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Blockchain technology is among the most disruptive forces of the past decade. Its power to record, enable, and secure huge numbers and varieties of transactions raises an intriguing question:

Can the same distributed ledger technology that powers bitcoin also enable better execution of strategic projects in a conservative sector like construction, involving large teams of contractors and subcontractors and an abundance of building codes, safety regulations, and standards?

“Increasingly, we are thinking more carefully about when and where we need to compete and what can we share and collaborate on,” said David Bowcott, global director of growth, innovation, and insight in Aon’s global construction and infrastructure group.

Using blockchain to automate the contractual processes and paperwork underpinning these complex projects could save money, free up valuable resources, and speed up project delivery. (Unless otherwise noted, quotes are from interviews we conducted as part of our research.)

Blockchain-Enabled Real Estate Development Projects

In commercial real estate, Amsterdam-based HerenBouw is applying blockchain to a large-scale development project in the city’s harbor. According to Propulsion Consulting founder Marc Minnee, HerenBouw’s objective was to set up a blockchain-enabled project management system to make the building development life cycle more efficient.

Minnee’s blockchain application for HerenBouw focused on registering transactions at legally binding moments, where accuracy and an audit trail are essential. “Blockchain provides a platform for clearly cascading work products down the chain and holding everyone accountable for completing key tasks,” said Minnee.

The system’s benefits include timely information, unambiguous communication, and fewer mistakes. “Stakeholders have a clear and evenly distributed incentive to register these facts on-chain: Either you won’t get what you ordered or you won’t get paid,” said Minnee.

They also develop trust, which reduces friction in their mutual business processes. “Stakeholders spend more time discussing creative design and building method options.”

Blockchain Pilots in Construction Achieve Liftoff

Aon, the global risk adviser to the construction industry, estimates that 95% of building construction data gets lost on handover to the first owner.

Briq, a California-based blockchain firm, is demonstrating the potential to capture and secure a construction project’s documentation in a blockchain ledger that parties can navigate and give to the owner as a deliverable.

Working on behalf of Minneapolis-based Gardner Builders, Briq developed a “digital twin” of a new office construction, with a room-by-room inventory of every asset.

“When a product or specification needs to be found in a building, there is finally a place to go to simply search for what is actually in that building,” said Briq CEO Bassem Hamdy.

The blockchain-encoded specifications are granular: paint colors, ceiling fixtures, LED bulbs, door hardware — plus manuals, warranties, and service life in a countdown clock that building owners can monitor.

“Any improvements and refurbishments to the building can be documented, and the whole repository can be transferred to new owners if the asset is put up for sale,” said Ellis Talton, Briq’s director of growth marketing. In other words, building owners get a living ledger of everything that has happened with the building.

Overcoming Cultural Obstacles

Engrained practices in the construction sector will likely prolong widespread blockchain adoption. “The construction industry is technologically advanced in many aspects of what it does,” said Talton. “But the industry is very relationship-based.

There are many family-owned firms and private companies. The selection of contractors and subcontractors can be based on relationships that have existed for decades.

”Talton also noted that very little money — less than 1% of revenues — is invested in up-front contracting and technology infrastructure for managing complex construction projects (that number is 3.5%–4.5% in aerospace and automotive).

“The vast majority of the projects costs are in the building process, including the people and materials,” he said.

Scott Nelson, CEO of Sweetbridge (where one of us, Don, is an adviser), finds construction a natural for blockchain-based project management: “Projects are well-structured and contract-based. Objectives are clear — be on time, on spec, and avoid rework.

Classic project management techniques still work, but projects can benefit from a more decentralized and agile approach, where transparency is high and parties can be compensated for outcomes as well as for work performed.”

Identifying Applications of Blockchain in Project Management

Over time, blockchain will have breakthrough applications for project management. We encourage organizations to explore and capitalize on this potential. Here are a few next steps.Identify use cases for blockchain adoption. 

Look for where success depends on mobilizing resources across enterprise boundaries; where identities, contracts, and payments must be audited and protected; and where the provenance and ownership of assets must be tracked. Some ideas for this:

• a reputation ledger that tracks subcontractors’ deliverables could help to identify reliable subcontractors for a project
• smart contracts that identify accountabilities and trigger milestone-based payments could automate agreements
• blockchain-enabled applications that aggregate data into a shared project management dashboard could help to manage workflow
• a distributed ledger that keeps an end-to-end chronicle of the construction process could record all building inputs and assets, including warranties and maintenance checkpoints
• blockchain-enabled apps that track materials, testing, and results against building codes and standards could streamline inspections

Develop prototypes and pilot projects. Do preliminary analysis: Audit the systems in use, consult their users, and think about who would need to be involved in identifying viable options, selecting one to prototype, designing the pilot, and participating in testing.

