Versatile Amphibian

I'm on my way back from Oslo, where I presented a keynote on the Digital Economy at the DND IT-lederkonferansen 2015 conference. Rather than do a standard Eight Traits presentation I decided to build on the work on success factors for digital economies that I prepared for SATNAC last month. You can find the presentation here . The structure of my argument was as follows: Norway was one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Economy. Before 1770 GDP per capita was on the same level as Mexico or Portugal; now it is more than twice that of the latter and three times the former. (I had to show 2003 numbers on the chart as doing 2015 made it look crazy!) But now the system is changing away from automation of physical processes into automation of mental ones. This will cause great disruption as it will polarise the productivity and hence the success of companies and countries. So how well set up is Norway? Success for digital economies is driven by four main factors: ac...

On Monday I was privileged enough to present a keynote at the SATNAC conference in South Africa, the slides for which can be found here . The presentation is a little less conceptual than my usual... in that there are significantly fewer pictures of cats off the internet. The thrust of my argument was as follows: Part 1 - setup We are in the early throes of a shift to a new economic system This means redefinition of the roles of individuals in society, businesses and governments in their lives Conceptually, some commentators believe that this new system will enable African countries to leapfrog over their developed world counterparts because they don't have the infrastructure, business model and cultural encumbrances of the Industrial Economy To examine whether that is true, we need to look at the ingredients for success at a macro (national or perhaps mega-corp level), which I'd describe as: Pervasive access to computing (because this is the general purpose technolo...