Glenn Parry, Professor of Digital Transformation at University of Surrey - Digital And Real Economy

[Music] hello and welcome to denis ward the city's abc open business council series we are here again for another fantastic uh profile and interview and today with someone that is changing the world digital economy and creating new solutions both in the academic world but as well on the business world and on the technology world which is kind of three areas that at the moment are interrelated more than ever so i welcome to our series professor glenn perry hello professor glenn so um it's difficult to summarize the profile and the and the achievements of professor glenn perry because he's been doing fantastic amazing things that touch like i mentioned both the digital economy um as well the academic world the blockchain supply chain but a lot of cutting-edge solutions that have been used to look at how to optimize business supply chains and a lot of other solutions so i'll just read and try to summarize uh some of the achievements that we're going to be talking about in the interview so professor glenn perry is the professor of digital transformation uh is the other department of digital economy entrepreneurship and innovation and the co-director of the decades that is a center for decentralized digital economy and which is part of the university of surrey he's a phd with a huge background academic and the um diplomas in a lot of diplomas i could go for some time he has as well the the mostly on the university roles on the university of serbia she's one of the the leading universities in the uk um the decade that is probably the the most high profile department that is the co-director the center for decentralized and as well responsible for business school impact champion which is an area that i'm particularly important both for our cities abc and open business council platforms uh his work is characterized by an approach of partnering with organizations to develop creative solutions to challenges it's been as well looking at the way organizations can help with business models uh value capture servitization and supply chains and he has managed research consortium the auto automotive industry aerospace media and construction industries among others and of course he has a huge portfolio of publications in international journals and academics and there's been uh as well collaborating with a lot of uh different sectors like the healthcare um with projects like uh um the manufacturing system of mss just as an example that provides the body on the body manufacturing for therapeutics and as well a lot of other projects that touches um iot computer data and storage for individuals and i could go through all the different achievements so um it's a pleasure to have you here professor glenn um i will put all the bio but i'm really excited about this interview thank you so much so i i will go straight away so to the point of uh so with a huge academic but as well business background i would like to see how this mix in your career and the background from your parents from your education from your curriculus put all together because it's an interesting puzzle from the business to the academic and as well right now more and more technological background which is i know that is not necessary your background how did it all come together um well i i suppose i failed quite early on um and that then makes you never want to do that again so um since then it's just really a lot of hard work um but also wanting to make a difference and so a lot of my academic work i always want to see some real-world application and i've been very fortunate in having a lot of great people who've mentored me who i've worked with and i've been able to see how what they do and sort of tried to follow in their footsteps in in some way shape or form so yeah i i started off as a chemist and so i have a chemistry background my first degree was chemistry with business so it's always been a meld of those two things and then i i worked through i worked at british steel um making paint and that went really quite well but i was it was always you know applying chemistry to make something for a commercial product and that you know that led to a sponsored phd was doing the same sort of thing i was making nano composites by that point blending organics and ceramics on the nano scale and again sponsored and looking for the commercial development of that and really enjoyed that that side of things but um you know when i graduated my phd i think i did what a lot of people at cambridge do and that's i ended up in the city as a consultant which i loved but you learned so much about business and very quickly um but i did miss academia so i went went off to warwick and i worked for uk lean aerospace there and we were applying again the thinking of the time which was lean i don't know about lean engineering but how you apply that to business and just that transfer has always been part of what i did and it led on to projects in construction automotive and that's when we started to see digital emerge i worked with um the record firm emi we'd seen this what we were calling um servitization which is the move from selling products to providing services and we saw that happen in music as as the physical product the the cd or the record was replaced by online streaming and they were losing millions and millions every year and we were modeling it and i you know working with great teams of people around well around europe a couple of spanish colleagues and farron bendrell who's now birmingham professor oscar bastinza who's um in granada we were looking at the development of this market and showing how how the physical product had become digital and i found that fascinating that you know this this process without happening and we just kept seeing it and that really led me into this applied digital world so from there many other projects really looking at the change in the fundamental business models as the digital technology move forward i mean i suppose i'm showing my age because some people will probably imagine well music's always been digital [Applause] but it was quite it was quite a new thing you know i remember napster and all these artists worrying about their income and you know it's a real problem and we've seen it with digital arts we've seen it with with music with film and so books as well and i've been looking at all of these spaces and that transition and really trying to understand what's going on where the money is going seeing the growth of these companies and looking at solutions that if you like help maybe creators help businesses and realize the value of the work that they do so we you know obviously it's an academic i do have quite a strong fundamental academic perspective which is i like to follow what i call the full good agenda so we have blockchain for good and this is trying to understand what good means and good is contextual good is perceptual and we get really philosophical i know we can we can get right right into the philosophy of what good means but but from a sort of simple perspective good is measured by value so when we talk about what is value or valuable we're really talking about people's values and then we get into all that's how you measure good and value might be money but it might be you know i value the experience i value friendship i value truth i value honesty and therefore these things are seen as good and how do we create that in a digital world at most businesses wherever they are money is is the proxy but you talk to entrepreneurs and they often have quite a strong mission an agenda for good and it's really tapping into understanding what's driving them what are they trying to create how it's good and that i find that really interesting that's what motivates me to do all these different projects amazing and so so well i think you have you are a global authority definitely in blockchain for good but as well a lot of different areas so before we go into this more technical and as well some of these uh areas that are critical actually for our world so coming back to your academic background so you mentioned cambridge warwick and now of course university of surrey so can you tell us a bit of this background because i think sometimes people don't understand all the work that these universities are doing that is critical for the rest of the world economy and first if you look at the vaccination now during kov19 was possible mostly because of cooperation between a lot of research between departments of the universities if you look at uh even most of the blockchains right now of course blockchain is is that the component of crypto and all the the which is right now is crazy because uh we are right now in february 2020 for the people listening to us in the future and we reach one trillion dollars of the valuation of bitcoin which was the first blockchain mainstream case at least