Episode #16
Doug Heintzman is the Chief Catalyst at the Blockchain Research Institute, a role that sees him travel the world sprinkling pixie dust and encouraging things to happen that otherwise may not and then to help them grow more quickly.
He’s been in the technology sector for 30+ years, and spent nearly 25 of those at IMB.
He believes the role of the Blockchain Research Institute is to act as an accelerant to governments and businesses all around the world to help them on their web3 and blockchain journeys.
The publication of Don and Alex Tapscott’s book (Alex is Don’s son) called Blockchain Revolution – set the scene in 2016. In the book they noted that the underlying technology of Bitcoin, which was blockchain obviously, was going to revolutionise the entire structure of business. So they created the Blockchain Research Institute to catalyse that activity and to do deep research into what was happening and what was about to happen.
In the last year or so it has become clear that a number of technologies are all kind of maturing and merging into a new platform that is referred to as web3. The prediction of artificial intelligence, the measurement of IoT, the spatial visualisations of augmented and virtual reality and metaverse. And then the operating system, the state engine, which was blockchain.
Doug and the team are preparing for the annual conference and gala awards – W3B and Blockchain World – an immersive and experiential event that aims to encourage more dialogue, be conversation orientated, and much provide more opportunities for networking and socialisation.
Themed around a Canadian wilderness camp there will be fireside chats and a main lodge, gatherings and campfire sessions. Plus plenary sessions with some of the world’s leading thinkers on blockchain and web3.
For information or tickets click this link. And while you’re at it, wish us luck, as ubloquity is shortlisted as a finalist for the Enterprise Transformation Award in the Enterprise Ecosystems subcategory.
SPEAKERS
Dom Burch:
Welcome back to the ubloquity podcast with me Dom Burch. This is the podcast where we get to speak to thought leaders and experts across the world. And my goodness, I am absolutely delighted to welcome onto the podcast, Doug Heintzman, who is the Chief Catalyst at the Blockchain Research Institute. Doug, first of all, before you tell me about your background, I need to ask the question, I’ve never met a chief catalyst. What is a chief catalyst?
Doug Heintzman:
Well, it kind of goes to what the Blockchain Research Institute is all about. We’re an accelerator. I mean, we are an accelerant. And we work with governments and businesses all around the world to help them on their web3 and blockchain journey. And my job is to basically run around the world to sprinkle pixie dust and try to make things grow and grow faster. And so we were because this is the ecosystem economy that’s emerging. The chief role that we play is one of the catalysts, right we kind of sit in the middle and try to help things kind of gel together. And so I’m just the chief of the catalysts.
Dom Burch:
Love that Well, listen, my father is a professor of chemistry and his speciality was actually building and designing catalysts. So he’ll be he’ll be pleased that I’m speaking to somebody who is indeed a catalyst, a chief catalyst. Tell me a little bit about your background. Right. So you know, you back a few years back, you were well, 25 years almost at IBM, what was it that you know, tell me about that, and how that got you towards doing what you know what you’re
Doug Heintzman:
Well, IBM obviously was a very large doing today? technology company. And I was I had many, many roles. I think it was like employee number four of the software group. So I spent most of my time in software and I went down to I was I’m a Canadian by birth, but I went down to the to the US on an assignment for two years and ended up staying 17 years working out of the headquarters organisation, mostly as a strategy executive, I was responsible for technical strategy for IBM Software Group, and I led the strategy purpose for a number of different divisions. And then I left to become a COO originally, and then a founder and then I took some C suite positions, VP strategy for major blockchain platform and some management consulting. And then my, my old colleague, Don Tapscott, who had done a whole bunch of work with us in my IBM days, basically called me up and asked me to come and help him, you know, help the planet. So, so that’s like, well, that sounds like a lot of fun. So here we are.
Dom Burch:
Fantastic. And you know, I’ve got the pleasure now of coming across to Toronto in a couple of weeks time for now, the Web3 and Blockchain World Awards is that how did I mean because it’s it’s W three B right, so it is already confusing me but it’s web3 and blockchain transformation awards. That’s that’s what we should call it right.
