Don tailors each presentation to the needs of his audience and is not limited to the topics we have listed below. These are subjects that have proven valuable to customers in the past and are meant only to suggest his range and interests. Please ask us about any subject that interests you; we are sure that we can accommodate you.
Avoiding a 20 Year Slump
More and more pundits admit that Tapscott was right a year ago when he said “This economics crisis is
not over, it’s just beginning.” But how do we avoid a prolonged period of calamity? Tapscott holds that the future is not something to be predicted but achieved, and to fix a broken world we must first understand the true problem. The economic crisis is unprecedented, but is just one aspect of the world going through fundamental change as the industrial age comes to a close. Because of digital information and communication tools, society needs to embrace a new set of principles for the 21st century — collaboration, openness, sharing, interdependence and integrity. Moreover, we shouldn’t look solely to big government or big corporations to supply the answers. We should also look to new web-based, collaborative technologies to rebuild our failing institutions. Entrepreneurship and Innovation will be key. But what is to be done?
Beyond Wiki Revolutions to Democratic, Secular Governments
In Egypt and Tunisia we saw a revolution in how to foment revolutions. Now we need to reinvent how to build democracies. Enabled by social media, anti-government leadership in these two countries came from the people themselves rather than a traditional vanguard. Tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter radically lowered the cost and effort of collaboration and undermined state censorship. Now leaders must use the same tools to help build functional democracies. “Social networks, Twitter and texting were critical to the revolution,” says Yassine Brahim, Tunisia’s new minister of infrastructure and transport. “We are going to leverage social media to build a horizontal democracy rather than a vertical democracy.” Tapscott explains how.
Addressing the Coming Worldwide Generational Conflict
Today’s youth were told that if they got a college degree, worked hard, and stayed out of trouble,
they would have a prosperous and fulfilling life. But that’s not happening. Around the world, youth unemployment is far higher than the national average. Young people are disillusioned, and their high unemployment raises the spectre of a new youth radicalization. In the ‘60s, youth radicalization was based on causes such as opposing the Vietnam War. Today’s radicalization is deeply rooted in personal broken hopes, mistreatment, and injustice. Today’s frustrated youth have at their fingertips the most powerful tool ever for finding out what’s going on, informing others and organizing collective responses. We could see a protest movement that makes the 1960s look like kids’ play. How can we avoid this situation?
Kick-starting Job Creation
The “jobless recovery” is an oxymoron. There is no recovery unless it is inclusive. Unemployment levels around the world are brutally high, particularly for young people. We urgently need to create more jobs, and we know that eighty percent of new jobs come from companies that are less than five years old. The good news: every day it’s increasingly easy to start a business. The internet provides young companies with unprecedented access to the resources and promotional tools once associated only with larger and older corporations. And start-ups have the advantage of not being saddled with bureaucracy and other legacy costs. To create jobs governments should adopt policies to encourage entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs also need more than just money — they need encouragement in the form of a supportive environment, access to resources, talent, innovations, and customers. This can be done with Web 2.0 and social networking. Tapscott explains how.
Overcoming the Inability of International Organizations to Solve 21st Century Problems
Institutions for global problem solving, such as the UN or G20, aren’t meeting our needs. Witness recent failures such as the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization and the Copenhagen conference on climate change. And the good things that are happening around the world, such as the struggles for democracy in the Middle East and north Africa, are not being made because of our global systems for co-operation, they are happening in spite of these institutions. Progress towards democracy is the result of citizens using social media to self-organize and rise up against dictatorships. Our existing global institutions created the status quo, and in their current form are simply incapable of dealing with modern challenges.
Corporations in the Age of Hyper-Transparency
WikiLeaks continues to release classified government and corporate information. But it is just the
tip of the iceberg. Increasingly all organizations operate in a hyper-transparent world. Today customers can use the Internet to help evaluate the true worth of products and services. Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies share intimate knowledge with one another. And in a world of instant communications, whistleblowers, inquisitive media, and Google, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope. So if a corporation is going to be naked — and it really has no choice in the matter — it had better be buff. Companies that embrace transparency will prosper. Tapscott explains how.