the blockchain protocol behind bitcoin but there's much more work that has been done within the universities that actually made all of this possible actually most of the papers made this technology because it comes from encryption it comes from a lot of different technologies so from all this work with the universities and as well from your chemical background and as well that part how do you see this bridge between the academy and the real economy because i think that particularly as well some some i think some mentions on dimension three of the leading universities in uk cambridge warwick and surrey um well universities i i think are often the training grounds for you know many business technical people it's where you get your fundamental training and also i think universities are are centers for networking where you meet very technical specialist people and you know throughout my my academic career um you know i've i've been able to meet these people it's it's a place in life where it's sort of a bubble in many ways because everybody you meet is very clever so you get to meet these very sharp people and it's a real privilege as an academic in that i get older but my students stay the same age because you know every year i'm a year older but the second years are still the same age so you meet this constant flow of of new ideas new perspectives new ways of seeing the world now that's a real privilege and all the different universities i've been at you know i was at bath i was at university of west england and each time you're exposed to these different groups of of very smart people so as an academic you get that and you get to stay if you like young through others hearing these new ideas and the way people perceive the world and that's keeps your mind thinking about these new business models um i'm working among colleagues i mean i like people working different ways um i like to work in a very open way um a colleague of mine uh dr valerie purchase said there are two sorts of people those who work in abundance and those who work in scarcity and i i really held on to that i mean she's she's over in northern ireland and but she said yeah some some people have one thought and they hold it close and that's fine and you can develop that thought and polish it but other people they they share everything and if you share everything other people who have like mind share everything with you and that's how i work and that's kind of how i've managed to do so many different things you know i find something interesting and i just share all these ideas and that sort of brings it pays back to you because people share their ideas and if you read someone like um kadama hangs greg he wrote philosophical homoneutics which is in his time he was trying to understand biblical texts but what he was trying to understand was truth and he he also wrote truth and method it's a very deep book but in trying to understand truth what he says is we all approach the world with our prejudice our pre-judgment and he doesn't mean that in a prejudicial way but in terms of we pre-judge a situation you can't open a door without pre-judging if i turn the handle i expect this thing to open so you have an understanding a mental model of the world but how do we expand that and he said well we are we expand it through discourse and that can be you engaging with an idea reading a book or actually talking to somebody else and if you engage in other people's discourse you then expand your knowledge horizons because you understand their prejudices their prejudgments you understand their mental models of the world and that expands the way you think and the more people you can you can meet who have these broader knowledge horizons than you the more yours get to expand and i think this is really where universities are are great centers for collaboration because you often bring in a global mix of people with different understanding the world very different experiences and through exposure and discussions you understand okay yeah this is your world view and you appreciate that and maybe you share yours back you expand your understanding of the world and it both shrinks the world and expands your knowledge base and for me that's that's what a great university does it provides you with learning but an environment in which you can learn and we see that's you know the leading universities that's what they're very good at these sort of events and actually what you're doing yourself you know bringing knowledge together having these conversations having discourse that other people can tap into and learn and expand their knowledge horizons and find new truth new knowledge in the world and you know that that is valuable and it's inherently good if you read uh sort of frank kenna's work on moral ethics you know what is inherently good well truth and knowledge are perceived to be inherently good they're just good and you know we can argue the the truth in that statement itself but for me i i'll buy that i like knowledge i like truth and that i think is good and that's what we seek to achieve and it's valuable uh what value we gain from that you know it might be helping others it might be extending life and we're seeing that through covid just the incredibles work that came out to make those viruses so quickly um and that's sort of you see this are the anti-vaxx movement where they're saying oh you know how did this happen so quickly like it didn't happen quickly there's decades of work to get to here where this can happen but it's like you know it's typical sort of iceberg stuff people go you did that very quickly you're like yeah but look at the look at the back story and you know the number of people in the collaboration and global effort and the way that we can now collaborate using digital technologies to meet people to expand our knowledge horizons you know what 12 months ago maybe 14 months ago i was using zoom but nobody else knew what zoom core was or very few people i mean obviously you would be a technologist but we lived in this little bubble where we're like oh you go to the conference now i'm just going to zoom no what's that i get well it's a bit like skype but most people just you're doing video calls you're like yeah we do virtual conferences but why do we do it because we can efficiently share knowledge and learn from each other and you know this shrinks the world even more we can chat to people all over the world and my team you know i work i always try and work with the best people i mean who doesn't you want to talk to the best people and and using technology like this your people can be anywhere i mean one of my guys um was working down in in portsmouth and then he moved to sheffield and we're we're based in guilford and it's like yeah he comes down when we really need a face to face but i i i think he's a great guy he really knows his stuff he's a programmer does ai machine learning that sort of thing he's bouncing around the place and yet we can still work together because the technology allows and that again allows this acceleration innovation entrepreneurship really to spread and i i guess you know many of your the people watching this might start to recognize this now corporate i think this is the the beauty of the world we have i think although like you mentioned we have a diversity of opportunities and tools although we still have a huge complexity because like you mentioned we have privilege because we know how to use these tools and we are actually using it for good and we try as well to expand our knowledge and the people around us this brings us to the work we've been dealing with digital transformation and as well the esco director of decade department so digital transformation is the most important thing and kofi just accelerated that for the world economy but we still have a massive paradox is that uh and i think for us if you look at professor yuval noah which is another academic that i like to quote is that if you look at the challenges that a huge part of the world is not digital it's still paper it's still the biggest technologies paper but the challenge we have is that at the same time all the biggest money and chunks of transactions in the planet are right now operated and managed by the biggest digital players in the planet um so of course this is very simplistic just to put it that way is more complex than this but i think my question to you is um as an expert in digital economy and as well a researcher and as well as leading a department that is a world leading department on that or leading research center on that area my question is how do you look at the re the challenges that we have to accelerate the bridges between the real economy and the digital kind of twin economy we've been talking about digital twins for cities but in the other days digital wins for us for each of our own identity because each of us has a complete data track record that is right now