Making something from Nothing

What do you think?

BSI Grants Landscape Briefing

Very proud to have been a part of BSI Innovation Grants Briefing hosted by BBG. 

Gems about various grants available in Australia.

Let me know if you want the Slides or interested in being referred to the gurus 

What if we are only at the beginning of the tech revolution?

The Bob Pritchard Column 

We urgently need to totally change the way we think about every aspect of business.  Everything we know, will soon no longer apply. Whether it be leadership, corporate culture and community citizenship, management, marketing and advertising or customer communication and service, we need to be able to manage extraordinary change.

 

The worlds leading thinkers, Singularity University in Silicon Valley, estimate that in the last 10 years we have advanced just 1% of the technology revolution, in the next 15 years we will move the next 99%. That means that in just 10 years, we will be exposed to 2048 times more information every day than we are getting today.   In just 5 years there will be over 5000 new apps every day, the overwhelming majority to facilitate various aspects of business.

 

 

Leadership…

Increasingly, leaders will have to be a visionary, inspiring the market and employees. Investor demands will change from steady management and incremental change to transformational, disruptive and dramatic change.  Cloud technology will interconnect everyone, from management to employees, to investors and suppliers, transparently and faster in all directions.   It is likely that CEOs will be more like the visionary inspiring leaders of Jobs and Musk than business managers like Jack Welch with the traditional CEO role being carried out by the COO. Leadership will change from protecting status quo to extending innovation capabilities.

 

Leaders will be challenged by:

• Information intelligence not information management
• Platforms to enable new value chains and integrated ecosystems not IT systems management 
• Business transformation and  accelerated growth not cost management

Millennials will move into positions of authority changing the values of the corporation and transforming the whole attitude toward life-work balance with the emphasis on life first. Organizations lifespans will be reduced from 45 years to 10 years.

 

Corporate Culture and Community Citizenship…

Research has shown the rapidly increasing importance of the Triple Bottom Line as the community becomes increasingly aware of, and concerned about, not only the environment but also the concept of assisting those less fortunate. The triple bottom line is the concept of not only generating financial returns but also simultaneously creating social and environmental returns.

In order to attract the top employees, investors, and generate sales from consumers, companies are having to increasingly take into account their complete impact on society and the environment, not just their impact on the economy. Businesses will  have to assume responsibilities that go well beyond the scope of simple commercial relationships.

 

Good corporate citizenship will increasingly provide substantial business benefits in eight areas;

Reputation management…the percentage of companies value derived from intangible assets increased from 17% in 1981 to 89% in 2011 and will continue to increase.

Risk profile and risk management…investment in environmental management will substantially reduce a firm's perceived risk and increase stock price from 5% to 25%.

Employee recruitment, motivation, and retention… In 2013, 56%, and predicted to rise rapidly, of employees take into account a company's ethics when deciding to take, or remain in a job, increasingly critical in high skill talent shortages

Investor relations and access to capital…corporate focus on environmental and social criteria now accounts for a 45% better  financial performance than companies without such focus. This will become increasingly important.

Learning and innovation…corporate citizenship objectives encourage creativity and innovation which leads to bottom line benefits.  This innovation will be critical.

Competitiveness and market position…research clearly shows that a rapidly increasing, and now a majority of consumers, form their impression of a company on the basis of its corporate citizenship practices rather than on brand reputation or financial factors.

Operational efficiency…reducing material use and waste saves money, as well as reducing the environmental impact which leads to direct improvements on the bottom line

License to operate…companies with a good reputation for corporate citizenship will increasingly fare much better in the face of labor or environmental issues.

 

The opening line of this newsletter said it all…We urgently need to totally change the way we think about every aspect of business

 

Just when I discovered the meaning of business, they changed it

 

AI is the bomb

"As the mechanistic parts of human cognition get commodified by AI, the uniquely human parts will be even more valuable." - Tim O'Reilly

“Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?” - Aldous Huxley

Elon Musk's New Battery Just Won Him a $50 Million Bet

  Elon Musk's New Battery wins him a $50m net from Mike Cannon-Brookes

By Emily Price 28 Nov 2017

Mike says he is so happy to have lost the bet!!!

        

Back in March, the Tesla founder made a bet on Twitter with Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of Atlassian, an Australian enterprise software company, that he would be able to install the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in Australia within 100 days, or he would supply it for free. That “free” would have been anything but to Musk, who said failing to meet the deadline would have cost him “$50 million or more,” Business Insider reports.

The 129-megawatt-hour battery was being built by Musk for South Australia, which generates a substantial percentage of its energy from wind power. Musk vowed to install the battery within 100 days of signing as agreement with the state government, which he did in September.

