks today offer.  Given how iTunes® and Spotify® reimagined music distribution, how Netflix® and Hulu® changed movies and television, and how digital and subscription libraries are reducing the cost of knowledge sharing, banking creates frictions transactionally, regionally, environmentally and socially that no longer are justifiable, safe or inevitable.  We have an Internet of Things, let’s use it to re-imagine banks built in and for the Information Age.”

Business reporter Camilla Webster will serve as event moderator. Camilla is a seasoned, business journalist, writing for Forbes and Huffington Post, and is co-author of The Seven Pearls of Wisdom: A Woman’s Guide to Enjoying Wealth and Power.  “TEDxNewWallStreet is a solution-based, engaging, idea-generating conversation during a historic time in the finance industry” says Camilla, who as MC will guide speakers and audience on a novel journey.

This event is about financial innovation beyond the next cool mobile app. We will be looking for deep innovations that may dramatically impact the way we think about the function of a bank. It is an honor for the Innotribe team to be invited as speaker at TEDxNewWallStreet. It is a reflection of the Innotribe reputation and brand. My presentation is combining material from “How to make Babies” and “The Soul of Innovation”, complemented with brand new material on our research project “Digital Asset Grid”, and some new insights on innovation disruption levels. Just last week, I gave Bruce Cahan a preview of the draft presentation, and Bruce’s reaction was: “you’ll blow a few circuits with this one!”. Looking forward to this event with all my heart and in full support for Bruce Cahan’s cause.

The future rarely arrives when planned

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The title for this blog post comes from a 2010 talk by Mark Pesce. He adds to it:

it rarely arrives in the form that we expect

it is too hard to grasp, a bridge too far

the seeds of the future are always with us in the present

I have referred many times already to Mark Pesce in my previous posts:

He keeps inspiring me, by the challenging content and his oratory skills. And yes, I am trying very hard to get Mark to one or more of our main Innotribe events as core anchor/igniter of some of our conversations.

I also recommend my readers to have a look at some of his recent work, especially about “hypereconomics”, Flexible Futures, and last but not least his upcoming book “The Next Billion Seconds”. The chapters of the books are being released now on an almost weekly basis, and here are some of the catchy titles with associated content:

  • Initiation
  • Introduction
  • Articulation
  • Replication
  • Duration
  • Revelation
  • Revolution
  • Origin

It reads like an “Origin of Species”, looking back and projecting us in the future of the Next Billion Seconds, aka the next several ten thousand of years. A fascinating read indeed.

But I wanted to use his 2010 talk as guidance to some of the work our Innotribe team is doing in our incubation project called the “Digital Asset Grid” (DAG)

In this talk, Mark Pesce talks to  a group of Human Service folks and Health officials. Although it is about health, I encourage you to listen with holistic ears, as everything he says is applicable for any vertical.

The talk is titled “When I am 64” and is looking forward 17 years from 2010. The “64” is a wordplay on the famous Beatles song.

Here is the link to the first part of the talk. The talk was split into 3 separate videos.

I will avoid the temptation to do an ad-verbatim transcript, and will just use a couple of quotes to illustrate my own points.

Highlights first video

Somewhere half-way, Mark Pesce mentions how his team went open source with their 3D Mark Up language and how surprised they were with the amazing ideas people came up with on what they could do with it.

  • He mentions and Austrian project that made a 3D encyclopedia, like a tree of knowledge, and
  • a 3D visualization of NYSE stock data.

The latter one makes it possible to see 5,000 times more information than on could see with the standard flatlanders’ Bloomberg terminal. Mind you, this was in 1997, that now 15 years ago.

My lessons learned for DAG:

  • The DAG story is a story of value propositions. That is what the prototype we are building will focus on. It is NOT a technology showcase.
  • We play with the idea of an open source DAG server. There is some hesitation. We should not hesitate. We should look at it like IBM looked at Apache Server at the time. Our core competence is to operate a high-available, secure and resilient infrastructure. Probably less in building server software. We know more than me.
  • There is so much innovation in the ecosystem. Our current thinking is to bring the APIs of the infrastructure in a controlled open. So that Banks and other 3rd parties can be on the bleeding edge of innovation.
  • On the longer term, this whole concept of stream-servers makes me think a lot about the Metacurrency.org software project of Art Brock and Eric Harris-Braun. The idea is to build a basic communication later to be able to deal with stream-scapes.

I can assure you that “streams” and “scapes” will be commongood in some years time. Another very cool initiative in this space is Nova Spivack’s latest start-up BottleNose.

Highlights second video

It really gets interesting when Mark Pesce starts unfolding how the power of our communities shape our behavior. Somewhere at minute 09:10, Mark develops an extremely interesting banking scenario:

  • Imagine someone steals your identity, walks into bank, and takes a loan in your name (if they are able to present the proper documentation)
  • The problem is that once you present stolen proof documents at the entry of the process, the process usually kicks off perfectly and delivers the programmed results
  • Better would be to be proofed by others, by your community. “An identity that is confined and constrained by those you are connected to”, by your on-line context
  • At minute 10:35, Mark suggest

that you should be able to handing the bank your social graph!

You really would expect your bank to be able to write some piece of software which could confirm your identity

Bank validating your identity strength based on who vouched for you !!!

This really comes very-very close to some of the use cases we have in mind for DAG.

This would result in a system with greater resilience, much harder to fool, because:

  • Identity is a function of community
  • And not just identity > even TALENT is a function of and a recognized value of a community
  • The social graph is the foundation of identity

In my opinion, all this is leading towards “interest based connections”.

The relationship economy, the reason why REXpedition is so important, is the next battlefield of competition; after most organizations squeezed all the juice out of SixSigma, Lean, and similar programs for increasing productivity and efficiency.

  • The focus of these programs was on doing better what we already did (sometimes doing bad things better)
  • Now its’ about doing new things, the right things. And those right things have all to do with better managing our trustful relationships

Therefore, Mark’s thesis that “a group of well connected highly empowered individuals is a force to be reckoned with” is one of the biggest forces in place. It has always been, but now returning in force thanks to our hyper-connectivity and information abundance.

Highlights third video

This part, entitled “Senior Concessions” really got my attention when Mark Pesce starts talking about “Personal Broadcasting”, networks of trust and sharing of social graphs.

Sharing of social graphs will enable us to identify who brings real value, who brings insight, who bring wisdom. And also those who seek to confuse, who are confused, or who are self-seeking.

This smells very much like reputation and influence like:

  • the reputation score in eBay
  • the thinking of Andreas Weigend’s from the Stanford Social Data Lab
  • Doc Searls VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) thinking
  • Drummond Reed’s Social Vouching start-up connect.me with its underlying Respect Trust Framework.

Mark continues how boundaries of expertise are becoming more and more fuzzy. The patient now often knows more than the specialist. The student knows more than the teacher. It reminded me to one of the first books I read about fuzzy logic by Bart Kosko in 1994. “The new science of fuzzy logic”

Reading that book so very early in my career was probably meant to be part of my life and my purpose.

Anyway, Pesce puts the patient in the center, like Doc Searls put the user in the center of his user-centric intention economy.

In my opinion, banks have a similar huge opportunity to put the customer back in the center and offer unprecedented high-quality data services.

And Mark Pesce goes on:

  • This is about user centric “social” graph
  • Knowledge will pass from one user to another (similar to John Hagel’s knowledge flows)
  • As knowledge is passed on to the community, the community empowers itself
  • Person as agency of his own data, deciding who gets access
  • Privacy of medical data is about making these data freely available to those who need it in context, but make them secret to those who do not need those data
  • Only if person has agency for his data and authorizing access to his (medical) records, and tools to track that access (and give/release access)
  • Without those tools we will loose track of who owns what etc and becomes easier for those who shouldn’t to have a look in
  • As our medical records spread through our networks of medical expertise, we will feel less fear, and more to surrender our privacy
  • There is power in releasing our privacy because we gain connections

It’s almost going back to Doc Searls (and others’) 1999 ClueTrain Manifesto where the authors declare in one of their 95 thesis that “Markets are Conversations”.

It’s also going back to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, where the each element is weak, but where the combined structure is stable.

As a matter of fact, the 3D space of the geodesic dome perfectly illustrates what the DAG is all about. Look at it as a certified map of where the data are located with their associated usage rights. Sharing as utility. P2P sharing with certified pointing infrastructure. It’s moving us from a Flatlanders 2D thinking of the physical world to a 3D thinking of the graph. That is what the DAG is really all about.

I put this blog together during one of my weeks off, weeks that are completely un-planned and un-structured. For me these are weeks where I refresh my brain, new ideas pop-up during moments of organized boredom. You could call it my Boredom Weeks.

It can therefore not be a co-incidence that Mark Pesce ends with a referral to Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and director of the Interaction and Experience Research Group within the Intel Labs. Just on that same day, I received a tweet from one of my followers referring to Genevieve Bell’s TEDxSydney 2011 talk on boredom.

The video basically illustrates that ideas come in moments you don’t expect, when you are not focused, when you have this blissful moments of boredom. Its back to the start and title of this blog post: “The future rarely arrives when planned and it rarely arrives in the form that we expect”

I can already see now how DAG will take off from and into un-expected directions. And we are just at the start of the prototype phase. Exciting times

@petervan from the #innotribe team

Pirates in the Sandbox!

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I spent last weekend in the wonderful city of Lisbon, under a blue sky, lots of sunshine and an pleasant spring-like 18°C! The atmosphere in the city is super-relaxed, the best description I heard was “like Barcelona on tranquilizers”.