controlled by most of these corporations and but even the governments don't have that data um so and and then then we have a lot of paradox and i'm complexifying the question but deliberately because i know that you're going to be tackling in different ways i'm sure but is that in one end let's say the transactions in finance 90 percent are done in in digital but then the supply chain is all paper and all complex that's why i actually created the platform cities abc and open business council because i was working with governments and i understood that there was not even clear date about cities and much less about business so i would like to understand from both the research but as well the industry how do you see this bridge which is probably the biggest challenge on the history of mankind because if you don't do this right at the moment you're going to have robots and you're going to have all the ais that you just touch uh replacing humanity if humanity doesn't do this well um but yeah it's a just want to touch more on the bridge between digital economy and the real economy okay and now i i had a little project a few years back where i was asked to look at the uk and uh could i measure the digital economy versus the real economy and i came to the conclusion that there is only one economy and it's the digital economy or the economy and the reason i came to that was my window cleaner has a website and is on facebook and you can't make a phone call without using you know it's all voice over ip it's glass so the whole phone network in the uk is digital all the switching is digital so we have to try and think what do we mean by the digital economy because it's all digital somewhere um i think there are digitalization and digitization which is you know some records are still on paper and maybe that's a good thing um some records are being uh digitized and some businesses are becoming digital um and i think it's a degree of appropriateness that we really need to look at and we won't get it right first time but i think what we have to do is iterate and be prepared to you know with all business we learn over time we iterate that the problems i see are if you remember um back in 2000 i had a project on erp system implementation when the millennium bug was the big story and we were working with aerospace companies and myself and a a guy who works with g now paul price looked at erp systems implementation and maintenance and how would we get through the millennium bug and there was an awful lot of work done to make sure systems didn't crash and what we were finding there was a lot of the system implementations okay there was the issues with dates and you know certain digital components timing out and maybe going wrong on when they hit the sort of zero zero of of the date but actually we started to unearth when people had implemented the system they'd written a lot of assumptions in and these had nothing to do necessarily with the millennium problem but there were things like lead times on products had been guessed and that had been buried in code and one example an aerospace company they'd given a 12 month lead time on a product and when i spoke to them i said yeah it takes us 16 months to manufacture that i said but your system's got a 12 month lead time in the day and they didn't know because it had been implemented the person implementing it had left and then it just been buried now for me this is the problems that are gonna come with the digital economy but they exist in the real economy the assumptions that are buried in that leads to institutionalized processes those are the big problems we're going to have to sort out and i mean you you will you will have read a lot about it already i expect the issues around training data for ai and whose data is training all this ai and is it inherently biased because if you train your ai on um you know as a generic population all the prejudices and views of that population get sort of baked into the ai and that's not particularly healthy so those i think are the problems going forward that the digital economy are gonna have to sort out and but i think the the economy itself um will be still always digital and if you like digitized transactions and non-digital at some point we're going to have to make a decision about privacy and for me that's a big question and we seem to have you know our move to digital really gone way beyond what would have been acceptable 30 years ago in terms of of access particularly government access to information on you to bank account records and you know where's privacy gone in all of this and how do we get it back gdpr in in the eu i think was a an important step but there's still a great deal of abuse of personal data going on and i think people are perhaps revealing far too much um information and we we had some research on identity theft and you know that what you can just look online people are giving away information that they don't realize is actually really sensitive so maybe education on privacy maybe a change in mindset on privacy and personal data um giving people back control i think is particularly important and there was talk of the data economy and um if you remember i think was in the economist where they had um data is the new oil and it's not a sentiment i agree with because with data its value is kind of in its flow in its use and when you use it you create more of it so when you use data you get metadata and you get you use this data but what did you use it for what did you create from it so you know from a very simple example if i've got all my personal details and i'm buying insurance somebody takes my data runs an algorithm on it and maybe creates a risk profile for me to be insured say driving my car based on that data so that creates more data from that data so now my data block's expanded but that's quite personal data and this is one of the reasons uh we created the hub of all things i think if you saw that was one of our projects and we were looking at this bigger question of the data economy and who's really benefiting from it and it's not necessarily the individual so the hub of all things created what we described as a personal data micro server pdf anyway whatever the acronym is pdas we call them now personal data accounts um and what what the idea there was was we were looking at internet of things in particular and the sort of data that was being generated in the home and i rigged up this my house and a number of other houses with lots of iot sensors and we were looking at the sort of information and i can share a link to the paper we wrote and people are really interested in that but you know we we put sensors on consumption so what was being consumed by the house because we you could say um you know this many tins of beans and things were being captured we looked at um bathroom space because that's very difficult because you're not allowed video cameras in there so we were using motion sensors we were using um humidity sensors light sensors water sensors and through all of this you could tell how often somebody showered how long they shout for how much water they used and you could tell i had an internet of things enabled towel so it had a sensor on it so when you moved it touched it it triggered the sensor so i had the first internet of things towel for fans of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy i knew where my towel was and i knew who was using it and and that was great but what we found from that was firstly i found out people were using my towel and when i wasn't there and therefore that that resource was being used more than i thought it was and it it was a consumption resource because towels you use them a certain amount and then you want to clean them but you need to know the use and iot allows that and then can some depletion resources like shampoo with um colleagues at um cambridge have made like a digital shelf and you could weigh you you put your stuff in it and it gave you a weight difference so when you used it and you put it back it's it knew you'd use that much shampoo and how much was left and then you could predict when that bottle was going to run out so we could see consumption but this is really sort of showing you about my life and when we start to correlate these data sets so we could correlate we had fitbit data so we could see that oh when this person goes running they then shower they shower for longer they use more shampoo than they would if they hadn't just gone running they use more soap than they would if they hadn't just gone running so you're seeing not only you know if tesco's for instance had your purchase data that's all they know but we could see when you use stuff why you use stuff how you use stuff you know that you use this in combination with that and those two if like shampoo and conditioners weren't what people were expecting with guys uh we were seeing people shaving in the shower and