Innotribe at Sibos Osaka – Future of Big and Small Data

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This blog post shares some more details about the Future of Big and Small Data session. This session will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 15:30 in the Innotribe Space. This Future of Data session is leading into the next session on Digital Asset Grid. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

Picking up where we left off last year with Big Data, this session will de-mystify what we think we know about data. We will hear opinions of different experts and judge together what are the hard facts, half-truths and complete unknowns about data today: big, small, broad, real time. We will dive into artificial intelligence, augmented reality and algorithms and how they impact our analysis and use of data.

This will be one of those Innotribe sessions, where we go “all the way” with super igniters (that’s how we call our speakers) and the amazing group techniques from Innotribster Mariella Atanassova and her team of designers and facilitators.

We will indeed design this session

as architects of serendipity,

creating collisions of ideas,

leading into

immersive learning experiences

The high-level design of the session is organized around debunking the myths that exist about data. We will look at this from different angles:

  • Who is consuming the data: people, business, devices, applications, API’s (Application Program Interfaces)
  • Technical and human aspects of data creation, data usage and data management
  • The different lenses offered by our igniters

I would like to share a bit more about our igniters for this session and why we have invited them:

For the more “technical” angle on the subject:

Sean Gourley, CTO, from Quid.

Sean Gourley is originally from New Zealand and now based in San Francisco where he splits his time between Mathematical research and his venture backed startup Quid.

He has a PhD in physics from Oxford, and his academic research has taken him from Nanotechnology to Complex Systems and the Mathematics of War. Prior to Quid he worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, Exclusive Analysis in London, and a (very) brief stint as a consultant at BCG in Chicago.

Sean started Quid back in Dec 2009, and they are doing some pretty amazing things with data, mathematics and visualization. They are building a global intelligence platform, a place where open source intelligence is collected, structured and visualized to help people understand and make better decisions about the complex world we live in.

Sean is currently CTO of Quid. Their corporate slogan of Quid is “Augmenting Our Ability to Perceive this Complex World™ ”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V43a-KxLFcg&feature=youtu.be

Sean will talk about the war of algorithms, a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm. I have already mentioned this fantastic talk in my blog post about “The Cambrian Explosion of Everything”

Amir Halfon, CTO for Financial Services , MarkLogic

It is Amir’s fourth Innotribe at Sibos.

Before Amir recently joined MarkLogic, he was with Sun/Oracle for more than 12 years, where his last position was Chief Technologist specialized in Financial Services. MarkLogic offers next-generation database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure. So, Amir brings the enterprise perspective.

This will not be a product pitch. We specifically invited Amir for his rich background in financial services and his familiarity with the Innotribe-way of doing things, so we can tap into his broad experience to map the generic big data concepts to our specific market.

Anant Jhingran, VP, Data, Apigee

I met Anant for the first time last year during Defrag 2011, where we had breakfast with Sam Ramji, Head of Strategy at Apigee.

Anant is VP of Data at Apigee. Before he 21 years with IBM where he was VP and CTO for IBM’s Information Management Division, Co-Chair of IBM wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board and one of the “IBM Fellows”.

He is our ideal igniter to talk about data as seen by API’s. However, in the session preparation talk I had with Anant, he already highlighted that discussions about APIs are very people centric in the enterprise:

“What is the governance for publishing the APIs? Some enterprises insist on a central gatekeeper for APIs, others believe in a decentralised Darwinian model.”

Anant blogs regularly. Check-out here how his new start-up life changed his thinking. I love his quote:

“Coding is liberating”

Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, Institute Fellow, Harvard University Institute

Alex is an award-winning scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He serves as an Institute Fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science and as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory.

He has received 107 major distinctions, authored 13 publications, been granted 16 issued, pending, and provisional patents, and founded, managed, and advised 4 technology companies, 1 of which has been acquired. In 1998 and 1999, respectively, he won the U.S.A. Computer Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search.

In 2003, he became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. In 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, where his research on smart matter, pervasive computing, and machine learning was awarded the Hertz Doctoral Thesis Prize.

His work has been featured in over 100 news outlets worldwide including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

Alex will share how HFT is driving a latency arms race. He has a fascinating story about “Sea-Steading”, where financial institutions start building operating centers in the middle of the ocean, just to win a couple of mille-seconds in latency.

He has developed an algorithm that calculates the best geographical spot for an operating center, based on a number of criteria given by the customer.

For the more “human” angle on the subject:

Andrew Keen, Author, Andrew Keen Productions, Author Digital Vertigo

I am very proud to have Andrew Keen on board. Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet culture and the trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier and Nicholas G. Carr among others.

Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.

He is sometimes called “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.

Andrew just published his new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo” (Amazon Affiliates Link), a book I highly recommend, and the thinking developed in this book is the main reason why I invited Andrew to Innotribe at Sibos.

Following extract is typical Keen-speak:

“I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: This idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed.”

He is a real “contrarian” and therefore our ideal igniter to challenge all your assumptions on data and social media. The myth he would like to challenge is:

“the myth that social media

brings us closer together

and unites the human race”

Daniel Erasmus, Owner, The Digital Thinking Network

I was introduced to Daniel Erasmus by Brewster Kahle (who was critical for the Google’s book digitization) during Jerry Michalski’s retreat when he heard about the Digital Asset Grid. Because Daniel was doing some really advance scenario thinking for some clients in the financial industry, Brewster thought i should meet him.

Since then, I enjoyed numerous calls with Daniel on the importance of scenario thinking, and it was almost by accident we stumbled upon his start-up NewsConsole™, which is all about big data and the co-existence of man and machine and the world of augmented reality, in the sense of augmented information reality.

“Every day, an exabyte of information is created – an amount equivalent to half of all information created up to 2001. You will not read it, nor will any other individual, but some of it will be critical to your business.”

NewsConsole™ reads more than a million news articles per day to give its clients strategic overview of today and tomorrow’s news.  The Console is in use in the Financial Services, Governmental, the Energy and other sectors.

I love the way he talks about big data:

“Big data sells the story of “the eyes of god”: sometimes it is there, sometimes is  not. It’s about sort of half-truths, I would call them contingent-truths, as half-truths” has something negative”

and

“We see a computation a-symmetry. Google (for example) can do calculations on my data, but I cannot. This a-symmetry will have stunning implications on the power balances in the world. 20th century is all about “mass”. The 21st century is about the interface of one”

Daniel is a very erudite and versatile international businessman. In his scenario thinking work, he uses similar facilitation techniques as the Innotribe team, so Daniel will move between the spaces of advocacy and facilitation.

As for the other Innotribe session, you see that we put quite some effort in architecting, content curating, designing and facilitating our sessions.

We want to do more than just “events”

and listing some speakers.

We’d like to offer you

a memorable experience

In summary, this session is about debunking myths about data. What is the myth YOU would like to debunk? Let me know via the comments option of this blog post.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 12:30 in the Innotribe Space.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Digital Asset Grid

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This blog post shares some more details about the Digital Asset Grid session. The session Digital Asset Grid will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 16:00 till 17:30 in the Conference Room-3. It is part of the Main Conference sessions of Sibos. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.

I have written extensively about the Digital Asset Grid in previous blog posts. Most recently in Banks-as-a-Platform and the Cambrian Explosion of Everything, all reflections on what it means to live in a hyper-connected world, to be immersed in the digital age.

We swim in a sea of data and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. A new environment requiring a lot of adaptability. We are species from the land that have to learn to live in the ocean. Like camels that used to live in the desert, that now have to survive in the ocean.

A new environment requires a new design.

The digital age and making the new design presents both threats and opportunities for Banks:

  • Dis-intermediation and erosion of market share by new entrants, telco’s and dominant technology companies threaten the position of Banks – and are increasing in velocity – reducing margins and profitability.
  • But there are also opportunities: new sources of rich information are multiplying, and the information that is available is being digitised.

Every business is becoming a digital business,

also banks and financial institutions

However, the potential benefits of the explosion in number of nodes and the data volume explosion are being squandered due to low levels of trust, concerns about security, and barriers to monetisation. The Digital Asset Grid has the ambition to tackle these challenges.

The Digital Asset Grid is a research project by Innotribe, SWIFT’s Innovation initiative for enabling collaborative innovation.

The Digital Asset Grid is probably one of the most forward-looking incubation projects of Innotribe.

The project proposes a new infrastructure

for banks to provide a platform

for secure peer-to-peer data sharing

between trusted people, businesses, and devices

The Digital Asset Grid does for data what SWIFT has already done for payments: providing a new scalable global network that supports “digital data banking”, a trusted peer to peer sharing of any digital asset between two or more nodes on the network. Banks existing qualities in management of de-materialized assets (today this is money but tomorrow this will be data), trust, regulatory compliance, market coverage and risk management puts them in a unique position to assume this role.

Indeed, with the Digital Asset Grid, we believe we are setting the direction for creating an internet-scale digital platform for information logistics.

The Digital Asset Grid acts as a digital map which describes:

  • The location of the data,
  • The trust framework governing access,
  • The digital identities who have access to that data, and
  • The usage rights these identities have under trust frameworks.

It overcomes the “data frictions” such as lack of security and trust and enables data to flow, leading to the creation of a low cost eco-system of revenue generating apps & services.

In addition, the Digital Asset Grid leverages SWIFT’s core skills and competences regarding governance, identity, security and operational excellence, establishing thus a global data-sharing platform as ubiquitous and reliable as today’s global banking network.

As part of the research, we wanted to go beyond mere PowerPoint presentation of a concept. What we have done is building an end-to-end prototype, with working applications and a working back-end infrastructure, together with a solid business story that is the result of a consultation with several banks of our community. In addition we produced a “foresight”-video of possible use cases.