A couple of months ago, Venessa Miemis pointed me to the website of SandBox, a movement/network of young entrepreneurs < 30 years old. I am almost double that age, and was very pleased and humbled when the organizers accepted me as one of their elderly guest at their first Sandbox Global Summit.

A few weeks ago, I had a Skype call with Laura Merling from Alcatel Lucent in San-Francisco in the context of our crazy Corporate Rebels United initiative, introduced her to the organizers, and she was accepted as well to attend. Here we were: two corporate rebels together enjoying the energy and enthusiasm of 200 highly energized young folks.

Sandbox is all about incubating people versus incubating projects: I love the idea of building a strengths based society on the energy of this young generation. Sandbox is now a community of 700 young leaders. About 200 of them were present at Sandbox Lisbon (twitter hash tag #lisbox12).

The event site suggested something that would be anything but a traditional “conference” and without any “keynotes” as most of the participants were each keynoters on their own right. I was indeed quite impressed with the quality of the audience.

The event formula was in essence a un-conference format, but where the session owners were pre-listed with their subjects before the event.

The event was really very well executed: personalized welcome for all participants at the airport, great catering, breakfast you don’t even see at sibos, excellent ice-brakers for speed-dating, many ways to mix up groups, well managed serendipity, trips in town, speed dating, collective raising hands to call for silence, and at the end a crowd-produced playbook:  a post-event testimonial guidebook for change-makers, with Bloomberg Businessweek co-production.

All this smells very Innotribe of course, and that’s great! We have a bit different emphasis on design, facilitation, immersive learning experiences and performance and it would be great exchange ideas and to explore with Sandbox some sort of co-production at one of their or our events.

Some other ideas of collaboration that crossed my mind were:

  • Having some Sandbox representatives in our corporate rebels united group (see later)
  • Let some Sandboxers present at Innotribe Sibos, topics abundant in anything that has to do with corporate culture and innovation
  • Co-produce Innovation Gardens for our customers: some Sandboxers already do this ad-hoc for corporations

What was really very cool at Sandbox was the decoration by cardboard company Oupas! Design: its amazing to see how many shapes in cardboard one can built in no time. The whole event took place in the former HQ of a Portuguese bank, now Museum for Fashion and Design of Lisbon, close to the Plaza di Comercio.

Sandbox had “occupied” the third floor, which was just an empty space 5 days before the event.

During the opening session, the core group of Sandbox explained what they were all about:  young do-ers with a passion for change, a passion for impact, and together on an “expedition” to become the leaders of our world in 20 years. What if they would meet and connect now when they are <30, and not when they are in leadership positions when 50+.

What could happen in terms of

creating relationships

and deep circles of trust ?

The organizers made clear that this event was NOT about networking or exchanging business cards. They also had a “no-wifi” policy to maximize real people connections:

connecting by disconnecting

They also had some big name sponsors: Bertelsmann, Siemens, and Bloomberg Business Week. It was a nice coincidence to see that the edition of Business Week where our Innotribe DAG incubation project was covered, was one of the giveaways at the event.

I have rarely seen such a concentration of young brainpower, and any smart company interested in recruiting from this well should not hesitate in sponsoring this organization.

And the core-group is quite ambitious for 2012:

  • Growing the community from 700 to 2-3000 members: in my opinion they will have to monitor very closely the quality of their members, if not the whole concept will dilute very quickly.
  • They want to increase the focus on incubation of projects
  • They think about a venture fund. It was indeed interesting to see how many of the Sandboxers were entrepreneurs and start-ups with strong ties to VC and Angel community. Some investors already “infiltrated”

I don’t know: it seems to me difficult to maintain the deep circle of trust concept when commercial and investment interests start to mingle. And I would like to see some of the “un-polished-ness” and “free-flow” nurtured and maintained for some time. The risk of wanting to grow too fast, you see?

Over the 2 1/2 days, there were 4 times 14 parallel sessions, all interesting and inspiring! Here is a couple of sessions I attended:

What if robots take over, and all jobs disappear?

  • My biggest learning was about how to lead a session. One participant made a great move. In stead of cutting if the creative flow he asked for your first name, and then asked a clarifying question, really inviting, and with great sensitivity for relationship building
  • It seemed to me that the participants in this session were in search for “better”, for “the unnamed quality”, something that resonates with the shift from finite to infinite games, the shift from money to wealth, the shift from having to produce something to the search for deeper relationships. It was as if they all wanted to grow on the Spiral Dynamics tornado of Don Beck.
  • The greatest question came from Lina:

“What makes you so afraid?”

Looking in the eyes of the session facilitator,

I saw the fear for loss of power,

not being part of the elite,

the fear for the loss of the ego.

Bank/finance 2.0

This was an incredible session with +/- 20 participants, lead by @marcpbernegger.

I was truly amazed how much they knew about this subject. One guy even made a PHD dissertation on banking/finance 2.0 in Switzerland. Some salient points of this session:

  • Most of the innovations spotted in financial services fall in one of these categories:
    • Front end innovation
    • Moral banking (Triodos, etc)
    • Financial crisis leading to more transparency
    • Alternative currencies leading to a redefinition of value/wealth
    • I also heard some very relevant statements/observations:

Why is it such a hassle

to care where your money is invested?

Why is it so difficult

to open a shared account?

This group was so powerful that I invited the session owner to open their closed Facebook group to the Innotribe Community.

Pirates session by Peter (@petervan) and Laura (@magicmerl)

As mentioned before, Laura, Mike Maney, myself and several Innotribe team members have been playing with the idea of “Rebels United”. During Sandbox, Laura and myself animated a session on this that was well attended by about 15 young people, 3 of them from a large corporation.

We asked the 3 ladies from Upash to make some cardboard props to announce our session. Here is Laura and me with our Pirates outfit:

Below the input we received:

  • Everybody thinks its a very cool idea
  • To succeed, we will need an inspiring vision, a shared belief system versus a generic and  fluffy “we are going to change this place”
  • A good way to get to that vision is to answer the question: “What needs to change in big corporations to get these young people willing to come to work for them?”
  • We should be looking for processes and best practices for efficient pirating in corporations
  • We have to be clear whether we want a “Movement” or a “network”
  • We need a budget to experiment
  • The metaphor of “How to make Babies” was very much appreciated and lead into a discussion on co-creation and ownership
  • In terms of ownership we should evolve from “my vision” towards “our project”
  • We have to get OUT physically of your normal corporate environment to meet in outside environment
  • Any movement of this kind will need executive sponsorship, but there is a reciprocal value of offering reverse mentorship: how can rebels inspire the current executive leaders?
  • We have to recognize and reward rebels’ success, show it can be a career to move up the ladder
  • We also introduced the concept of “The Castle and the Sandbox (or the Garage)”.

There was a lively discussion that still resonates with me. Is it really such a good idea to isolate innovation projects in a separate “garage” location? I got even more inspired by the Lisbon City tour that brought us to the “Villas”. The “villas” were actually houses for the poor that were build INSIDE the patio of houses of very rich people. Below picture of the inside of Villa Sousa that was part of our tour.

It got me thinking and I was getting more and more confuzed by the polarization effect of the castle/sandbox pitch we like to use so much in Innotribe.

Instead of separate innovation ghettos, we might be better off thinking about incubation “floors”, zones, islands, meeting points, plazas, patios, “Villas”, planets, etc, where anybody of the company can look over the shoulder, get interested, and get infected by the innovation virus.

The same way we should plant and nurture innovation angels/flowers/rebels deep in the fabric of our company to create innovation from within and thus

creating viral waves of change

To push the metaphor of “babies” even further: once the rejected baby comes out of the incubator, find an adoption family or zone that going to take care as if their own baby, in stead of creating special-character camps – garages – ghettos, where the kids will come out like non-adaptive aliens, prone to development of criminal behavior and ending up in jail (exaggerated pun intended, but you get the idea 🙂

Other suggestions from our crowdsourcing session included:

  • Make failure affordable: organize “failure-fairs”
  • Create “safety nets” for Corporate Rebels
  • Offer case studies
  • Declare and organize a “Worldwide corporate rebel day”
  • Reward and celebrate corporate rebels
  • Rebels competition
  • Exchange programs to inject rebels in organizations wishing to experiment with the idea
  • Go undercover, build in some secrecy, have a little pin, a secret code

There was also some discussion on the word “Rebels”

  • It has connotations with subversive, disruptive
  • Better would be to talk about the “Supreme Head of Internal Innovation” (pun intended J
  • Don’t be shy, don’t try to hide from the start: just call what it is. Certified corporate rebels
  • Go further: provide formal corporate rebels training
  • Check out “The Unreasonable Institute”(see closing dinner speaker Robyn Scott)
  • Organize a “Rebels Bootcamp”
  • Don’t get hang-up on the word “rebel”: allow for different styles adapted to the specific situation: rebels, shakers, igniters, instigators, champs, angels, corporate tree shakers

Lots of the throughts about Corporate Rebels are captured in my Prezi on the Soul of Innovation (which since begin Jan 2012 almost got 1,000 views) and Jennifer Sertl’s post/reaction on Google+:

“I sense some

tipping point moments

due to your curation”

She also contextualized her feedback with a quote from Malcolm Gladwell from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference:

“A tipping point is that magic moment

when an idea, trend, or social behavior

crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”

A wildfire, I love it. While we are getting organized to more formally set up our movement, get further inspired by a curation of resources I have been compiling for a while now via Scoop.It

Enjoy !

By @petervan from Innotribe

2012: my boss wants me to dance!

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We are getting towards the end of the year, and time has come to nail down the Innotribe 2012 objectives of our team members.