Privacy in the Age of Facebook
The Facebook leadership continues to treat privacy as an afterthought, which could prove to be its undoing. To be sure, when hundreds of millions of people post online detailed data about themselves, their activities, their likes and dislikes, and so on, they do this voluntarily. But this information should be treated with respect. Unfortunately, Facebook’s leadership confuses the right to privacy with transparency, arguing that transparency is good for individual relationships. This is misguided. Transparency applies to organizations, not people. Organizations are increasingly obliged to communicate pertinent information to their customers, shareholders, business partners and so on. This is not the case for individuals. Indeed, individuals have an obligation to themselves to safeguard their personal information. And institutions should be transparent about what they do with our personal information.
The Demise of the Newspaper and the Rise of the New News
How can newspaper executives reinvent their value propositions and their business models to survive in the digital age? First, listen to today’s youth, because within their culture is the new culture of news and information. Second, commodity news won’t cut it for any audience, so create a distinct offering. Third, develop rich, multimedia experiences for new digital platforms and devices. Finally, embrace collaborative innovation by creating an open platform so that others can help you invent new sources of value.
How More Musicians can Earn a Living in the Age of MP3s
Apple, Amazon, and Google have announced initiatives to make music available in the cloud, but the big music labels still don’t understand that viewing songs as individual products to be sold for 99 cents
is the wrong approach. Music should be a service, not a product. Instead of purchasing tunes, listeners would pay a small fee — say $4 per month — for access to all the songs in the world. Recordings would be streamed to them via the Internet to any appliance of their choosing — such as their laptop, mobile device, car, or home stereo. A huge advantage of this restructuring is that a lot more musicians could earn a living doing what they love: Singing and playing music. The superstars may make fewer millions, but our culture would benefit enormously.
Ending the Government Debt Crisis
The concept of “Reinventing Government” — for better cheaper government, has been around for two decades. But its time as come. The Sovereign Debt crisis in Europe and the spiralling debt in America and other Western countries calls for more than tinkering. There is now a new medium of communications that only changes the way we innovate and create goods and services — it can change the way societies create public value. Governments can become a stronger part of the social ecosystem that binds individuals, communities, and businesses—not by absorbing new responsibilities or building additional layers of bureaucracy, but through its willingness to open-up formerly closed processes and data to broader input and innovation. In other words, government becomes a platform the creation of services and for social innovation. It provides resources, sets rules and mediates disputes, but allows citizens, non-profits and the private sector to share in the heavy lifting. This is leading to a change in the division of labor in society about how public value is created, and holds the promise of solving the debt crisis.
Without fundamental reform, universities will not be able to compete with cheaper and more effective online education providers. While many young people are still going to university, a growing portion of the best and the brightest students have given up attending classes, because the information is available in a more easily ingested form online. Universities must shift their business model from the centuries-old notion that a professor lectures students, to a more collaborative, interactive model. Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” teachers should be the co-pilot for students as they explore and collaborate online to acquire knowledge.
Urban Intelligence: Achieving Smart Connected Cities
The world’s cities are under stress with megacities paralyzed by population influx, lack of infrastructure, traffic congestion, pollution and crime. Many cities built up since the Second World War are dysfunctional and getting worse as the industrial economy collapses. Yet everywhere there are bold new collaborative initiatives for reinvention of cities. Governments of all levels realize that they can’t do this work alone. Thanks to digital information and communication technologies, it’s now more effective to develop a platform that enables the public sector and private sector to collaborate.
Don Tapscott discusses how cities can transform themselves around 10 axes: Economic Development; Public Safety; Open Government; Transportation and Managing Traffic congestion, Powering the City, Clean air and water, Human Services; Education; Government Operations; and Transforming Democracy.