Innotribe and its collaboration partners will present this prototype at Sibos on Wednesday 31 October 2012 from 4pm – 5:30pm in Conference Room 3. The session is part of the Main Conference Sessions of Sibos.

What we will show-case is:

  • A very strong opening with a strategy story by Antonio Benjamin – Global Chief Technology Officer & MD Citi GTS/ICG
  • A exciting intro into the changes in the digital data landscape
  • A brand new HD video – in the style of “Flowers for Grandma” and “Fly me to the Moon”, taking you into a not so far future 2013-2014, and showing in life environment of what is possible with current technology and the apps that we have built as part of the prototype.
  • A working prototype of the Digital Asset Grid server, server code and APIs
  • 4 applications illustrating the power of the Digital Asset Grid; some apps are relevant for the retail space, others are more relevant in a B2B context.
  • A compelling Business Story, where the opportunities are categories in three groups:
    • Creating new revenue streams through monetization of existing and new data assets
    • Doing the same better
    • Delivering New Services

But it would not be Innotribe if we added some elements of performance and interactivity. I can’t reveal everything in this blog post, but the staging of this session will include a motorcycle and smoking server.

Also, we will have facilitated breakout sessions to create an immersive learning experience for the audience. In these breakouts you will have the opportunity to get into person-to-person conversation with the developers of the applications and the back-end infrastructure, and the partners who have built the Business Story.

And at the end, Yobie and senior representatives from two other major banks will wrap-up the sessions with some suggestions on the way forward. And we’ll have some other surprises and some very cool announcements, which of course I cannot share now, if not you would not come to the session 😉

The Digital Asset Grid offers Banks the opportunity to transform their industry, making them and their customers more efficient, generating new value and enabling Banks to launch a range of new services – it is a game changer.

The financial industry has a unique chance to seize this opportunity and position themselves in a very compelling competitive position in a future of real-time information logistics.

I cannot enough emphasise the importance of the Banks-as-a-Platform meme: it means that the value creation moves from the centre to the nodes. The market used to think in monopolistic, silo-ed service providers, that put themselves in the middle of the nodes-universe, leading to non-interoperable silos of data and value creation. By moving from a central to distributed architecture at internet-scale, banks suddenly have the opportunity to be themselves the platform, with SWIFT as a shared beacon of governance and trust.

I believe this is a “good” project. Good for our industry. It comes at the right time and at a tipping point where we see an evolution towards a peer-to-peer economy between trusted nodes in the grid.

It is fantastic that SWIFT – through the Innotribe Incubation Fund – makes this sort of research and experimentation projects possible.

Incubation is in my opinion indeed about “catalysing ideas”: it is about setting waves of thinking into motion, planting seeds in the brain, and getting the chance to develop those ideas in full so that they become foresight scenarios that become in their turn reference points for decision making.

Only when you have some strong foresight scenario/reference in your brain, you can spot and recognise the disruptive change signals from the market and make relevant and inspired decisions on “what would I do if this scenario happens?”

The Digital Asset Grid is one of those foresight scenarios of a catalysed idea, a strong testimony that innovation beyond adjacencies can happen in more traditional environments.

The team has done a great job in depicting the “foresight reference model” of a not-so-far-out possible future. The test for our community will be to validate whether we can rally ourselves to take the foresight model out of its incubation sandbox and move it to the next phase of acceleration and do it for real.

I am very excited to be able to share soon with a wider audience the results of the last couple of months of hard work, and I am very curious to see how and when our industry will seize this opportunity. I feel privileged to witness this turning point, and I am deeply grateful to the team, the customers, and SWIFT who made all this happen.

See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 16:00 in Conference Room-3.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Companies are Movements for Greatness

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A couple of weeks ago, I was attending #BIF8 conference, organized by Saul Kaplan and his team. I was there 2 years ago, when Keith Yamashita from SY Partners did his fabulous talk on “Should I Dare to be Great?”

With hindsight, I found that that 2010 edition of BIF was better curated and had a more consistent level of high quality of speakers or “story tellers” as they are called at BIF.

Whereas 2010 was great, 2012 was good. This year, I was missing that consistency in quality. But there was clearly a theme emerging from the different talks. Initially it was a bit blurry for me what the theme was: companies are communities, creators of serendipity, human community movements, platforms for movements,… ?

In any case, it was clear that something deep is changing about what a company is all about. It made me think about the 1997 (yes, 1997!) book “The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business” by Arie De Geus (Amazon Affiliate Link).

The foreword by Peter Senge highlighted the big shift that is described in this wonderful book:

“The contrast between these two views – thinking about a company as a machine for making money versus a living being – illuminates a host of core assumptions about management and our organizations”

and

“Seeing a company as a living being leads to seeing its members as human work communities”

Most decision makers in our organizations have and still are trained in the model of the organization as a money making machine. Because this model almost completely ignores the fact that organizations are made out of people, human beings of flesh and blood and emotions and not “human resources” that you can just move around on the check board like physical resources, this has created in many companies an almost toxic environment with little room for happiness.

“Corporate health is experienced as work stress, endless struggles for power and control, and the cynicism and resignation that results from a work environment that stifles rather than releases human imagination, energy and commitment. The day-to-day climate of most organizations is probably more toxic than we care to admit, whether or not these companies are in the midst of obvious decline”

In addition, most of our marketing and strategy managers have been trained in fundamentals like the 4 P’s, the 5 C’s, etc by management gurus like Drucker and Kottler.

Andrew Stein recently posted a blog in defense of Kottler and Drucker, in essence claiming that the marketing fundamentals have not changed.

I tend to disagree, and here is why.

An important piece of the why argumentation came my way during the #BIF8 conference, by two storytellers:

  • The first was Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, the shoe company acquired my Amazon last year (one of my other heroes companies)
  • The second was Susan Shuman, CEO of SY Partners, yes the same company that Keith Yamashita from “should I dare to be great?” is working for

I was really blown away by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (Shoes) acquired last year by Amazon.

Tony was talking about Zappos’ Downtownproject and the slide deck he used was more or less the same as what is on the slideshare here

The story kicks off when Zappos was considering building a new HQ Campus like Google, Apple, Nike, Microsoft etc,

Instead of venturing in yet another megalomaniac luxury campus with everything on-site from shops, restaurants, doctors, and central central incubator garages, he decided to become deep integral part of the city fabric and to create collisions and serendipities. He is investing about 350 million USD in local start-ups, local small businesses,  education, arts, culture, and residential & real estate.

It is an amazing story circling and hovering over what are probably the five or ten or whatever number of C’s of the hyper-connected and learning organizations of this new era:

  • Curated content
  • Community (Culture of openness, Collaboration, Creativity, and optimism)
  • Co-Learning, Co-Working, Co-Creation
  • Collisions (Colliding communities, serendipity, etc)
  • Connections

As in a real roller-coaster, Tony Hsieh took us from one sensation to another:

  • “We are creating a space where innovators, dreamers, doers, and though leaders from around the world can come to share ideas to enrich the community, to inspire us all. Call it a residency program”
  • “We want to make you/us smarter”
  • “Culture is to a company what Community is to a City See”
  • “Vibrant, interesting and community focused”
  • “Short term ROI vs long term ROC Return on Community”
  • “A learning community” aka “A learning organization” aka “An agile community”

And then it suddenly crystalized for me:

“Companies are Movements”

The sort of movements to change the world.

I reached out to one of the books in my library; very recent one about change management.

Or should I say transformation management?

The book is by Jurgen Appelo and is titled How to Change the World: Change Management 3.0 where he proposed four dimensions for change:

  • Dance with the system: Plan, do, check, act
  • Mind the people: Ability, Knowledge, Desire, Awareness, Reinforcement
  • Stimulate the network (instigators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards)
  • Change/Transform the environment: Information, Identity, incentives, infrastructure, institutions

It’s all about being part of the system you are trying to change. But change or incremental innovation is not good enough anymore in this fast moving world. The keyword is “transformation”: bringing into a new state where there is no option back, a risk to fall back into the old toxic habits. It is about a humanization of our organizations; a transformation at deep people level.

This is where my other #BIF8 hero comes in: Susan Shuman @susansyp, CEO of SY Partners.

She did not talk about the executives and the middle managers.

She talked about

“the forgotten middle”

the people who actually do the work in companies.

Some participants to the conference found she was too much in pitching mode, pitching her company. That may be true, but the story of what her company does is a very strong one.

I love the tagline “we help companies design their future”. This is a transformation story of Seeing, Believing, Thinking and Acting in meaningful and impactful new ways:

  • See = Fore-sighting, seeing the options vs constraining the options
  • Believe = deep sense of what is possible
  • Think = new solutions, prototyping, fail fast and wisely
  • Act = liberated in pursuing value driven opportunities

It’s about transformation management (not “change” management). It’s about a new way for creating strategy, grounded in complexity thinking and opening the options versus closing them, seeing through the lens of possibility not the lens of constraints, making visible and enabling options for collaboration.

The sort of collaboration and learning experiences that enable greatness, viral change from the top and from deep in the company fabric. It enables a modern way to look at strategy, an emergent strategy, where we not only look at short term revenue streams, but also for new capabilities and strengths. A different way of content curation, facilitation and design, leading to new collisions of expertise, and long lasting transformations.

The sort of collaboration that exists in great team where “duo’s” or “triads” of highly complementary people create greatness. Teams don’t just happen.

Teams are designed

You have to design for team magic

That’s also why moving around “human resources” from one team to another does not move around the greatness with it.

It’s about a new set of tools to let teams perform at their very best, a network of individuals dedicated to each other’s success, a tribe of humans that envision, believe in, and fight for greatness. It’s about a new practice for value creation.