you know obviously all guys talk about where they shave when they're in the pub hey where do you show i mean it's a conversation we don't have and yet the iot sense was going well this this person's shaving in the shower they're not buying shower gel because they they in the shower shaving away well that's a different use context and that sort of information that we were gleaning super interesting for you know fast-moving consumer goods companies who are actually seeing oh this this is the use and the context for my product in real time incredible visibility but massively invasive of privacy so the hub of all things streamed all that iot data into this account that you held so you hold your data in a personal data account and actually the company with your permission can send an algorithm to your account and do work there so it can interrogate your data in your personal data account and then with your permission maybe just release the result so that um that then spawned a company called uh well it's called uh hat dex and now it's called data swift uh dot io there they're raising they've been going for five years or so uh so that's you know people are interested in that company and we we started that um a while ago based on that idea and they've they've built it out since then but the idea that you hold your data in and then you can sort of trade with it so what i think you know an interesting use case that i explored early on was insurance where instead of me giving the insurance company all my data they just send the algorithm to my pda it works the analysis and all that's sent back really is the risk profile even then we were looking at what's the absolute minimum well actually i could just send a hash of the data that you know my whatever i need to fill in probably my age and something about maybe my house if it's buildings insurance i could just send a hash of that data and a payment from my wallet address and that's all the insurance company really needs we've paid you here's a policy code and this is the data upon which it's based i don't need to hold the data they're holding the data you know the individual holds the data if there's a claim i might ask to see that data to make sure there's no fraud and if i try and change the data well i can't because it's hashed it's all secured so you can see the sort of business models that you can build on that sort of personal data account so that's that's how i see you know personal data in economy that's some of the work i've done but you know that's just a tiny snippet and that little bit sort of got me into um blockchain because we were working on that personal data and privacy piece and irene professor irene from warwick and who's also the ceo dave swift asked what about an ico because icos were big back then remember when they were a thing and i was like what does that mean so i was dispatched to go and learn about initial coin offerings and blockchains and so i went and learned all about that because data swift doesn't have a blockchain in it it's just a personal data account much like you might have an email account um so then i went and learned learned all about the world of blockchain and you know bitcoin was something around something between 250 pounds and a thousand pounds yeah and even then i didn't understand i still don't understand the value of bitcoin but that's a completely different well that's another podcast in itself now fantastic and i i think it's really important so i want to touch one thing in what said about the digital economy and i completely subscribe but the challenge i've been finding is that like you mentioned everything right now is digital okay but it's more about who is getting out of the digital economy the challenge right now is that we have i think we can say these the digitally included and the digital inclu excluded okay and that's the part of the data and that's the part of the businesses because one of the things right now is that um i always like to look at parallels with with narratives and metaphors and if you look at narratives especially in film uh you have blade runner you have uh star wars and you have star trek so at the moment definitely go in the direction of blade runner because we have this mega corporations taking part of a huge part of the world economy um and this is no longer science fiction is right now happening as we speak because for instance just from a data perspective and you are in economy no better than me but the numbers are really scary um for instance i just mentioned you touched bitcoin but bitcoin as we speak reach one trillion dollars valuation and and for instance the world economy the numbers is around 80 trillion a bit less but the world theft is around 300 trillion dollars so we have a lot of paradoxes right now that are getting more but the point is that first if you look at all the major 50 economies in the world i would say that with some exceptions all of them have adapt bigger than their economies but at the same time if you look at the major corporations like the top 20 corporations in the planet from the apples to the the facebooks that are most of them are worth close to trillion dollars at least some of them and they have more cash flow than a lot of governments together so we have and as well more data so i want to a bit more provocative uh how do you see this especially from a perspective of digital economy and as well these bridges that we were talking about um well the big the big companies issue you know i mean you're absolutely right the uh the sci-fi is ahead of us here with you know blue sun and the delos corporation and these you know sci-fi based ideas of these dominant monolithic firms and what when we study these firms we have to ask why they're doing it and you know if you take amazon um we did some research on them trying to understand their business model and what we saw was and we were interested in books and we were looking at well what what they've done is sort of inserted themselves between consume the consumer and the provider owning that interface they started to extract data and if you have ip so if you've got a book that's in copyright then you can extract value from amazon and you can say well you know what we want this much margin and this is the amount of money we want out of it but the moment stuff goes out of copyright we saw that amazon then pushed lots of options with taking the money but in terms of their business model what they were doing was they were revenue maximizing and what what that means for the consumer is amazon we're looking at providing you with the best price and creating consumer surplus that is in your head you have a mental model for how much you want to spend so maybe you want to spend ten pound on a book and they provided you with six pounds now you've got four pound surplus now in their original model they just sold books and maybe you only wanted one book but you also wanted some trainers for them to absorb that full pound surplus they had to open up and then they moved towards you know robocop i think it was who had omnicorp the corporation that sold everything but from a sort of business perspective your business model it makes sense to sell everything if you're doing it low price for the consumer because any consumer surplus means when that person goes to spend again they spend in your store and this is for me why you end up with these you know big uh alibaba and you know sell you everything type organizations with data manipulation of microsoft google and they've also been able to dominate the market with an offer so i don't think it's in the sci-fi these organizations are always seen somehow you know masterminded the evil i don't really see that having sort of watched it develop it's sort of it's a business logic and it's been allowed to grow and why is it being allowed to it's it's regulation just hasn't kept pace with it now we could regulate these organizations and smash them up if you like or break them into smaller units and absolutely that could happen and i think throughout human history we have seen large companies dominate and you know some of the the old british companies have dominated global markets tobacco companies you know there's only a small small number of british american tobacco philip morris these these were globally dominant firms and we're seeing it with data maybe it needs regulation and maybe it will be innovation because the innovation in this space is so fast and maybe they'll just get overtaken we don't know time will tell and but quite how we address it i think we'll need we're seeing that the fights going on at the moment in in australia with media news media um and maybe this sort of regulation will come in and necessarily break down these big big businesses into smaller organizations but recognizing that in breaking them down you might put the price of things up because you lose those scale economies you lose the benefits