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.
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.
Time – If it were done when it were done, they’re well done quickly;
Territory – you can’t be everywhere at once;
Talent – some people are naturally better at it than others;
Trust – is rarely immediately conferred, instead growing from a continuing relationship, and must exist for commerce to succeed;
Tongue – language barriers persist until we all speak Globish.
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”
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.
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:
And then there was Marc Hochstein’s (@MarcHochstein) excellent coverage in American Banker titled “SWIFT Reimagines Banks’ Role for a Data-Driven Future”. It’s really a great article and there is an excellent video coming with it where Marc positions the DAG as it should be positioned: a unique opportunity for banks to offer a whole new series of Data-Driven applications.
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.
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.
UPDATE: we are now also present on other social media channels:
Our Website (in progress) > make sure you have signed-up here (everybody who commented and signed up on comments of this post has been imported in our website already)
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.
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.
“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”
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.”
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.
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”
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?
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 #siboshttp://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.
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
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.
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
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.
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:
Part-1: a metaphor for the process of innovation called “how to make babies”
Part-2: a pirate/rebels metaphor for “the soul of innovation”
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.
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.
Time – If it were done when it were done, twere well done quickly;
Territory – you can’t be everywhere at once;
Talent – some people are naturally better at it than others;
Trust – is rarely immediately conferred, instead growing from a continuing relationship, and must exist for commerce to succeed;
Tongue – language barriers persist until we all speak Globish.
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
Tomorrow is May 1st, 2012: International Worker’s Day.
And unless you have been living in a cage or other planet, tomorrow is also the day where the Occupy movement is organizing a general strike action across the 125 cities in the USA.
This is organized by the 99%. In the UK however, the “97% Owned” investigates behind the scenes of the ever changing financial system, to uncover how the monetary system provides the foundations for international dominance and national control. Fresh thinking, new ideas and answers to simple questions are squeezed into this 2hr 10minute expose.
Due for release May 1st it features frank interviews and comments from Positive Money, The New Economics Foundation, PRIME, Paul Moore HBOS Whistle Blower, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Nick Dearden from Jubliee Debt Campaign.
97% owned is from the creative team behind Generation OS13: The New Culture of resistance, continuing the distinctive ‘tour de force’ style and artistic interpretation.
Not that i subscribe everything that is said in this video – but i want you to sense the intensity and aggressivity of this movement. It reminds me a lot of what happened in 1977 with the punk movement, or the Flower Power 60’ies, but these were softer more “Peace no War”. This is getting much more confrontational. Check also the comments, as clearly not everybody agrees with the content, the quite tendentious language and music.
Also check-out Simon Dixon (@SimonDixonTwitt), CEO of BankoftheFuture.com, starting off his TEDx talk with some musings on leadership:
“figuring out what you were brought on this earth to do, and then do it”
This resonates strongly in me, see also my latest posts, many of them related to my reflections on what i was meant to be in this world.
Simon explains:
Why we need to change the rules of banking
What will happen if we don’t change the rules of banking
How we can change the rules of banking
His thinking about value is very close to Art Brock‘s ideas on the Living Ecosystem of Wealth (check out www.metacurrency.org). In Art’s model, it’s becoming crystal clear that the majority of investments are purely speculative in nature, and don’t return any value back into the economic system.
Simon is doing a call for:
equality
sustainability
stability
At the end, he also talks on how to change the rules, in essence by training and planting change agents virally in all financial institutions. Sounds familiar to our Corporate Rebels approach where we’d like “to ensure that true change happens virally”, although we are not targeting any specific industry.
Starts crystalizing for me that what Corporate Rebels needs to change is to make our organizations more agile, more fit, more vital, more resilient in creating value rather than extracting value. Now i know why i once read Cradle to Cradle by William A. McDonough (Amazon Affiliates Link) why once again it’s an architect who inspires me. Because it and i was meant to be.
Simon Dixon will launch his own initiative “Banks To The Future” in 30 days or so, as an alternative to bring money to the business without venture capitalists and banks involved.
Another example of “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” (Mahatma Ghandi), our theme for last week’s Innotribe in Bangkok.
Simon Dixon looks to me a as good candidate for #innotribe #sibos for the session on “Future of Money”, don’t you think so ? And maybe we should be re-baptise that session into “Future of Value” ?
I am restless these days. Exploring my limits, physically and mentally, and calibrating and navigating what I was meant to be: an architect, painter, scripter, dramaturge, producer?
I am so hungry to create those true memorable experiences, with artistic, architectural, and ethical rightness and integrity. Experiences those feel right from the very first second to the very last. Produced and executed with a crew of super professionals
Experiences that matter, those touch and move you.
Experiences that give you the same sort of “bang” as when you arrive in Bangkok airport, and get amazed by the post-industrial architecture, in all it’s grandeur and massivity.
The sort of “yes” when seeing the Blue Man Group. But a Blue Man Group with a message, and not only one-way, but where also the audience has to participate to realize the full potential and learning of the production.
The sort of “love” and being “moved” when seeing/hearing Mark Pesce analyzing and synthesizing, and story telling with an eruditeness seldom witnessed before, with us at Innotribe Bangkok last week.