It is not a coincidence that Innotribe’s updated mission statement includes a couple of these key components for the modern organization: “To enable collaborative innovation for the financial industry and create new value for the people it serves”

Companies are movements

Movements for greatness

Innotribe enables those movements and transformations.

Innotribe at Sibos Osaka: Hyper-Economies

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I blogged about the overall Innotribe Program at Sibos here. That post is kept up-to-date with the latest announcements and program changes. The Innotribe program is also available here on the Sibos website.

This blog post shares some more details about the Hyper-Economies session. The session Hyper-Economies will take place on Tuesday 30 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 14:30 in the Innotribe Space (the special tent in the middle of the conference centre).

We live in a hyper-connected world. The speed of change is increasing exponentially. Information has become abundant, versus scarce in the past, and change is happening in real-time.

This session will focus on the major cultural tectonic shifts that are underpinning and driving the hyper-connected economy and are the under-stream of deep organizational changes. We are witnessing the birth of
new economies based on hyper-connected organizations, exposure of core competence through APIs, horizontal sourcing versus vertical integration, Peer-To-Peer (P2P) sharing of data and Open Source developments, that lead to a new practice for value creation.

We have brought together an eclectic set of igniters (our name for “speakers”) to have a healthy interactive debate on the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for our financial industry.

Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce is Founder of Future Street Consulting, based in Sydney. He is currently publishing a book on the topic, titled “The Next Billion Seconds”. Mark was already with during the Innotribe Bangkok event in April of this year.

Every company should assess whether it is reducing frictions, or whether it is introducing frictions. This friction (less)-rule not only applies to organizations and functions but also to people and events.

But be aware, there are some “irreducible” frictions. Mark Pesce identifies 6 of them, all starting with a “T”. Here is how Mark Pesce describes the 6 “Ts”:

No matter how ‘smooth’ and frictionless hyper-connected commerce becomes, certain frictions in the business world will persist.  These represent both speed humps and opportunities.  The businesses of the 21st century will find leverage and differentiation by identifying and exploiting them.

 

  1. Time – If it were done when it were done, they’re well done quickly;
  2. Territory – you can’t be everywhere at once;
  3. Talent – some people are naturally better at it than others;
  4. Trust – is rarely immediately conferred, instead growing from a continuing relationship, and must exist for commerce to succeed;
  5. Tongue – language barriers persist until we all speak Globish.
  6. Tension – frictions in teams between humans

The topics that Mark addresses are very relevant to the evolution towards Banks-as-a-Platform and the Cambrian Explosion of Everything.

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is in my opinion the absolute “guru” for the P2P Economy, the thinking behind the Commons and the role of Open Source in software and other collaborative approaches.

He is the founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Michel currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, has taught at Payap University and Dhurakij Pandit University’s International College. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group.

The Hyper-Connected economy leads to new models of co-operation, and value production in highly connected P2P networks. Michel describes this as “Commons-Oriented Peer Production”

To get a deeper understanding of Michel’s work, check-out this fantastic report “The Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy” (link to PDF file)

Allevo

Allevo’s presence at Sibos will be under the signs of Innovation and Open Source.

Their project FinTP gravitates around the bold idea of developing an open source application for financial transactions processing and a creative community around it.

FinTP is an open distributed application for processing financial transactions and it is based on the 7 years practice proven solution Allevo has successfully deployed at its customers.

Covering the entire life cycle of financial transactions, FinTP intends to create a widespread financial transactions processing platform, an alternative for an industry common solution. The hope is this will evolve into a new standardization layer – a single financial dialect comprehensible for any party involved from individuals, SMSs, to corporates and financial institutions.

We believe this represents in fact the acceptance of the commoditization of the payments processing arena.

The format from this session will be a facilitated conversation. Like in Bangkok, we will help the audience identifying friction points in their value chains, and assess how the concepts of the Hyper-Economies, P2P and Collaborative Economy, and Open Source can give rise to a rich eco-system of parties building added value on top of Open Source platforms in financial services.

The session Hyper-Economies will take place on Tuesday 30 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 14:30 in the Innotribe Space (the special tent in the middle of the conference centre)

This session is a meta-story for the session “Future of Organizations”, that follows right after this Hyper-Economies session.

By @petervan of the Innotribe Team.

Bank(s) As A Platform

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I am just coming out of 3 fantastic and super-intense days with the team that is working on the prototype for the Digital Asset Grid (DAG). The DAG is a SWIFT Innotribe’s incubation project; we are really in research mode. Acting as a catalyzer, putting a big bold vision on the radar-screen of our community. Our plan is to show the results of our work during the upcoming Sibos in Osaka. Our session is planned on 31 October 2012 at 4pm in Conference Room 3.

Just last week, there were a couple of really interesting articles in press about the Digital Asset Grid project:

Click on image to launch video

At the end of the video, Marc says:

“If you can give the consumer more control over day-to-day commerce and greater privacy, that would be a reason to actually like your bank, rather than being resigned to deal with your bank”

So it looks like the huge opportunity is in the apps. True, but there is more.

And that only became apparent last week when we were together with the FULL team:

  • We took stock of the draft presentations, demo-scripts and video material that we will be showcasing in Osaka
  • We had some great and very intense interactions with customers, management and staff
  • We completed the last bits of the video, and we taped the last video interviews that will lead to a mini documentary on the topic
  • We articulated the key messages to be used on our communications plan leading up to Sibos

But last but not least, we created a platform of intensity where ideas could flow freely, leading to the most formidable insights.

One of those insights came during the playful key-messages-exercise, where we nailed down our key concepts by imagining what would be printed on the imaginary “product box” of the Digital Asset Grid (thanks to Martine Deweirdt of the Innotribe team to facilitate this exercise).

It was the moment where the word “platform” was deeply debated.

Is “platform” like Windows (or for the sake of the argument any PC-era operating system), or did we mean something else?

The owner of the platform really owns 90% of the market. Not only the OS market but also the ecosystem of applications and application developers that create a business on top of the platform.

The platform that is most loved by developers and that gives most value for the business decision makers/owners of the application companies ultimately wins. But we have evolved quite a bit since the early PC days.

  • In the PC-era, we had really one dominant Operating System. But it was a siloed OS.
  • In the SmartPhone Era, Steve Jobs and Apple reinvented the space and created the Application Store, a disruptive channel for apps. But still built on top of a highly closed and proprietary OS and ecosystem
  • More or less same happens with clouds. They become more and more proprietary. iCloud, DropBox, G-Drive, Skydrive, etc All living in their own silo. All these examples are very consumer oriented, but usually B2B follows the slipstream of retail customer, and it can be expected the same happens with B2B cloud offerings.
  • Add to this mess the blurring lines and confusions between all sorts of clouds: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, community clouds, personal clouds, device clouds, etc, etc

In the end, every entity (people, business, device, program, etc) will have its own cloud and its own APIs

  • What has to come next in this evolution is an interoperability of clouds, a layer of almost Kernel level services, protocols and standards that let the Cambrian Explosion of Everything share data in real time, securely and with the appropriate governance and trust per interest-domain.
  • This is the bottom-layer in the diagram above
  • This is what the infrastructure-layer of the DAG is trying to address. We base ourselves on open standards XDI/XRI which are going through their approval process at OASIS.

Phil Windley described the vision of the Personal Cloud Operating system in his blog “The Layers and Components in a Cloud OS”

Image courtesy Phil Windley

So far, we are thinking about companies (banks) hosting apps that run on top of this Customer Cloud Operating System. I use the more generic term “customer” in stead of “personal” Cloud Operation System, as the “customer” can be both the person, a corporate, or even a device or program.

In all our discussions, we have been so tempted to say that the value is in the apps (upper layer of this diagram). Whether that is in providing those apps as service providers (the bank as a data service provider), or as a consumer of data-services (in that case the bank acts as a “vendor” of financial services, trying to leverage the information from the direct channel with the customer (whether that customer is a retail or wholesale customer)

But that’s “only” the temptation.

The Holy Grail

is to be able to position your company

as the “platform”

on which others can build apps and create value.

Like Amazon (not the bookshop but Amazon Web Services). To make yourself so indispensable as a platform, that even your competitors start building on top of your company platform.

And suddenly the “gem” was there:

Bank(s)-as-a-platform

It is apparently a new meme (I Googled it, and did not get any hits ;-), and so I trademarked it 😉

Update: the meme “Bank as a Platform” is not new. Nicolas Debock (@ndebock) kindly pointed out to me that:

Anyway, “Bank(s) as a Platform” is what the DAG really enables. A new interoperability layer for people-, business- and device-clouds, creating a value and reputation system leveraging the existing KYC and digital slipstream information of customers with full respect of privacy and empowerment.

The real question is whether banks will see and grab this enormous opportunity, or whether they will satisfy themselves with copycats of outworn 20th century business models, and narrow down a great vision into adjacent banality.

Maybe we all can get inspired by two of my heroes:

Jeff Bezos (Founder and CEO of Amazon) said last week in an interview with @triciad in All Things Digital

“we don’t ask why do this, we ask why NOT do this?”

Click on image to launch video

And Buckminster Fuller said:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

and

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you its going to be a butterfly”.

The opportunity for banks is indeed to position themselves as data-platforms for value creation by a formidable ecosystem of third parties, so that every customer – from the Bottom of the Pyramid to the Top of the Pyramid and every customer in between – appreciates their bank as their own private wealth manager.

“Wealth” not necessarily exclusively expressed as “Money”, but as a richer an broader concept including social data capital for financial inclusion, reputation, trust, ethics, and integrity. Roger Hamilton nailed it when he said “Wealth is what you have left when you have lost all your money” 

This sort of wealth is enabling empowered customers with agency. The origin of the word “bank” was “bench”, a place where two people meet and create a relationship.

