Fragmented Industries should Transform not Just Innovate.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a reality; many industries feel the effects of technological and generation disruption. Airbnb is a prime example of a company that has effectively leveraged the Internet to grow from small businesses to disrupt the hotel industry. Today, founded in 2008, Airbnb is more significant than the world’s top five hotel brands put together.

Successful companies wanting to lead or at least stay ahead of their industry disruption embrace the rapid progression of technological advancements to explore with new approaches what it is holding for their industry. They must be ready to learn from inexpensive failures. They will need to learn how to connect and scale the abundance of opportunities in terms of, for example, talent, data, or capital.

We see fully tech-enabled experiences in traditional fragmented industries such as property management, health & wellness, and conference planning. Technology plays a pivotal role in streamlining the operational complexities of managing hundreds of properties, patients, or events/trade shows and disintermediating these industries by replacing middlemen with little value.

We believe for an existing business, the path is in transforming, not just innovating their industry. Successful CEOs will need to change their core business and build new edge business units simultaneously. This transformation is not a simple task, but it is possible. Moreover, it is the best way to combat the immune system of organizations. Amazon/AWS and Apple/iPhone are great examples of how large companies create new successful business units on the EDGE to drive top-line growth while adjusting their core business and culture to respond more rapidly to changes in the external world.

Exponential transformation is a detailed implementation handbook for becoming an Exponential Organization enabling organizations to speed up their transformation and overcome the obstacles to success. At Escalate Group, we have practical experience creating new exponential business units while transforming your traditional business.

It is possible to remove friction, pain, and cost from traditional fragmented industries, such as reimagining rental, healthcare, learning, or networking experiences and helping to improve the quality of service and increase the productivity of the participants in such fragmented industries.

Brainstorm Swarms

Now more than ever, companies need fresh ideas, creativity, and critical thinking to overcome many of the situations that a world pandemic has pushed us against the wall.   In many organizations, we encounter a significant amount of uncertainty when making decisions and face gaps in expertise within their workforce in certain areas that seem to be the right ones to explore for the business.

The power of collaborative work

We are aware there is an abundance of brilliant minds with the experience and talent that can collaborate temporarily as a pool of prequalified workers with availability to share their knowledge.  To leverage these external workforces, we hired them for our customers on an as-needed basis to conduct innovation brainstorming sessions, to help companies evaluate and analyze ideas that have not been in-depth discussed. 

With this concept in mind, we are addressing the power of Brainstorm Swarms.   Brainstorm Swarms are online interactive sessions of two hours where a company team can pose questions on specific topics related to their industry.  The inquiries are presented to a Global carefully vetted group of advisors and experts that will provide useful insights, contact, recommendations, and breakthrough solutions you can never imagine on your own.

The power of collaborative work and collective intelligence is a valuable resource to test ideas and explore opportunities from different angles provided by the experience of those who already went through that path.

How to engage in a Brainstorm Swarm

Before going into a Brainstorm Swarm session, we will assess our customers’ needs to gather a clear view of the strategic thinking that the company is willing to get insights and recommendations.  Based on that, we will proceed to engage the best minds of advisors and experts who have the experience and knowledge of each field of action to align their inputs with our customers’ expectations.

The practice of Innovation Swarms has introduced companies to fresh thinking and disruptive innovation in a practical and customized way to tune up projects, concepts and recalibrate ideas from its conception to maturity.

If you are interested in knowing more about the revolutionary concept of Brainstorm Swarms, contact us to explore more and start the process of bringing on board brilliant ideas to re-imagine your organization.

My experience at the EXO World Digital Summit

What a wonderful three days at the EXO World Digital Summit with around 1500 or more global participants! Greater than a Digital Summit, it was a Digital Festival. Perhaps a novel way of Summit that will lead us to a newborn category of omnichannel events.  

 I have had the privilege of listening to many speakers during the past years, first at the Singularity University Executive Program at Moffett Field. Later at several SU Global Summits in downtown San Francisco. Moreover, at many podcasts, when working out in my smart bike training at home. This week the new digital experience created by the organizer of the EXO World made it different and better.   

I noticed I was more engaged with participating from home and sharing the experience with my family. Actively commenting within my several WhatsApp and Discord groups, broadcasting to my Twitter and LinkedIn communities, and crowdsourcing the notes of the Summit.  

Ironically in the middle of the quarantine, the whole adventure felt like an enhanced “business” week. Perhaps this better experience to learning and networking is partially explained by the “metacognition” concept presented by @NicoleDreiske on day one.  

The Summit brought to me many take-aways, and it was not easy to select my top “take-home-value.” Disclaimer: it was physically impossible to hear from all the presenters as multiple sessions were happening at the same time. I will binge myself into the recordings to complete the presentations and to listen again to the segments I liked the most. Meanwhile, here my list created right after the experience ended.  

Scarcity = Abundance – TRUST  

I have been wired, for more than five years, to the concept that exponential technologies are enabling us to make more significant gains and solve our big problems in the next two decades. I understand trust as a critical enabler for web 3.0 (the value internet). I evangelize how business models of the past century are based on scarcity, while the business models of this century are based on Abundance.  