of consumer surpluses so we we have to look at what do we want to do why do we want to do that and be aware of the if you like unintended consequences um because there were a lot of uh benefits in smaller more sustainable maybe local organizations but they also cover drawbacks so we have to be cognizant of the the whole space and try and again it's it's why i like the good agenda how can we do this so that the outcome is good the good might not mean money you know massive revenues good might mean work and health and employment and security those are the things we should focus on not necessarily gross value-add which may not be the the most beneficial measure here i'm completely with you and i think the the the challenges is how we're going to make this bridge but as well is not so much about corporations it's about how you educate the organizations like you mentioned the regulators the governments there are the smes that are all laying behind this digitalization process and that one as well so there's a couple of essays where you talk about this but i think it's particularly interesting you mentioned um as well digitization and digitalization i know that this is a very important concept to understand because the devil's on details and i think it's very important to speak about digital macro concepts but let's look at the details so could you just uh the difference between these two concepts because i think this is very important even to narrow the challenge with digital transformation and the challenge with the digital economy well we talk about digitizing data you know you've got paper records you make them digital so you can search them but then you look at digitalization the make changing the business model so it's fundamentally digital um and for me it's it's what's more important is looking at what you're trying to achieve with your business model when you transform so if you make something digital how can you improve things and again you know being of a it's not a standalone being of a certain age i remember the answer phone and for me the telephone answer machine that we used to have i remember buying one i've kept one and it's at home in my cupboard um but it's a tape deck basically that plugs into the phone line and you know you you recorded it hi this is glad i'm not here right now but leave your message after the beep there goes beep and the other tape starts playing and record your message brilliant what a great device i have my little digital answer phone if you watch the rockford files the start of his that tv show there was this big tape deck with the tape spinning and tie it's jim some people won't even know what that is and but that was a physical device and almost overnight they just disappeared because the physical device was replaced by the phone service offering a digital service so they serviced the product away and that that's extraordinary if you think about it something that has was physically a product suddenly doesn't exist anymore because it's just a digital service so digitalization destroyed a business model and now it's you know it's practically free isn't it your your phone company just throws it in there and you can pick your calls up wherever you like save them delete them and it's all done in the cloud and that sort of change in a business model is so fundamental and we keep seeing it and we saw it in music and we've seen some resurgence in in vinyl and and i think and also tape cassettes but this for me is about positional goods and they are a product or artifact that has value because you can have it and somebody else can't because with the digital it's nearly always fully scalable so everybody can have that because i can reproduce it perfectly well how do i create value in the artifact well i can do it with vinyl so i only press so many or tape and how do i do it with digital so the scarcity creates value and this is where you know we we looked at digital art and how we give ownership and and again you know this takes us up to blockchain more recent ideas how um blockchain technology allows you to ascribe ownership of an item and put it in in a list so that somebody can audit against that and go yeah that that belongs to them and therefore it has value because if you have a copy maybe it's not legitimate as a copy or maybe it's very difficult to copy because of its digital nature and it links to that and that that link makes this item what it is because you know with with some artifacts it's it's having a legitimate thing you know with we look at um trainers they were yeezy these beef 350 boosts the um belugas for instance worth about 500 pounds for a pair if you look on stockx so people are trading trainers but they've got to be legitimate and there's not a lot of forgeries out there and we see these indices great companies like stockx who provide you know you send the trainers in and they check to make sure that yeah these are the real things before they post them on so they've created this digital business this whole stock index around trainers and sneakers and watches and all the other things that they sell and but it's the scarcity of those items that pushes the value of them up and how do you ensure that those items are as they should be the digital space helps but it also makes it difficult when you've got a digital item because you know as with music with napster and things being shared and digital art we have to somehow either limit or ascribe ownership and that that's where blockchain comes in i think that's a useful application of it now completely so that brings us to the blockchain in and as well as one of the biggest foundation technologies of our uh well resident development so i would like to to touch a bit so you are um we've been researching about blockchain and you touch how you went to blockchain but you've been in particular working blockchain and supply chain that is now a critical element uh for business worldwide and actually most of the organizations are trying to get in that direction but there are still a substantial number of needs around the first of all what is decentralized ledger technologies which is a very broader concept and as well what is centralized what is not centralized that's why it is as well the concept of blockchain for good but first of all before we go to that um can you guide us through the concept of blockchain and supply chain and as well some of the major studies that have been working and some case studies in the industry okay and so blockchain is i mean there's a we've got a video online that i i can maybe share a link with that explains blockchain and it's all its steps professor colomos has done that but for those who aren't familiar with it i always just just describe it as blockchain allows you to create a list of things and it's very difficult to change that list so that's what it does so it's a list that's difficult to change um so what you can put in that list is transactions so it's used in bitcoin to say you know somebody has so many bitcoins and they give some of those to somebody else and that transaction is put in the blockchain so it says now this person has this many this person has this many and that list builds up over time and it's very difficult to change that list very difficult to edit it so it provides immutability which means difficult to change and that provides provenance history to show you can look back and go yeah there it all is and you know that's great for uh so you can have obviously public private all sorts of hybrid blockchains but fundamentally that's what you're doing you're writing this list you can't go back and change it very easily so when it comes to supply chain that can be useful because if you've got say very sensitive supply chains where you want to know all the transactions that are happening then you can put information into the blockchain to say well this this this thing went from there to there went from there to there went from that and then you've got a history and you can audit against it you don't need this if you have a trusted third party so if you've got somebody you trust they can just have a database within but where you maybe have many different players who are a bit do we really trust them then you can use this this technology and you say well here it is you can all look at it all the time and you can all add to it maybe and you can create all sorts of variations on that um so where is it useful in supply chains well you can put transaction data but you can also hash a document so if you have a certificate of you know origin for something you can say well um for instance i spoke to a company the other day mind spider we're doing some really interesting work on minerals and they were saying well they've got a multi-level blockchain but you can put certificates in one level ownership details of the minerals and then you can also put who works in the mine where is the mine how much of these people