The deep meaning behind the DAG beyond its technical innovation is that it creates Relationship-as-a-Service (a term coined and trademarked by Respect Network). The realisation of this Relationship Economy will change the love/hate relationship with banks:  instead of being criticised for their past behavior, they can be loved like the Googles, Amazons, and other great platform companies of this era.

Corporate Rebels Manifesto

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Since my initial post “Corporate Rebels United – the start of a corporate spring?” of 17 March 2012, and the subsequent “A New Global Practice for Value Creation”, the core team has been working on fine-tuning  our mission.

UPDATE: we are now also present on other social media channels:

I am very grateful to the whole team for getting us where we are today, and especially for initial instigators Laura Merling and Mike Maney, and our advisors/mentors Nilofer Merchant, John Hagel, Mark Bonchek, and Dave Gray.

A special word of thanks to Dave Gray (author of the just released “The Connected Company”), who inspired us with his concept of “Pods”:  independent self-organizing cells who act autonomously but in context of shared platform of common, core, connected principles. Dave was also the person who landed the first version of this manifesto, based on previous culture-hacking work by the core group.

Mathias Vestergaard is the first Corporate Rebel from the core group starting the a Corporate Rebels Pod in New-York City. Who’s next?

Some of us will be present at the CultureCon2012 (co-organized by fellow rebel Dan Mezick and author of “The Culture Game”) and at BIF-8, the fantastic story tellers event by Saul Kaplan and team. Let’s continue the conversation there or online.

The release of this Corporate Rebels Manifesto coincides magically by the release of “The Labor Day Manifesto Of the Passionate Creative Worker” by John Hagel, mentor and my source of inspiration for many years, who writes:

We celebrate the passionate and dedicated individuals in all fields who have both led us to where we are now, and are creating and shaping the future. They are explorers, pushing back the limits of our current understanding. They pioneer new ideas, discover new truths, and tirelessly innovate. They actively seek out new challenges and connect broadly with others to solve them. Though they come from every occupation and background, they are unified by the sincere belief that they can leave the world a better place than they found it

So, without further due, here is our/your Corporate Rebels Manifesto:

+++ start manifesto

What is the problem?

Our companies no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with a high-velocity, hyper-connected world. They no longer can do what we need them to do. Change is required.

What is the vision?

We love our companies and want them to succeed. We want to reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version, to accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations, and to reclaim our passion for work.

What is Corporate Rebels United?

We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm. Our actions will lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity. We are architects and scouts into the future, and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then.

Relentlessly

Challenging the status quo

Breaking the rules

Saying the unsaid

Spreading the innovation virus

Seeding tribal energy

With no fear

With a cause to do good

Leading by being from our true selves

Going after the un-named quality

Relentlessly

We are holding a space.

We are making and holding a space where everybody can have a voice in service of value creation. The DNA of our movement is a platform of core principles that are the basis for us to connect, to practice, to embrace, and to inspire other to dream and make our dreams come true.

How do we define success?

When we have a community of 10,000 pods worldwide, with a good distribution across industries and regions. When we feel whole at work. When the DNA is established, when the pods start to divide, enabled by the lightweight space we are holding. Holding a space is a about context; the job is done when the space is holding itself, when people start saying: “I suddenly feel free to be awesome.” When our practice gets the same attention in annual reports as efficiency practices such as Lean and SixSigma.

Help us articulate the principles.

We are now defining the DNA: A platform of common principles that define who we are and what we stand for. We could use your help.

  • Principle-1: We love our companies and want them to succeed in this high-velocity, hyper-connected world.
  • Principle-2: We dare to be great.
  • Principle-3: We have the mandate to be brave and to challenge the status quo.
  • Principle-4: We will reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version.
  • Principle-5: We accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations.
  • Principle-6: We enable and empower the rest of our organizations to move at rapid pace, but with room for patience and reflection.
  • Principle-7: We unleash the enormous potential that lies within every human being within our organizations.
  • Principle-8: We re-ignite the passion in our organizations.
  • Principle-9: We are not just talkers, but doers.
  • Principle-10: We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from their true selves.
  • Principle-11: Our actions lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity.
  • Principle-12: Our community acts from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm opening up old rusty structured.
  • Principle-13: We are architects and scouts into the future,
  • Principle-14: and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then.
  • Principle-15: We are very well intentioned individuals.
  • Principle-16: We are united people with shared purpose, starting with our own being.
  • Principle-17: We maintain integrity and relevance..
  • Principle-18: We keep our community a safe environment, where you can become who you want to become. Where you are not alone in being a catalyst.
  • Principle-19: Our core values are integrity, clarity of reason, brightness and great positive energy.
  • Principle-20: Reflection, reporting back and adding-on to each others input and opinions is our natural way of collecting and discussing opinions.

Join us.

Start a pod. Organize yourself. Decide on your own activities, your own resources, and your own relationships. And link them back to the mothership, the DNA platform of common, core, connected principles.

+++ end manifesto

If this Manifesto speaks to you, we ask that you become a “signatory” by indicating your support in the comment section below.  We’ll add you to the growing list of Corporate Rebels. And we’re in the process of creating an online holding space for our common principles and convictions. Stay tuned.

Cambrian Explosion of Everything

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“The Cambrian explosion was the relatively rapid appearance of most major animal life forms, accompanied by major diversification of organisms. Before, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organised into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude and the diversity of life began to resemble that of today.” (Adapted from Wikipedia )

I believe we are witnessing a similar “Cambrian Explosion of everything” in the information technology evolution of the recent years, and we see a relatively rapid appearance of new “life” forms, new building blocks for the way we do business in this hyper-connected economy.

This thought came into my mind when attending recently the Cloud Identity Summit in Vail, Colorado 16-19 July 2012.

Explosion of API’s

During the pre-conference workshops, I had already seen the explosion of a whole set of new authentication methods and digital identity concepts like SAML, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, OIX, Facebook Connect, Google’s Accountholder.com initiative, etc, etc

And then came Craig Burton with a presentation announced as “The future of Authentication” but in essence a variation of his epic talk on “Identity and the API economy”. His full prezi presentation is here. (Disclosure: Craig has been advising us on our Digital Asset Grid research project)

  • If this evolution goes on, we’ll have 30K “open” APIs by 2016
  • But most enterprise API’s are not open, they are kept private, and their growth rate is 5 times that of open API’s. They are also referred to as “Dark API’s”, because you don’t see these species in the open.

Craig then showed some staggering stats of open API’s, the so-called “API Billionaires”

If you do the calculation, this means 150,000 API calls per second for Twitter!

Update: apparently most of these stats come from John Musser @johnmusser from The Programmable Web. Credits are made in Craig’s prezi, but not apparent in my post here. Sorry, John !

Craig believes – and I subscribe – that we will see a very fast evolution where

“everyone and everything will have its API”

And every API needs its identity. Leading to the staggering conclusion that we will need to provision more than 1,000 new identities per second.

In enterprise, one of the more accepted federated identity authentication and authorization standards is SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Craig created some consternation by stating, “SAML is dead”, because it is not made for the provisioning of this Cambrian explosion of identities. In essence the SAML model does not scale. For this type of scale, manual provisioning does not work anymore, we need high levels of automation, also at the provisioning level.

Explosion of Nodes

In his Cloud Identity Summit presentation, Craig was focusing on the explosion of number of API’s and the identities they will require.

Let me give another dimension, triggered by the research work we are doing on the Digital Asset Grid: when Craig talks about “everyone and everything will get an API”, I’d like to offer the dimension of “entities” aka “nodes in a grid” that need share data with each other. Those entities can be:

  • Humans
  • Group of humans – a good example is a Google “circle”, it’s a group of people without legal entity and therefore no liabilities associated
  • Companies – another type of groups of people – with legal entity and liability. Note that the liability of a non-profit is different from a commercial organization, from a educational institution, etc
  • But now we also add devices to the mix
  • And programs – pieces of software code – that act on our behalf or independently
  • Services and 3rd parties representing the seller, and 4th parties representing the buyer.
  • And personal and corporate clouds, where persons and corporations will keep the data they want to share in context with all the other entities in this grid of nodes.

And all these entities will get an API and will need to get an identity. It is leading to a “Catastrophic Complexity” unless we find a way to govern our communities differently, less manual, and highly automated.

It was very interesting to see that in the closing plenary of the Summit, Bob Blakley – now Global Head of Information Security at Citigroup – introduced the concept of the “Limited Liability Persona” that you could select as your identity to participate in certain data sharing use-cases. I’d like to emphasise he talks “personas” (plural of persona) and not “persons”. For example using your Limited Liability Persona “1” for getting a bank-account, and Persona “2” for your health transactions, etc.

This multiplication in personas will just add to the number of identities to deal with.

Explosion of Data

Big Data, Small Data, Real-Time Data, Fast Data, etc… I guess you are familiar with the buzzwords. I would like to share some insights that go beyond the generalities heard at most conferences.

Have a look at Avinash Kaushik – Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google – in his fascinating talk at Strata 2012 earlier this year. And especially pay attention as from minute 4:00 where he introduces Donald Rumsfeld as one of the “greatest philosophers when it comes to analytics”:

“Reports say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are the known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”

And then there is this recent Future of Internet PEW report that opens with:

Big Data: Experts say new forms of information analysis are helping us be more nimble and adaptive, but they worry over humans’ capacity to understand and use new tools well

And in the opening para:

We swim in a sea of data … and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. An equivalent amount of data is generated by people simply going about their lives, creating what the McKinsey Global Institute calls “digital exhaust”—data given off as a byproduct of other activities such as their Internet browsing and searching or moving around with their smartphone in their pocket.