However, early on, I felt very connected when @SalimIsmail presented Abundance in terms of Trust while inviting us to move from the male (patriarchy, information wall-guarded, oil-based-world) to the female (distributive and abundant world, collaboration, nurturing, positive reimagining better world) archetypes. Combine with, Peter Diamandis’s remarkable commentary about the inequalities, and his quote, “I’m not worried about artificial intelligence, I’m worried about human stupidity.” It completed my first take-home value.   

An Aha moment – “And COVID just accelerated it”  

@JeffBooth explained at his session that we’ve printed $186 trillion worth of money over the past 20 years, to generate $46 trillion of GDP growth. Then, he illustrated how we are living a deflationary abundance from technological development, e.g., cell phones, are staggering. So, given this increasing deflation, governments are creating a structural problem printing more money as they are destroying the value of cash. All this was pre-Coronavirus.  

He cited how Zoom went from 10M to 200M users in a month to explained that COVID just accelerate it. They are not going to go back to 10 million after the Coronavirus, he added. “This delta and more people working from home are going to put a downward price on commercial real estate prices, which will lead to a subprime crisis.”  

Jeff added, such a crisis and the debt will lead to more dislocation and inequality in society, which will eventually lead to uprisings, wars, and the rise of dictators—causing a system reset.  

Another path is to “let it fail,” Booth commented, but that will cause a global depression like the one from the 1930s, and it can cause the banking system to collapse. Can policymakers stomach this?   

Furthermore, he commented that the loss of trust in one’s currency might lead to the possible pegging of some currencies to bitcoin or other similar cryptocurrencies. Some tech (e.g., crypto-currency) will disrupt this and ultimately lead to an economic explosion. And COVID just accelerated it.  

We have to open the space for the new generation.  

The youth is the future of the world, the future of our countries and our cities. They are the next generation, the entrepreneurs of the Singularity age. We should enable future generations to take the lead.  

The dreamers touched my daughters and me. Dream Tank is an organization on a mission to ignite kids around the world through entrepreneurship to make their biggest dreams become a reality. They are here to activate 1 billion young people worldwide to build solutions to our global crisis and our future. Xprize, Openexo, and many other partners genuinely believe in unleashing the creative ideas of young people to design the future and are standing with them. How are we going to contribute? 

 Here another seven moments from the Digital Summit, worthy of comment. 

@PaulSaffo was explaining how the City-State concept, born out of the Information revolution, is a new challenger in the 21st century. It is as a dominant force versus the Nation-State model from the 19th century.  

@AnneConnely was citing Vitalik Buterin to explain how blockchain removes intermediaries. “Instead of putting the taxi drivers out of work, blockchain puts Uber out of work and lets the drivers work with the customer directly.” She added, much of today was designed around centralized trust models – the future is decentralized. It will be done from the bottom up.  

@VishenLakhiani was ending to-do-lists, phone-calls, emails, regular meetings, and presentations. Cultivating flow, and embracing collaboration and reflection through social tools. Recommending to use the OODA Loop for decision making: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.  

@DavidRoberts remarks about how CEO training is different to SEAL and CIA agents training and how the second ones are prepared to operate within a continuously changing and highly uncertain environments. Should CEO training improve?  

@PaulPagnato inviting companies to have Privacy and Transparency Standards, while explaining his 6Ts model: Transparency, Terms, Total Accountability, Total Cost, Truth, and TRUST.   

@AndrewHessel’s closing remarks: “the future of life is that we’re going to design and build more and more of it.” We have to navigate the limitations, opportunities, and ethics and “we have to move beyond the fear of the virus.”   

@RaymondMcCauley’s interactive and creative presentation illustrated how biotech will move from current applications in pharmacogenetics, disease identification, consumer genetics, precision agriculture, industrial-biology, etc., into CRISPR to create vaccines! Antibiotic, antiviral – Are we going to see the end of infectious disease?  

Thank you to all thought-leaders that took part in the EXO World Summit.  

To end this post, I would like to share a selection of my favorite quotes from my EXO Ambassadors colleagues when reflecting on the EXO World Digital Summit. 

“It is super inspiring, not only the content and the interactions but also for developing new formats for building community and making movements happen at a large scale. Next stop abundance, cheers,” – Lars Lin Villebaek

“What a fabulous chance for exponential thinkers to ideate the best possible future together. Congratulations to all involved!!! Look what can be achieved in one month, navigating huge complexity.” – Emilie Sydney-Smith

“In addition to amazing content and people, it has been a breakthrough experience in terms of emotional engagement. Last night I felt deeply sorry it was over. This feeling so deep never really occurred to me in traditional events. My Singularity attendance 8 years ago was an intellectual breakthrough but certainly not so emotional.” Augusto Fazioli 

“ExO World was awesome! It was as (or even more) inspiring and intensive as SU but accessible to everyone, which is the way to go (democratizing inspiration!). Kudos to all the team who made it possible. I think this event will be the first of his kind, looking forward for more to come 🚀” – Francisco Palao 

“ExOWorld! What-a-festival amidst gloomy times! A zero-carbon conference, attended by over 1500 purpose-driven individuals and knowledge seekers, from 50+ countries. None traveled. Everyone stayed at home with family, ate home-cooked food, logged-in at all odd hours from the comfort of their living room or bed, in their pajamas. All for a single cause: transform the world for a better future!” – Suman Sasmal