Last Friday, I had my regular 1-1 with my boss Kosta Peric @copernicc – Head of Innovation at SWIFT. We had a really good discussion, challenging each other vigorously on what would be the best use of my time and talents in 2012.

Just the fact that we start from a strengths based paradigm is typical for how we get around these things in the Innotribe team. It remembers be the blog of Venessa Miemis on “Framework for a strengths-based society”.

And as digital identity and digital footprint are some of the topics that have deeply infected me virally, I was wondering why not apply the principles of sharing to my objectives 2012. So far, I don’t recall anybody doing this, and reflecting on it: why not?

It’s a good way to articulate your agreement with your manager, and then to share it in the open with your followers: one way or another, this adds to your personal transparency, and on the other hand I feel it makes me commit stronger to these objectives as it’s now in the open, and shared with your followers. And applying the principles of crowdsourcing and open innovation, the worst that can happen is that my followers come up with ideas to better implement my objectives.

My objectives are organized around following clusters:

  • Sensing and curating for Innotribe Events
  • Internal Evangelism
  • Digital Asset Grid
  • Innovation seeds for Lite Application Platform

Sensing and curating for Innotribe Events

Like in previous years, I will use my “antennas” to sense what’s happening at the edges of our ecosystem. Spotting the new themes and inspiring igniters that help shape our Innotribe events.

I will focus and be involved in the following main Innotribe events:

  • Innotribe stand-alone events: Bangkok in April 2012, and Belfast in June 2012
  • Innotribe @ Sibos Osaka, from 29 Oct – 2 Nov 2012

My role is that of “content curator”: these themes are the basis for my “painting” of events. It’s the architectural canvas. After conceptually agreeing on this main direction, the fantastic Innotribe facilitation team gets into action and shapes the events into immersive learning experiences. In many of our events in 2012, we will inject a “Start-Up Competition” under the leadership of Matteo.

  • The “technical” themes I have in mind today – this may still change in the coming weeks/months – are about: API’s, The Age of the Machine, Augmented Reality combined with big data.
  • The “non-technical” themes are about: Organizational Fitness, Hypereconomics, and new approaches to Innovation. And some of the 2011 themes will be re-enforced and go mainstream: Future of Money, Banks for a Better World, Digital Asset Grid.

We have some early wild ideas on how we can excel the 2011 experience of our Innotribe events: in 2012 we are going to play all senses, and looking into performance elements based on art, dance, and music. We also have some ambition to inject young people (20-25 years) into everything we do.

Internal Evangelism

In many of my previous blogs – especially the one on the digital asset grid – I have been using the metaphor of “the dance”.

So far, I “dance” quite well with the outside world of SWIFT, but I will now apply that skill more to the “internal dance”. Getting from just “shooting some bullets” and scaring the hell out of my colleagues, towards “dancing together” and making sure that we can make sense and meaning for SWIFT of everything we sense/spot outside. It’s what I would call: creating a knowledge flow out of our knowledge stock. I have some wild dream to one day have an “Innotribe University”, where we have internal and external 101 and 102 courses on for example big data, digital identity, etc. But I would like it to “emerge” from the brown bag sessions and other initiatives: again, seed a lot, see what works, be a gardener for the new promising species, incubate, grow, repeat.

Part of this cluster is a new initiative that I have under preparation: “corporate rebels united”. I am a big believer of viral infection of companies by planting seed “bombs” throughout the organization. People who act genuinely from their true self, from their true force, with no fear for sticking out their neck. Expect soon a website and on-line community where you can meet inspiring corporate rebels worldwide.

Digital Asset Grid

I have written a lot about digital identity last year, and especially about the Digital Asset Grid (DAG) incubation project at SWIFT. The last post was titled: “Digital Asset Grid: Let’s meet at the SWIFT Dance Hall”

The theme of dancing is back there as well: it will indeed be about dancing with constraints. From rather simple constraints like time and budget, to more complicated challenges like keeping the SWIFT “Castle” deeply involved, and balancing and mixing some other internal projects that have clear touch points with the DAG.

It’s a real challenge for me, as I have a tendency to “give-up” too soon when involving internal resources. But I like the challenge, as it is one of perseverance.

Innovation seeds for Lite Application Platform

Whereas the above is about a 30-30-30% of my time in 2012, I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues on phase-2 of “LAP-15”.

LAP stands for “Lite application platform” and “15” refers to the 2015 strategy of SWIFT, and is a continuation of the Alliance Lite project that I was part of and launched in 2008 at Sibos Vienna. As in our team, we have learned quite a lot in our pilots and prototypes about B2B marketplaces, that thinking can be re-injected in LAP. Also some of the ideas articulated in the Digital Asset Grid project with respect to API’s will most probably be of great interest to LAP15.

A dream mission:

I have said it many times, and repeat again: I have a dream job. After having prepared my brand new presentation “The Soul of Innovation: a story about DJ’s, Painters, Pirates and Corporate Rebels”, I probably have to re-word this.

What we do in the Innotribe team is not a “job”. We are on a mission. So, based on that, I can happily state:

“I don’t have a job, I have a dream mission”.

That combined with a boss and organization that wants me to dance internally and externally: what else do you need 😉

So, who wants to dance with me?

Happy @petervan from the Innotribe Team

Defrag2011: Mercenaries with a Soul

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This was my second Defrag.

I attended Defrag for the first time last year in 2010, and it helped me spot 6 excellent speakers for Innotribe at Sibos: Jeff Jonas, Mark Dowds, Laura Merling, Dion Hinchcliffe, Doc Searls, and Stowe Boyd.  I contacted more Defrag speakers, but or they couldn’t make it, or I just couldn’t fit them in the already packed Innotribe agenda.

It’s a dream for me in my role as content curator for Innotribe events. But it is also one of the conferences that really helps me identifying trends in tech industry.

I tweeted the one-liner “once Defrag always Defrag”. Life permitting, I want to go every year.

Defrag is not a conference like any other. It’s a 2-day encounter of tech enthusiasts in Broomfield, close to Boulder, Colorado. It’s capped in number of participants: 325 max. The quality of the speakers, content and participants is excellent. Always a place to have great conversations.

It’s perfectly organized by Eric Norlin and his spouse Kim, and tuned for a modern tech audience: super quality video projection, awesome sound system (the organizers love playing lots of hard rock and metal music), power plugs on all tables, and a Wi-Fi system that is tuned to deal with 3 devices per participant. How good how good was Defrag’s Wi-Fi? Well, they had people downloading the new iPhone/iPAD iOS *in* the keynote room, and we did not notice any drop in quality! And everybody got a goodies bag so big that you have to buy a separate suitcase to get it all home. Eric’s super curation skills, his no-frills introductions of the speakers and his humble no-hero attitude completed the pack.

As usual, I will not make a chronological report of my impressions, but zoom into some of the highlights of this year’s conference.

  • For a very detailed twitter stream, check-out the tweet tsunami with hashtag #defragcon:  https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23defragcon
  • or even better, Matt Groeninger (@mgroeninger) compiled tweets for hashtag #defragcon during Defrag 2011 (11-3 to 11-11), cleaned it up for double entries, time-zone adjusted them and posted the whole lot as an *.CSV file here: http://bit.ly/u8Xppi . Thx, Matt! It helped me writing this blog!

Like last year, the conference opened with an awesome energizing video trailer. This year – the 5th edition – was no different.

Defrag Video: http://vimeo.com/31903004

That was great as a kick-start. Eric and team had decided not to have a specific overall theme for the conference, and I believe that’s a good change. However, after the 2 days, I saw some themes lurking behind all the great content: big data, APIs, the race against the machine, and inspiring new ways of work were recurring.

Opening by nobody less than Tim Bray from Google with a talk on “Mysteries of the Internet”

He was one of the speakers who did live coding as part of his talk, and it was the second time in 3 weeks that I heard the message that nobody really understands the Internet (first time was at Compass11 from Danny Hills from Applied Minds). “Don’t try to predict the future from the past” and “I want to be an explorer (of unknown territories)” were typical one-liners of this talk.

I have organized this blog under following themes:

  • Check your assumptions
  • Machines in charge
  • When presentations become art
  • How to run your company like a start-up
  • Philanthropy
  • Great conversations
  • Big Data
  • Pitch Alert

Check your assumptions

Sam Arbesman from The Kauffman Foundation pointed out that most facts change over time. There are few absolute truths. He introduced the notion of “mesofacts”, warning that “your reality is out of date” and that “whatever period we are born in we view as the state of affairs”. Facts (averages of facts) obey (mathematical) rules: half of scientific data changes in about two generations. Many of our decisions are based on outdated facts. “Are your facts up-to-date?” was the appropriate call for action for this talk.

Duncan Watts, author of “Everything is obvious, once you know the answer” explained that common sense is hat we rely on to navigate concrete, everyday situations. Unfortunately, we try to apply common sense or gut feeling for complex longer-term situations. In complex systems history never really repeats, history doesn’t repeat deterministically, so generalizations based on the past have limited utility. “Is the Internet to sociology what the telescope was to physics?” is a good summary.

Aneesh Chopra, CTO to the White House gave a passionate talk. The assumption that he challenged was that government officials are boring and non-inspirational. Oh boy, I was impressed by his in-depth knowledge on a broad set of technology matters, and the contagious energy he was spreading. Governments need more people like @aneeshchopra in public service. Do, don’t talk, innovate, don’t legislate, open government using big data, API’s, and crowd sourcing to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship. Cool stuff.

