The Robots are Coming

Jobs are not important workers are! The Swedish model works.

The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine

The New York Times shares with us the success of Sweden ! 

In a world full of anxiety about the potential job-destroying rise of automation, Sweden is well placed to embrace technology while limiting human costs. 

Some gems:-

A Cushion for Innovation

Sweden presents the possibility that, in an age of automation, innovation may be best advanced by maintaining ample cushions against failure.

“A good safety net is good for entrepreneurship,” says Carl Melin, policy director at Futurion, a research institution in Stockholm. “If a project doesn’t succeed, you don’t have to go broke! “

Handling automation , innovation and change needs a major mindset shift from all parts of an economy and country! 

It boils down to trust !

Trust that the company will look after the employee

Trust that the state will look after the Enterpreneur

Trust that it’s about the worker and the human and not about the job!

Hope you all have an amazing 2018! 

 Read the full story

Best

Ivan

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.