paid so all that information can be held in documents and then you encrypt the document and generate a hash which is you know a special number unique to that document if that document changes that hash no longer matches it so you put the hash in the blockchain and somebody goes well show me this certificate for this this particular mineral here it is here's its origin and then the individual can check that document against the blockchain and go yeah this is an original document i trust the provenance the history of that and therefore i'm happy to buy this mineral knowing that you know there's maybe not been any slavery in that supply chain any abuse if you think about conflict diamonds that sort of thing so we were looking at this um in supply chains and we looked at an aggregator which is organic grain i think that's based in australia so if people are buying organic status they want to know is this really organic because obviously grain how do you track that and what they were doing was looking at you know putting the details of the grain i mean you could you could put in how much was harvested the weather conditions any fertilizer all that sort of information can be stored then you can track that through the supply chain but if if somebody's bought a ton of that grain and they've made two tons of products you know there's a problem you can do simple mass balance to show that that's that's not true so they've got a great system they've been working on tech rock yeah we're developing a tracing system for baby food and they're looking in china because they've had problems with contaminated baby food there this puts an rfid tag over the top of the lid and a qr code and you can scan that code and that'll bring up a picture of the tin maybe it'll say whether it's a real tin and if somebody tries to open the tin the rfid tag is broken and you can see a complete history of where that tin's been so that gives you some some veracity that your product is is the right thing world wildlife fund transceivable we're tracking uh catching fish uh in the i think in the pacific um but there's a problem with you know illegal catches and with modern slavery on board some ships with people basically being taken to sea and not coming home for years on end and you know the ship's out at sea doing something called cross-docking where one ship unloads to another that runs in and out of fort but this fishing ship stays out and see for years but if you put gps tag trackers on the ships and you have a manifest of who's working on the ship and then they log the catch as it comes in then all of those fish can then be documented and so when you buy them you've got a bit more provenance of of the fish and then we also looked at wine and we've got another wine case ongoing uh with colleague mike brook banks is looking at a chain vine but that that original one was looking at um moving wine and they put an rfid tag in a cork they put a qr code on the bottle because fine wine is is massively um pirated you know copied and so with this you could scan your bottle and it would you know tell you yes that's good no it's not and if the corks pulled the rfid d tag would break so you know that was all of that data again stored in a blockchain so that that was one example of the one mike's looking at is moving wine from australia to the uk particularly interested in recording all the information so that it can flow through um borders so you need with brexit particularly challenging now you know you need different information you need different certification and they're moving wine from australia to the uk and you can do it by bottle or you can do it by bladder so a bladder is a big container with lots of wine and you bottle it here or you move individual bottles in either case you need to track that and make sure it's not being tampered with so that when the the receiving company here gets that they know yeah my wine is safe it's been treated well the temperatures and things haven't fluctuated it's moved through these borders and you know i can bring it in obviously there's there's um tax questions around this and all of that information if you put it into this sort of blockchain type solution then there's more trust and maybe trust can be developed more quickly with border agencies allowing you to move products more towards frictionless trade which is obviously going to be a question for i think for brexit and this sort of blockchain solution might really help us to provide you know you could just look at it and say yeah this is this is a an unchangeable list we can trust this product so you know i think blockchain has really great applications we've got a lot of stuff to figure out and particularly around the digital physical interface but those are some of the examples we've been working on yeah that's great examples so that brings us to the question of blockchain for good and actually we could put it tech for good or tech ai for good a lot of different things but let's focus on blockchain for good and that's being especially because like we mentioned there's a lot of meets still around blockchain but blockchain they say if you and i think very small people speak about this because at the moment people are still very blurred uh about what is blockchain first of all and the people even that know about blockchain even people that supposedly need to know more are still confusing on the crypto part of blockchain and the non-crypto and at the same time than the ones in blockchain there's a lot of meets between centralized blockchain decentralized blockchain or hybrid systems there are blockchain for good let's put it in one way if it can go very bad if we get a some systems that are centralized so i would just would like to touch that and and your research around these topics and we were watching what was happening you know as academics and looking at all the claims being made and you know i i do tend to come at things somewhat skeptically and and i kept reading those early documents that you know blockchain to end world hunger blockchains who you know help refugees and save them but if you if you use my what is blockchain blockchain is a list that's difficult to change so when everyone says blockchain or oils mentally say you know a list that's difficult to change to end world hunger now it's it's it's part of the system what is your system trying to achieve and what small part of that system will be using blockchain and why so again it comes back to this this idea that it's a list that's difficult to change and we should only put you know the transaction rate of blockchain is not good it's you know visas thousands a second the blockchain just can't do that so what are we putting in there what's the minimal viable amount of data we put in a blockchain why do we put it there so when we look at for good so id somebody somebody had a great idea once of if we put um individuals data into a blockchain then we're able to identify them when they move country and you've got to really question that you're like well why does an individual want to shed their identity it's probably because they're being persecuted and the moment you put it into an immutable ledger something that ties the person to the id you actually if you know if a regime who is unpleasant gets hold of that you this is not blockchain for good you've created a real problem so we mustn't do that and you know talking to people who work in aid companies and really understanding the the you know the unpleasantness of some people's lives and quite how sad it gets you know um talking to somebody who who said that you talked about the paper economy that some aid agencies would go into a village and go and ask everybody what resources they had so they'd list resources of villages and then they'd say right these are the different villages this is the resources they have we have this much money to maybe provide food or water which village of all these villagers who all need it needs it the most and i was like well that's an appalling thing to have to do and they said yeah and also we have to be careful with that record because there are invariably warring factions and if they get that data on who's got what resources and where are they that just makes them a target because that means it's going to attack my village and i was like oh that's terrible and so you have to be really careful when collecting data and really consider what is good in your space and how do you create value in a safe way and you know really understanding and seeing the world from their point of view going back to what is good how do we expand our knowledge horizons so we understand the challenge on the ground and why it's happening so the blockchain for good agenda has some real benefits and you know i've spoken about the you know you providing visibility into supply chains um and we're looking at the moment chocolate and how we can trace because chocolate supply chain