Blockchain Revolution

Wikinomics introduced the concept of ideagoras—emerging marketplaces for
ideas, inventions, and uniquely qualified minds, which enabled companies like P&G
to tap global pools of highly skilled talent more than ten times the size of its own
workforce. Firms use services like InnoCentive and Inno360 to facilitate holding
“Challenges,” “Digital Brainstorms,” and other techniques to find the right temporary
talent outside their boundaries to address critical business challenges. It’s about using
data to find the right talent to hack your business for the better.

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Talent—the uniquely qualified minds to solve problems—can post their
availability to the ledger so that firms can find them. Rather than InnoCentive, think
bInnoCentive. Individuals can cultivate not only a portable identity, but also a
portable résumé (an extended version of their identity) that can provide appropriate
information about them to potential contractors. Think a distributed skills inventory
owned by no one or everyone.
As every business becomes a digital business, the hackathon is an important form
of ideagora. Now with blockchain technology and open source code repositories,
every company could provide venues to geeks and other business builders for problem
solving, innovating, and creation of new business value.
Blockchains and blockchain-based software repositories will fuel such activity.
Companies can now use powerful new programming languages like the Ethereum
blockchain with built-in payment systems. An excerpt from a conversation on Hacker
News: “Imagine how cool it would be if I could share a guid for my repo—and then
your bit client (let’s call it gitcoin, or maybe just bit) can fetch new commits from a
distributed block chain (essentially the git log). Github is no longer an intermediary or
a single point of failure. Private repo? Don’t share the guid.”
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How cool indeed! (Well, maybe you didn’t understand one iota of that little piece
of coolness, but you probably get the idea.)
6.
Blockchain Makers
Manufacturing-intensive industries can give rise to planetary ecosystems for sourcing,
designing, and building physical goods, marking a new phase of peer production. It’s
about making it on the blockchain. Just as a modern aircraft has been described as “a
bunch of parts flying in formation,” companies in most industries are tending to
disaggregate into networks of suppliers and partners. Three-dimensional printing will
move manufacturing closer to the user, bringing new life to mass customization.
Soon, data and rights holders can store metadata about any substance from human
cells to powered aluminum on the blockchain, in turn opening up the limits of
corporate manufacturing.
This technology is also a powerful monitor of the provenance of goods and their
movement throughout a supply network. Consider an industry close to all our hearts
(and other body parts)—the food industry. Today your local grocery store may claim
—and truly believe—that its beef is safe, raised humanely, fed quality ingredients,
and given no unnecessary drugs. But it can’t guarantee it. No one keeps histories of
single cows; bad things happen to good bovines. We trust our hamburger with no
means to verify. Usually it makes no difference; billions and billions keep getting
served. But once in a while, we get a glimpse of mad cow disease.

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The food industry could store on the blockchain not just the number of every
steer, but of every cut of meat, potentially linked to its DNA. Three-dimensional
search abilities could enable comprehensive tracking of livestock and poultry so that
users could link an animal’s identity to its history. Using sophisticated (but relatively
simple to use) DNA-based technologies and smart database management, even the
largest meat producers could guarantee quality and safety. Imagine how these data
might expedite lab tests and a community health response to a crisis.
Knowing how our food was raised or grown is not a radical idea. Our ancestors
bought supplies at local markets or from retailers who sourced products locally. If
they didn’t like how a local rancher treated his cattle, they didn’t buy his beef. But
transportation and refrigeration have estranged us from our foodstuffs. We’ve lost the
values of the old food chain.
We could restore these values. We could lead the world in developing a modern,
industrialized, open food system with down-to-earth family farm values.
Transparency lets companies with superior practices differentiate themselves. The
brand could evolve from the marketing notion of a trustmark—something that
customers believe in because it’s familiar—into a relationship based on transparency.
Surely food producers have an appetite for that.
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7.
The Enterprise Collaborators
Yochai Benkler spoke about how blockchain technology could facilitate peer-to-peer
collaboration within firms, and between firms and peers of all sorts. “I’m excited
about the idea that you have a fully distributed mechanism for accounting, for actions,
and for digital resources across anything; whether it’s currency, whether it’s social
relations and exchange, or whether its an organization.”
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Today, commercial collaboration tools are beginning to change the nature of
knowledge work and management inside organizations.
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Products like Jive, IBM
Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft Yammer, Google Apps for
Work, and Facebook at Work are being used to improve performance and foster
innovation. Social software will become a vital tool for transforming virtually every