“Disruption is the New Normal.” This is the key message from the executive introduction to this series of reports. In the first report we outlined the exponential growth of digital opportunities. Start-ups are keen to fill the gap, challenging the establishment. At the same time the speed with which innovations prove to be successful is increasing. This expansion is set off by the slow reaction of organizations that are unable to keep pace with the digital tidal wave.
This phenomenon, also known as Eroom’s Law (Moore’s Law, spelled backwards), is beginning to dawn on more and more organizations. In the second report, “Design to Disrupt: New digital competition,” the challengers were central. Few established organizations wise up to them at an early stage, as they usually come from outside these organizations’ industries and are not taken seriously at first. Their allegedly inferior propositions confuse prominent players, who should in fact be the very first to be open to disruptive innovation.
This innovator’s dilemma brings us back to the major question of this Design to Disrupt project: how can you, as an organization, design your own disruptive market possibilities? This third report is devoted to an entirely new design principle. It outlines the potential impact of blockchain, a new way of organizing trust in the presence of unreliable parties. It owes its current fame to the currency, the bitcoin, in particular, but the cryptographic capacities of the network can be deployed in a variety of other ways. It is a special kind of platform, which in its turn is a basis for numerous other platforms − in other words, a platform for platforms. We outline its relevance for organizations in three steps: the crypto-economy 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. “Think about the blockchain as another class of thing, like the I nternet − a c omprehensive information technology with tiered technical levels and m ultiple classes of applications for
any form of asset registry, inventory, and exchange, including every area of finance, economics, and money. I n fact it is even more, the blockchain concept is a new organizing paradigm.”
Melanie Swan, Institute for Blockchain Studies