“The realisation of dynamic and emergent systems as a natural order will cause people to realize the foolishness of trying to game systems to the Nth degree. We will see the rise of more algorithmic thinking among average people, and the application of increasingly sophisticated algorithms to make sense of large-scale financial, environmental, epidemiological, and other forms of data. Innovations will be lauded as long as they register a blip in the range of large-scale emergent phenomena.”

Explosion of Time

This leads me into one of the coolest presentations I have seen on big data, high frequency trading and the new algorithmic ecosystem by Sean Gourley from Quid.com at TEDxNewWallStreet

Especially watch the section as from minute 9:00 or so, where he lets us discover how machines are doing business in matter of nanoseconds: a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm!

It is not so much that more time is created, but more some form or time “implosion”, where things happen in milli- and nano-seconds timeframes, an outer-space alien to human beings.

Btw: Sean Gourley will be with us at Innotribe@Sibos Osaka 2012 in the session about The Future of Big and Small Data

Explosion of Mobile

Also repeated over and over again at Cloud Identity Summit by different speakers. Whereas many of the suggested solutions consisted of some form of “identity bridges” or translators if you want, I start to believe we come at a point where also here the existing metaphors and techniques are not adapted to the new paradigm of super-scale.

I have seen so many statistics and data that mobile is big, I prefer to refer to the mother of all internet trends, Mary Meeker who moved last year from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers with her May 2012 update on Internet trends.

As from slide #29, she introduces  the “Re-Imagination of nearly everything”

And closes her presentation with

“This cycle of tech disruption

is materially faster & broader

then prior cycles…”

Explosion of Decentralization

With some delay, I found some time this week to watch Don Tapscott’s talk at  TEDGlobal 2012 where he gets into “the interest of the collective”

Tapscott points out that this is “Not an Information Age, but an Age of Networked Intelligence”

And Don Tapscott nails it when he summarised the 4 principles for the open world:

  • Collaboration
  • Transparency
  • Sharing
  • Empowerment

The meta-story underpinning all this, is probably well reflected in the recent essay “The Democratization of Globalization” by Parag Khanna: We are not only moving into the age of Networked Intelligence, but we are also moving into Globalization 5.0 that is characterized by a high level of fragmentation and decentralization.

“Call it Globalization 5.0, the most decentralized form of the phenomenon in history. If succeeding in Globalization 5.0 comes down to exhibiting a single trait, it would be resilience—a decentralized, node-to-node way of doing business, where hundreds or thousands of points of interconnection form a giant web of commerce, information and social good. Those who can demonstrate resilience will adapt and thrive. Those who cling to the old, centralised paradigm do so at their own risk”

I am deeply convinced that the “Cambrian Explosion of Everything” is leading us very fast in a highly fragmented world of heterogeneous entities that are sharing and analysing data at warp speed.

It’s a new world

that will soon require new levels of

governance, security, identity

and community or commons management

Who could be the neutral trusted organisation for the financial industry to deliver us that resilience and trust for the next superfast and hyper-connected data-age?

Innotribe@Sibos Osaka 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2012

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Now in its fourth year, Innotribe@Sibos, the initiative’s flagship event, runs throughout Sibos week and offers a comprehensive programme exploring a range of topics crucial to the financial industry. Innotribe@Sibos in Osaka 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.

Some aspects of Innotribe@Sibos will be familiar to those who have attended before, such as the Innotribe Labs and the magic they create. But we will also explore new formats and new topics, and experiment with new facilitation techniques, such as game-storming and open space discussions. Building on our history of creating compelling line-ups of speakers, Innotribe will bring together a set of our most exciting innovators yet.

Innotribe will take the main stage at Sibos 

with an awesome Innotribe opening session.

In the last four years, we have made roads into the main Sibos conference: in 2009 we were located 15 minutes away from the main conference area; this year we are at the heart of the event. The Innotribe space will be the first thing you see when entering the event, and this year we have secured three main conference sessions. The Innotribe Space will be located in our own tent, in the middle of the conference patio. It just looks gorgeous!

Who should attend?

Innotribe@Sibos is open to all who come to Osaka. It brings together strategists, business and technology leaders, trend-setters and trend-watchers, and thinkers interested in taking action and shaping the future. In short, anyone keen to find out how the world is changing and what that means for 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

Innotribe Opening: The Tribe on the Tatami – Plenary Room

In 2011, this session was standing room only. In 2012, Innotribe will take to the main plenary stage for the first time, giving a sparkling overview of the 2012 Innotribe program. Through inspiring keynotes, spiced up with some novel interactive formats and techniques, the 2012 Innotribe@Sibos topics will be introduced, followed by an amazing performance with one of the leading judo practitioners. This will be a session not to be missed.

Already confirmed:

  • Sean Park, Founder, Anthemis
  • Mark Pesce, Founder, FutureStreet
  • William Saito, Founder & CEO, InTecur, K.K.
  • Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation, SWIFT
  • Christopher Siers, Director, Financial Services Network
  • Aiko Sato, Women’s World Champion Judo (-57kg)

BREAKING NEWS: Very proud to confirm Aiko Sato (Current 57kg Women’s World Champion Judo) for #innotribe opening #sibos http://see.sc/kJpiBI > Aiko will do live demonstration of Innovation Themes through Judo Movements.

Innotribe Health Index: Accelerating positive re-balancing – Innotribe Space

The Innotribe Health Index is a brand new Innotribe initiative. Through six different lenses (Reputation and Sentiment, Relationship, Big Shift Readiness, Technology Readiness, Urbanization and Inequality, and Agility), we will try to give an alternative ‘health check’ of the financial system. The intention is that the Index is an annual checkpoint based on New Economies and New Values thinking, aimed at accelerating a positive re-balancing.

Already confirmed:

  • Wouter De Ploey, Director in Business Technology Office, McKinsey & Company
  • John Hagel, Co-chairman, Deloitte Centre of the Edge
  • Michael Jones, VP of Technology, Dachis Group
  • William Saito, Founder & CEO, InTecur, K.K.
  • Michell Zappa, Founder, Envisioning Technlogy
  • Julius Akinyemi, MIT Media Lab and Wealth Of Nations

Ignite Talks – Innotribe Space

Ignite Talks is a new Innotribe format of  with 4-5 short 15 minutes power talks by innovators from the financial industry. We will share some of the presentations we have seen in 2012 that really wowed the Innotribe team. There will be three sessions spread over the event.

Already confirmed:

  • Antonio Benjamin, Global Chief Technology Officer & Managing Director , Citi
  • Shamir Karkal, Founder and CTO, Simple
  • Jesper J. Koll, JPMC
  • Nils Boesen, Director Knowledge, Innovation and Capacity, United Nations Development Programme

Future of Money – Conference Room-2

This session will look at financial innovation in detail. What’s happening on the fringe of traditional finance, with new alternative currencies and peer-to-peer payments? How are the innovative ideas of last year evolving and how quickly are they becoming mainstream? What can we expect to see next from some of the leading big financial innovators? Expect discussion on these themes and more.

Already confirmed:

  • Udayan Goyal, Founder, Anthemis
  • Chris Skinner, Balatro Ltd
  • Eli Gothill, Research Technologist, We Are Social
  • Mike Laven, CEO, The Currency Cloud
  • Yoni Assia, Founder and CEO, Etoro.com
  • Vipul Shah, MD, Product Strategy Executive T&SS, J.P.Morgan Chase
  • Paul Wilmore , Managing Director, Barclays US

SWIFT Applications Platform – Innotribe Space

The SWIFT Applications Platform is a strategic initiative, currently in the ‘incubation’ phase that aims at delivering cloud-based financial services and applications in a simple and secure way. Key objectives include providing a harmonised framework in terms of security (authentication and authorisation) and APIs usage, along with a simple, integrated customer experience. The platform will be built around three main pillars:

  • A secure business portal and application store that will allow users to find and purchase financial applications and services. Offering a harmonised user experience as one place to subscribe, register, access and manage applications and services
  • An Identity and Access Management component as a single and uniform security layer to access the portal, business applications and services, by providing authentication (e.g. single sign-on), authorisation, registration and non-repudiation.
  • An Application Programmable Interface (API) engine to offer a standardised way to use or consume applications and services. In addition, this will enable customers and third-party developers to create new or to enrich existing applications and services.

Hyper-Economics – Innotribe Space

This session will focus on the major cultural tectonic shifts that are underpinning and driving the hyper-connected economy and are the understream of deep organizational changes. We are witnessing the birth of new economies based on hyper-connected organizations, exposure of core competence through APIs, horizontal sourcing versus vertical integration,  Peer-To-Peer (P2P) sharing of data, Open Source developments, and activated humans that act from their true selves and

lead into a new practice for value creation

Already confirmed:

  • Corina Mihalache, Director Business Analysis, Allevo
  • Mark Pesce, Founder, FutureStreet
  • Michel Bauwens, Founder , P2P Foundation

The Future of Organizations – Innotribe Space

We live in a hyper-connected world. The speed of change is increasing exponentially. Information has become abundant, versus scarce in the past, and change is happening in real-time. It affects the way we think; some claim it affects our brain.

to be able to deal with these profound changes

we need to rethink

the body and soul

of our organizations

What does this mean for our organizations? What is the impact on organizational structure, hierarchies, team-forming and disbanding? What sort of skill and mindset will our next generation of knowledge workers require? What does it mean to let people take real personal leadership, and create viral change from within? The future of Organisation is a brand new Innotribe session, building upon the success of last year’s Corporate Culture session.