Be in company of these sources of inspiration, or at least breath the same air (spotify link)
Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe yes to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
When as an audience you know, just know, that this production is so right I, in the sense of “exact”, “spot-on”.
When as a producer, behind the scenes and behind the technical desk, you can feel the shiver down the spine as the rumble of the deep bass rolls-in and when the show begins, and the mystic of the lights, the mystery of the colors, the artists, the perfect technology, the professional crew are all coming together in an amazing whirlwind.
A production that feels more like a good book, where you have to invest in the beginning, where you discover new stuff, not the same old re-mashed hyped stereotypes, tricks and banalities.
Like a great film where the plot unfolds, and magic and surprise come together.
With deep immersive learning experiences, and drama, lots of drama, even in the sense of theatrical overacting. It’s creating a meta-story, a story of stories and adding performance to it. A new class of story telling, of immersive learning experience.
With authentic, inspiring mastery on stage, orchestrated and mashed-up into a brand new value play artistry, adding facilitation and superior crowd control to the mix. Aah! How I love the “stage” with it’s smell of wood, nails, pain, curtains, mechanics, flight-cases, racks, amps, cables, light and sound towers.
The whole discussion of hyper-connected companies during our Innotribe event in Bangkok, and especially the story of Uber taxi, made me reflect deeply on the role of the old taxi company as a dispatching service.
A dispatching role that was in essence the friction in the system, and becoming 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).
This friction (less)-rule not only applies to organizations and functions but also to people and events.
The master of ceremony (MOC) role has to become much more than just announcing and introducing speakers. If the MOC role stays limited to that, the MOC becomes a friction in itself that needs to be removed. The MOC has to become a “master of connections”, bringing additional content-value, interpretation and guidance to the mix.
In the case of events, we have to start looking at them as a way to bring the consumers and providers of our immersive learning experiences in direct P2P contact through API’s aka “emotional synapses” of the speakers/ignitors.
Some folks out there claim that we are pushing the envelope of performance too far, and should fold back to simpler formats closer to TED, or that our banking audiences and cultures are not ready for this. I deeply disagree. I believe that what we set out as a performance design in Bangkok is just the beginning, the middle of a spectrum between minimum and maximum.
It is of course easier, less complex, where you just program some cool people and surf on the success waves of others, never creating something yourself. But when an event becomes a happening with no file-rouge, no overall theme, without gluing metaphor and design, and without deep reflection about the overall energy and thematic rhythms, then we end-up merely with a set of sequentially ordered speakers, at best a mash-up of speakers, MOC, and facilitation tricks picked from the routine shelf, where the colors and scribes are just lipstick on a pig, a weak copy of the original.
It’s like cheating your audience. Because you know you can do so much better. Not giving the best of yourself is a cheating your audience, whether that audience is your beloved one, your family, your team, your company, and your world.
Easy is easy. Easy smells laziness. What we – at least me – are trying to do with events is not about producing a soap, or the n-th well produced game-program for points or money on television. Although I can be seduced by a well executed professional television production like “The Voice”.
I don’t want to go “easy”, that’s not where I set my bar. When “going back to basics, to easy” starts showing its ugly head, it’s time for us not to be complacent and run on routine, but to re-invent ourselves. We have to re-invent ourselves when we think we have explored the limits.
I am looking for the French quality of “profondeur” which I find richer than “depth”. That is where I want to go.
Sometimes, it looks like the ecosystem I live in today is not ready for this ambition and experiences. Sometimes, my current fishbowl is not ready to follow. I sense it’s a matter of time before we all can see the perspective.
This minor headwind is no reason to give-up or scale-down. I want this “giving-my-best-experience” to happen rather sooner than later. I don’t think I can do more than one production like this per year or even two years if I want to keep the quality of content and production I have in mind.
The choice is between many small touch points, with superficial tricks from the routine box and less events, with a dramatic increase in depth and exploration of new limits. Our edge of yesterday has already become the core. We have to be and remain the Edgewalkers (Amazon Affiliates link)
We have to keep our edge of “Edge-Walkers”, “Protagonists”, “Corporate Rebels”: challengers as described in Art Kleiner’s “The Age of Heretics”.
Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it.
The journalist of the article makes some great observations:
Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.
We live in a culture that nurtures competitive skills. And they are necessary: discipline, rigor and reliability. But it’s probably a good idea to try to supplement them with the skills of the creative monopolist: alertness, independence and the ability to reclaim forgotten traditions.
Maybe I should disappear for some months or years, to do my ultimate research, find sponsors, leverage the knowledge of the commons, produce and distribute with the best of the best.
I have already decided to invest in myself, healthy mind in healthy body to start with, but also focus on giving the best of myself in everything I do, and yes – with a little dose of arrogance – ignore everybody for the better overall health of myself. Ignore everybody as in Hugh McLeod’s bestseller with the same title (Amazon Affiliates link)
I am restless. Because I feel I am stagnating in my current environment. Limited in my creativity. I want to break free. Unchain my heart. Being able to speak free again. No strings attached. Surprise you and myself. Explode, and be emotional and physical again. Exploring my limits.
Sometimes all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe yes to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
Petervan Studios 