Machines in charge

Robert Stephens was founder and CEO of Geek Squad until Best Buy bought it. Robert is now CTO Best Buy. “Every company should have a Robert Scoble” and “where is the AppStore for home automation?” were some good openers. He made clear that there is a whole market out there for repairing/supporting robotics, home automation, fitness, the Internet of things. On social media, his dream is to have NO social media response team, that every employee is connected and empowered. He also showed some “wireless hygiene stats”: how much noise devices cause in a Best -Buy shop. Towards the end, he made a shutout for #singly > VRM and locker project, and defended that bringing your own device to work (BYOD) works better than giving an employee their own corporate device.

Brad Felds (managing director at Foundry Group) opened his talk with an awesome scary app on Facebook http://www.takethislollipop.com/ > try it and make sure your Facebook locations are “on”.

For Brad, the machines have already taken over: they are very patient, come in many disguises. Machines don’t have to kill us; they are patient and can wait till we die. Still, he is an optimist and thinks that machines will like us and will help us. He urged us to change our mindset about who is controlling whom. Regarding the singularity, he does not care anymore when it happens, it’s happening already, and very fast. To my question “what values to we have to give our children to prepare for the age of the machines?” he answered to my surprise “nothing”. Kids younger than 15 years have grown up symbiotically with being connected, and will solve it themselves. Therefore, Brad remains optimistic.

When presentations become art

Lili Cheng from Microsoft Research surprised everybody with a beautiful presentation inspired by architecture, going back to her education roots: why did I like this talk so much? ;-). She was using the architecture metaphors to refer to the ideal structure of a city, and how that is inspirational to build social software that is flexible and creative enough to optimize big data. “Dance like no 1’s watching. Sing like no 1’s listening. Tweet like no algorithm is coldly deciding your social worth” or a modern implementation of “Why do we loose our child’s innocence along the journey of life ?” was a fantastic quote to make the transition to a great demo of Montage, a document editing package based on search and mixing all kinds of content: pretty cool. It is the first demo in many years that I see from Microsoft where they prove they are finally getting the web.

Already last year, Paul Kedrosky seduced me with his talk on “Ladders”, a great presentation on big data correlations. With Kedrosky, you never know where he is leading you till 10 min in the talk. This year was no different. He started by live coding in game ZORK, trying to get into the White House through the backdoor. At a certain moment in the game, he hits a location that is labeled “this page is intentionally left blank”, btw also the title of his presentation. You must be brave to drop the word “vacansopapurosophobia” (fear of a blank page) into an early-afternoon keynote 😉 In essence, his talk was about transparency and about vulnerability in being open: “I want to play a game but I don’t want to be gamed”. The blank page is a way to reassure us we are missing out something.

How to run your company like a start-up

There were some really cool presentations on new methods of work.

Jay Simmons, President of Atlassian had a talk on “Hack your company”. Some salient approaches included scoring based on performance and stretch, come up with an idea and ship it in 24 hours (yes, 24 hours!) and iPads at the entrance of work to survey employee satisfaction, instead of boring long surveys.

T.A. McCann, Founder and CEO of GIST charmed everybody with “A startup Start to Finish”. In his opinion great people, aligned passions, and complementary skills are the secret sauce for startups. The HOW is as important as what: he suggested to operate your start-up like clockwork: 18 month horizon, 6 month goals, 3 month plan, 1 month themes, 2 week sprints.

Adrian Cockcroft, Cloud Architect from Netflix blew everybody away. In essence this was a great talk on innovation and on Netflix’s corporate culture. He made clear that the one R&D or Innovation center does not work, is not taken serious by the rest of the company and how incredible hard it is to change corporate culture in a big organization: he implied it’s impossible. I loved his quote “For innovation to happen, you have to get out of its way”. His list of corporate culture attributes was mind-blowing: they only hire senior people, have no coding standards (peer pressure works fine). They don’t have a CIO and their IT staff only supports employees. They push out code, as needed, several times a day, and not “the old way”, the 2-week train like at eBay. One and the same persons now do project manager, line manager, and architect. Prima donna’s are expelled by group pressure. There are no bonuses, just flat and very competitive salaries. And they have monthly stock options at the current price with instant vesting. Fascinating. With his grand-finale “we only hire rockstars: do you want to be in the audience on part of the band on stage?”, any professional should be attracted to check out the open positions at Netflix 😉 Post event @matthixson posted a link to a slideshare about the Netflix culture. It’s great and I recommend it to all, especially if your company is reviewing motivation, appraisals, etc.

I was trying to invite Adrian to Innotribe at Sibos 2012, but could not yet convince him. A couple of days after Defrag, I had a call with Kaliya Hamlin @identitywomen on an unrelated subject, and she asked me how Defrag went. She said that the people who know Innotribe should make a invitation blurb to help us convincing folks who do not immediately see what’s in for them to talk to senior banking executives: Innotribe is different, cool, engaging, and no better ambassadors then those who experienced. Great idea, Kaliya! Thx!

Laura Merling from Alcatel-Lucent was brilliantly comparing the aspects of a business to 5″” stilettos and making a plea for women in business and tech: “it’s not about whether you’re male or female, it’s about whether you’re the right person for the job” almost got a standing ovation. “Build a culture, create a business tribe” sounded as music in my Innotribe-ears. Her presentation used a strong metaphor of boots/shoes, and it was not just a gimmick: the boots have a sole/soul, and mentioned innotribe as a role model. Slides here. http://www.slideshare.net/llm007/five-inches-of-fabulous-defrag2011

Sam Ramji was great during one of the API break-outs: “I am a mercenary, not a missionary” on question whether API intermediaries should refuse non-standard OAuth.

And Dion Hinchcliffe joined JP Rangaswami @jobsworth when he stated “design for change, design for loss of control”

Philantrophy

Matt Galligan showed how even start-ups can contribute to a better world via philanthropy.

His initiative “1% of nothing” lets start-ups engage with 1% of their equity. It is called “1% of nothing” where nothing is equity of a startup that us not (yet) worth anything

Great conversations

I had some great conversations with Sam Ramji and Anant Jhingran from Apigee. I have invited them to do a brown-bag session for all staff, next time Sam is over in Europe. This setting is btw possible for any company that has something innovative to offer that falls within our strategic objectives.

I also had some in-depth chats with digital identity folks Ian Glazer (Gartner Research), John Fontana (Ping Identity), and Drummond Reed (Connect.me). The day after, I was already invited to the Cloud Identity Summit in July 2012 to talk about our Digital Asset Grid (DAG).

And it is always fun to brainstorm with Laura Merling and Mike Maney from Alcatel Lucent. We believe there is some fertile ground to join forces, and to do something around a crazy idea of “Rebels United”. More about that for sure in one of my subsequent posts

Big Data

Last but not least, almost all talks had “big data” in them somewhere. It became almost annoying at some moment in time, especially when there was a presentation specifically trying to prove that this was the latest buzzword, and becoming as generic and meaningless as “social media”.

Pitch Alert

On a very few occasions, there was “pitch alert”. And one of the sessions on policy really could not inspire me. The last talk was – at least in my appreciation – a bit “thin” in content (speaker was ok), and I would have preferred to end on a real high, like the conference started.

Post conference, I had some great chats with Eric Norlin. Maybe I’ll get a chance myself as a Defrag speaker next year: I am working on a brand new prez on “the soul of innovation” based on the attributes of DJ’s, Painters, Pirates and Corporate Rebels”. It’s work in progress, and I am experimenting with sound, video and image landscapes as part of that presentation. Would be nice having a European flavor into the Defrag conference 😉

Two days after the conference, I saw a tweet from Eric Norlin: “had a break-thru moment last night about how to improve the defrag agenda/structure in a discussion w/ kim. can’t wait for 2012.”

Same here. Can’t wait for 2012. Already note down the dates for next year’s edition: 14-15 November 2012. If you go, you will not be disappointed. See you there!

Fear is not an option

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Previous posts were impressions of some great conferences I recently attended.

This blog post is different. It is more a personal reflection.

I invite you to join me on my journey.

In our company, failure is not an option (FNOA). That’s quite normal given the nature of our business: a worldwide business-to-business network for mainly international financial transactions. That’s not something you mess around with: rightfully so.

Recently, when attending the Compass Summit, there were a couple of sessions on risk management. Some examples were given how risk is assessed in other businesses such as investments in oil refineries, also an important and critical infrastructure. The similarities with our business were obvious.

There is always the tension between investing in proven technologies and taking some risk with less proven innovative technologies. Moreover, any investment in such space usually commits you for long periods:  10-40 years.  So, you better make the right choice.

All the risk managers I have met are highly responsible people. I can imagine that people making such decisions do their homework and base their assessments on extensive risk analysis. There are for sure many techniques, processes and best practices for this.

But what about the more unconscious parts

of these and other decision processes?

Do emotional and less rational processes play a role? Such as doubt? Such as uncertainty? Such as fear?

  • Fear to make the wrong choice.
  • Fear of taking the leap of faith and switch to the next wave of technologies.
  • Fear of holding back.

I did some introspection in my own state of mind and what’s holding me back some days.

I realize that by sharing this, I do show some personal vulnerability (see video Brené Brown), but i take the risk. Because I am a strong believer of open mind, open heart, and open will. And would like to make more “human” connections with all those who I care about: my family, my friends, my colleagues, my followers, the followed. Because I believe openness leads to transparency, better connections, better choices, and more conscious corporations with a real soul. I would like more people showing some vulnerability.

It feels so much more human.

As some of you may have noticed, I am quite active on twitter. I read a lot. I follow more than 1,000 RSS feeds. I try to stay up to date. I believe my readers appreciate. I believe my employer appreciates the holistic view I bring to the table. I appreciate their feedback and it gives me energy.