it starts off with very big companies but when you go down to it you know you're looking at maybe is it 80 or 800 000 farms in ghana and ivory coast and talking to people who've been on the ground there saying well the idea of borders in some of these places are interesting they're drawn on a map but you know you've got people who roam and they don't know what the border is nor do they care and it's just a line on a map and they move goods and people get trafficked as well and people get caught on farms and unfortunately the the way of certification is not strong so some farms may get certified as good but then what we hear about is well this farm takes on a contract to provide so much product and they can't meet it or maybe they have a bad yield so they buy it off another farm and it all gets amalgamated and taken forward and we see we see that happening um in lots of different places um in lots of different industries you know in timber in cotton in coco and sugar um it does seem that there's problems in all these supply chains because of this issue where we don't have the visibility we don't have the traceability and it's very difficult for firms to trace it back because they might register with an organization and say right you're going to certify but then often again we've heard the certifying organizations now there's a lot of them and they're effectively competing for business against each other so it's almost like there's a market at this bottom end and the moment they start competing on price then you know corners are cut maybe maybe not but how many can they really certify and still charge another price are they really going around all the farms and i was talking to a a chat brand who runs on slavefreetrade.org and he was uh he's been around these places and he said it's appalling and you know you'll visit a farm and maybe they had somebody visit three years ago and there's abuse on these farms and yet they're certified so there's a great deal more work to be done here but maybe blockchain can help in these cases because we can we can provide visibility if you put in the blockchain this farm certified them and maybe here's some pictures here's who works there that sort of detail but it's dated so then you know you could push that through into regulation to say well this is this better be updated every year every six months or whatever is appropriate and then we can get visibility into that supply chain and that's where blockchain can help and the other thing we're pushing towards now in the chocolate case is using biological markers um because part of the the big challenge in in supply chain is is this digital physical link you know grain and things how do you know if you've got a silo full of grain and you put a barcode on the side somebody can swap the barcode it's it's the weakness in the system but working with with um pedro the fargots yui and mike rogerson from bath universities we're looking at biological markers where you extract dna and you create a metabar code which is based on the dna of in this case cocoa the bean that makes chocolate and that is unique to the tree to the little group of trees it's from and it survives the processing of the chocolate so we can say right that chocolate bar contains 90 percent of beans from that tree in this region so we know exactly where it came from and you can then put that sort of information into a blockchain and say right you're claiming it's made here that's where it's made and we can we can register that bean against that bar via our trusted source our third party of provenance using you know dna blockchain technology and it creates this system of audit that protects people protects supply chains in many ways protects the big firms because they you know i i believe that most of these firms really want to have clean supply chains but it's difficult to do governments need to step in and regulate this has been going on far too long so you know i don't give firms or government a clean bill of health here i think it's been very very poor in providing this sort of structural support for supply chain visibility and i get a bit of hobby horse about it but you know i think that is good that is a good application of blockchain but you can see it's a small part of a bigger system now and it's really a fantastic example so i think you illustrate it fantastically as well very practical because i think the challenge right now is to get in there so i'm cautious that we passed one hour now um so we're going probably to wrap up with the last question but i want definitely to go to a second one and i think there will be the principle of a lot of other eventual collaborations so um nobody well there's so much different things that i definitely i'm i'm very excited here but uh i i want to just uh so you touched in the beginning of this conversation the process of first you mentioned the digital uh creative industries like music and for instance music is and comes back to my thesis of this kind of challenge that we have with blockchain for good with technology for good is that at the moment the music industry uh spotify as 40 of the global market and apple is probably the rest so we have a big challenge that these platforms digital platforms already controlling a huge part um of the big shanks of the world economy but at the same time there's a lot of innovation you have for the background the digital arts there's nfts that is known fungal tokens which is a new area of creating new ways of creating revenue streams for artists and this really fast-growing explosive area but i would like to touch obviously these specific areas especially in the work that you're doing with decade because being always bridging specific projects like you mentioned with the reality research and business which is fantastic because that's the way to go but from this because normally the like you mentioned um the music industry was probably the most disruptible i remember that i actually did an album with david bowie which was my biggest achievement and i put all my economies in the beginning of the music industry and suddenly the album was available on lobster this was exactly in the early days and i was okay i'm not going to make any business with this album but it was more visible and i started saying okay you just have to enjoy the wave but i know that this has been very damaging because let's say even the nfts which is right now fast growing very few artists know how to do this and very few people still know how to use these tools and i think that's the biggest challenge to wrap up with the digital economy at large is how we get this to really empower people and that comes to the blockchain for good but as well to create better stuff so it's a big question but it's the last one just to wrap up and i think we yeah so decade our center this does give me a great opportunity to talk about the work we're going into yeah so i appreciate that and so we've got three main themes the first one is co-creating value and you know from an academic and a personal perspective it's how i work value is always co-created and we work with others we share resources and together we co-create value and so we're looking at uh you know in in that case uh our first example is in the creative for a decade our first if you like area is going to be in creative industries our three themes are co-creating value data and identity and decentralizing work so these three things are core to everything we're going to do because we've got to work with others to co-create value we're looking at data but whenever we look at any questions of of data we always go back to establishing identity and that's who owns what so you must identify artifacts and people and link them together so value flows appropriately and then really with decentralizing work because these economies move the way work is done and you know some work becomes ai it means artists can work wherever all of these interesting questions come up so we've done work um looking at media and you know i've spoken a little bit about um looking at um the move from physical to digital music and what we're looking at in in the first phase of our work in decades is creative industries particularly looking at images but you know it can just be a file and we're looking at content provenance so the truth engine and some of the work is looking at video some of it is looking at um photographs but actually pictures can can be shared but if they've just been flipped or scaled then it's not really changed but if if somebody adopted it changed it you know put something in the background that wasn't originally there then you've got another problem because this is where you move into maybe fake news agendas and we've moved away from truth you know this is no longer true and that's not good you know so how can we fingerprint and we've got technologies that are being developed to audit truth and we're looking at systems