Doug Heintzman:
Yeah. And it was it used to be so Don wrote this, Don and Alex his son wrote this, this very important book called Blockchain Revolution back in 2016. It was kind of the first big book to actually use the word blockchain in its title. And they, you know, had this great insight that this this Bitcoin phenomena was kind of interesting. But the truly important piece of the puzzle was the underlying technology, which was blockchain and it was going to basically revolutionise the entire structure of business. So they created the Blockchain Research Institute to catalyse that activity and to do deep research into what was happening and what was about to happen. And we had this big conference called Blockchain Revolution Global, and the awards were called the blockchain enterprise awards. And then what happened in the last year or so is it became clear that a number of technologies were all kind of maturing and merging into a new platform that we refer to as web3. So we had the prediction of artificial intelligence. We had the measurement of IoT. We had the spatial visualisations of augmented and virtual reality and metaverse. And then we had the operating system, the state engine, which was blockchain. And the state is just the record of transactions, the remembrance of things that have happened. And the question is, you know, when those characteristics stopped being the, you know, controlled by and governed by private companies, but when they become inherent characteristics of the network, all kinds of really interesting things happen. And so, because we were watching this phenomena, we basically rebranded the conference, web3 and blockchain world and the awards got rebranded, web3 and blockchain transformation awards. So that’s how we’ve arrived. It’s, it’s the continuation of the annual awards we’ve been having for many, many years now. But it is kind of the most modern incarnation of them.
Dom Burch:
Now we’re coming over right. So we entered this award, what maybe six months ago and we’re absolutely delighted we’ve been shortlisted alongside Verizon and Teck Resources. But not only the awards gala, right, which is going to be fun, and I am going to, you know, dust off the monkey suit and the bow tie. But it’s also a two day event. And there’s a number of amazing speakers aren’t there over those two days and some great forums as well, across things like supply chain and health. You know, what, what are some of the highlights that you’re looking forward to?
Doug Heintzman:
As we were planning the conference, we actually did a lot of thinking about what people were looking for. And we did a bunch of market research, as people kind of reintegrating with society, and getting back to going to conferences and to interact with people in three dimensions. You know, we’ve kind of moved past the knowledge economy, where, you know, you went to a conference, because there’s a smart person that had kind of deep insight. And, you know, they imparted information to you, to much more of a flow economy where the importance was being in proximity or participating in the dialogue in the conversation. And so we’ve kind of reimagined the conference to be much more experiential, much more dialogue, conversation orientated, and much more opportunities for networking and socialisation. And we themed it all around a Canadian wilderness camp theme. And so we’ve got fireside chats and main lodge, you know, gatherings and campfire sessions. And you know, the whole decor is all kind of wilderness and it’s gonna be great fun. And then as you were mentioning, we have a number of specific streams that we’re going to explore web3 and blockchain in the context of things like digital assets in distributed finance, or decentralised finance, in healthcare in what we call blockchain for good, the whole ESG question carbon, the carbon credit marketplace space, and then so people will be able to, you know, delve deeper into those particular areas and interact with world experts in those spaces, as well as their peers, there’s, you know, there’s kind of two different approaches, and depending on where companies are they, they tend to kind of towards one or the other bit of a mix, you know, one is that you want to kind of interact with your peer companies to, you know, acquire insight into what the state of the art is, and what the lessons learned are, and you know, where the blind alleys are, and, you know, what’s the art of the possible. But then there’s a lot of companies that engage in these sorts of activities, because they want to know what’s going on in other industries, what lessons are learned in other industries, because they talk to their peers all the time, we very much thought of this as a bit of a gathering, and much more of an experiential engagement with delegations coming from all over the world,
Dom Burch:
You made me so excited, just listening to the format and the way it’s gonna be run, I feel like I’m gonna have to dust off my LL Bean, now if it’s like, you know, Canadian campfire, I mean, I’m gonna bring my bean boots, why not I want to fit right in. And I love this notion that, you know, I, when I worked in the marketing, sort of social media sector a few years ago, we’d go to places like SXSW, and one of the best things about being at one of those events was this kind of cross pollination of ideas. At the time, I worked for a retailer, but actually seeing what somebody was doing in a completely different segment in a completely different world to yours. You know, I remember seeing one talk, and it was about how in the future we’ll be suing our own AI equivalent of ourselves, right, the AI version of Dom will be like wanting to leave the physical body of me and will sue me for that separation. And I remember thinking, either I’m really hung over or this is a really, really weird speech, but it didn’t half get me thinking. So I’m looking forward to maybe this idea then of cross pollination, while I’m over in Canada.
