# 1: Triple D: Digital Technologies that are Disrupting the Development ecosystem

About 20 years into the 21st century, innovations in digital technologies are taking center stage in most areas of commerce. Big data are everywhere and companies and governments all over the world are figuring out how to handle them, what they can do to improve value creation and how they are changing our understanding of privacy. Is privacy even possible these days? The internet of things or IOT is promising to increase data usage, collection, and creation to completely new levels. With every newly connected device, terabytes of data will be produced that somehow need be analyzed, turned into useful information, and create value for individuals, organizations, and society. Because the quantity of data vastly exceeds our human cognitive capacities, artificial intelligence, machine learning (AI/ML), neural networks, topic modeling, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, deep learning, and hundreds of others strangely fashionable words have become part and parcel of our daily vernacular. These technologies enable us to look at the world and the data it produces in new and exciting ways, creating insights our human brains could not create and assessing quantities of data so enormous we cannot even begin to fathom the discoveries and opportunities that they may produce.

AI/ML has a dark side as well. There is genuine and righteous consternation about the ethics of artificial intelligence and the risks the creation of an interventionist Supreme Being may entail, but this article is not about that. Last but not least, there is blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin that has governments and companies all over the world both scared and excited. Will decentralized cryptographic currencies replace fiat money backed by national governments? Will bitcoin replace the US dollar as the de facto global reserve currency? Will a blockchain-based financial system move away from fractional reserve banking? Will governments lose control over monetary policy if every random Joe can create his own currency, develop an ecosystem around it, and engage in economic exchange without the use of government-backed currencies?

I do not think it will get that far, but this convergence ecosystem of big data, IOT, AI/ML and blockchain (Lundy 2017) is proving to be a very powerful engine of innovation and disruption. One of bitcoin’s most foremost thinkers has suggested that blockchain technology will create a paradigmatic shift in the economy and society more generally. He refers to this as the fourth infrastructure inversion (Antonopoulos 2016). Following the combustion engine, electricity, and the internet, the impact blockchain technology can have on all areas of life is enormous. For those who are unfamiliar with blockchain, do not worry, soon enough you won’t have to understand it anyway. Much like the protocols that make the World Wide Web possible are beyond the understanding of most people, so too will blockchain fade into the background. It will become part and parcel of the infrastructure through which we create, capture, and exchange things of value like currency, electricity, intellectual property, ownership rights, carbon and so on. And it will all be possible without the intermediation of a third party. While decentralization and disintermediation are currently all the hype, they are also more than a hype. They provide an alternative vision for the future. They inspire a new economic paradigm and together with the technologies of the convergence ecosystem, they will spark a social, ecological, and economic revolution. Welcome to the new economy!

However, to be entirely honest, I am not going to delve too deeply into these technologies either. I will talk about them in as far as they are used to achieve the things that I am truly interested in: durability, sustainable development, business model design, and organizations with a purpose.

In my work as a scholar, my colleague and co-founder Ryan Merrill and I have developed a thesis about how these digital technologies are changing the way we can address the big problems of our time. In our opinion, no problem is more important than climate change and all its related problems of oceanic acidification, biodiversity collapse, deforestation, overexploitation of natural resources, and the destruction of natural biomes big and small that are vital to sustain life on earth. Yes, we are currently rightfully distracted by the Covid-19 crisis. Sitting in Singapore right now as the confinement is relaxed so little that it will simply persist until at least the end of June, it is hard to think about anything else. But climate change will jeopardize the life of many more people than Covid-19 will, so let’s stay focused.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) have set ambitious targets for business and the world to be achieved by 2030. When it comes to achieving the climate related goals, failure is not an option. The science and the predictions of what will happen to this blue planet and the dominant species that roam around on it are very disturbing. We need action and we need it fast. In sharing my thoughts and experiences, I hope to inspire business leaders and graduates, ten-year olds, and pensioners, politicians and prisoners to join forces to deploy the digital technologies we have come to rely on for many of our daily comforts, for something larger than ourselves. Climate change is the quintessential existential threat. It is a problem so complex and hard to grasp that many people consider it almost a matter of faith. You have believers and non-believers, although the latter are few and far between, especially outside the USA. There are also still people who actually believe the earth is flat. From a scientific perspective, we can safely put climate change deniers in the same box as those flat-earthers. Only the flat-earthers are a relatively harmless bunch of wackadoodles, not a powerful lobby of established fossil fuel interests, not nation states whose entire existence and survival is contingent on pumping oil out of the ground, not Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Gas.

But eventually the established interests, the powerful incumbents will be overthrown. Not violently and abruptly, but through continuous innovation and through stronger political and social commitment. Already, the sinking costs of photovoltaics have made solar energy production competitive with coal and gas plants. The same is happening for wind energy, and as innovations in energy storage are being developed, the green energy trend is continuously eating away the fossil fuel industry’s market dominance. Whether the speed of this transition, the energiewende as the Germans call it, is high enough is uncertain. Actually it is not uncertain. The speed is way too low. Setbacks like the USA pulling out of the Paris accord are not getting us anywhere. Yet despite the shifted political landscape in the US, the rest of the world has not abandoned its climate objectives and neither have most US companies and many of its states.

Regardless, there is one truth that always wins in the capitalist system: whatever is profitable, will be done. Politics can play an important role in creating the conditions within which doing well and doing good go hand in hand, but even without such political support, green technology is marching forward unabatedly. But technology can only do so much.

Without the right business model, the best technology does not turn into a product or service that people want to use. Whatever engineers, natural scientists, biologists, developers and other creators come up with, does not turn into a killer application or into the next unicorn by chance. Invention requires strategy, marketing, partnerships, capability development, a financial architecture, product or service development, and a value proposition that entices customers. It requires a business model that eventually creates value for consumers at the start of the demand chain, enables a firm to capture some of that value and transfer the rest of it to other actors in the firms’ value network.

As an academic, I should not worry too much about putting these ideas into practice. My species tends to prefer to shelter of the ivory tower, from which we look down on the messy reality and dream up theoretical laws that allegedly govern human and organizational behavior. Academics like me keep on discovering contingencies to existing theories and occasionally someone has a really bright and new idea but too much of what we do is scratching at the surface. At some point, it stopped being enough for me. While I still enjoy the intellectual circle jerk that is academic writing and publishing, I decided there was not only time but also space to do more. So I decided to start building my own organizations, and I decided to write for a different audience. Thanks for reading