Make a business case for investing in blockchain. Identify ways blockchain can increase project success, such as improving processes and organizational capacity to locate and share large quantities of data with specific individuals and entities.

As David Bowcott of Aon said, “Collectively, we are all better off if we encourage data collaboration and use blockchain and machine learning to help us establish longer-term industry road maps for investments, and technologies that can boost productivity and efficiency and lessen risk.

” While the fundamentals of project management will remain important, blockchain enables managers to focus their talents on solving problems and achieving better project outcomes.




Don Tapscott is the bestselling author of Wikinomics, The Digital Economy, and a dozen other acclaimed books about technology, business and society. According to Thinkers50, Don is the 4th most important living management thinker in the world; he is an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management, and Chancellor of Trent University.

He and his son Alex are co-authors of the book Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World. Follow him on Twitter @dtapscott.




Ricardo Viana Vargas is executive director of the Brightline Initiative, a coalition of leading global organizations from business, government, and not for profit sectors, led by the Project Management Institute. Ricardo is a specialist in project management and strategy implementation, and has been responsible for more than 80 major transformation projects within the oil and gas, energy, infrastructure, telecommunications, information technology, and finance industries. He has written 15 books on project management and hosts the 5 Minutes PM Podcast, published in English and Portuguese.

The cloud computing market is pegged to balloon to $411 billion by 2020, according to a Gartner Market Report. In particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is expected to grow the fastest, expanding 36.6 percent from 2017 to 2020. 

IaaS cloud services are dominated by the likes of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud for enterprises looking to tap into vast computational resources, data storage, and networking.

However, these resources are housed in centrally controlled facilities (i.e., massive server farms) that make them inefficient in furnishing the connectivity and edge computation required for the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). 

“IoT applications require edge computing close to the source, something vastly different from today’s cloud computing paradigm which has a bigger focus on scaling the service or offering consistency,” details DeepCloud AI CEO, Max Rye. 

As a result, high bandwidth-consuming traffic like video streaming has to travel through extensive routing protocols to reach central servers — increasing costs and reducing connectivity performance.

Edge devices (e.g., IoT) require computation and detection close to the edge of the network, making centralized cloud infrastructure antithetical to the goals of IoT proliferation. 

Add in the data privacy and security concerns of centralized repositories, and it is clear that distributing the infrastructure holds significant promise. And blockchains are increasingly revealing themselves as the optimal medium to achieve the lofty goals of IoT. 

Decentralization is The Name of the Game

The overarching decision to transition networks to more decentralized frameworks is the prevailing trend among firms pushing the narrative of “decentralized cloud computing.

” One of those, DeepCloud AI, views the blend of AI and distributed ledgers (i.e., blockchains) as the natural next step to supplement the growth of the IoT industry. 

“We enable resource providers close to the edge, such as retail shopping malls, to share the excess capacity of their computer resources on the decentralized cloud, close to the city traffic lights, which makes it possible to do these local computations close to the source,” details Rye. 

DeepCloud AI extends this capacity by implementing AI, which is used to efficiently allocate resources where they are needed across the network.

But supporting a new generation of IoT devices with better performance and connectivity doesn’t stop there.

The concept of machine-to-machine (M2M) payments is a vital component of standard demands that IoT devices, such as for weather or environment metrics, will face should they become widely adopted in enterprise business models.

Fortunately, cryptocurrencies have shed light on the possibilities of micropayments, since they have much lower transaction costs than traditional payment rails.

“We deploy sidechains and a Decentralized Acyclic Graph (DAG) layer on top of our blockchain to provide a mechanism for faster transactions with zero fees,” says Rye.

Cryptocurrencies remove the middleman since they exist on P2P networks, which translates to reduced transaction costs. For DeepChain AI, the native token of their network, DEEP, which recently completed it IEO on BitMax, functions as the medium for IoT devices, applications, and users to make payments over the network. 

The interest from enterprises in the potential of decentralized cloud computing is already manifesting itself too. 

For example, DeepCloud AI has attracted strategic partners like LD Capital, Voyager Innovations, and the National University of Singapore, all of which have taken a keen interest in promoting and researching the practical enterprise use cases of blockchains. 

Speaking on the agreement with the National University of Singapore, DeepCloud AI detailed: 

“The cooperative agreement between the University’s School of Computing’s Department of Computer Science & DeepCloud AI is multi-faceted, including the exchange of scientific, technical, academic information, and appropriate materials and information of mutual interest for which each Party holds intellectual property rights.” 

