Our EY Startup Challenge has been a fast programme, focusing on identifying blockchain use-cases and whittling them down to develop the prototypes and products for Energy Trading and Digital Rights Management. The momentum is strong and figuring out the case for collaboration has been the key. Having led two startup innovation programmes before, this latest experience has reminded me of a few things and taught me some others. Firstly, about the relevance of blockchain for these two industries of media and energy, and secondly about the process and principles of “open innovation” between large corporates and emerging tech startups.
Some thoughts on blockchain
I came in to this as a relative newbie – I didn’t know a lot about blockchain, let alone the details that are so important when thinking about its suitability for various industry issues. There are plenty of resources online to explain it but I found the easiest way was to take the specific use-case of bitcoin and understand the bitcoin blockchain. Through understanding the bitcoin blockchain, once you’ve understood what distributed means, the importance of consensus, the purpose of mining and the idea of the ledger being pretty much tamper-proof and automatically providing an audit trail, you are beginning to realise the big picture value.
Take it one step further and realise that since every node is a computer that’s processing, you can also add code for nodes in the network to execute – cue smart contracts. By creating and executing smart contracts on a blockchain, you enjoy all the benefits of the blockchain – the execution of smart contracts is recorded on the blockchain just like the transactions, you can create smart contracts to do things with assets on the blockchain, and you can also rest assured smart contracts will execute as written....