The goal with the battery pack is to make South Australia more self-sufficient and able to provide backup power and affordable energy to South Australians during the summer months.

The battery is part of a $550 million plan by South Australia to help guarantee its power supply after a string of blackouts over the last 18 months. The state has not indicated how much it is paying Musk for the battery. A 250MW gas-fired generator is also expected to come online in the area next summer to help ease energy concerns.

Musk also recently supplied battery power to help aid Puerto Rico’s electrical grid following the devastating hurricane earlier this year.

© Time Inc 2017. All rights reserved

Four Key Innovation Takeaways from the 2017 Lean Startup Conference

Great takeouts from Dr Jeffrey Tobias from the Strategy Group https://www.thestrategygroup.com.au/2017-lean-startup-conference-takeaways/

What’s changing in leading edge innovation thinking?

For the fourth year running we attended the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco, hosted by Eric Ries, the founder of the Lean Startup movement.

The Lean Startup methodology has changed the way both small and large organisations work, developing businesses and products quickly and iteratively based on tests and insights from customers. The approach is now evolving to focus on empathy as a starting point for understanding customer’s needs; part of a broader shift of focus towards the customer.

Here are my four key takeaways from the conference:

1. Design Thinking and the Lean Startup are moving closer together.There was a decided focus on empathy as the starting point to getting closer to your customer. While rapid experimentation is a given, the common view was that empathy was the way to uncover customers’ needs, pains and gains. This is somewhat of a change from past conferences, where there was little to no mention of empathy or Design Thinking. Empathy, and empathic interviewing and observations, is necessary to uncover not what customers want (because they don’t know) but what they need, to address their gains and their pains. Once these have been uncovered, the real problem to be solved can be uncovered – and it might not be the problem that appeared obvious at the beginning. After ideating around solutions to the problem, then the Lean Startup process of Build-Measure-Learn can be used to validate, and invalidate, the underlying assumptions of the solutions.

2. It’s all about the Experience. Chip Heath talked about his new book The Power of Moments – how we all have defining moments in our lives – meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. Many of them we owe to a great deal of chance: A lucky encounter with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you did not know you had. A realisation that you don’t want to spend one more day in your job. The question Chip posed at the conference was: Can we shape these moments and control them? Through research, Chip maintains that defining moments are created from one or more of the following four elements:

• ELEVATION: Defining moments rise above the everyday. Moments of elevation transcend the normal course of events; they are extraordinary
• INSIGHT: In a few seconds or minutes, we have the “ah ha” moments in which we realise the importance of the moment and have a sudden flash of insight into something that was obscure until now
• PRIDE: Defining moments capture us at our best – moments of achievement, moments of courage
• CONNECTIONS: These are moments we share with others such as weddings, graduations, vacations and the like

3. The Business Portfolio Map. Alex Osterwalder (pictured above in conversation with me) ran an excellent workshop about the need to manage a portfolio of innovation that leads on from the Business Model Canvas. Most of us are familiar with the concept of Explore and Exploit when it comes to mapping our strategic priorities, but few of us really understand how to map activities against a framework that makes strategic sense. Alex presented an excellent process to not only map out the Explore and Exploit opportunities, but also to link them in a manner that makes their management almost obvious. What is really nice about his model is that he regards the Explore and Exploit opportunities as a collection of business models (i.e. business model canvasses) so his thinking is a logical extension of the previous work on the various canvasses he has developed in the past. Further, through the use of his processes, one can not only uncover new business model opportunities, but also evaluate the effectiveness of the business models in play.

The final question posed at the workshop was: Do you have a balanced portfolio that makes you invincible?

4. Artificial Intelligence will create jobs for tasks we have not yet imagined. Tim O’Reilly from wtfeconomy.com spoke about the buzz that artificial intelligence will put hundreds of thousands of people out of work. He pointed out that when Amazon added 45,000 robots, they added 250,000 human workers. His message is that we have to draw a new map of the world, not be blinkered by what we know today, and we need to realise that, as the world increasingly becomes digital, and as artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems pervade all that we do, we are actually creating new kinds of partnerships between machines and humans. He emphasises that we should not just recreate what went before – we need to rethink business models, workflows and processes. For example, Henry Ford didn’t just rethink the automobile and the factory, he rethought the work week, and the reasons why people might want to drive.

Big Thinks take on life in 2027

Some extracts from the transcript...

Vivek Wadhwa Appointments at Duke and Stanford. Writes for Washington Post, LinkedIn Influencers, Huffington Post, ASEE Prism

http://bigthink.com/videos/vivek-wadhwa-what-will-your-life-be-like-in-2027-big-thinks-long-take 

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Ray Kurzweil says that as any technology becomes information it starts advancing exponentially. It seems that everything is being digitized now and every technology I look at seems to be entering this exponential curve. And what happens is that when technology is advancing on an exponential curve they do amazing things, but when technologies converge, when exponential technologies converge that’s when you get industry disruptions.