Doug Heintzman:
Well, there are a number of the streams right like the the digital identity stream, or the web3 and dao stream, or the metaverse stream with ESG stream, or even the digital assets stream that really will intersect many, many different industries. So it’ll it’ll be will be a mix of people from different points of view and perspectives and experiences.
Dom Burch:
So let’s talk a little bit what you know about some of the sectors and some of the things that we’re up to, right. So although we’re a start business here in the UK, where we’ve teamed up with a consortium of companies actually to help build a solution for supply chains, and you really utilising the blockchain in a way that allows, I guess, people within a system that where there is a, you know, a lack of trust, and that could be where regulatory authorities or it could be where people in a retail supply chain, even though they might have a customer, they don’t really want to share all their data. And we’re beginning to sort of build these ecosystems, if you like, that allow the data to move, whilst only allowing certain parties access to that information, and starting to sort of like reengineer and break down some of these, you know, quite ancient ways of moving across international borders or transacting between different nations or different companies. It’s a really exciting time. And you know, just been able to put that out there and then wonder what’s everybody else up to in the world right now? Is an exciting, it feels like a really exciting moment. And maybe that’s because I’m relatively new to blockchain. Is it still exciting for you, you know, you’ve been around this industry and probably have been thinking about this for decades,
Doug Heintzman:
I have, but it is exciting, because it’s kind of two major things are happening. One is that there happens to be, you know, the maturity and the convergence of some very important technologies that aren’t just disruptive technologies, but are foundational technologies. And it really is only kind of once in a generation that, you know, systemic infrastructure, foundational technology emerges, that means that, you know, kind of all the rules change. So that’s that, on the one hand is exciting. It’s the other part that’s kind of exciting is that we have this, this artificial accelerant, right? You know, whenever human history whenever society has kind of gone through a major stress, whether it’s a, you know, a war engagement, or, you know, some sort of significant economic stress. First of all, there is a tendency towards quality, a lot of the excess and frivolity gets kind of, you know, shed out of the system. But there is a an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how things are done. And just a lot of innovation that kind of pours in. And I think supply chain is actually a really good example. The pandemic has exposed just how unbelievably fragile our our supply chains are the number of containers that are stuck in North America, and in Europe, and are not going anywhere, the number of ships that are just kind of floating around without port access, and the cascading effects through the supply chains, it’s just been devastating to planning, the overcapacity under capacity overstock under stock issues in many different supply chain bases are kind of have come to the fore, and even cold chain issues, because of the distribution of vaccines and various different therapeutics has kind of also, you know, reared its head and people are kind of looking at it. And so I think as a result, the whole space will probably accelerate its innovation and was a bit of a laggard in digitization. But I think about five to eight years of innovation are going to be squeezed into the next 18 months. And that’s kind of exciting, especially when this technology is emerging. And this, the other piece of this puzzle is, is thinking about just how broad the problem space is, right? The the idea of transparency, and a common ledger, that different pieces of the supply chain can have visibility into so that they can, they can plan better, you know, the metaphor I like to think of is when you’re driving your car, and kind of inexplicably everything comes to a stop, and then it kind of accelerates and it comes to a stop. And the reason is that, you know, the input that we have are the tail lights of the car in front of us. But if we had visibility 20 cars, 30 cars in front of us many kilometres in front of us, then, you know, we would make different strategic decisions, including how we would route things, you know, in a similar sort of way that visibility is kind of transforming the way we think about supply chains, and how effective and efficient and adaptive they can be and how resilient they can be. But there’s this other issue that, you know, I think we need to think through this technology affords us the opportunity to substantially reduce wastage. And whether it is produce that spoils in transit, or it’s carbon that is used in inefficient sort of ways, we can start to incorporate those externalities into the pricing and the decision making in a supply chain. And that’s really exciting possibility that we’ve never really seen before. We start to be able to see scope three issues and supply chain, be part of that information flow. And that’s incorporated into both the pricing and regulatory environment. So I think this whole space is just ripe for a complete rethink. And it’s going to be very, very exciting to see what comes out of this.