Staying up-to-date is a matter of discipline.  In principle, I reserve time early in the morning, during lunch breaks, and late in the evening when the kid is to bed, and everything is silent. I estimate it’s about 3-4 hours per day before and after working hours: quite an investment and intensity.

And with this sort of intensity, I realize every day that there is so much good stuff out there on the edges of our ecosystem. There are so many inspiring people out there, so many inspiring ideas.

Is it just a dream that one could live

in such a permanent inspiring environment?

When I come back to the office, into the “real” world, I often wonder how I can make that knowledge stock more relevant for our company, for our community. How can I create a knowledge flow from my knowledge stock? What’s a better way of sharing? With some more rubber hitting the road. And to see more significant progress and results of our innovation activities.

It becomes almost

an existential question

“What am I doing here if nothing or very little of these spotted innovations, prototypes, and incubations ever hit our mainstream business?”

As Nick Carr wrote in The Shallows (Amazon Affiliate link), all this exposure to scattered new stuff does something with your brain. You start getting used to “scanning”.

It’s a different type of attention, a different type of presence or even “non-presence”. And it becomes difficult to focus for some longer time on something specific, even something as simple as reading a book.

Scanning leads to distraction. Overflow. Not seeing clear anymore. But on the other hand, you become much better in making connections between topics, memes and trends.

Just the other day, a friend called me, and she was in awe for the progress we had made with Innotribe. And also for the personal growth progress I had made myself.

I am not sure. I am in doubt. Maybe I don’t see it. Maybe I don’t see the progress anymore, to close to see clear.  Forgetting the take the time to take the helicopter view.

  • Maybe that’s why I feel more like stagnating.
  • Maybe I am too hungry.
  • Maybe I don’t walk the talk of letting emerge what needs to be.
  • Maybe I don’t celebrate enough progress.
  • Maybe I am too closed.

Even more closed with people I like a lot. Then I feel afraid.

  • Afraid of jumping and making bold moves
  • Afraid of sticking out my neck even more.
  • Afraid of showing some/all my vulnerabilities.
  • Afraid of being hurt.
  • Afraid of giving too much, and not getting back.
  • Afraid of opening up
  • Afraid of the unknown in opening up.
  • Afraid of discovering emptiness.
  • Afraid of loosing control.
  • Afraid of jumping in the empty hole.
  • Afraid of standing in the full fire.
  • Afraid of my true self.
  • Afraid of being free.

I am hungry to be free. 100% free. In the sense of being “alive”, being 100% in my true flow, free from internal blockages such as fear. Free like in letting myself go in dancing. Free like in my most creative moments.

And then, just the other night, coincidently – there are no co-incidences, I believe a lot in synchronicity and that the things that come to you had to come to you – I was picking up again that book of Christopher Alexander in “The Timeless Way of Building” (Amazon Affiliates link) about patterns in architecture.

Chapter 2 is about “The quality without a name”. It made me aware that what I am chasing is more than “free”. I recommend anybody to read this chapter, for me it’s like an ideal compass for life:

There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named

and

It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions

and

… the most primitive feeling which an animal or a man can have, as primitive as the intuition which tells us when something is false or true.

Attributes of this quality without a name are:

  • Alive
  • Whole
  • Comfortable
  • Free
  • Exact (like in “right”)
  • Egoless
  • Eternal

But maybe I should not try to chase “free” or to chase that unnamed quality.

Maybe that unnamed quality is an illusion.

I don’t think so. I would surely hope not so.

The day

I am not after

that unnamed quality,

I better stop

Going relentlessly

after that unnamed quality

IS my reason for being

But the hunt for better and more quality sucks ànd gives energy.

And sometimes I need a pause. Time to reboot. Step out of the treadmill. Take distance. Re-connect with my true self. Pure silence and no distraction. Presence. More conscious.

Sometimes, I imagine living in a convent or on a desolated island. Nothing fancy. Almost minimalistic: small Spartan room, clean, bare furniture, some simple fair food and some wine. And reading. Musing. Reflecting. Having a tribe following.

Maybe that’s enough.

  • But wouldn’t I feel bored pretty soon?
  • Wouldn’t I become a fugitive of myself?
  • Prisoner of my own fear?

So, I have come to the conclusion that

fear is not an option

I believe that one has to hit the bottom of fear, and stay there for some time. And be present in that bottom moment. And let emerge and let happens what comes.

You can’t “steer” everything in live. Probably nothing. I don’t believe anymore one can “steer” innovation, that one can steer change. That a subject for a subsequent post 😉

Some things cannot be planned. You have to let go, and take the leap of faith.

The only way to make personal and professional progress is to jump. Take the risk. Stick out your neck. And fail sometimes. Fail many times. Re-start. Retry. Fail. Retry. Success. Repeat.

Do you have fear? Do you have doubts? Do you need time to reboot? To re-connect with your true self?

What does this do with you? How does this resonate with you? Does this want you to respond and share your own perspective and experiences?

Or is it more, OMG…

Let me know.

@petervan

Compass Summit: can we win the race?

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Last week, I attended Compass Summit.  After Contact Summit in NYC the weekend before, the contrast could not be bigger. Whereas Contact Summit was held in a worn-out synagogue, Compass was held in a 5 star luxury resort close to LA.

Also the audience was fundamentally different: in NY we saw a group of activists and revolutionaries (a good representation of the 99%): and the theme was “the evolution will be social”. In LA, scientists and economist – probably a subset of the 1% – shared the space for a couple of days under the overall tag line “What’s possible, What matters, What’s ahead?”

Innotribe was sponsoring both events. In Compass Summit, we also acted as co-curator and facilitator for 1 plenary on Future of Money, and 4 breakouts (see later)

Agenda and program

The Compass agenda was packed.

For a minute-by-minute coverage of the conference, I suggest to check out the #compass11 Twitter stream or Kosta Peric’s coverage by live e-scribing here.

UPDATE: all videos of all talks are now available here.

Instead of doing a vertical or chronological report on this conference, I will try to give you a horizontal report-cut of the topics discussed, and add some personal opinions to the mix.

The conference was a very high quality event, with super speakers from science and economy.

I left the conference with a mixed feeling: who will win, the positive scientists or the dooming economists? My overall take-away was that we are in a very deep crisis of everything, much deeper than most newspapers let us believe. I am worried for our children and what will happen the next 2-5 years.

Format

Compass Summit is a traditional conference, in the sense of  the format: speakers on stage, 20 min talks, fireside chats, and panel debates. The general sessions felt like a TED, but then one with audience interactions. Which gave the organizers a timing-headache as all the Q&A’s ran out time and so the whole conference program. No problem for me: as long as the content is as interesting as at Compass, I could stay there the whole night ;-). Towards the end of the conference, there was some experimentation with a “sequential conversation”, but there was more potential in that: it just requires more scripting and preparation. The Innotribe breakouts and wrap-up were – how would I say? – very “Innotribe”J . We always try to do something special, and you expect no less from us (more about this at the end of this blog post)

Science

The overall message was positive, although many questions were raised on the impact of the increasing human-machine blurring, and whether real life implementations of great ideas in current R&D will reach us in time to save the planet.

Danny Hills from Applied Minds and one of the originators of the Long Now indicated that “we are already in The Matrix” right now. “Nobody really knows how the Internet works” and “we overestimate the human ability to control and underestimate its adaptability” were some reflections leading to his conclusion “Forget the Enlightenment, we now live in the era of “the Entanglement.”

We also saw some great progress on Solar Energy production and photosynthesis Fuel. To put things in perspective: the energy needs for 2050 are such that if we want to cover it with nuclear energy, we would need to install one nuclear plan per day. The conclusion of the energy debate was clearly solar is the way forward and that energy storage was the Holy Grail for the immediate future.

David Gelernter stood out with a milestone presentation.

His talk was completely scripted, no slides. But it sounded like a novel, a piece of science poetry. So many beautiful metaphors, play of words, and fine humor! The content was mind-blowing as well. His starting premise was that we are witnessing the transition from a space-based organization of information to a time-based organization of information. Search starts smelling like value-based search, with time as just one of the values. The concept of a stream-browser instead of a web-browser was no less than brilliant, and I loved his evolutionary insight from “cybersphere” to “cyberflow”.

This was quite consistent with the messages form Brian Arthur and E. Stevenson: everyone is connected and it’s getting deeper and deeper…the grid starts to look like an organism, neural network. The underlying grid of machines talking to each other was described by Brian Arthur as “the second economy” that will soon be bigger than the real economy. The question “Who will win?” in the session “Race against the machine” – and also title of a new book by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson – was therefore spot on.

Cities and their dynamics and their impact on growth and innovation were also a recurring theme: Geoffrey West – world famous since his memorable TED talk – did his fantastic thing on “Cities never die”. Saskia Sassen added a new dimension for me: “a city talks back”, suggesting that a city tells us in immediate feedback loops what works and what not

Economy

The overall message was extremely negative. I was shocked by some of the facts presented.

Although we still see a growth in wealth creation, the wealth is more and more concentrated with the happy few. The 1% starts looking more and more like the 0.01%. The world is also turning younger, more urban, and more impatient for accountability, in both democracies and authoritarian states. We need a different diplomacy where also NGO’s, Philanthropies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and companies like Google and Wall-Mart are represented. I believe that is a good starting point, as the concept of “country” is really dead. But the real question is what are the criteria for who can sit at that table: will be allow organizations like Goldman Sachs, who claims to rule the world, but is creating fake value through speculation, value outside of the real wealth system in my opinion. And whereas countries and UN are as good as dead, there is no transition in governance model between now and then, and we risk falling into a governance no-mans land.