Look at Ehang and what they’re doing in Dubai. That’s really a drone on steroids that’s being used to transport human beings.

Imagine being able to learn science by doing virtual experiments, anatomy by seeing your human body inside and out. Imagine learning mathematics by going into ancient Egypt and building pyramids. Imagine learning language by going into another country and talking to the natives in their local languages. Imagine learning Latin by going back in time and talking to people in Latin. I mean this is all becoming possible, and this is within five years we’ll have that. 

Imagine that a Fruit of the Loom tag in your underwear, which is monitoring you 24/7, monitoring your activity levels, which is monitoring your EKGs—all these different symptoms that can be captured from the skin, imagine it being gathered 24/7, being uploaded to the cloud, and having an AI now analyzing the data and say, “Look you’re about to get sick, you need to get some exercise,” and then having all of these cameras and sensors which watch what we’re eating and what we’re doing and saying, “All right Vivek, you don’t need that extra piece of pie. Stop. Abort. Abort. Abort.”

there was a study published in Nature magazine about a year and a half ago in which they took the feces—if I can say this on Big Think, feces means shit. They took the feces of a fat mouse and gave it to a thin mouse, and the thin mouse gained weight. They took that feces from a thin mouse and gave it to a fat mouse, and the fat mouse lost weight.[...]So forget all these diets we’ve been obsessed with; could it simply be a matter of taking the feces of a thin person and giving it to a fat person and the fat person loses weight? [...]there have been studies that show that Crohn’s disease, which is a debilitating disease that children get, they took the feces of a healthy child and gave it to an unhealthy child, and it appears that this unhealthy child was cured.You’re curing disease by transplanting bacteria?! It doesn’t make sense.

This is a crazy prediction, but I really believe this is going to happen: that within 10 or 15 years we will come to the conclusion that antibiotics were destroying our health.

when I read these studies everyday, that is the conclusion that I’m getting—that the entire Western medical system is about to be upended through the microbiome.

So move forward to the 2020s: we have all of these diagnostic data, we have all of this data about our genome and our microbiome, we have data on not thousands of people but hundreds of millions of people, and we have AI that analyzes all of this information. That app on your smart phone that’s monitoring you 24/7 may be the best doctor you’ve ever had. It’s your friend, it’s your advisor, it guides you on how to maintain optimal health, and it guides you on how you get healed if you do get sick.

I mean maybe there were some people who saw it coming, but the vast majority of experts in this field didn’t think that AI would progress at the rate it’s progressed just over the last few weeks.

When you walk into your supermarket, when you walk into any retail store you note that there are cameras over there. In the last two years or so the ability for computers to recognize faces exceeded the ability of human beings to recognize faces. So those cameras now have the ability to know who you are, and they have the ability now to interface with the registers where you buy things—and to keep track of what you bought.

Let me switch gears now and talk about saving the world.[...]Eighty-eight percent of the infectious disease in the developing world is caused by water borne viruses. [...]Now, all it takes to have 100 percent clean water—to boil the oceans and have all the water we need—is energy. The trouble is that energy has been so expensive. Well guess what? That’s changing. We’re headed into an era of unlimited clean and almost free energy.

the cost of solar has dropped 99 percent since 1976, and what happens is that as the price drops, the installations double. As installations double, the price drops.

We’re in a vicious cycle over here of exponential technology advances.

At the pace we’re going we’re only about six doublings away from having the capability of generating 100 percent of the earth’s energy needs through solar. This sounds crazy. And the doublings are happening less than every two years from now. So what I’m saying is that by 2030 or so we could have unlimited clean energy on this planet from sunlight, and the cost will be a fraction of what it is today. Imagine 1/16 of what it is today, 1/30 of what it is today. In less than 15 years from now!

What happens when the work disappears? Even if you have all the energy you want, all the food you want, you have perfect health, you have all the things you need, you’re able to 3-D print your food and clothing and all that, if you have all of those things taken care of you have nothing to do. You feel depressed.

If we don’t now start educating and uplifting everyone we’re going to have Mad Max.

Can we make sure that everyone benefits from the technology so that we don’t have people being left out and we don’t have anger brewing?[...]do the rewards outweigh the risks? [...]does the technology create autonomy or dependence? ]what I sincerely believe is that if we get these right that if we now benefits everyone and we do things in a sensible way we can create the amazing future of Star Trek, that we really can get to this world in which we’re now sharing prosperity, we’re seeking enlightenment and knowledge, we’re working to uplift humanity and we can do this 300 years ahead of schedule.