Dom Burch:
And we touched on ESG a little bit earlier. And you know, there’s a lot of, I just happened to watch a documentary last night with Greta Thunberg, who was interviewed by the BBC here over in the UK. And you know, they talked a lot about greenwashing. And this is something that, you know, I was in the PR Team of a retailer. Right, so greenwashing is, as long been an accusation thrown at companies, big companies, particularly from the NGOs out there, but now with it being a regulatory requirement, the bar is getting raised every year and being able to accurately quantify your carbon impact for example. Blockchain is definitely going to be one of those enablers, isn’t it? Where, even if it wasn’t necessarily collecting that data at the start, the fact that we know every single journey, we know the, you know, potentially the provenance of the product and the ingredients in that product. We know how long it was chilled, we know when it arrived and where it went next, you know, gradually over time, you can imagine how these systems are going to actually enable finger on the button, absolute accuracy to the full end to end impact of that product. And then, as you say, price that in or tax it
Doug Heintzman:
Yeah, I think that’s right. You know, there’s down. a bunch of different pieces of this puzzle and the greenwashing issue has been a problem, the greenwashing has been a problem and of late, the give me a carbon credit for not doing something problem, right? Whether it’s you know, okay, I won’t, you know, clear cut pieces of Amazon, if you pay me not to do it, I won’t develop a particular, you know, oil or gas field if you pay me not to do it. And there’s these sorts of peripheral issues that I think are somewhat are very problematic in the marketplace. So there’s a bunch of solutions to this. Blockchain combined with IoT will allow us to measure these things in ways that people should have confidence and ledger those measurements appropriately. And then once they’re ledgered to be able to move them throughout the supply chain and have you not only the goods, but their carbon content change custodianship, and that because of the blockchain, we can enforce digital scarcity so that we’re not double counting things and inflating things, and allowing people to get greenwash cover off of an inauthentic, unauditable measurement. And so I do think that it means that there’s integrity and once you’ve got digital scarcity, integrity, you can make marketplaces and once you’ve got marketplaces, you can tax, regulate, and price in the various different you know, those externalities that we’ve just let slide on the side. And so I think that’s got the potential to really change the how the whole system works,
Dom Burch:
I could probably keep on talking to you right up until this conference in a couple of weeks time but um, I need to be respectful of your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the ubloquity podcast, you really whet my appetite really whet my appetite for coming over to Toronto in a couple of weeks time. Hopefully, I’ll get to shake your hand and say thank you for putting on the event.
Doug Heintzman:
Well, you’re very welcome. And I’ll just do a quick plug. Because of course we’re I’m can’t wait to meet you in person and your colleagues. But for anyone else is interested, you can go to W3Bworlds.org. And find out information about the conference and we hope to see in Toronto,
Dom Burch:
and don’t worry, I will put all of those links and all the socials on the description of the podcast too. But in the meantime, Doug, Chief Catalyst, not only a catalyst, but the Chief Catalyst of the Blockchain Research Institute. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Doug Heintzman:
Great pleasure. Thank you very much Dom.