that can we identify real photos and link who owns them very quickly and hopefully at some point in real time and then if we're filming something or taking photographs we can then look towards what we call sort of second stage next generation content production whereby um you know we've got truth and rights management established then we can say well if you go to a concert and say you're you've gone to i don't know glastonbury or one of the big events and you see the audience now and everyone's got their phone holding up their phone and they're recording and i look at it i think yeah the individual recording is probably breaching copyright because you're not allowed to record but maybe we could put a truth check app or something on the phone so you can record it but after you've recorded it says look you can keep that but you have to pay a small amount to the creator and so you've got your own recording and it's unique to you but maybe you pay something back to the you know the artist you just recorded so that would you know bring back some money to you know make some equity value is co-created but there's another thing that might happen is if i'm trying to cover glastonbury as a broadcaster i've got a limited number of cameras and yet i've got maybe 60 000 people streaming 4k with their phone if you've got that app on your phone you record you get maybe paying but maybe if i ask can i buy that recording from you value is co-created you say well you can keep it for free or maybe if i use it in my live broadcast i'll pay you so now i'm creating this world of of experience where we we're really co-creating value and and you know much like the nft type um payments back to the creator each one of these transactions might make another payment to the artist who's worked with filming but we could do that we've got this really interesting space and then we could offer new experiences because you know maybe you can't make that event but if i've got 60 000 people with phones filming and they're all activated and i bring them in my network then i can do some really interesting trades and build experiences and that's the sort of systems that we we hope to do having micro brokerage so that if you wanted to upload it onto facebook you know you might have experienced it yourself you try and put something up and it blocks it because there's something copyright maybe in the image or in the soundtrack you think i'll pay but at the moment that option's not there but again we can see with blockchain having some form of decentralized organization brokeraging micro payments i'll just make the payment i'll make my small payment so that this can be live so that's the sort of exciting digital economy that maybe we can move towards and then we can move we're also then looking at well we're decentralizing work really what else can we do well if we look at what why describes high value jobs like say nursing where nurses might work at a number of different hospitals but they have to keep a record to keep their you know licensing and pilots as well have to keep a record well they might work for different agencies if you have a centralized blockchain record that's trusted and these agencies have permission to load it then anyone can check it but only a small number of trusted people can look you can you know write to it and then i have my list that's difficult to change which is my provenance of my work and that co-creates because it makes me more valuable as a nurse or as a pilot or you know if i work in the nuclear industry as a qualified nuclear technician all of that builds my credibility and again this is this is decade and so the final thing we're looking at is maybe commodifying personal data so as well as just the the things we see maybe the things we experience maybe we can use these transaction platforms to to build and sell on that so as an example you check into a hotel and at the moment you might get a little card that you fill out at checking or check out you know i i did this i did that i had a great time who really fills out surveys you know bored people and angry people and bored people and the angry people fill the survey and they shape the world that's awful our world is shaped by bored people and angry people who are doing surveys the rest of us don't do it and but if we have blockchain that's capturing data and you're prepared to give that well maybe the hotel example maybe they give you a discount on your stay they're like oh you can you can stay in this hotel but if you're prepared to share some iot data and maybe we'll we'll let you see what that is or maybe use hub of all things data swift type data repository we can mine it and it can be distributed but we just want the metadata the what do individuals enjoy and how can we make our experience better not on a survey not on what we think but going back to that you know that iot example i spoke about earlier which shows the the combinations of things you do oh you know you like to go to the pool and immediately after the pool you like to eat and then you shower and then you go to the cinema and you this is what most people like so let's set our hotel up for this but so many businesses with that sort of data insight could offer really better experiences but we've got to do that with respect to privacy we've got to do that with respect to the individual with truth so we don't get fake news or things going in there and you know this is why i think blockchain digital economy and things like the decentralized agenda is really exciting because i for me that's where the future of business for good is and there's so many exciting business models that hopefully will emerge from this space well i think you put it in a fantastic way of concluding this amazing conversation so definitely i will want to potentially have a second follow-up and i think for people listening to us we'll search and we'll get it there but i think uh i want to thank you for this uh fantastic journey as well the capacity to synthesize but as well in a very um practical and as well inspiring way because i think like you mentioned this part and the work you're doing with decade that is uh behind you in the image the center for the centralized economy and i think this is the kind of organizations that can make a massive uh leapfrog in the world economy and as well to make things this happen because what you just mentioned all these different players working together can create new trillion dollars business and i think this is where people sometimes are not looking at the solutions but more looking at the problems or sometimes just ignoring which is worse and i think especially people listening to us i don't think they are ignoring they're taking this serious um and i think we're going to put the links to your youtube channel so it's amazing youtube channel there's a massive amount of videos and interviews there so it's um i think for people listening to us just search for glenn perry uh youtube channel there's as well a huge amount of videos and respect and research uh in terms of different areas and different things we're going to put links to all the the papers and and the research centers that professor uh glenn is involved i want to thank you for all this time and definitely they will be the first of a lot of more thank you so much professor glenn thank you very much i i hope people find it interesting and you know if anyone wants to get in touch and have conversations like i said i work in complete openness my if you like my metric as an academic is actually to create impact in the world so if people go i really like that idea get in touch let's talk about it let's help you achieve it because i'm an academic i'm not going to be necessarily building the business so it's it's up to people in the world to do that i can just share ideas and help them achieve that and make the world a better place and that's that's got to be what we're about completely and i i love that and definitely i think we'll put the links to your departments to all the different platforms or you are quite as well visible on twitter and a lot of different platforms i appreciate your time it's been a fantastic journey and definitely i want much more but i'll leave that for the second one thank you so much you

Channel: Dinis Guarda

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Keywords: DinisGuarda2020, innovation, digital transformation, blockchain, 4ir, artificial intelligence, dinis guarda, AI, leadership, thought leadership, podcast, podcaster, ztudium, citiesabc, intelligenthq, techabc, lifesdna, hedgethink, tradersdna, blockimpact, fintech, poetry, ideas, dinisguarda.com, citiesabc.com, art, tech for good, tech 4 good, interviews, influencer, Glenn Parry, Glenn Parry interview, University of Surrey, Prof Glenn Parry, digital economy, digital and real economy

Id: AXisLYxoJdY

Length: 80min 23sec (4823 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021