Already confirmed:

  • Guibert Englebienne, CTO, Globant.com
  • Jennifer Sertl, Founder and Author, Agility 3R
  • M.J. Petroni, Principal, Causeit.org
  • Mark Dowds, Investor, Trov.com
  • Dave Gray, SVP Strategy, Dachis Group (via video)

Next Bank Asia: Banking meets Design – Innotribe Space

Next Bank Asia was one of the best financial services events the Innotribe team attended in 2012. The mix of fringe players, entrepreneurs with new business models, designers, and anthropologists resulted in a raving 2 day event tuned for Asia. A guest slot for Next Bank Asia will be held in the Innotribe Space, where bankers meet designers in 4-5 short talks.

Already confirmed:

  • Rob Findlay, CEO, Next Bank Asia and curator for this session
  • Arvind Singh, Founder/CEO, Aleph Labs
  • Toby Johnston, Partner/Creative Director, Shift Partners
  • Tim Kobe, Founder, EightInc

The Future of Big and Small Data – Innotribe Space

In this brand new Innotribe session, we will take you on a fantastic rollercoaster journey on the future of data. We’ll start where we ended last year on Big Data, and will dive into Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, and Wars of Algorithms. It’s not only about Big Data, but also about the massive amount of small data generated by sensors and self-tracking devices. We will question how we can do real-time analysis on this ever-growing and ever-faster moving data stream.

Already confirmed:

  • Sean Gourley, CTO, Quid
  • Amir Halfon, CTO for Financial Services , MarkLogic
  • Anant Jhingran, VP, Data, Apigee
  • Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, Institute Fellow, Harvard University Institute
  • Daniel Erasmus, Owner, The Digital Thinking Network and CEO NewsConsole
  • Andrew Keen, Author, TechcrunchTV

Digital Asset Grid – Conference Room-3

Artwork by Kosta Peric

The Digital Asset Grid is one of the most forward-looking of Innotribe’s incubation projects. In this session, we will present the results of the prototype, including a business story, a compelling video, real applications and a prototype back-end infrastructure. We will bring about an in-depth conversation with some of the world’s leaders on privacy and digital footprint, followed by an interactive discussion with the audience too.

Already confirmed:

  • Liz Brandt, CEO, Ctrl-Shift
  • Andrew Keen, Author, TechcrunchTV
  • Matthias Kroener, CEO, Fidor Bank
  • Alan Mitchell, Strategist, Ctrl-Shift
  • Drummond Reed, Founder, Connect.me
  • Phil Windley, Founder and CTO, Kynetx
  • Mark Dowds, Investor, Trov.com
  • Julius Akinyemi, MIT Media Lab and Wealth Of Nations

The Future of Doing Good (Banks for a Better World) – Innotribe Space

Is “Doing Good” more than Corporate Social Responsibility? Is “Doing Good” good for Business?

This Innotribe session will look at new ethical, sustainable and social responsible products, services and practices and how they represent great opportunities both for our industry and society. The focus will be on “Banks for a Better World”, our latest Innotribe initiative focusing on 3 mains streams: financial inclusion, collaborative social engagement and interconnecting infrastructure(s) between the mainstream financial industry and the alternative banking industry and its beneficiaries, such as social entrepreneurs and unbanked.

This session will also include

the Social Finance Innovation Challenge

in association with Ashoka.

Already confirmed:

  • Julius O. Akinyemi, Entrepreneur-In-Residence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • Kartik Kaushik, Managing Director, Global Head of Business Development, Citi
  • Carolyn Stephens, Professor (PhD, FFPH, IFRSM) , Universidad Nacional de Tucuman/UCL
  • Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Chairman, Yunus Centre

Innotribe Startup Challenge 2012 – Grand Finale – Innotribe Space

The Innotribe Startup Challenge 2012 introduces the world’s most promising FinTech and financial services start-ups to the global community of financial institutions, venture capitalists, angels and influencers actively investing in innovation.

Sibos will host

the Grande Finale of the 2012 Challenge

following regional showcases

in the Americas, EMEA and APAC

From a total of more than 500 candidates, the 15 very best start-ups of 2012 will compete in front of a live audience and professional judge panel for a cash price of 50,000 USD.

Innotribe publication by Informilo

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.

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:

  • Digital Asset Grid: How banks might play a key role on securing and disseminating personal data
  • Future of Money
  • Hypereconomics and P2P: how the evolution of data is changing business
  • API’s: opening the way for new services
  • Top-25: the hottest start-ups in the financial space
  • Mobile money, commerce and transfer
  • 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. Contact jennifer@informilo.com

Conclusion

Innotribe at Sibos 2012 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

You can follow the progress of our program as speaker announcements continue between now and October 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: www.sibos.com/conferencedata/pages/topic_innovation.page

We look forward

to seeing you in Osaka!

By @petervan from the Innotribe team

Cross-Posted on Innotribe Blog

www.sibos.com/conferencedata/pages/topic_innovation.page

www.innotribe.com

Twitter: @innotribe and @petervan

Corporate Rebels United – A New Global Practice for Value Creation

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Since my initial post “Corporate Rebels United – the start of a corporate spring?” of 17 March 2012, a lot of exciting things happened.

I’d like to share with you where we are, and what’s the plan for the upcoming weeks and months. When most of you will be on the beaches, we’ll do some digging and set the basis for some of our infrastructure needs 😉

What happened?

The 17 March post was without any doubt the most viewed post ever on my personal blog. I got loads of comments. I got in contact with some very high profile people who offered their mentorship, coaching and mindshare in their communities. Many very cool people contacted me and wanted to know how they could be part of the movement. Clearly, something strong and positive resonated with you.

We now have a “core” group of +/- 30 Corporate Rebels: it’s a cross-industry group, with folks from the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. All the way from San Francisco to Sydney, with Europe in-between. Maybe still a bit weak in South-America, Africa, and Asia. We’re getting there 😉

We had several calls and Skypes, and we had our first face-to-face meeting in London on 22 June 2012. We had about 10 core rebels attending physically and 15-20 via call: one call for the Americas and one for APAC. It was a great experience, refreshing, and reinvigorating. With thanks to SWIFT for the meeting facilities.

We have worked hard with that “core” group to articulate why and how we want to create this movement. We also looked in detail into the “what”, the deliverables. We wanted to ensure that the message we sent out was “right” before we throw into the open.

I now want to share with all of you the progress we have made so far. With deep gratitude to the core group of Corporate Rebels United: as all this is obviously the result of teamwork. I also would like to talk everybody who took the time and effort to listen to me and give feedback.

Our mission, vision, and strategy

“To transform our companies into hyper-organizations and create new value for the people they serve.”

“We love our companies and want them to succeed in this high-velocity, hyper-connected world. We want to reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version. We want to accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations. We want to enable and empower the rest of our organizations to move at rapid pace, but room for patience and reflection. We want to unleash the enormous potential that lies within every human being within our organizations. We want to re-ignite the passion in our organizations. We are actionable.”

“We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from their true selves. Our actions will lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity. Our community acts from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm opening up old rusty structured. We are architects and scouts into the future, and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then.”

“We are making and holding a space where everybody can have a voice in service of value creation. “

Our game plan

We are making and holding a space where everybody can have a voice in service of value creation.

  • This space is called “Life”. This is where the new practices for value creation exist.
  • A community of cells upholds the space. These communities are self-organizing. These cells are built on the DNA of our movement.
  • The DNA of our movement is the platform of core principles that are the basis for us to connect, to practice, to embrace, and to inspire other to dream and make their dreams come true

DNA: A core (the common practice, the “commons” practices that cannot change, everything else can change. The DNA gives birth to cells. The cells can organize themselves.

They decide upon their own activities, their own resources, and their own relationships. And they always connect back to the mothership, the DNA of common core principles. Together, the cells create “Life” – our new global practice for value creation.

Our deliverables

We plan 8 types of deliverables:

  • Our manifesto
  • A common language
  • The 20 core principles of our DNA
  • A New Global Practice for Value Creation
  • A Belonging and Support program
  • A Discovery program
  • An Exchange program
  • A series of Events

I would like to summarize some of these deliverables:

The Manifesto

It has not changed really, but I’ll share it once more, as it, especially the “relentless” part of it, inspired so many people 😉

Relentlessly

Challenging the status quo

Breaking the rules

Saying the unsaid

Spreading the innovation virus

Seeding Tribal energy

With No fear

With a cause to do good

Leading by Being from our True Selves

Going after the un-named quality

Relentlessly

Common language, lexicon

It is our ambition to get buy-in and support from our corporate leaders for our proposed company transformations. We also want to articulate the direction. In a language clearly indicating the road from where we are today towards the destination we aim for. More specifically, we want to show the safe path and help our companies navigate from here to there.

This above is just a summary of some from-to destinations. The core group worked out a quite detailed and compelling list.

The 20 Core Principles of our DNA

We don’t want to be an exclusive club or so. It’s just in these early days we keep the group to 30 to be able to hack-out a first solid foundation. We will then throw it fully into the open.