Corporations are piling up cash that is sitting idle. Someone summarized this signal as “between fear and opportunity is paralysis”. In the meantime, the center of power and control is further moving East-wards: 2009 was the first year in 200 years where emerging markets outgrew developed ones. We aren’t going back.

Bernard Lietaer (author of “The Future of Money” and more recently “Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies”) was no less than impressive.

He showed that he had empirical evidence that the financial system is systemically instable. He pointed to some solutions to the monoculture of fiat state currencies. The most frightening was probably his statement that “we have 5-10 years to fix this, if not the game is over”.  This was the first (and not the last) time that the idea of war (as in world war) was uttered as a very possible scenario, and although Lietaer did not mention this, I interpreted his message as a warning for fascist behavior and polarizations.

And one day later, Mark Anderson painted a super confrontational picture between the USA and China, and indicated that the IP war was already going on, stronger even, that phase-1 of the war was over and we are already doing corporate body counting.

Add to this the Saudi Arabian oil situation, where the monarchy is a) paying it’s citizen from the oil reserves to avoid a Saudi Arabian spring and where the oil reserves will more and more be used for internal needs. Pierre Larroque added that Saudi Arabia is now in essence a supplier of China, and asked the question “why should we defend them?” Quite a statement!

Add to this water scarcity. Add to these big dysfunctions in education systems. Add to this the fact that the current young generation is the first generation that will enjoy LESS wealth than their parents. Add to this the #occupy movement, Middle East spring, etc. and the picture is not very rosy, the least to say

Values

Following his discourse in currency value debate, Bernard Lietaer also mentioned the need for more “feminine energy, presence and softness”, echoing a message from John Hagel in his blog a week earlier.

“Quod Demonstrandum Est” must have thought Caroline Stephens.

She gave the audience a wake-up call when stating “I have stopped talking about poverty in a 5 star hotel”. Her testimonials of future-less generations in South-America moved everybody in the audience, except the moderator who showed a pedantic lack of empathy and moved to the next point on the agenda by stating “now that we have solved a couple of world-problems…”

A genuine tweet from Heather Vescent sparked the Innotribe team to rally for an ad-hoc session to give Caroline the space needed for her message. It was interesting to see how people quickly tried to recuperate strong personalities like Caroline for their own agenda. It’s a very fine balance to walk. In the end, we failed to get such an ad-hoc session squeezed into the already busy Compass agenda. But we won’t give up: Caroline, we will contact you directly for one of next year’s Innotribe events.

The rest of the conference value discussions debated the rhetorical question whether value-based thinking is eroded by output concentration.

As a lot of the identity discussions were related to privacy, I quickly cover this under this value-section. One participant reacted somewhat sarcastic by saying that during the panel debate she almost believed that Google and Facebook were philanthropic organizations. We were probably closer to the truth when the moderator said “facial recognition will dramatically change what it means to show your face in public”.

Organization

Mark Bonchek introduced the notion of “Social Architecture” and gave a great example how this relates to networks and nation building during warfare. And how the US military has realized that shared situational awareness enables self-synchronization. It appears that the army’s counter-insurgency Field Manual (PDF Link) is “the best single guide for driving large scale corporate change.” After the conference we had a really interesting chat with Mark on corporate change and whether you really can steer change or whether it is just as effective to drop a seed bomb of corporate activists, and just watch what happens and emerges. That will be the subject of another blog

An interesting Risk Management debate revealed that trade-offs have to and are being made whether one should implement latest technology or proven technology only, and that the relentless push for efficiency pushes towards latest technology. If one would take the brain scan of the most adventurous CEO, one would see “40% risk taking, 60% risk aversion”.

Brian Arthur spoke about the “second economy” (see earlier). With some hindsight, I would like to suggest even a third economy underneath (or overlaying) that: “the values/spiritual economy”. What are the real values and intentions we have when completing a transaction? Values like transparency and fairness. Like belonging. Like intrinsic drivers of motivation such as the drive to acquire, to defend, to bond and to learn. Which brings us to education.

Education

It looks to me that the USA has a bigger problem with education than other continents. Or they focus more on it. I don’t think it is the latter. Michael Crow from Arizona State University was inspiring when stating “in stead of exclusion (to the education system), our metrics should be based on the output of our education system”. Other speakers insisted that the education system should celebrate from failure instead of exclusively focusing on and measuring success. Jack Hidary was passionate in his plea to “educate to innovate”.

But by the end of the conference, I got a bit tired of the so generic term “innovation”, used as the deus-ex-machina for world hunger problems, without specifying what the solution exactly is.

Innotribe sessions

In addition of the (rather traditional) plenary session on Future of Money with Bernard Lietaer, Innotribe was also responsible for 4 breakout sessions. Our team really went the extra mile in decorating the rooms, and using sound and visual landscaping to further add to the immersive learning experiences that have become the trademark of Innotribe sessions.

For the identity breakout we repeated our Sibos trick with the music from Tron. For the future of value, our ladies Mela and Martine almost created a zen-like experience with candles, rose leafs, and spiritual music.

From a content point of view, I would like to summarize each of them with a couple of tweet-like statements

–       The Future of Banking

  • “Money is the memory of value”
  • “Trust will define the future of banking”
  • “There are huge opportunities for banks in the unregulated space”

–       The Future of Transactions

  • “From the gift economy to the re-gifting economy”
  • “Transactions are the fuel to the relationship economy”

–       The Future of Identity and Trust

  • “Digitization of identity good or bad?”
  • “Identity should be part of digital inclusion”

–       The Future of Value

  • “The poverty of financial metrics prevents full wealth recognition”
  • “Right conduct + truth + peace +non-violence + love = living system of wealth”

Conclusion

Our economic, financial, energy, and wealth distribution problems are huge. The problems seem bigger and more insurmountable than the general press makes us believe. Scientists try to picture of optimism, but I could not resist the discomfort that the implementation of their inventions will come too late. Fear for war can turn any moment into a real possibility. And still our politicians don’t get it. We witness an aversion against the establishment in general. The cry to do without them gets louder.

But current problems and solutions are still presented as a game of winner and losers, with polarization leading to simplification, populism, and possibly fascism. I would prefer a model based on infinite game thinking. The world is the opposite of flat, and the role of black swans is not included in any of the models discussed today. It’s all about redefining a new value context, new value movement, less re-active, less “protest” than OWS, more pro-active.

It is about a collective awakening, where flow reveals structure. You can’t just start with structure and force everything to fit into it. It would be far better to create a parallel positive: a much safer way that just saying “nuke the system”.

Maybe I should close this blog post with the quote by Leonardo da Vinci that was printed on the back of the Compass Summit conference program:

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

That’ s probably why the title of this blog post is “Can we win the race?” and why the Innotribe wrap-up ended with “It is only up to us to act”.

@petervan from the Innotribe team

Cross-posted on Innotribe blog here.

Digital Asset Grid: Let’s meet at the SWIFT Dance Hall

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This post is a fifth in a series on personal digital identity. Part-1 “The unpolished diamond was published here in August 2010 and Part-2 ‘The Digital Identity Tuner” was published here in September 2010. Part-3 “Personal Data Something” was published here in December 2010. And part-4 “Austin-Munich-Toronto” was published in February 2011 here.

Drawing by Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) during the Innotribe Deep Dive on Digital Identity, Sibos Toronto, September 2011.

That was February 2011. Since then a lot happened. I had so many rich discussions, met so many new fascinating people, and have been aroused by a deluge of new ideas on digital identity.  And my employer SWIFT gave the go-ahead for an incubation project on Digital Identity that is now called the “Digital Asset Grid”.

As I mentioned in my Innotribe Sibos report, the Digital Asset Grid (DAG) is important because:

  • We are moving from money bank to digital (asset) bank
  • The DAG is an infrastructure play for SWIFT to offer a certified pointer system pointing at the location of digital assets and the associated usage rights
  • It’s and economic imperative for SWIFT to expose its core competence via API’s
  • The DAG is a huge opportunity for SWIFT to be a key infrastructure player in offering an end to end hardened infrastructure and end-point to enable the seamless exchange of any sort of digital asset between any number of entities
  • This is also a huge opportunity for financial institutions to plug-in to this infrastructure for offering a new set of services in the data leverage space in un-regulated data market places

For me Digital Identity is so much more than your log-in, or our account-number that is backed by a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process, or another userid/password or a security token.

I look at it a spectrum. Like you have a spectrum analysis for a star that uniquely identifies it, you can imagine a spectrum for the digital identity of persons:

Digital Identity Spectrum is everything from PKI, account#, Log-In to address, attributes, history, preferences, biometrics, reputation, risk profile, intentions, signals, etc and all this in transaction and time context.

It’s no co-incidence that Facebook recently announced “TimeLine”. Identity in time-context leads to your identity spectrum that is unique at one given time. And yes, you will be able to play it backwards like a movie, but also forward to do trend analysis and forecasting.

VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) is about sharing specific parts of my spectrum with specific vendor(s) in specific transaction context(s). In the Digital Asset Grid project we asked ourselves:

“What if we could apply the VRM principles not only to personal data but to any content, to any piece of information, to ANY digital asset?”

You could then start thinking about sharing specific parts of any digital assets with specific vendor(s) in specific transaction context(s).

In essence, what we are doing, is “weaving” digital contents with associated digital rights and who has the rights to that content.

It’s a map of digital weavings

of digital fabrics

This is how the Digital Asset Grid was born.