Rethinking Business Processes for an Age of Networked Intelligence
Industrial age processes focused on structured work. But the Industrial Economy is finally running out of gas, giving way to a new age where knowledge contained in the brains of everyone can be interconnected. People can now collaborate like never before and this has profound implications for every process. In fact, web is changing the deep structures and architecture of the corporation and how we innovate, create goods and services and engage with the world. Talent can be inside but also outside.
In fact, we need to rethink and rebuild many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, but are no longer able. Evidence is mounting that traditional economic and social pillars of the industrial age have come to the end of their life cycle. How must our institutions change for a new century, new media, new generation and a new economy? How does knowledge work and collaborate with the business process? How can companies find the leadership for this rethinking of their modus operandi?
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World
The Net-Generation has come of age. The children of the baby boom, aged 13-30, are not only the largest generation ever — they are the first generation to come of age in the digital age. The new digital media, particularly the Internet, are at the heart of a new youth culture and a new generation who, in profound and fundamental ways, learn, work, play, communicate, shop and create communities very differently than their parents. For the first time in human history children are authorities on a central innovation. This generation gap is leading to far reaching changes in commerce and in every institution in society.
In this presentation, the author of the earlier book Growing Up Digital brings us up to date on these profound transformations and their implications for organizations of all kinds, using the results of a multi-million dollar study that has followed these young people for the past decade.
Don can bring some of the people in his book to participate in a panel that can also include young people from your own organization. This has proven to be a unique and exciting progam—ask us about the details.
Government 2.0: Wikinomics, Government and Democracy
Until now, governments were modeled after the command and control industrial organizations that dominated the business landscape. If it was good enough for GM it was good enough for government bureaucrats. But in the digital economy, mammoth vertically integrated industrial corpora- tions have started to unbundle. Today’s most successful corporations aren’t just speeded up versions of the old industrial behemoths. Instead we are seeing the rise of the business web, a much more supple and effective form of wealth creation.
An equally dramatic innovation is starting to happen throughout the public sector, paralleling the new forms of commercial value creation. Around the world, creative bureaucracies are partnering with companies
and organizations to develop governance webs. The big wins are not achieved simply by taking the status quo online, but by transforming the industrial age model into digital-age governance.
Ultimately this promises to change the nature of democracy and the relationship between citizens and the state — for the better.
Marketing 2.0
As the net generation enters the marketplace, they are changing many facets of retail and marketing from advertising to the brand.
How does the net generation influence others through their N-Fluence Networks? What should companies do to reach this generation? Why is traditional advertis- ing becoming less effective? How are social media becoming as important as traditional media? How can you harness the power of self-organization? Why are the four P’s of marketing (Product, Place, Price, Promotion) no longer valid? How should companies rethink marketing for the 21st century?
Wikinomics
Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics is the first book to truly come to grips with the most profound change in corporate architecture, strategy and management in a century—the reinvention of the Web to provide the first global platform for collaboration in history. In this presentation based on the book, Don offers audiences the tools and insights required to succeed in this emerging Age of Collaboration.
The knowledge, resources, and computing power of billions of people are self-organizing into a massive collective force, inter-connected and orchestrated through blogs, Wikis, chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks, and personal broadcasting. This mass collaboration is changing everything. The pace of innovation and change is accelerating, and end users — whether consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, or competitors — now harness technology to innovate, collaborate and challenge incumbents like never before.
In the world of Wikinomics, the choices for collaboration are endless. You can build your own business on Amazon; produce a television news clip for Current TV; create a community around your photo collection on Flickr; or edit the astronomy entry on Wikipedia. You can plug into InnoCentive and join Procter and Gamble’s virtual R&D department; remix the Nine Inch Nails rock album; or co-design the interactive features for your next BMW.
This new participation — “peer production” — is changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis. It also presents far-reaching opportunities for every company willing to understand and master its dynamics.