But something needs to hold us together. These are the DNA principles of our practice. In the language section above you’ve seen that one of the to-from destinations is the journey from “Distrust as a default” to “Trust as a default”. Networks only work when there is trust. We want to walk the talk. When we will open-up our movement, everybody how signs-up is “in” by default. You will be “trusted” by default as long as you act in line with our 20 core principles:

  • Principle-1: We love our companies and want them to succeed in this high-velocity, hyper-connected world
  • Principle-2: We dare to be great
  • Principle-3: We have the mandate to be brave and to challenge the status quo
  • Principle-4: We reboot our corporate and organizational culture to install a 21st century, digitally native version.
  • Principle-5: We accelerate positive viral change from deep within the fabric of our organizations.
  • Principle-6: We enable and empower the rest of our organizations to move at rapid pace, but with room for patience and reflection.
  • Principle-7: We unleash the enormous potential that lies within every human being within our organizations.
  • Principle-8: We re-ignite the passion in our organizations.
  • Principle-9: We are actionable
  • Principle-10: We are building a global network of change catalysts that act from their true selves.
  • Principle-11: Our actions lead to new product and services and new global practices for value creation, agility and velocity.
  • Principle-12: Our community acts from deep personal awareness and presence, and an irresistible enthusiasm opening up old rusty structured.
  • Principle-13: We are architects and scouts into the future,
  • Principle-14: and we want to guide our organizations in navigating a safe path from now to then
  • Principle-15: We are very well intended individuals
  • Principle-16: We are united people with shared purpose starting with your own being
  • Principle-17: We maintain integrity and relevance of the reason.
  • Principle-18: We keep our community a safe environment, where you can become who you want to become. Where you are not alone in being a catalyst
  • Principle-19: Our core values are integrity, clarity of reason, brightness and great positive energy
  • Principle-20: Reflection, reporting back and adding-on to each others input and opinions is our natural way of collecting and discussing opinions.

New Global Practices for Value Creation

The core of our ambition is to create/let emerge a new Global Practice for Value Creation.

It’s “practice” like in Lean “practice” and SixSigma “practice”. However these are  for increasing efficiency in our organizations. We are on the innovation side. Innovation is less about “optimizing” the core engine; it’s more about new value creation.

Imagine having “black-belts”, “champions” in value creation and deep transformation of our companies based on our mission and principles. In the end, a company should be proud and outspoken of having x number of “black-belt Rebels” on board!

We want it to be global. From a meta-story perspective, wanting it to be something “global” that holds the values is probably one of the strongest thoughts of our movement.

We would like that these practices develop in a self-emerging way through the activities of the cells. Our expectation is that these practices are grounded in following principles:

  • Practice of Courage, Fear-is-not-an-Option, No fear to jump
  • Behavior/attitude: “Shift Makers”, “Accelerating Purposeful Innovation”, “Inside and Outside the company”, “Accelerators”, “Catalysts”, “Igniters”, carrying “The soul of Innovation”, “Re-Build”, “Re-Work, “Corporate Activists”, “Positive Deviants”
  • Emergent from the cells
  • Includes stealth approaches etc
  • Practices that lead to mastery
  • Focus on what works
  • Be part of curriculum
  • Certification levels vs. Reputation system
  • To be added as program to universities etc

In writing this blog post, it suddenly becomes clear to me that we found the sweet spot between “singing my own song”,  my loosely defined concept of a “New Value Movement”, and the irresistible enthusiasm of corporate rebels who want their companies to succeed in the 21st century by creating viral change from within.

What’s next?

I just sent a much more detailed consolidation of the 22 June London meeting to the core team. Given the summer holiday period we gave ourselves time till Mid August to co-edit all that material.

By somewhere mid-September our web site should be done.

We have planned our next face to face on 22 Sep 2012 in Providence, Rhode Island (USA), back to back with the BIF8 Summit.

Now in its eighth year, the BIF Summit has earned it reputation as “one of the top 7 places to watch great minds in action” (according to Mashable). The BIF Summit is an annual gathering of innovation junkies and transformation artists all in service of better – across industry, sector, and community. Eighty percent of Summit participants are senior executives; all are designing next generation business models. The summit provides participants with the space to be curious and crazy, get inspired, and collide with unusual collaborators. A shoe designer learns innovation processes from a car designer. A police officer teaches a business guru about transforming industries. This year’s storyteller line up features diverse system thinkers like Intel’s Brandon Barnett and ZipCar’s Robin Chase, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and the Food Network’s Simon Majumdar, GE Healthcare CTO Michael Harsh and Drupal Creator Dries Buytaert.

BIF8 is September 19th and 20th in Providence, Rhode Island. For those who want to move their inspiration into action, there is a third day, post-Summit Workshop on Business Model Innovation. This workshop is hosted and facilitated by BIF Founder and author Saul Kaplan and the creator of the Business Canvas, Alex Osterwalder.

Many BIF Summit participants come as teams from the same organization or affiliated group – using the BIF magic to challenge norms, inspire creativity, and think across disciplines. Recognizing how hard it is to bottle the magic, and harder still to operationalize it upon the return to business as usual, BIF offered us an interesting Team Package, helping us prepare for and act on insights and random collisions experienced at the Summit. Thank you BIF for your generosity.

The BIF8 conference is on 19-20 Sep 2012 http://www.businessinnovationfactory.com/bif-8

It’s probably around that time we will throw it into the open.

And in November, we’ll do some solid campaigning in the heavy event season with Innotribe at Sibos, Techonomy, Defrag and Blur. And back-to-back to that week, we plan our 3rd face to face on 17 Nov 2012 in Boulder, Colorado (USA).

For 2013, we already received a generous offer from the Australian AMPlify Festival to host one of our next coming together.

Hopefully by then, we’ll find some sponsors to cover some of the basic costs for keeping this going.

Some resources:

  • Prezi: some of the visuals is this post were created in Prezi. I did a talk at the EU Marie-Curie event in Brussels on 3 July that included our rebels story. That talk has 3 sections:
  • I am still maintaining a Scoop.it curation on Corporate Rebels United. As I am doing my daily RSS Feed reading, tweeting, etc, I am reading them with a specific “Corporate Rebels”-lens and put them all together in one place: http://www.scoop.it/t/corporate-rebels-united > check it out

Feel free to use and share it with anybody who can help and support our cause. Let’s rock this place together and let’s get a life / get alive ! And feel free to post events on this blog or contact me via mail or twitter.

Innotribe flight 876 Bangkok-Future landed ahead of schedule

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Our Innotribe flight 876 from Bangkok to the hyper-connected future landed on schedule on 27 April at 17:30pm local time. It was quite a flight with lots of turbulences.

It was one of the first times that we designed an event with a metaphor end-to-end. Our metaphor was that of a flight. We had some nice gimmicks like a boarding pass, seats lined up like in an aircraft, security video and seat pocket flyer.

But more importantly, we made sure we took our passengers on a journey, from check-in, taxiing, takeoff, cruising altitude, approach landing: building up the content slice by slice, and not slide by slide.

We had expected more people to attend the Innotribe 2-day flight. And we tested the agility and adaptability of our team to deal with this by making in-flight changes to the program. We scaled down day-1 to a “private jet” flight, and day-2 into a new format “Innotribe Unplugged”. I made a separate blog post some days ago on how our team is exploring the limits.

With hindsight, I believe we touched this way on some of the “irreducibles” of Innotribe events.

  • I believe “intimacy” is our real secret sauce. That’s why we created the Innotribe space as a no-tie zone
  • Create immersive learning experiences
  • Our ability to create tribes and groupies, whatever size of the audience, and the qualities of our team, as Mark Pesce @mpesce described them in a kudos mail:

“It was wonderful working with people so passionate, intelligent, driven and creative.  We covered a huge amount of territory in two days – a round the world tour.”

The lack of attendees was made good by a genius move by Matteo @matteorizzi to convince the Asian Banker Summit organization to run their closing session in our Innotribe space.

If you cannot bring innotribe to the plenary, bring the plenary to innotribe

It felt like a complete take-over of the Asian Banker Summit, and to take some perspective here – if I listen to the words of Emmanuel Daniel @EmmanuelDaniel – the Asian Banker Summit will never be the same again. We are with Innotribe Bangkok where we were with Innotribe at Sibos in Hong-Kong 3 years ago. Everybody knows how the Innotribe-way has made in-roads and impact on the overall Sibos event. Expect something similar with Asian Banker Summit in the next 3 years.

Disruptions:

William Saito @whsaito gave us his insights in Innovation in Asia. I specifically liked his distinction between “incremental” innovation and “entrepreneurial” innovation, where the latter addresses NEW markets.

This nicely dovetails with my “levels of disruption” of my TEDxNewWallStreet talk of 11 March 2012. That talk is now on-line on YouTube. I was supposed to give a tailored version of this talk in Bangkok, but we decided to drop it as part of the in-flight changes.

The biggest disruption over these 2 days was witnessing the end of highly vertical (financial or other) organizations and the emergence of a new type of organization where horizontal sourcing of point functionalities – exposed through APIs – becomes the norm.

The following slide out of Petervan’s API presentation should scare the hell out of bankers.

As most of my readers know, the original version of this slide (I saw a version already 2 years ago) comes from Sean Park from Anthemis Group, who did a great “Re-inventing Finance” presentation (Feb 23, 2012) on this specific subject during the LIFT#12 conference this year in Geneva. The slide above is part of that talk, and has evolved a lot since. Recommended viewing!

We are all nodes in a grid

Hidden, as another metaphor in the whole Bangkok program was the comparison between the cells, synapses and electric signals in the brain, and the entities, functions and API’s in a value chain/ecosystem. I have written about this recently in “The Programmable Me: we are all nodes in the grid”

In Bangkok, our flight plan took us first through some basic concepts of this topology, and gradually added evolution of message types (request/response and event signals), identity of the entities in the graph, the choreography/dance of the nodes, collaboration and expression and finally cultural differences and appreciations.

One specific theme was on visibility, by Eiji Hagiwara from Mitsui & Co, himself a proficient airplane and helicopter pilot. He used airplane navigation systems as a metaphor for visibility in value chains.

Our ad-hoc McKinsey consultant Luc Meurant, added additional perspectives from corporates in the financial corporate to bank value chain:

In addition to visibility, what corporates are looking for are predictability, action, and independence

It suddenly became clear to me we are witnessing the birth of a fractal value system, almost layered but probably more like a Spiral Dynamics construct.

