Irving Wladawsky-Berger
A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects.
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Category: Digital Money and Payments
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“We have finally learned how to tread more lightly on our planet. It’s about time,” writes Andrew McAfee in the Introduction to his new book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next. McAfee is Co-Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital…
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Digital transformations have generally followed three distinct stages. First comes the use of IT to improve the productivity and quality of back- and front-end processes. Distribution is next, leveraging the universal reach and connectivity of the Internet for online transactions and access to information. Finally, the transformation reaches a tipping point when technologies radically change…
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A few weeks ago I attended two back-to-back blockchain events in Toronto, – the Blockchain Research Institute All-Member Summit followed by the inaugural Blockchain Revolution Global conference. Both events included a number of excellent talks and panels. One of the presentations I particularly enjoyed was Scaling Blockchain for the Enterprise: Emerging Business Models, by IBM’s…
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Blockchain was created around a decade ago as the public, distributed ledger for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Most everyone agrees that it’s a truly brilliant architecture, built on decades-old fundamental research in cryptography, distributed data, distributed computing, game theory and other advanced technologies. When it first came to light, blockchain had no broader goals beyond supporting…
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A recent issue of The Economist included a special report on cryptocurrencies and blockchains. The Economist’s overall conclusion was that “Bitcoin has been a failure as a means of payment, but thrilling for speculators.” Its assessment of blockchain was somewhat more positive. “For blockchains, the jury is still out,… For all the technology’s potential, though,…
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In 2016, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy launched its first annual Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC). The key objective of the IIC is to help create greater shared prosperity around the world by awarding over one million dollars in prizes each year to to entrepreneurs that are leveraging technology advances to reinvent the future of…
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A few weeks ago I wrote about social physics, a new discipline that aims to help us better understand and predict the behavior of human groups. Social physics is based on the premise that all event-data representing human activity, – e,g,, phone call records, credit card purchases, taxi rides, web activity, - contain a special set…
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Blockchain Revolution, published in May of 2016 by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, was one of the first books that explained the promise of blockchain technologies to the general public. Its central argument is that for nearly four decades, the Internet has been great for reducing the costs of searching, collaborating, and exchanging information. But,…
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One can look at the transformational impact of IT on companies and industries through a variety of lenses, – e.g., products and services, revenue and profit, sales and support, market strategy. One of the most important such lenses is the impact of IT on business processes, that is, on how work is actually done across…
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A killer app is an IT application whose value is simple to explain, its use is fairly intuitive, and the application turns out to be so useful that it helps propel the success of a product or service. Spreadsheets and word processing were major factors in the 1980s adoption of personal computers, for example. A…