As the realized potential of decentralized cloud computing in the materialization of a more advanced IoT-based sharing economy unfolds, look for more partnerships between innovative platforms like DeepCloud AI and academia to continue. 

The future of tech hinges on the remodeling of centralized archetypes that have dominated big tech for the last decade, and with a few bleeding-edge technologies under their belt, decentralized solutions are beginning to make some noise. 

• The Fourth Industrial Revolution will take center stage at the World Economic Forum's (WEF) annual meeting next week in Davos, Switzerland.
• It's a term used by CEOs, policymakers and industry to describe technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, 3D printing and the internet of things.
• Some companies and governments are struggling to keep up with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Elizabeth Schulze | @eschulze9



What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?  1 Hour Ago | 04:10


The Fourth Industrial Revolution will take center stage at the World Economic Forum's (WEF) annual meeting next week in Davos, Switzerland.The concept, a theme of Davos this year, refers to how a combination of technologies are changing the way we live, work and interact.

Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the Geneva-based WEF, published a book in 2016 titled "The Fourth Industrial Revolution" and coined the term at the Davos meeting that year.

Schwab argued a technological revolution is underway "that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres."Simply put, the Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to how technologies like artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles and the internet of things are merging with humans' physical lives.

Think of voice-activated assistants, facial ID recognition or digital health-care sensors.

Schwab argued these technological changes are drastically altering how individuals, companies and governments operate, ultimately leading to a societal transformation similar to previous industrial revolutions.

The first three industrial revolutions

Zvika Krieger, the head of technology policy and partnerships at WEF, told CNBC on Tuesday there is a common theme among each of the industrial revolutions: the invention of a specific technology that changed society fundamentally.

The First Industrial Revolution started in Britain around 1760. It was powered by a major invention: the steam engine. The steam engine enabled new manufacturing processes, leading to the creation of factories.

The Second Industrial Revolution came roughly one century later and was characterized by mass production in new industries like steel, oil and electricity.

The light bulb, telephone and internal combustion engine were some of the key inventions of this era.The inventions of the semiconductor, personal computer and the internet marked the Third Industrial Revolution starting in the 1960s. This is also referred to as the "Digital Revolution.

"Krieger said the Fourth Industrial Revolution is different from the third for two reasons: the gap between the digital, physical and biological worlds is shrinking, and technology is changing faster than ever.

Telephone vs. 'Pokemon Go'

For evidence of how quickly technological change is spreading, Krieger pointed to the adoption of the telephone. It took 75 years for 100 million people to get access to the telephone; the gaming app "Pokemon Go" hooked that many users in less than one month in 2016.



Toru Hanai | Reuters

Pokemon Go app on an iPhone, Tokyo, Japan, July 22, 2016.Companies in industries from retail to transportation to banking are vying to incorporate new technologies like augmented reality, 3D printing and artificial intelligence into their operations.

A 2017 study by the European Patent Office found the number of patents filed related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution increased a growth rate of 54 percent in the past three years.

"Technology, and specifically digital technology, is so intertwined with many businesses, as well as our social and economic lives, that trying to separate 'tech' from 'non-tech' is becoming increasingly redundant," said David Stubbs, head of client investment strategy for EMEA at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, in an email to CNBC.

Left behind

Companies, governments and individuals are struggling to keep up with the fast pace of technological change.

Krieger, who served as the U.S. State Department's first-ever representative to Silicon Valley from 2016 to 2017, said technology is often missing from policymakers' "toolkits.

" As a result, he said, companies are left filling a void trying to understand how to implement — and regulate — advancements like A.I."There's an absolute hunger for concrete things companies can do," Krieger said.



Will robots take our jobs?  10:40 AM ET Tue, 30 Oct 2018 | 03:10

Jordan Morrow is the head of data literacy at analytics firm Qlik. He said individuals and companies lack skills, like interpreting and analyzing data, to successfully compete in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

"Not everyone needs to be a data scientist but everyone needs to be data literate," he said in a phone interview with CNBC. Studies show technologies like artificial intelligence will eliminate some jobs, while creating demand for new jobs and skills.

Some experts warn of a "winner-take-all economy," where high-skilled workers are rewarded with high pay, and the rest of workers are left behind.A 2018 report by investment firm UBS found billionaires have driven almost 80 percent of the 40 main breakthrough innovations over the past four decades.

In 2016, Schwab predicted inequality would be the greatest societal concern associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

"There has never been a time of greater promise, or one of greater potential peril," he said.

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