The “zooms” into the fractal are different layers of human and agent organization such as individuals, teams, tribes, companies, and ecosystems. It’s similar to the Second Economy of Brian Arthur, but where Brian Arthur focuses on the machine artifacts underlying the real economy, I am trying to point at the human artifacts and levels of organizations.

The consultant matrix

As we were preparing the event and the input for our scribers, I hit by accident on what I would call a typical two-dimensional consultant matrix:

On the horizontal axe, we have the elements that are subject of measurement, almost the fractal levels of the previous paragraph: organization as a whole, inward-looking and outward looking. Inward to people, teams and internal processes. Outward to external nodes (customers, suppliers, developers, etc) and external processes and value chains. (Although I feel “Chain” is too much of a flat-landers word, too two-dimensional)

On the vertical axis, we have the dimensions of measurement or the KPIs. During the Bangkok session, we saw emerging:

  • The 7 key KPI’s for assessing the readiness of organizations for the hyper-connected future/reality
    • Situational awareness
    • Reputation
    • Customer satisfaction
    • Adoption rate
    • Openness
    • Connectedness
    • Q-curve about asking enough and relevant questions
  • There are many other possible KPIs: Idea generation, Fitness and Vitality, Autonomy, Agility, Resilience to adapt, Responsiveness, Tolerance, REducing/INTROducing frictions, Openness, Autonomy, Visibility, Connectedness, Enablement of competitors, Density of your eco-system, Sensing, and Purposefulness.

Taxi drivers are the smartest people on earth

The whole discussion of hyper-connected companies, and especially the story of Uber taxi, made me reflect deeply on the role of the old taxi company as a dispatching service.

The dispatching role itself was in essence the friction in the system, and the dispatching service became completely obsolete when the nodes (in this case taxi drivers and their customers) started talking to each other via API’s (in this was built into iPhone apps).

Every company should assess whether it is reducing frictions, or whether it is introducing frictions. This friction (less)-rule not only applies to organizations and functions but also to people and events.

But be aware, there are some “irreducible” frictions. Mark Pesce identifies 6 of them, all starting with a “T”. Here is how Mark Pesce describes the 6 “Ts”:

No matter how ‘smooth’ and frictionless hyper-connected commerce becomes, certain frictions in the business world will persist.  These represent both speed humps and opportunities.  The businesses of the 21st century will find leverage and differentiation by identifying and exploiting them.

 

  1. Time – If it were done when it were done, twere well done quickly;
  2. Territory – you can’t be everywhere at once;
  3. Talent – some people are naturally better at it than others;
  4. Trust – is rarely immediately conferred, instead growing from a continuing relationship, and must exist for commerce to succeed;
  5. Tongue – language barriers persist until we all speak Globish.
  6. Tension – frictions in teams between humans

Identity

I have already spent significant time on my blog on the topic of digital identity and digital assets. Check-out my post on “The programmable me: we are all nodes in the grid”.

In Bangkok, we started the journey from SWIFT’s recent 3SKey offering, and through a choreography and theater play, we illustrated how 3SKey solved the friction of multiple tokens, but does not solve the friction that customer and personal data information is being kept locked in silos.

We moved on to the concepts of the Digital Spectrum and the Digital Asset Grid. And we had an exercise for the Innotribe participants to identity frictions solved/unsolved and opportunities for financial institutions in this data services space.

Artwork by Kosta Peric (@copernicc)

I am very grateful for the feedback:

  • Answering the question of frictions and opportunities is difficult, if not impossible without the context of a use case
  • There is a key role for SWIFT standardization in the semantics of digital assets to be exchanged
  • The Digital Asset Grid is like oil on fire. Once the API’s of the infrastructure are opened-up, there will be a wildfire or data services popping up, offered by banks ànd competitors of banks.

But there is no way back. The only way to be agile in this hyper-connected future is to choose radically for 100% openness, leveraging the skills of the crowd-sourced community, and opening up even to competitors. Exactly like Amazon did: they have made their infrastructure indispensible for the operation of the Internet. When Amazon went down last year, it became clear that 40% of Internet services were running from AWS.

The concept of the programmable me is just a start. We are clearly evolving into a world where all entities are recording ànd sharing everything of what is going on.

I case you need to be convinced, have a look at some of the latest developments:

Placeme, built by Alohar Mobile, simply records everything in the background. Robert Scobleizer recently posted this 32-minute video with Alohar Mobile’s founder, Sam Liang, to get a complete description of the app. I recommend watching the entire conversation, but if you skip to the 2:40 mark, you’ll see Liang show you where he’s been and what he’s done for the past day, as captured automatically by Placeme.

Or check-out this short video from MIT project P.A.U.S.E.S. , where portable computing is now ubiquitous, and has been a key factor in fueling the explosion of social networking. These guys are exploring the projecting a better version of ourselves through edited sharing of our lives.

Don’t be surprised to see more and more of the “tricorder” functionality coming up in next versions of Siri on Apple iPhone 6 later this year.

It is clear that for this short of sharing of digital assets and footprints or even better “footstreams”, there will be a need for a Trust Framework, and some level of standardization of the semantic in this space.

If you are interested in more on this topic, follow my curation on Scoop.it

Organizational Fitness and Vitality

Just when everybody more or less got it that we are talking here about a real-time sharing of signals between all sort of nodes in the grid through APIs etc, we injected a first turbulence into our flight.

Guibert Englebienne @guibert did a fascinating talk/ignition on Corporate Fitness, focusing on the body of the organization. Guibert talked about the corporate fitness of Globant.com and the their clients, and as the day progressed with discussing the KPI’s, I wondered how much of these internal measurements Guibert would be ready to share with his customers and other stakeholders. We also had some interesting thoughts on what companies would have the guts to publish a real-time leadership satisfaction index based on the crowd-sourced results of assessments by staff. That would be quite some innovative form of transparency!

Artwork by Kosta Peric (@copernicc)

Jennifer Sertl @jennifersertl is all about corporate “soul”, the mind-complement of the body. Jennifer inspired us all with the 3 R’s of Agility: Resilience, Responsiveness and reflection.

It became clear for me that the 3 R’s both play at company and individual level. Jennifer wrote a book about it, where she explains that the real magic happens when the individual and company value prisms are aligned. But these are fairly abstract concepts, and to ensure that all participants internalized these through an immersive learning experience, we let them play casino-game, letting everybody fill in their own cultural meaning of the words resilience, responsiveness and reflection.

Collaboration

As a well-oiled tandem (they just met a couple of hours before); Dan Marovitz @marovdan and Matt McDougall @sinotechian looked into the history of communication and collaboration.

Dan asked the question how it comes those true digital knowledge providers like consultancies are still struggling with offering their deliverables in a full virtual way. There is a need for an integrated enterprise collaboration suite composed of  directory serviced, scheduling, messaging, payments, workflow, Analytics, Search and Communication

And Matt McDougall mind-boggled us with his 8 connectors:

Note here again the connected nodes in a grid 😉

  • Shared values (peace, equality, liberty,… )
  • Shared roots (religion, ethnicity, language, citizenship,…)
  • Shared fights (politics, environment, wildlife, …)
  • Shared Interest and benefits (wealth, power, information, notoriety,…)
  • Shared Lifestyle (fashion, housing, restaurants, vacation, …)
  • Shared Hobbies (sports, arts, gaming, collecting, travelling, …)
  • Shared Access (sites, platforms, devices,…)
  • Shared Preferences (food, drinks, cars, music, clothing,…)

In perspective

With hindsight of the Innotribe Bangkok event, I would like to offer the following perspectives:

  • We are witnessing 3 parallel revolutions: hyper-connectivity, openness through APIs, and the advent of P2P vs hierarchical organizations
  • The hyper-connected future is huge challenge for the financial industry, and there is little chance that the incumbents win the race
  • The Asian Banker Summit will be different the next years: the seeding has happened and there is no way back
  • The real problem: only 5 out of 250 bank-attendees are in contact with the start-up community: the Innotribe startup challenge helps to close gap

Outlook to Innotribe@Sibos, Osaka, 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2012

I have a dream: I would like to see an Innotribe opening session at Sibos with William, Sean, Mark, Guibert on the tatami.

I am looking forward to the grand-finale of that Start-Up Challenge in Osaka. In Bangkok we had the opportunity to see the pitches of the winning candidates from the APAC competition just a couple of days before on 24 April 2012 in Singapore.

Wrapping up this blog post

In case you were wondering what the flight number 876 is all about: 8 connectors, 7 KPIs, 6 irreducibles.

The next Innotribe flights are:

  • SWIFT African Regional Conference 2012 Kampala, Uganda: 8-10 May. Here we are part of a classic SWIFT regional conference. Matteo and Martine will be there with one Innovation plenary, and two Innotribe Labs, one on Remittances, and one on Mobile Payments.
  • The Age of the Empowered Customer, Sydney: 8 May. This is a small-scale event for 40 people, invitation only, organized together with Microsoft Australia.
  • Innotribe@Belfast on 13-14 June 2012: this is a full-blown Innotribe event like Innotribe Belfast. We already received the first registrations.
  • For other Innotribe events, check-out our Innotribe events page

Acknowledgments

Innotribe Bangkok would not have been possible without the help of the Asian Banker Summer, our APAC colleagues and the full Innotribe team. Special kudos to the Innotribe design team with Mela, Martine, and Dominik. Also thx to Kosta, Matteo, Nektarios and Muche for helping out with all the executions and facilitations.

By @petervan from the Innotribe team (cross-posted on the Innotribe Blog)