With vivid and engaging examples, Tapscott shows how value creation increasingly depends on these dense networks of public and private participants and large pools of intellectual property that routinely combine to create end products.
Unlike Web 1.0, this new Web 2.0 links over a billion people directly, and now it reaches out to the physical world, connecting trillions of objects from hotel doors to cars. It is beginning to deliver dynamic new services, from free, long distance video-telephony to remote brain surgery.
In this environment, internal capabilities and a handful of tightly coupled partnerships will no longer ensure success. Instead, firms must engage a dynamic, self-organizing ecosystem of partners to co-create and peer-produce value for customers.
This presentation is based on one of the largest investigations of strategy and management to date. The project, entitled Information Technology and Competitive Advantage, was funded by 22 large corporations who invested $4.2 million to understand the changing nature of the corporation and how firms compete. The study’s lessons include rich case studies, valuable data, some “big ideas,” and new practices that will significantly contribute to your business growth.
Winning with the Enterprise 2.0
The corporation is undergoing the biggest change in a century. Due to deep changes in technology, demographics, business, the economy and the world, we are entering a new age where people participate in the economy like never before. This new participation has reached a tipping point where new forms of mass collaboration are changing how goods and services are invented, produced, marketed, and distributed on a global basis. his change does not wreck corporate profit. If understood, it presents far-reaching opportunities for every company and for every person who gets connected, in both the developed and developing world.
Don Tapscott, one of the world’s leading thinkers about the role of technology in business discusses insights from his new book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration changes Everything. He explains how a “Perfect Storm” of four drivers for change is creating the first category 6 business storm.
- The technology revolution — the rise of the Web 2.0
- A demographic revolution — the rise of the Net Generation
- A social revolution — social networking and the explosion of community
- An economic revolution — the global unbundling of the vertically integrated corporation posing the need to not just think, but act globally.
The conclusion? A new Enterprise 2.0 is emerging — one that innovates, creates value, orchestrates capability and builds relationships differently than the corporation that has dominated the 20th century. These new enterprises compete better and grow faster than the old model. But how can firms find the leadership to make the change?
Trust and Competitiveness in the Age of Transparency
Don Tapscott, one of the world’s leading authorities on business strategy, explains the rise of transparency and discusses how firms can embrace it to enhance their reputation, build trusting relationships with their staff, partners, shareholders and the public, and achieve competitive advantage. He discusses the far-reaching implications for every manager.
Tapscott explains how customers can evaluate the worth of products and services at levels never before possible. Employees share formerly secret information about corporate strategy, management, and challenges. To collaborate effectively, companies and their business partners have no choice but to share intimate knowledge with one another. Powerful institutional investors today own or manage most wealth, and they are developing x-ray vision. Finally, in a world of instant communications, whistle-blowers, inquisitive media, and Googling, citizens and communities routinely put firms under the microscope.
Corporations have no choice but to rethink their values and behaviors — for the better.
Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
Reinventing Healthcare for the Age of Collaboration
Leadership and Collective Intelligence
Rethinking Science for the Age of Collaboration
Fighting Climate Change in the Age of Networked Intelligence
Surviving and Thriving Times—Now is the Time to Innovate
All over the world, the way people connect and collaborate is undergoing an astonishing transformation. Smart organizations are shunning their old, secretive practices and embracing transparency. Companies are widely sharing intellectual property and releasing patents. And movements for freedom and justice are exploding everywhere as organizations like Wikileaks spread information faster than every before. Though these movements may differ, they all share one idea: radical openness. In their compelling new book *Radical Openness*, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams show how this revolutionary new philosophy is affecting every facet of our society, from the way we do business to whom we chose to govern us. But while radical openness promises many exciting transformations, it also comes with new risks and responsibilities. How much information should we share and with whom? What are the consequences of disclosing the intimate details of our business and personal lives?