Is this not too consumer oriented for an organization like SWIFT? I believe this is the wrong question. The discussion “consumer vs. enterprise” has kept us blind. Same by all sorts of other customer segmentations like “small-medium-large”. In the identity ubiquity game, all this is segmentation is irrelevant.

We have to start thinking in terms of different sorts of entities that participate to the identity-dance. Those entities can be:

  • Person (humans)
  • Loose group of persons (for ex Google Circles), that have no legal construct
  • Commercial companies
  • Non-Profit companies
  • Governments
  • Educational institutions
  • Programs (code)

The last one – programs – is quite fundamental. We are witnessing the blurring between humans and computers. It smells like early singularity. And in this debate we should not only be concerned on how programs augment humans, but also how humans augment programs. But that is another more philosophical discussion, and some good reading on this can be found in the book “The Most Human Human” by Brian Christian. (Amazon Affiliate link)

Back to our Digital Asset Grid…

The vision of the Digital Asset Grid

is to move the SWIFT network and SWIFT services

from a closed, single-purpose, and messaging-based system

to an open, general-purpose, API-based system

It’s a natural evolution. That’s it. No disruption. No—“the next big thing.”

Just apply out-of-band our core competency to the modern age of connectivity. Instead of destabilizing the market by disruptive innovations, provide the basic infrastructure missing for a global transaction-based platform on the Internet.

Of course, its vision is grand, with plenty of innovative elements and thinking. Here are some examples how we move from the traditional identity “space” to the new “Digital Identity Grid”

I would like to zoom-in on one of the bullet points above: from one way request-response to full duplex dance.

The web – a collection of pages – is based on some simple request-response mechanisms. I request a page and the server responds and gives me the page. End of that transaction.

With the dataweb – a collection of Digital Assets with associated usage rights – we will need something where exchanging entities can perform a dance around and with the Digital Assets. And we want to be sure that they are who they say they are, and that they have the right usage rights to the digital assets. So we move from a two dimensional view of the world (in computer terms a “table”) to a multi-dimensional view (in computer terms a “graph”)

The Digital Asset Data Web is the next phase in the evolution of important internet stuff. It’s probably what comes next in the following series:

To continue the dance metaphor, the SWIFT infrastructure is the Dance Hall where entities meet to perform certain specific dances.

One of the many use cases for the Digital Asset Grid would be to solve compliance, In stead of moving messages from A to B, we keep the data where they are and “point” to them with SWIFT certified pointers to where the data are located and the associated usage rights.

The dance protocol (full duplex) for this use case, from opening of the dance with (a “webhook” in technical terms), to the actual picking-up of the content, and closing the dance and everything in-between, could look like something like this:

  • PartyA: “hey, I am sending a signal that I wanna dance the tango (slang for payment instructions) with any party in the Swift dance hall at 9pm”
  • PartyB: “yep, I wanna dance with you, let’s meet in the SWIFT dance hall at the bar”
  • PartyA: “ok, here we are, cool place ;-)”
  • PartyA: “Let’s get to business”
  • PartyA: “I just gave you following rights my payment instructions at this XRI: you have XDI pick-up rights”
  • PartyB: “ok, gotja. Will pick it up right away”
  • PartyB: “knock knock, I am coming to fetch those payment instructions”
  • PartyA: “let’s check if you have the usage rights….”
  • PartyA: “everything looks fine, go ahead”
  • PartyB: “loading, loading, loading…”
  • PartyB: “Ok I am done”
  • PartyA: “So am I”
  • PartyB: “tomorrow, same place same time to dance ?”
  • PartyA: “would love to 😉 9pm again ?”
  • PartyB: “sure, bye bye”
  • PartyA: “bye bye”

And, what’s really cool about it, it’s fully auditable, end-to-end.

When telling this story to one of my colleagues, I got the following reaction: “Hey, but you are changing the basic messaging paradigm of SWIFT… I am not sure that I want to support an innovation like this… one that is cutting off the branch from the tree I am sitting on…”

Here is something essential for innovation. Any innovation team in any company should not only look at some nitty-gritty small incremental innovations, but

daring to be great and to re-think

the cash cows of our companies

Like Guy Kawasaki used to say: “the best way to innovate is to set-up a company that is trying to kill your cash-cow”

All the above is about the infrastructure story that SWIFT could play in and in that sense is a bit navel staring. But the biggest opportunity however in all this is probably for banks, financial institutions, and new upcoming innovative financial service providers.

This is a HUGE opportunity to offer new digital services in non-regulated markets

Many examples and use-cases here :

  • Personal Data Lockers, Digital Asset Lockers, Digital Asset Services aka Digital Bank, « Who-touched-my-data » services, Personal Data Trading Platforms, Digital Asset Trading Platforms, Corporate and Bank Klout Services, Audit services, Tracking services, Big Data and Analytics services, EBAM, Corporate Actions, etc.
  • Also e-Wallets of all kinds. Not only « wallets » for money but wallets for all sorts of Digital Assets. An e-Wallet is nothing else than a browser on a personal money store. What if we start thinking a browser for a personal data (asset) store?
  • And I spoke recently to one of our managers in Securities Business : also there plenty of examples, even in looking at trading assets.

So far, the Digital Asset Grid was just the result of a research project at SWIFT. Today, I am very pleased to announce that the SWIFT Incubation Team just gave the green light to move this project in prototype stage.

It means that during Q1 2012, we’ll have a working prototype targeted at a specific use case, but we will expose the API’s of the infrastructure and give them in the hands of developers and challenge them to come up with some cools apps that can be built on top of this infrastructure.

A lot of the thinking in this blog is the condensation of a lot of teamwork of many many people who participated to this Digital Asset Grid project. With the risk of missing out somebody, I’d like to send out a digital invitation signal to those people for a thank-you dance in the SWIFT Dance Hall: Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin, Doc Searls, Drummond Reed, Craig Burton, Andreas Weigend, Gary Thompson, Tony Fish, and also lurking-in Don Thibeau, Scott David, and Peter Hinssen.

I would like to say Thank you! Maybe with David Bowie’s 1983 hit “Let’s Dance”? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4d7Wp9kKjA

Let’s dance put on your red shoes and dance the blues
Let’s dance to the song they’re playin’ on the radio

Let’s sway while colour lights up your face
Let’s sway sway through the crowd to an empty space

If you say run, I’ll run with you
If you say hide, we’ll hide
Because my love for you
Would break my heart in two
If you should fall
Into my arms
And tremble like a flower

Innotribe at Sibos 2011

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Innotribe is SWIFT’s initiative to foster collaborative innovation in financial services – through debating the options (at Innotribe events) and supporting the creation of innovative new solutions (through incubation).

Hugh MacLeod Innotribe Ignite Man

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Now in its third year, Innotribe at Sibos, Innotribe’s flagship event, runs throughout Sibos week and offers a comprehensive programme exploring a range of topics crucial to the financial industry. Innotribe at Sibos in Toronto will once again bring together a powerful combination of world experts to participate in an exciting mix of keynote sessions, case studies, and interactive discussions.

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Some aspects of Innotribe at Sibos in Toronto will be familiar to those who’ve attended before – for example, we are keeping the Innotribe Labs and the magic they create.

But we will also explore new formats and new topics. We will experiment with new facilitation techniques such as game-storming and open space discussions. We will build on our history of creating compelling line-ups of exciting speakers to bring together a set of our most exciting innovators yet to participate. We will close the event with the Innotribe Celebration – our most ambitious interactive experience yet.

Here are Mela and Kosta explaining the high level what and how: http://innotribe.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/innotribesibos-toronto-2011-the-what-and-the-how/

In many sessions we will engage with students from the Social Data Lab from Stanford University and with young entrepreneurs bringing to the table the energy of Silicon Valley. And Chris Skinner will have a very special role: besides blogging, interviewing and tweeting he will also be our professional challenger to keep you and our speakers sharp.

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This year’s Innotribe technology inspired topics are Social Data and Collaboration, Big Data, and Digital Identity. And for the first time, Innotribe will explore non-technology topics – corporate culture, new economies, and a Start-Up competition .

Two technology topics from previous Innotribe editions now move to the main conference: Cloud and Mobile. For the technology topics above, we have teamed up with our IT colleagues who are launching this year the “Technology Stream”, covering Cloud Computing, Time to Market, and Catastrophic Risk handling. And with our Banking Markets colleagues for the Mobile session on Thursday 22 Sep at 11am. Just another proof, that:

Innotribe at Sibos is the place

where new trends can be discovered

and explored,

before they hit mainstream

Who should attend?

Innotribe at Sibos is open to all who come to Toronto. It brings together strategists, business and technology leaders, trend-setters and trend-watchers, thinkers interested in shaping the future and doers looking to implement it – in short, anyone keen to find out how the world is changing and what that means to our industry.

Why attend?

Join us to discover new business and technology trends; share and discuss ground-breaking ideas for co-investment; and challenge each other to build theoretical concepts into tangible prototypes in professionally facilitated workshops.

Programme

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Innotribe opening: The Power of the Tribe
In 2010, this session was standing room only. 2011 will be no different. Through a couple of inspiring keynotes, spiced up with some novel interactive formats and techniques, we will introduce this year’s Innotribe topics. A session not to be missed!

Already confirmed:

  • Brett King, Author of Bank 2.0
  • Heather Vescent, Futurist
  • Dan Robles, CEO – Social Flights
  • James Gardner, MD International – Spigit

Discovering the new Physics of Big data
The quantity of data available to our businesses is sky-rocketing. Data volumes continue to explode, doubling every 14 months. So what tools are out there to enable us to use the patterns that can be identified in huge data sets such as Twitter, blogs, and other forms of social media to make correlations and even predict trends? Also get the lowdown on the SWIFT Index – a research project into how SWIFT traffic data can correlate with economic indicators such as GDP. And find out the latest on SWIFT’s Business Intelligence tools and how they can help you turn data into decisions.

