For a long time in human history trade was done by paying with precious metals or calculating exchange rates based on commodities such as grains or shells. Only recently paper currencies have been issued. Initially tied to a precious metal like the gold standard, nowadays just with the trust that the issuing government will honor the exchange. How quickly trust can be destroyed we learned from the past with hyperinflation in Germany in the 1930s, or high inflation rates like in Russia today.
And currencies can be easily manipulated by speculators or the issuing states themselves. That's where digital currencies such as Bitcoin become interesting. While there are only around 200 government issued currencies, digital currencies number several thousand. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Linden Dollars, or M-Pesa are just some of them. And they are not only much less dependent on a governments behavior, but also have near-zero transaction costs. That's where we'll see disruption happening with traditional banks. And the FinTech-sector is exploding in activity. Here is an overview of nearly 1,400 FinTech-startups on Venture Scanner.
Read more about FinTech in general in a book that I just read: Breaking Banks.
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With Infosys having trained over 45,000 employees so far in DESIGN THINKING, another big company is embracing it. IBM is going to hire 1,000 designers and embrace this methodology. It's not the features or functions anymore that sell technology, it's design. The best technology isn't worth a dime, when users have troubles interacting with it.
I know many companies are skeptical. After all, isn't engineering the hard skill that you can easier measure and learn? Well, technology in itself is not creating the value. The way we use it is. And if humans have hard times using it, you will not be successful.
The CREATIVITY-technique of the day is Cook on all Burners. This means that you should work on multiple projects at a time.
Behavior scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (known for his Flow-concept) realized while interviewing creative people, that they all worked on multiple projects at a time. Thus they could create associations between them and become more creative.
A list of more creativity techniques can be found here.
Disruptive INNOVATION has been coined as a term by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in the 1990s. In the past months there has been some controversy of what disruptive innovation really means. Fact is that we still seem to understand little of how innovation works, and how we can make it part of an organization's DNA.
Some areas that are experiencing disruption are cities and science. The famed peer review system in science has proven to become less and less effective as a way to guarantee quality. And with self-driving cars at the cusp of being unleashed on city roads, how will cities have to rethink their public spaces?
Our list of Innovation Outposts - offices established by companies in the Silicon Valley - is growing longer and longer. With over 150 of them companies are trying to get a foothold in the planet's most innovative region and monitor what innovations are trending, with whom to partner or even acquire, what talents they need to hire, or simply to learn how to become more innovative. Some of the outposts are just one person and a desk, others number several hundred people.
Infusing the SILICON VALLEY MINDSET into their organizations is one of the more long-term goals of such outposts and can be a real challenge. Just opening an outpost for a publicity stunt is a waste of money. There are multiple factors what you should consider to decide if you are opening an outpost.
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Given the high unemployment statistics from the EU and a UN-study that comes to the conclusion that within the next 20 years the global economy needs additional 600 million jobs, LinkedIn-founder and CEO Reid Hoffman believes that only STARTUPs can deliver that amount. Traditional corporations will only create between 10 to 20 million of those jobs, but startups the rest.
Whatever the truth is, we need more startups and people who are willing to and can found them. And we need to teach them how to do that and not be hostile towards learning about entrepreneurship in school like it happens in Germany. We rather have to follow the Finnish model of teaching it. With Spain's 50% youth unemployment rate and similar rates in Southern and Eastern Europe, this becomes a more and more pressing issue.
Today's NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - comes in time for the holidays. With all the stress of preparing food for large family gatherings an additional pair of hands may be really really helpful. And I have just the thing for you: the robotic kitchen that may be a bit slower in preparing the delicious cake, but that gives you more time to unwrap your gifts and have conversations.