Already confirmed:

  • Michael Chui, Senior Fellow – McKinsey&Company
  • Jeff Jonas, Chief Scientist IBM Analytics Group – IBM Research Labs, Los Angeles
  • Sean Park, Founder – Anthemis Group
  • Larry Ryan, Chief Technologist Financial Service Industry – HP
  • Amir Halfon, Senior Director of Technology – Oracle
  • David Campbell, Technical Fellow – Microsoft
  • Michael Ouliel, CEO – Ripple Homeland Security Group
  • Michael Driscoll, CTO – Metamarketsgroup
  • Francis Martin, SWIFT

Related topics:

  • SWIFT Index will be have it’s own deep dive session later that week in the SWIFT Auditorium
  • Other SWIFT colleagues focused on Business Intelligence will have 2 other related sessions in the SWIFT Auditorium:
    • Leveraging SWIFT’s Business Intelligence solutions – Monday 10AM
    • Define the future of your correspondent banking business with SWIFT Business Intelligence – Wednesday 10AM

Social data and Collaboration
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Chatter and many other social data and collaboration platforms make it possible for banks to bring customer engagement to new levels of excellence. So far so familiar: but what is the bigger impact of social media on the banking business? What opportunities does this phenomenon enable for reputation and influence, talent discovery and development? And what is the best way to balance the opportunities with managing the inevitable compliance and regulation issues that social media create in the financial world?

Already confirmed:

  • Dan Marovitz, MD – Deutsche Bank
  • Boxley LLewellyn, Director of Growth Initiatives Financial Services – IBM
  • Dion Hinchcliffe, Senior Vice President – Dachis Group
  • Tom Coombes, CEO – Cognito Media
  • Pol Navarro, Head of Direct Channels and Innovation – Banc Sabadell
  • Stanford Students
  • Sarah Carter, Vice-President Marketing, Actiance
  • Drummond Reed, CEO and Founder, Connect.me
  • Doc Searls, VRM initiative and Alumnus Fellow – Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
  • Azeem Azhar, CEO- Peer Index
  • Howard Lindzon, CEO -StockTweets
  • James Gardner, MD International – Spigit
  • Darius A. Miranda, VP Social Business Strategist – Wells Fargo
Digital identity

This interactive session will explore the edges of the digital identity eco-system, looking into personal data stores, trust frameworks, and multi-channel authentication techniques. We will also present the findings of the research phase of SWIFT’s Digital Identity Incubation project.

Already confirmed:

  • Tony Fish, AMF Ventures, Author of “My Digital Footprint”
  • Drummond Reed, Connect.me
  • Doc Searls, VRM initiative and Alumnus Fellow – Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
  • Azeem Azhar, CEO – Peerindex
  • Gary Thompson, Co-Founder and CEO – CLOUD.Inc
  • Michael Ouliel, CEO – Ripple Homeland Security Group
  • Mary Hodder, Chair – Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium
  • Craig Burton, Founder of Novell, and Founder of The Burton Group
  • Kevin Sharp, SVP Sales EMEA – DAON Identity X
  • Scott David, Partner – K&L Gates LLP law firm

Corporate culture
We will explore how we can create true company culture change beyond powerpoint and processes. How do we allow for the human in our organisations, and show respect for the passion and vulnerability of the individual? How can you turn your company in to a talent factory? How can we create a community of change agents?

Already confirmed:

  • Mark Dowds, CEO Brainspark
  • Harold Jarche, Principal Life in Perpetual Beta
  • Stowe Boyd, Web Anthropologist and Edgling
  • Tom LaForge, Global Director of Human & Cultural Insights, The Coca-Cola Company
  • Sean Park, Founder Anthemis
  • TA Mitchell, Partner – Co Company

New economies
Is money the only form of transaction value and wealth? What about social currencies? We will expose you to new thinking on new economies such as the trust economy, the intention economy, the relationship economy, the social economy and the ethical economy.

Already confirmed:

  • Jerry Michalski, Founder – The REXpedition
  • Art Brock, Co-Founder – Metacurrency Project
  • Dan Robles, Founder – Director – The Ingenesist Project
  • Umair Haque, Director Havas Media Lab and Author New Capitalist Manifesto > Via Skype
  • Gregory J. Rader, Blogger – InTheSpiral
  • Doc Searls, VRM initiative and Alumnus Fellow – Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
  • Craig Burton, Founder of Novell, and Founder of The Burton Group

Future of Money: is there still a role for banks ?

New payment schemes are trying to enable peer-to-peer money transfers, dis-intermediating the banks. Money is no longer seen as the sole representation of value. New alternative currencies are being created. Facebook credits are now used by more than 250 million people. New payments schemes are being proposed at the infrastructure level of the internet. Currency is open-sourced. How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer-to-peer exchange? How do we (re)define the role of banks in this fast moving eco-system of new value providers?

Already confirmed:

  • Udayan Goyal, Founder – Anthemis Group
  • Venessa Miemis, Social Technologies Researcher – Future of Facebook
  • Antonio F. Benjamin, Global Chief Technology Officer – Citi
  • Darrell MacMullin, Managing Director – Paypal Canada
  • Heather Vescent, Futurist
  • Donald Norman, Co-Founder and CEO – Bitcoin Consultancy
  • Shamir Karkal, CFO Banksimple
  • Stan Stalnaker, President and Creative Director – Hub Culture

Banks for a better world

This session will explore how Banks and Financial institutions can create a fund and a framework for supporting sustainable and responsible businesses. Together with several inspiring speakers we would like to engage you, the audience to create a vision of what Banks for a Better World may mean. We would like to engage in a conversation around the following topics: How can we create a new generation of wealth and value platforms and services to support sustainable and responsible business? Could we create a fund to invest in developing and supporting new organisations and business models that focus on delivering different value to society, such as “better banks”, ethical businesses, etc? Could today’s financial institutions play an active role in enabling new value transactions – exchanging social reputation for cash, money for social currency?

Already confirmed:

  • Alain Dresse, CEO – Bamboost.org
  • Stowe Boyd, Web Anthropologist and Edgling
  • Stan Stalnaker, President and Creative Director – Hub Culture
  • Bruce Cahan, Found and CEO – Good Bank

Start Me Up: Innotribe start-up competition
The first round of the ‘Start Me Up’ Start-Up Competition! An invitation-only pre-selection session for start-ups, to elect the best top two of which will receive the Innotribe Award later in the week during the Innotribe Celebration…

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The 2011 Innotribe $100K Start-up Challenge will introduce the most promising FinTech and Financial Services start-ups to SWIFT’s community of more than 9,700 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 209 countries.

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On September 21, 2011 at Sibos in Toronto, 10 finalists, selected by their peers and expert judges, will present to an invitation-only audience of dozens of decision makers from the world’s largest financial institutions, serial entrepreneurs, investors and media. And on September 22nd, two of those companies will each be presented with a check for $50,000 in front Sibos’ audience of 8000 financial industry. Learn more.

If your start-up is ready for the recognition and rewards it deserves from the global financial services industry, register and apply to the 2011 Innotribe $100K Start-up Challenge today!

Watch Matteo’s intro video here: http://innotribe.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/innotribe-startup-competition-at-sibos-curious/

The Innotribe Celebration
All the 2011 Innotribe themes will come together on the fourth day of the conference in an exciting non-stop “celebration” from 11am till 15:30pm – featuring open-space sessions, prototype and incubation booths, chatrooms, music, video and other animation, and of course the Award winners of our Start-Up Competition. The celebration will explore “the future of everything”. The buzz and excitement of this day at Sibos will set a new standard for interactivity in the conference space.

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Informilo Media Partner for Innotribe

Informilo is the official media partner of Innotribe, is publishing an independent 16 to 20 page print report at Sibos entitled:

“The Networked Economy:

How Technology

Will Radically Transform Banks

and the Future of Money”

The glossy print publication is being overseen by Jennifer L. Schenker, a journalist with 30 years experience who has worked full-time, at various points in her career, for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek.

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The magazine will use first-rate independent journalists who have worked at some of the world’s most prominent newspapers and magazines.  The publication will put business and technological developments in context, explaining how everything from mobile money to cloud computing will forever
change the world of banking.

The outline of the publication is as follows:

  • The future is here: are banks ready for it?
  • Getting the most from Big Data
  • Digital Identity
  • Mobile Money: monetizing a widening digital slipstream
  • Beyond Kenya: mobile money in the developing world
  • The future of money: is there still a future for banks?
  • Top-25: the hottest start-ups in the financial space
  • Re-inventing management in the digital age
  • Banks for a better world?

A range of opportunities are available for sponsors wishing to effectively reach and influence potential clients in this targeted publication.

Conclusion

Innotribe at Sibos 2011 will rock! Make sure to bring your energy pills!

Innotribe is about being infected

by irresistible contagious enthusiasm

of open-minded, curious

and passionate people

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You can follow the progress of our program as speaker announcements continue between now and September on the Sibos website. Many more speakers and inspirational thought leaders will get confirmed in the coming weeks. Follow our daily tweets at http://twitter.com/innotribe or regularly check-out the Sibos website where we have grouped all sessions that are related to Innotribe at Sibos:

http://www.sibos.com/conferencedata/pages/stream_innovation.page?

We look forward

to seeing you in Toronto!

Download and check-out our latest PDF flyer here:

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The Innotribe team

www.sibos.com

www.innotribe.com

www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe

innotribe@swift.com